Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

by Jessica Bruder

THERE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN ITINERANTS, drifters, hobos, restless souls. But now, in the second millennium, a new kind of wandering tribe is emerging. People who never imagined being nomads are hitting the road. They’re giving up traditional houses and apartments to live in what some call “wheel estate”—vans, secondhand RVs, school buses, pickup campers, travel trailers, and plain old sedans. They are driving away from the impossible choices that face what used to be the middle class. Decisions like: Would you rather have food or dental work? Pay your mortgage or your electric bill? Make a car payment or buy medicine? Cover rent or student loans? Purchase warm clothes or gas for your commute? For many the answer seemed radical at first. You can’t give yourself a raise, but what about cutting your biggest expense? Trading a stick-and-brick domicile for life on wheels? Some call them “homeless.” The new nomads reject that label. Equipped with both shelter and transportation, they’ve adopted a different word. They refer to themselves, quite simply, as “houseless.” From a distance, many of them could be mistaken for carefree retired RVers. On occasions when they treat themselves to a movie or dinner at a restaurant, they blend with the crowd. In mind-set and appearance, they are largely middle class. They wash their clothes at Laundromats and join fitness clubs to use the showers. Many took to the road after their savings were obliterated by the Great Recession. To keep their gas t...

As I write, it is autumn. Soon winter will come. Routine layoffs will start at the seasonal jobs. The nomads will pack up camp and return to their real home—the road—moving like blood cells through the veins of the country. They’ll set out in search of friends and family, or just a place that’s warm. Some will journey clear across the continent. All will count the miles, which unspool like a filmstrip of America. Fast-food joints and shopping malls. Fields dormant under frost. Auto dealerships, megachurches, and all-night diners. Featureless plains. Feedlots, dead factories, subdivisions, and big-box stores. Snowcapped peaks. The roadside reels past, through the day and into darkness, until fatigue sets in. Bleary-eyed, they find places to pull off the road and rest. In Walmart parking lots. On quiet suburban streets. At truck stops, amid the lullaby of idling engines. Then in the early morning hours—before anyone notices—they’re back on the highway. Driving on, they’re secure in this knowledge: The last free place in America is a parking spot.

For the first time the Jeep is towing Linda’s home: a tiny, pale yellow trailer she calls “the Squeeze Inn.” (If visitors don’t get the name on first mention, she puts it in a sentence—“Yeah, there’s room, squeeze in!”—and smiles, revealing deep laugh lines.) The trailer is a molded fiberglass relic, a Hunter Compact II, built in 1974 and originally advertised as a “crowning achievement in travel for fun” that would “follow like a kitten on the open road, track like a tiger when the going gets rough.” Four decades along, the Squeeze Inn feels like a charmingly retro life-support capsule: a box with rounded edges and sloped sides, geometrically reminiscent of the Styrofoam clamshell containers once used at hamburger joints.

I’d originally met Linda while researching a magazine story on a growing subculture of American nomads, folks who live full-time on the road.* Like Linda, many of these wandering souls were trying to escape an economic paradox: the collision of rising rents and flat wages, an unstoppable force meeting an unmovable object. They felt like they were caught in a vise, putting all their time into exhausting, soul-sucking jobs that paid barely enough to cover the rent or a mortgage, with no way to better their lot for the long term and no promise of ever being able to retire. Those feelings were grounded in hard fact: Wages and housing costs have diverged so dramatically that, for a growing number of Americans, the dream of a middle-class life has gone from difficult to impossible. As I write this, there are only a dozen counties and one metro area in America where a full-time minimum wage worker can afford a one-bedroom apartment at fair market rent. You’d have to make at least $16.35 an hour—more than twice the federal minimum wage—to rent such an apartment without spending more than the recommended 30 percent of income on housing. The consequences are dire, especially for the one in six American households that have been putting more than half of what they make into shelter. For many low-income families, that means little or nothing left over to buy food, medication, and other essentials. Many of the people I met felt that they’d spent too long losing a rigged game. And so th...

The day before Linda left for Hanna Flat, I asked whether she was excited. She looked at me as if this was the most obvious thing in the world. “Oh, yeah!” she said. “I’ve had no car. I’ve had no money. I’ve been stuck on that couch.” Her $524 monthly Social Security checks would carry her to the first payday of her new job.† Linda was ready to feel her world opening up again after it had shrunk to the size of a sofa. For too long, she’d been without her accustomed freedom, that accelerated rush of newness and possibility that comes with the open road. It was time to go.

