Nomadland Read online

  Before long, he yearned to be closer to his kids and to the Safeway where he held a steady job. (His father had been a Safeway manager and Bob had scored his first job there, as a bagger, on his sixteenth birthday.) But apartments in Anchorage were expensive and sustaining two separate households seemed next to impossible. Of the $2,400 he took home each month, half went to his ex. “She got $1,200 of it, and that left me $1,200, and you can’t rent an apartment in Anchorage on that,” he said. “Most places you can, but I certainly couldn’t there.” Meanwhile, he was burning time and gas money every day as he commuted between Anchorage and Wasilla. He started feeling desperate.

  So Bob tried an experiment. To save on fuel, he began spending the workweek in the city, sleeping in an old Ford Courier pickup with a camper shell, and then returning to Wasilla on the weekends. That relieved some of the pressure. When he was in Anchorage, he parked right outside the Safeway. The managers didn’t mind. If someone didn’t show up for a shift, they’d offer it to Bob—he was right there, after all—and he’d score overtime that way. All of which made him wonder: Could I do this permanently?

  Bob couldn’t imagine living full-time in his tiny camper, but he started to mull over other options. On his commute, he’d been driving past a battered Chevy box truck with a “For Sale” sign parked in front of an electrician’s shop. One day he went inside to ask about it. The vehicle had no mechanical problems, he learned. It was just so ugly and beat up that the boss was embarrassed to send it on service calls. The asking price was $1,500, the same amount Bob had left in savings. He went all in.

  The walls of the box truck were seven feet tall with a roll-up back door. The floor was eight-by-twelve feet. It was really the size of a small bedroom, Bob reasoned, rolling out his sleeping pad and blankets. But as he lay there that first night, he found himself weeping. No matter what he told himself, immersion in this new life felt soul-shattering. It didn’t help that, in his forty years, Bob had never been a particularly cheerful or optimistic person. From childhood on he’d learned hard lessons about impermanence as the ground shifted, sometimes literally, under his feet. When he was a toddler, his unhappily married parents had moved between Flagstaff and Prescott, Arizona, and Ponca City, Oklahoma. In 1961, the year he turned six, his family settled in Anchorage. Three years later, the world came to an end. Or at least it felt that way. The second-largest recorded earthquake in history struck south-central Alaska at 5:36 p.m. on March 27, 1964, when a fault ruptured between the Pacific and North American tectonic plates. The Great Alaska Earthquake, also known as the Good Friday Earthquake, registered 9.2 on the Richter scale and lasted four and a half terrifying minutes, with numerous aftershocks. Tsunamis swept Alaska’s coastal towns, while Anchorage was devastated by landslides that demolished entire city blocks. The sixty-foot control tower at Anchorage International Airport collapsed. Concrete slabs tumbled from the façade of the five-story J. C. Penney building, crushing people and cars below. At Bob’s school, Denali Elementary, the foundation was riven with cracks and a brick chimney crashed through the roof, shuttering the building for the next year.

  Bob remembers cowering at home with no light, no heat. Outside the weather was below freezing and there was snow on the ground. “I mean the earth opens up around you and all night we had aftershocks,” he said. “You’d hear houses exploding. You’d be laying there in bed and a house would explode. There’d be a natural gas leak and it’d ignite somehow.”

  His home didn’t blow up that night. But it did, in a sense, seven years later, when he was sixteen and his parents finally split up. His sister chose to live with their mother. Bob felt sorry for his dad and decided to stay with him. Before long he was also sharing a roof with a stepmother he hated. As Bob grew into adulthood, he fended off feelings of emptiness. In the coming years, he’d try to fill that void with whatever was at hand: debt, food, sex, religion.

  Bob had never been especially proud of the life he was building. But when he moved into a box truck at age forty, any remaining scraps of self-worth disappeared. He feared he’d hit rock bottom. He saw himself critically: a working father of two who couldn’t keep his marriage afloat, reduced to living in a vehicle. He told himself he was homeless, a loser. “Crying myself to sleep was a routine event,” he said.

