Nomadland Read online

  Past Empire’s factory, single-story cottages lined four main residential streets planted with cottonwoods, elms, and silver poplars. U.S. Gypsum subsidized the rents, which were as low as $110 for an apartment or $250 for a house. (Mechanics in the drywall plant made up to $22 an hour and equipment operators got a little bit less, which meant employees could typically cover a month’s rent with a day or two of work.) The company also paid for TV, sewer, trash, and internet service. Since employees’ expenses were low and their income reliable, the notion of living paycheck to paycheck—that nerve-wracking, precarious form of existence so common in the outside world—was relatively foreign here. Empire felt like a town suspended in the 1950s, as if the postwar economy had never ended. “It’s a really good place to save money,” Anna Marie Marks, a fifteen-year employee who worked in the factory lab testing Sheetrock, told me.

  At the town’s peak, more than 750 people lived there, as noted in the July 1961 issue of U.S. Gypsum’s in-house magazine, Gypsum News. “The folks who make their homes in Empire are one big happy family,” the magazine reported. Though the population dwindled amid modernization and was less than half of that by 2010, the sentiment hadn’t changed. Since all the citizens of Empire knew each other, the front doors of houses stayed unlocked, and cars were often parked with keys left inside. “No gangs, no sirens, no violence,” rhapsodized Tonja Lynch, who lived in town with her husband, a factory supervisor. And because Empire was so isolated—for years it was marked on state Highway 447 with a two-story sign that said “Welcome to Nowhere”—folks had no choice but to entertain themselves and each other, too. That meant a lot of block parties, potluck dinners, and gatherings to play a dice game called Bunco, along with excursions into the high desert wilderness to hunt deer, antelope, and chukar, a gray and cinnamon-colored partridge with striped wings and a bright red beak. Many of the townspeople cultivated improbably lush lawns, pushing back against the arid landscape and asserting something that looked like civic pride. Where the grass that marked their territory ended, the Black Rock Desert stretched unbroken all the way to the horizon. In satellite photos, Empire was obvious: a splotch of green in an otherwise brown and barren wasteland.

  Isolation had its downside. “We’ve got the neighborhood watch program,” quipped Aaron Constable, the factory’s maintenance foreman. “Your neighbors watch you, whether you want them to or not.” This had been the local way of life for decades, with coworkers dwelling in close quarters. In 1923 laborers established a tent colony on the site of what later became the town. By some accounts, Empire boasted the longest continuously operating mine in the country, excavating a claim first established by Pacific Portland Cement Company in 1910.

  On December 2, 2010, that history came to a sudden stop. Workers in steel-toed shoes and hard hats gathered in the community hall at 7:30 a.m. for a mandatory meeting. Mike Spihlman, the gypsum plant’s soft-spoken manager, delivered a grim edict to a room full of stunned faces: Empire was shutting down. Everyone had until June 20 to leave. First came silence, then tears. “I had to stand in front of ninety-two people and say, ‘Not only do you not have a job anymore, you don’t have a house anymore,’” Mike recalled later, sighing heavily. Employees got the rest of the day off. They wandered back out into the cold and overcast winter morning, returning to homes that wouldn’t be theirs much longer, to mull over the news and break it to their families.

  U.S. Gypsum, valued at $4 billion, had taken heavy losses in 2010, hemorrhaging $284 million by the end of the third quarter. William C. Foote, then CEO, attributed the company’s declining fortunes to “continued weak market conditions and extraordinarily low shipping volumes.” Beneath that jargon was a simpler story: Demand wasn’t high enough for what Empire made anymore. The fortunes of wallboard manufacturers are tied to the domestic construction industry, and the slump brought on by the housing market collapse had lasted too long. So while many towns had been merely scarred by the recession, Empire would completely disappear.