Silvianne was a tarot card reader—she’d also held jobs in corporate healthcare, waitressing, retail, acupuncture, and catering—and she came to see the chain of events that put her in her van as divine influence, the goddess setting her on a gypsy path. (On her blog, Silvianne Wanders, she also characterized the transition like this: “A not-quite-retirement-age baby boomer gives up her sticks ’n bricks former miner’s cabin, her three part-time jobs, and her attachment to any illusion of security this tattered remnant of the American Dream might still bring to her tortured soul. The goal: to hit the road for a life of nomadic adventure as the Tarot reader—Shamanic Astrologer—Cosmic Change Agent she was always meant to be.”)

AS LINDA GOT ACCUSTOMED to Hanna Flat, I observed her first two-and-a-half weeks there. We sat together for hours in her trailer at night. She doled out her life story in installments. The oldest of three siblings, Linda had adored her parents despite their shortcomings. Her father drank heavily, working on and off as a machinist in the San Diego shipyards, while her mother fought chronic depression. They bounced between apartments, moving seven times in a single year, and at one point left California for a stint staying with family in the Black Hills of South Dakota. On the drive east, Linda squeezed into a truck with her parents and two brothers, plus all their belongings and a dachshund named Peter Jones Perry. Linda’s mother had to get some teeth pulled around the same time. “My father couldn’t afford to put dentures in her mouth,” she recalled. “So here we are in this big flatbed with all the furniture in the back, my mother with no teeth, three kids, some damn dog.” Over time Linda’s father developed an increasingly violent temper. Sometimes at the dinner table he whacked her youngest brother over the head with a serving spoon. He beat Linda’s mother, threw her down the stairs, and “tossed her around like a ragdoll.” During one of the fights, Linda, who was about seven, hid in the back corner of the top bunk in her bedroom. There she made herself a promise: This is never going to happen to me. Meanwhile Linda struggled with dyslexia, though no one knew it. When her r...

At the same time, Linda had a long-term dream for her future. It didn’t include any of the old clichés—a gated community in Florida or even a few rounds of golf. Her hopes were, quite literally, down to earth, made out of dirt and other people’s trash. She wanted to construct an Earthship: a passive-solar home built using discarded materials such as cans and bottles, with dirt-filled tires for its load-bearing walls. Invented by radical New Mexico architect Michael Reynolds, who has been tinkering with them since the 1970s, Earthships are designed to sustain their inhabitants entirely off the grid. The tire walls act like batteries, absorbing the sun’s heat through a bank of south-facing windows during the daytime and then releasing it at night to regulate indoor temperature. Rain and snowmelt drain from the roof into a cistern, providing water that gets filtered and reused for drinking and washing, feeding indoor fruit and vegetable gardens and flushing toilets. Electricity is supplied by solar panels and, in some cases, windmills. For all their pragmatism, many Earthships have fanciful touches—spires and turrets, columns and arches, adobe-clad walls in vivid hues, or rows of bottles inlaid to resemble stained glass. Their construction does not require any sophisticated techniques, which makes them accessible to amateur builders and leaves room for creativity. Dozens of them dot the desert outside Taos, New Mexico, in a subdivision known as the Greater World Earthship Com...

Probably the most infamous Earthship builders so far were Heaven’s Gate cult members, who erected a tire house on their New Mexico compound. In the media frenzy following their 1997 mass suicide, architect Michael Reynolds assured America that Earthships had nothing to do with it. “Crazy occult people need housing” just like everyone else, he told the Associated Press. “We’re teaching people here to connect with the planet, not leave it.”

One of the last traditional company towns in America, Empire was wholly owned by United States Gypsum, the company that makes Sheetrock. The place was a throwback to the much romanticized heyday of American manufacturing, when factory jobs offered workers a sure footing in the middle class and the chance to raise a family without fear of displacement. Empire was six miles north of “the gyp,” an open-pit gypsum mine nestled at the foot of the Selenite mountain range. There miners detonated blasts of anfo—an explosive blend of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil—to dislodge white, chalky chunks of ore from five terraced pits, the largest a half-mile across. Haul trucks shuttled sixty-ton batches of gypsum up the highway to a drywall plant on the edge of town. There workers pulverized it, heated it to 500 degrees in massive kettles, and shaped it into the wallboard found in homes across the American West. 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 payche...