  That box truck, which he often referred to as a van, would be his home for the next six years. Living there wasn’t the descent into misery he expected, though. Things started to change as he made the place habitable. He built bunk beds out of plywood and two-by-sixes. He slept on the bottom one and used the top as a storage loft. He lugged in a cozy recliner. He screwed plastic shelving into the walls. For a makeshift kitchen, he had an ice chest and a Coleman two-burner stove. For water, he visited convenience store restrooms and filled up a gallon jug. On his days off from work, his sons came to visit. One slept on the bunk bed and the other on the recliner.

  Before long, when Bob remembered how he used to live, he found he didn’t miss much. On the contrary, thinking about some of the things he now lacked—in particular rent and utility bills—made him giddy. With the money he was saving, he kept making the van more comfortable. He insulated the walls and roof. He bought a catalytic heater with a forty-gallon propane tank to stay warm when winter temperatures plunged to thirty below and installed a through-ceiling fan to keep cool in the summer. After he added a generator, battery, and inverter, it was easy to run lights at night. Soon he even had a microwave and a twenty-seven-inch tube TV.

  He grew so attached to this new lifestyle that, when the engine blew on the box truck, he didn’t falter. Bob sold his land in Wasilla, along with the shell of the house he’d continued to build there on credit cards. Part of the proceeds went to fixing his engine.

  “I honestly don’t know if I would have been brave enough to do it if I hadn’t been forced into it,” Bob admits on his website. But in retrospect, he’s glad the change happened. “When I moved into the van, I realized that everything that society had told me was a lie—that I had to get married and live in a house with a white picket fence and go to work, and then be happy at the very end of my life, but be miserable until then,” he told me in an interview. “I was happy for the first time ever living in my van.”

  In 2005, Bob started CheapRVLiving.com. The website began as a modest collection of how-to articles for readers hoping to live in a vehicle on a shoestring budget. The key was “boondocking”: going off the grid rather than relying on the kind of hookups for water, sewage, and electricity that come with a paid spot in an RV park. (Though its informal usage has broadened, the word “­boondocking”—as purists will quickly point out—also implies that one is parked way out in the wilderness. Vehicle dwellers who are doing this sort of thing in cities are technically not boondocking—they’re “stealth parking” or “stealth camping.” In any case, Bob’s website shared strategies for both kinds of living.)

  After the financial meltdown of 2008, traffic to CheapRVLiving.com exploded. “I started getting emails almost daily from people who had lost their jobs, their savings were running out, and they were facing foreclosure on their home,” he later wrote. Cast out of the middle class, these readers were trying to learn how to survive. Googling phrases such as “budget living” and “living in a car or van” brought them to Bob’s website. And in a culture where economic misfortune was blamed largely on its victims, Bob offered them encouragement instead of opprobrium. “At one time there was a social contract that if you played by the rules (went to school, got a job, and worked hard) everything would be fine,” he told readers. “That’s no longer true today. You can do everything right, just the way society wants you to do it, and still end up broke, alone, and homeless.” By moving into vans and other vehicles, he suggested, people could become conscientious objectors to the system that had failed them. They could be reborn into lives of freedom and adventure.

  ALL OF THIS HAD A PRECEDENT. In the mid-1930s, with America in the grip of the Great Depression, house trai
lers went into mass production for the first time. Hobbyists and small-batch builders had been constructing the curious contraptions for years, but now their popularity skyrocketed. “At first . . . the trailer was just something different in camping . . . then people discovered you could live in them,” Fortune Magazine recounted two years later.

  At the time, millions of dispossessed Americans shared the sentiments Bob later echoed. They’d upheld their end of the social contract, yet the system had let them down. Some of those people had a revelation—that they could escape the stranglehold of rent by moving into house trailers. Becoming nomads. Getting free. Heck, it beat Hooverville. “Go anywhere, stop anywhere, escape taxes and rent—this is irresistible. Nothing but death has ever before offered so much in a single package,” read an article in Automotive Industries in 1936.