  In January 2011, I visited Empire to report a magazine story. Calvin Ryle, who had been the quality control supervisor and, before that, the general foreman, told me he started working at the factory on July 1, 1971. “I’ve been here for thirty-nine years and seven months,” he said matter-of-factly. “I’ve never missed a single day, never been injured.” Since he held the record for longest continuous service, the honor of halting the production line went to him. Standing beside a conveyor belt in the factory, where his son also worked as a maintenance mechanic, the sixty-two-year-old raised his right hand as his coworkers looked on. He pressed the stop button and wept. “The worst thing you can hear in a board plant is silence,” Calvin explained. “You’re a part of building America; it’s not just making Sheetrock here.” And Empire, he added, had been a great place to raise kids out in nature while earning a solid living. He planned to dig up the rosebushes he’d planted in his yard to bring with him, since he figured the town would be quickly overtaken by weeds. “It’s probably going to look like that movie The Hills Have Eyes,” he said soberly. (An abandoned nuclear test village full of decrepit houses and lurking cannibals figures prominently in the 2006 remake of that cult horror film.) “It’s going to be the 2011 Nevada ghost town.”

  Within sight of the factory, the Catholic mission of St. Joseph the Worker was celebrating one of its last masses. The church had a new wooden sign carved by one of the parishioners, Tom Anderson, sixty-one, who’d been a full-time electrician at the factory with thirty-one years of service. Like Calvin with his plants, Tom said he’d reclaim his handiwork before leaving. He attended the service along with some two dozen neighbors. Toward the end, the pastor asked if anyone had special prayers to offer. A six-year-old girl in a lavender princess dress spoke up. “I want to pray about some of the people who need help to find homes,” she said haltingly. “And the people who need the stuff to live.” The room was silent.

  At the quarry south of town, roads had already been choked off with giant gravel berms to keep out vehicles. Before long other signs of Empire’s demise started to appear. An eight-foot chain-link fence topped with barbed wire rose along the perimeter of the town. Locals said it made the place look “like a concentration camp.” The newly unemployed created a makeshift memorial, tossing their construction helmets into the branches of a tree across from the post office. (U.S. Gypsum hard hats had once brought pride to their wearers, the corporate equivalent of team jerseys. Many had been personalized with stickers, some with paint or permanent markers. And there were distinctive gold-colored helmets for workers like Calvin who’d surpassed twenty-five years of service.)

  Slowly the diaspora began. The same economy that had been flattened by the housing crash saw gold prices skyrocket, and Nevada’s mines were hiring. More than a dozen former Empire employees left for jobs with the Barrick Gold Corporation, which owned several nearby sites. But others among the dispossessed workers were having a harder time.

  “I threw out a few resumes, haven’t gotten any bites,” former supply chain manager Dan Moran told me. “I might just end up cutting firewood for a living.” Monica Baker, twenty-two, who grew up in Empire, had recently moved back to town from Oahu with two young children on the promise of factory work, only to be broadsided by the shutdown. “I was really pissed off about it because they kept telling me I’d have a job here,” she said. Though she’d heard the gold mines were hiring, Monica worried about working near a toxic leach pond, noting that mercury from the industry had already made it so no one could eat the fish caught in northern Nevada. She figured she’d try her luck seventy miles south in the small city of Fernley, which had chain stores. She’d be riding the tide of the national economy: away from manufacturing, toward the retail and service industries. “I’ll just get a job at Walmart or Lowe’s,” she said.

  The exodus of workers’ families continued through June. When the last of them departed, the town was sealed away behind chained gates, with security cameras and no trespassing sign
s. The cottages along with a public pool, two churches, a post office, and a nine-hole golf course were left to rot. Even the local zip code, 89405, was expunged. To keep the weeds down, the company imported two dozen goats, which roamed the new ghost town like a pack of organic lawn mowers. Years later, visitors would compare the place to Chernobyl, a catalog of interrupted lives. At the factory’s office, unfinished cups of coffee remained on desks and calendars still showed the date of the shutdown.

  Eerily, there’s one place where Empire lives on. As of 2017, you could still go to Google Maps Street View, drop a tiny avatar on Circle Drive, and wander around looking at parked cars and lawn furniture and folks watering their yards uninterrupted, all frozen in a photographic landscape that hasn’t been updated since 2009.

