Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

by Jessica Bruder

Old beat-up high-top van, Like livin’ in a large tin can. No rent, no rules, no man, I ain’t tied to no plot of land. I’ve got cool forests for summer fun,

There seemed to be no way off the treadmill of low-wage jobs.

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.

All of which is to say that Social Security is now the largest single source of income for most Americans sixty-five and older. But it’s woefully inadequate. “Instead of a three-legged stool, we have a pogo stick,” quipped economist Peter Brady of the Investment Company Institute.

Linda had discovered CheapRVLiving.com, the creation of a former Safeway shelf stocker from Alaska named Bob Wells. Imagine an anti-consumerist doctrine preached with the zeal of the prosperity gospel—that was Bob’s message. He evangelized living happily with less. One principle underscored all his writings—the best way to find freedom, he suggested, was by becoming what mainstream society would consider homeless.

“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.”

The World War II generation was content to play bingo, go to dances, go rockhounding, and volunteer in our several community service organizations. As the Baby Boomers replace them, we observe that they want more things to do or they get bored.”

I found my people: a ragtag bunch of misfits who surrounded me with love and acceptance. By misfits I don’t mean losers and dropouts. These were smart, compassionate, hardworking Americans whose scales had been lifted from their eyes. After a lifetime of chasing the American Dream, they had come to the conclusion that it was all nothing but a big con.

One guy at a Rubber Tramp Rendezvous campfire was horrified to learn I hadn’t yet read Travels with Charley; the next day he arrived at the van to lend me a paperback. Other entries in the literary canon of this subculture included Blue Highways by William Least Heat- Moon, Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey, Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, Walden by Henry David Thoreau, and Wild by Cheryl Strayed.

In America, if you don’t have an address, you’re not a real person.

“For most people, their first night sleeping in a van is so far out of their comfort zone, it can be very difficult,” he’d explained. “Your fear will magnify every sound (and there are a lot of them) and you may not get much sleep. When you wake up in the morning, you will be disoriented and wonder where you are.”

“Tillie,” after the train in The Little Engine That Could that says, “I think I can, I think I can.” Then Vincent set off on a journey. “I hit the road to learn how to stand on my own two feet,” he explained.

Are we seeing the emergence of a modern hunter-gatherer class?”

I wondered if the lack of racial diversity had something to do with the fact that camping attracts a disproportionately white audience, a trend borne out by studies from the U.S. Forest Service. Perhaps it takes a certain kind of privilege to regard “roughing it” outdoors as a vacation. The satirical website “Stuff White People Like” sums it up like this:

Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse Five: America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves . . . Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters.

She distilled her feelings in one final line: “It’s like a bank robber doing his last job in order to retire.”

Wages minus grocery receipts. Minus medical bills. Minus credit card debt. Minus utility fees. Minus student loan and car payments. Minus the biggest expense of all: rent.

A deepening class divide makes social mobility all but impossible. The result is a de facto caste system.

First the excavator clears the overgrown access road, opening a path to her land. Next it scrapes out a driveway, somewhere the Squeeze Inn can park.