  “We are rapidly becoming a nation on wheels,” wrote one prominent sociologist in The New York Times in 1936. “Today hundreds of thousands of families have packed their possessions into traveling houses, said goodbye to their friends, and taken to the open roads . . . [soon] more families will take to the road, making an important proportion of our people into wandering gypsies.” Roger Ward Babson, a financial oracle who’d foreseen the 1929 market crash, turned heads when he announced that half of all Americans would be living in house trailers by the 1950s. Harper’s Magazine proclaimed that “homes on wheels” represented “a new way of life which will eventually change our architecture, our morals, our laws, our industrial system, and our system of taxation.”

  Over the next quarter century, Americans bought—or built in their garages or backyards—an estimated million and a half to two million house trailers. The fad ended around 1960 with the rise of the so-called “mobile home”: inexpensive manufactured housing units that were roomier than their wandering cousins but offered less freedom since, after getting towed to a trailer park, they typically stayed there.

  Social critics were split on the trailerites, depicting them as either liberty-loving pioneers or harbingers of social disintegration. The writer David A. Thornburg, whose parents lived for fifteen years in a house trailer, saw in their push for self-determination a quiet revolution. In a poetic history called Galloping Bungalows, he wrote:

  And so, right out of the heart of the Great Depression a new dream was born: the dream of escape. Escape from snow and ice, from high taxes and rent, from an economic system that nobody trusted anymore. Escape! For the winter, for the weekend, for the rest of your life. All it took was a little courage and a $600 house trailer.

  He went on to elaborate:

  The Great Depression reduced millions of Americans of every age and class to the powerless condition of adolescents . . . But a few people saw opportunity amid all this chaos—opportunity to rebuild their world, their values along more personal and perhaps less vulnerable lines. Among these rebuilders were the pioneer trailerites of the 30s, over a million strong, idealists and iconoclasts, thoughtful and deliberate drop-outs. People who chose not to wait for government or big business to save them, who chose to take their economic destiny into their own hands. People who elected to slip the middle-class noose and form for themselves a wholly new subculture—a life just a little freer, a little more autonomous and less anxiety-ridden, a little closer to their hearts’ desires.

  EVEN AS THE STOCK MARKET IMPROVED, Bob kept hearing from new economic refugees for whom the “jobless recovery” had brought little relief. It seemed that, unlike the trailerites of the thirties—most of whom eventually went back to “stick and brick” housing—the new wave of nomads were girding themselves for a more permanent transition.

  “Money is a major issue for all of us, especially in today’s very bad economy,” Bob wrote in a 2012 post about budgeting. “Almost every week I get an email from a reader telling me they lost their job a while ago and now they are being evicted. Among their other questions, they ask me if they can afford to be a vandweller. I write back and answer their other questions and then ask them, ‘How can you afford to not be a vandweller?’ I am convinced that living in a car, van or RV is by far the cheapest possible way to live long-term.”

  By then Bob’s website included reports on residing in vehicles of all sizes, from a subcompact Ford Festiva and a Honda Prius to vans of every conceivable vintage and even a decommissioned U.S. Air Force bus. Some of their inhabitants were featured, too, including Charlene Swankie (aka “Swankie Wheels”), who moved into a van at age sixty-four when she was too broke to rent a decent apartment and was struggling with bad knees and asthma. The lifestyle suited her; she dropped sixty-five pounds and embarked on a quest to paddle all fifty states in a yellow kayak that she transported atop her van. (Swankie ended up completing her mission at age seventy and set a new goal: hiking the 800-mile Arizona Trail.) In another article, a nomad called Trooper Dan described losing his job in Ohio and living in a white Toyota pickup with a red camper top, which he’d driven to southern Florida and called his BOV, or bug-out vehicle. As an ardent survivalist, he’d long been ready for WTSHTF, or When The Shit Hits The Fan. “I’m just an average guy that has fallen victim to the current economic downturn. Basically I feel like I am camping and I do not consider myself homeless,” he wrote on the website. “I think this is a sign of things to come and we will be seeing people living in tents and vehicles everywhere (remember ‘Hoover towns’?). The ‘mobile homelessness’ is so bad that the cops don’t even stop people from doing it anymore.”