  AT THE SAME TIME Empire was dying, a new and very different kind of company town was thriving seventy miles to the south. In many ways, it felt like the opposite of Empire. Rather than offering middle-class stability, this village was populated by members of the “precariat”: temporary laborers doing short-term jobs in exchange for low wages. More specifically, its citizens were hundreds of itinerant workers living in RVs, trailers, vans, and even a few tents. Early each fall, they began filling the mobile home parks surrounding Fernley. Linda didn’t know it yet, but she would soon be joining them. Many were in their sixties and seventies, approaching or well into traditional retirement age. Most had traveled hundreds of miles—and undergone the routine indignities of criminal background checks and pee-in-a-cup drug tests—for the chance to earn $11.50 per hour plus overtime at temporary warehouse jobs. They planned to stay through early winter, despite the fact that most of their homes on wheels weren’t designed to support life in subzero temperatures. Their employer was Amazon.com.

  Amazon had recruited these workers as part of a program it calls CamperForce: a labor unit made up of nomads who work as seasonal employees at several of its warehouses, which the company calls “fulfillment centers,” or FCs. Along with thousands of traditional temps, they’re hired to meet the heavy shipping demands of “peak season,” the consumer bonanza that spans the three to four months before Christmas.

  Amazon doesn’t disclose precise staffing numbers to the press, but when I casually asked a CamperForce manager at an Amazon recruiting booth in Arizona about the size of the program, her estimate was some two thousand workers. (That was back in 2014. For the 2016 season, Amazon stopped hiring CamperForce workers earlier than usual because “it was a record year for applications,” according to a Facebook post by a former program administrator.)

  The workers’ shifts last ten hours or longer, during which some walk more than fifteen miles on concrete floors, stooping, squatting, reaching, and climbing stairs as they scan, sort, and box merchandise. When the holiday rush ends, Amazon no longer needs CamperForce and terminates the program’s workers. They drive away in what managers cheerfully call a “taillight parade.”

  The first member of CamperForce I corresponded with at great length, over a period of months, was a man I’ll call Don Wheeler. (That is not his real name, for reasons I’ll explain later.) Don had spent the last two years of his main career as a software executive traveling to Hong Kong, Paris, Sydney, and Tel Aviv. Retiring in 2002 meant he could finally stay in one place: the 1930s’ Spanish Colonial Revival house he shared with his wife in Berkeley, California. It also gave him time to indulge a lifelong obsession with fast cars. He bought a red-and-white Mini Cooper S and souped it up to 210 horsepower, practicing until he was named third overall in the U.S. Touring Car Championship pro series.

  The fast times didn’t last. When I started exchanging emails with Don, he was sixty-nine, divorced, and staying at the Desert Rose RV Park near the warehouse in Fernley. His wife had gotten to keep the house. The 2008 market crash had vaporized his savings. He had been forced to sell the Mini Cooper.

  Don was living with Rizzo, a fifteen-pound Jack Russell terrier, in a 1990 Airstream he called “Ellie”—a reference to its model number, 300LE—with a plastic hula girl on the dashboard and race car posters propped against the drawn blinds. In his old life, he’d spent about $100,000 a year. In the new one, he’d learned to get by on as little as $75 a week.

  By the end of the 2013 holiday season, Don anticipated he’d be working at the Amazon warehouse five nights a week until just before dawn, on overtime shifts lasting twelve hours, with thirty minutes off for lunch and two fifteen-minute breaks. He’d spend most of the time on his feet, receiving and scanning inbound freight.

  “It’s hard work, but the money’s good,” he explained. Don was bald with wire-rimmed glasses and a snow-white goatee. He had an artificial right hip, a replacement from when he fell off a pickup truck during another temporary job at an Oregon campground. Don didn’t abide complainers. Still, like most of his coworkers, he was counting down the days until December 23, the end of the CamperForce work season.

