Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

by Jessica Bruder

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.

“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.”

The AllStays “Walmart Overnight Parking Locator” app marks every store in the United States and Canada with a little “W” icon. Some are red. Park there and you may get rousted or, worse, towed. Most are yellow. Clicking on them brings up user experience reports, like the following from a Walmart in Pahrump, Nevada:

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.”

She figured she’d get a new job quickly, only to discover in her fifties how much harder the job market was. “I sort of aged out,” she reflected.

When I reached out to workampers for the first time, I was met with cheery platitudes. I got warnings, too. One CamperForce RVer agreed to meet me, but added that I’d better not portray him and his comrades as Americans in crisis. “There are plenty of indolent whiners, slackbodies, and layabouts who are happy to complain about nearly anything, and they are easy to find,” he wrote proudly. “I’m not one of those.”

Positive thinking, after all, is an all-American coping mechanism, practically a national pastime. Author James Rorty noted this during the Great Depression, when he traveled America talking with people forced to seek work on the road. In his 1936 book, Where Life Is Better, he was dismayed that so many of his interview subjects seemed so unshakably cheerful. “I encountered nothing in 15,000 miles of travel that disgusted and appalled me so much as this American addiction to make-believe,” he wrote.

The first thing I would realize on the road was that, despite having interviewed many dozens of nomads, I didn’t know a damn thing about living in a van. The learning curve was steep and it never really tapered off, since the circumstances kept changing.

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

He observed, “Almost all the people in these pictures are white.” He wanted to know why. I did, too. By then I’d met hundreds of folks living this way—workampers and rubber tramps and RVers from coast to coast. And while a handful were people of color, they clearly represented a micro-minority in the subculture.

That made me think: America makes it hard enough for people to live nomadically, regardless of race. Stealth camping in residential areas, in particular, is way outside the mainstream. Often it involves breaking local ordinances against sleeping in cars. Avoiding trouble—hassles with cops and suspicious passersby—can be challenging, even with the Get Out of Jail Free card of white privilege. And in an era when unarmed African Americans are getting shot by police during traffic stops, living in a vehicle seems like an especially dangerous gambit for anyone who might become a victim of racial profiling.

The reality was less polemic, more slapstick, like an updated version of Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times. Our trainers regaled us with tales of unruly robots. Kivas had gone AWOL, escaping through a gap in the fence. They had tried to drag a stepladder away from a station while a worker was still standing on it. On rare occasions, two Kivas collided—each carrying up to 750 pounds of merchandise—like drunken European soccer fans bumping chests. Sometimes the Kivas dropped items. Sometimes they ran those items over. In April, a can of “bear mace” (basically industrial-grade pepper spray) fell off one robot’s payload and got crushed by another. The warehouse had to be evacuated. Paramedics treated seven workers outside. Another was rushed to the hospital with respiratory problems.

“How we define ourselves is really important. If you’re driving down the road calling yourself homeless, or any other negative label, you’re in trouble.

Bob had a more practical plan for his declining years: “I’m going to dig a big, long trench and buy a cheap school bus and backfill completely over one side and over the roof, with windows on the south side. You can buy a crap school bus that’s not running for $500. It’s tough as nails and will last forever.” But when that wouldn’t work anymore, he planned to wander off into the wilderness and take his life with a bullet. “My long-term healthcare plan is bleached bones in the desert,” he said.

They called the new ritual “Burning Van” and commemorated it by singing lyrics they’d written to the tune of “Little Boxes,” the satirical ode to suburban conformity composed in 1962 by Malvina Reynolds. Little vans out in the desert Little vans all made of ticky tacky Little vans out in the desert Little vans and none the same There’s a white one and a white one And a white one and a flowered one And they’re all made out of ticky tacky And there’s none two just the same And the people are rubber trampers The nicest people anywhere. And they won’t be put in boxes And they won’t be all the same We are friendly We are family We love to get together, In the desert, in the desert, Where the terrain is all the same . . . And we have no pavilion, No bathhouse, no central stage But we do have a fire pit where friendships are made We’re all made out of ticky tacky And none think all the same

To be independent, get out of the rat race, support local businesses, buy only American made. Stop buying stuff I don’t need to impress people I don’t like. Right now I am working in a big warehouse, for a major online supplier. The stuff is crap all made somewhere else in the world where they don’t have child labor laws, where the workers labor fourteen- to sixteen-hour days without meals or bathroom breaks. There is one million square feet in this warehouse packed with stuff that won’t last a month. It is all going to a landfill. This company has hundreds of warehouses. Our economy is built on the backs of slaves we keep in other countries, like China, India, Mexico, any third world country with a cheap labor force where we don’t have to see them but where we can enjoy the fruits of their labor. This American Corp. is probably the biggest slave owner in the world.

Radical I know, but this is what goes through my head when I’m at work. There is nothing in that warehouse of substance. It enslaved the buyers who use their credit to purchase that shit. Keeps them in jobs they hate to pay their debts. It’s really depressing to be there.

What parts of this life are you willing to give up, so you can keep on living? Most who face this dilemma will not end up dwelling in vehicles. Those who do are analogous to what biologists call an “indicator species”—sensitive organisms with the capacity to signal much larger shifts in an ecosystem.

The top 1 percent now makes eighty-one times what those in the bottom half do, when you compare average earnings. For American adults on the lower half of the income ladder—some 117 million of them—earnings haven’t changed since the 1970s.

The most widely accepted measure for calculating income inequality is a century-old formula called the Gini coefficient. It’s a gold standard for economists around the globe, along with the World Bank, the CIA, and the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. What it reveals is startling. Today the United States has the most unequal society of all developed nations. America’s level of inequality is comparable to that of Russia, China, Argentina, and the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo.

“Working ‘off-the-clock’ for any reason is a violation of Company policy and employees violating this policy will be subject to disciplinary action up to and including termination of employment.

http://gubbsearthship.com.