  Swankie Wheels has a map in her van that commemorates kayaking all fifty states.

  CheapRVLiving.com covered topics from choosing and outfitting a vehicle to finding seasonal jobs and eating healthy on the road. Tutorials explained how to install rooftop solar panels, which had plunged in price over the previous decade, putting a technology that was once only available to relatively affluent folks within reach of low-budget vandwellers.

  For purposes of stealth—to avoid getting harassed by passersby or, worse, rousted and maybe ticketed by police—readers were advised to hide their solar panels between the bars of a luggage carrier or ladder rack.

  While many of the articles he published were purely pragmatic, Bob also dabbled in philosophy. He posted inspirational quotes from a grab bag of thinkers, from Braveheart and Dale Carnegie to Kahlil Gibran, Hellen Keller, Henry David Thoreau, and J.R.R. Tolkien. Pairing this borrowed rhetoric with personal existential musings, Bob suggested that a pared-down and peripatetic lifestyle could go far beyond meeting basic needs, becoming a portal to loftier aspirations: freedom, self-actualization, and adventure.

  To mainstream Americans this kind of transience may suggest a modern-day version of The Grapes of Wrath. But it’s worth noting a critical distinction. For the nomadic Dust Bowl–era refugees who were once snubbed as “Okies,” self-worth meant keeping alive the embers of one precious hope: that someday the status quo would return, moving them back into traditional housing, restoring at least an iota of stability.

  Along with many of the wayfarers he came to inspire, Bob saw things differently. He envisioned a future where economic and environmental upheavals had become the new American normal. For this reason, he didn’t package nomadic living as a quick fix, something to tide folks over until society had stabilized, at which point they could reintegrate with the mainstream. Rather he aspired to create a wandering tribe whose members could operate outside of—or even transcend—the fraying social order: a parallel world on wheels.

  By late 2013, a discussion forum on Bob’s website had attracted more than 4,500 registered members. Less than three years later, the number had grown to over 6,500. Nomads swapped advice on everything from keeping up with snail mail to coping with loneliness and police harassment. In this supportive environment, even a basic question like “how do I shower?” generated an outpouring of clever solutions. Some commenters, for example, recommended joining a no-frills gym chain—Planet Fitness was a popular pick—and treating the membership like a nationwide washroom pass. Some swore
by sponge baths and the liberal use of baby wipes. Some preferred solar showers, which resemble giant IV bags, with one side painted black to trap heat. Some bathed using pressurized garden sprayers. Some knew about Laundromats with pay-per-use shower stalls in the back. Others visited truck stops like Flying J, Love’s, and Pilot, which reward drivers with shower credits when they fuel up. Long-haul truckers often accumulate more freebies than they need and gift their credits to fellow travelers in the checkout line.*

  The conversations grew intense, and they weren’t limited to CheapRVLiving.com. Bob’s site was just one node in a rapidly expanding network of internet gathering places where far-flung, low-budget nomads could learn from and support each other. The online community goes back to at least November 2000, when a mysterious figure calling himself “lance5g” created “Live in Your Van,” a Yahoo message board, with this simple introduction:

  Welcome. I wish to teach interested parties the technique of living in your van for the purpose of saving, what else? $.

  Obviously, this subject is best suited to the single male, but the woman can also learn . . .

  Categories: bathing, sleeping, parking, going to the bathroom, safety, avoiding detection, interior organization, winter nights.

  After that, lance5g never posted again. Like a low-rent version of the “watchmaker god” devised by Enlightenment-era theologists, he built a world, set it in motion, and walked away. His creation grew without him, though, populated with what would become a tight-knit group of friends posting under such names as vangypsy and vwtankgirl. Then came a problem: Yahoo decided to move all of its message boards to a new platform. Groups with absentee owners seemed unlikely to survive that transition.