  Don told me that he was part of a growing phenomenon. He and most of the CamperForce—along with a broader spectrum of itinerant laborers—called themselves “workampers.” Though I’d already stumbled across that word, I’ve never heard anyone define it with as much flair as Don. He wrote in a Facebook direct message to me:

  Workampers are modern mobile travelers who take temporary jobs around the U.S. in exchange for a free campsite—usually including power, water and sewer connections—and perhaps a stipend. You may think that workamping is a modern phenomenon, but we come from a long, long tradition. We followed the Roman legions, sharpening swords and repairing armor. We roamed the new cities of America, fixing clocks and machines, repairing cookware, building stone walls for a penny a foot and all the hard cider we could drink. We followed the emigration west in our wagons with our tools and skills, sharpening knives, fixing anything that was broken, helping clear the land, roof the cabin, plow the fields and bring in the harvest for a meal and pocket money, then moving on to the next job. Our forebears are the tinkers.

  We have upgraded the tinker’s wagon to a comfortable motor coach or fifth-wheel trailer. Mostly retired now, we have added to our repertoire the skills of a lifetime in business. We can help run your shop, handle the front or back of the house, drive your trucks and forklifts, pick and pack your goods for shipment, fix your machines, coddle your computers and networks, work your beet harvest, landscape your grounds or clean your bathrooms. We are the techno-tinkers.

  Other workampers I spoke with had their own ways of describing themselves. Many said they were “retired,” even if they anticipated working well into their seventies or eighties. Others called themselves “travelers,” “nomads,” “rubber tramps,” or wryly, “gypsies.” Outside observers gave them other nicknames, from “the Okies of the Great Recession” to “American refugees,” “the affluent homeless,” even “modern-day fruit tramps.”

  Whatever you want to call them, workampers ride a national circuit of jobs extending coast to coast and up into Canada, a shadow economy created by hundreds of employers posting classified ads on websites with names like Workers on Wheels and Workamper News. Depending on the time of year, nomads are sought to pick raspberries in Vermont, apples in Washington, and blueberries in Kentucky. They give tours at fish hatcheries, take tickets at NASCAR races, and guard the gates of Texas oil fields.* (“It was awful,” said one workamper of a gate guarding job in Gonzalez, Texas, where she and her husband made about $125 for a twenty-four-hour day—working out to about $5 an hour—and were quickly exhausted because they could only sleep in short intervals. “You have to log everybody—license plate, name badge—at all hours of the night. When we left there my husband and I were total zombies.”) They flip burgers during baseball games at the Cactus League, a spring training series in Phoenix, Arizona. They’re in demand to run concession stands at rodeos and the 2017 Super Bowl at NRG Stadium in Houston. (“Must be comfortable with up-selling,” insists the job listing.)

  They maintain hundreds of campgrounds and trailer parks from the Grand Ca
nyon to Niagara Falls, recruited by private concessionaires along with the U.S. Forest Service and the Army Corps of Engineers. They staff some of the nation’s premiere tourist traps, including Wall Drug, with its eighty-foot-long concrete brontosaurus and animatronic singing cowboys, and The Thing?, a curiosities museum on a desolate stretch of Arizona freeway where dozens of yellow billboards tease “Seeing Is Believing” and “Mystery of the Desert.”

  The migrants work at roadside stalls during the holidays, selling pumpkins for Halloween and fireworks for the Fourth of July. (Camping for “a week next to a tent of explosives . . . Am I nuts?” wrote one workamping widow who was preparing to take a fireworks job.) Some vend Christmas trees. (“Give a Camp Christmas Tree a try!” beckons an ad aimed at RVers. “No grumps,” grouses another.) Some run kiosks in shopping centers, selling seasonal gifts for See’s Candies and Hickory Farms. Others get hired as leak detectors on natural gas pipelines, trudging along miles of buried conduit with “flame packs” that monitor hydrocarbon levels to prevent explosions.

  The Florida Department of Fish and Game hires them to run a check station for hunters, where they weigh the carcasses of wild hogs and deer and remove biological samples—specifically, deer jawbones—for testing to monitor the age and health of local herds. A pheasant hunting lodge in South Dakota has openings in its “bird processing” department.

  Workampers run the rides at amusement parks from Dollywood in Tennessee to Adventureland in Iowa, Darien Lake in New York, and Story Land in New Hampshire. (“Workampers not only get to meet and work with new people from around the world, but also get to experience the pure joy of children’s dreams coming true every day!” promises a Story Land recruitment ad.)