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 ...

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 ...

There’s no clear count of how many people live nomadically in America. Full-time travelers are a demographer’s nightmare. Statistically they blend in with the rest of the population, since the law requires them to maintain fixed—in other words, fake—addresses. No matter how widely they wander, nomads must be officially “domiciled” somewhere. Your state of residence is where you get vehicles registered and inspected, renew drivers’ licenses, pay taxes, vote, serve on juries, sign up for health insurance (except for those on Medicare), and fulfill a litany of other responsibilities. And living nowhere, it turns out, means you can live anywhere you want, at least on paper. So many folks opt for residency in the places with the fewest hassles—Florida, South Dakota, and Texas, which lack state income taxes, are longtime favorites—and use mail-forwarding services to stay in touch. The rules for becoming a South Dakotan are especially laid-back. Spend one night at a local motel and register with a South Dakota mail forwarding service. Then show both receipts to the state department of public safety and you’re in.

Of all the programs seeking workampers, the most aggressive recruiter has been Amazon’s CamperForce. “Jeff Bezos has predicted that, by the year 2020, one out of every four work campers in the United States will have worked for Amazon,” read one slide in a presentation for new hires. To find warm bodies, the company has set up recruiting kiosks at nomad-friendly events—mostly RV shows and rallies—in more than a dozen states across the country. Recruiters wear CamperForce T-shirts and pass out “NOW HIRING” fliers, along with promotional stickers, notepads, paper fans, tubes of lip balm, landscape calendars, and “koozies,” the neoprene sleeves that keep beer cans cold. All the objects bear the CamperForce logo: a black silhouette of an RV in motion, bearing Amazon’s “smile” insignia. More recently, that logo and a link to the recruiting website for CamperForce have appeared on large magnetic sunshades, made to cover the windshields of parked RVs. In 2015 these were presented as gifts to a handful of CamperForce workers, who were urged to put them up wherever they roam. Workers are also offered a referral bonus of $125—up from $50 in 2012—for each new hire they sign up.

I WANTED TO SEE this new kind of company town for myself. When I mentioned that to a former CamperForce recruiter, he suggested the best time to visit would be late October, because “folks wouldn’t be quite so exhausted yet.” I took that advice, arriving in Fernley the week before Halloween in 2013. By then, workers had already crammed into lots as far as thirty-five miles away from the Amazon warehouse, including the RV parking area at the Grand Sierra Resort & Casino in Reno. (Linda was among this crowd, staying in the nearby town of Fallon, but I didn’t know it at the time and wouldn’t encounter her until three months later in Arizona.) Many of these mobile home parks had booked up months in advance and had long waiting lists. The most popular—it offered the shortest commute—was the Desert Rose RV Park, a gravel patch bounded by Highway 50 and bisected with high-voltage wires that crackled audibly overhead. There CamperForce workers had set out doormats and patio furniture. They’d hung wind chimes and bird feeders from the cottonwoods and raised flags emblazoned with “AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL” and “IT’S FIVE O’CLOCK SOMEWHERE.” A few displayed homemade yard art, which included a cantaloupe-sized flying eyeball mounted on an inverted steering column, with several forks welded to each side for wings. Others had put up Halloween decorations: hay bales, dried cornstalks, a pumpkin covered in pink glitter. And when they weren’t beautifying their own parking spots, they engaged ...

I’d long assumed that most RVers were retirees tootling idly around America, sightseeing and enjoying the relaxation they’d earned after decades of employment. RV, after all, stands for “recreational vehicle.” Those happy-go-lucky pensioners still exist, but they’ve been joined by the new nomads. Most of the denizens of the Desert Rose, for example, weren’t thinking about recreation. Newcomers were preoccupied with “work hardening,” an acclimation period of half-day shifts. Earlier arrivals were already straining to keep up with the pace in the warehouse.

many of the RVs I entered were stocked like mobile apothecaries, with Icy Hot Pain Relieving Gel, tubs for soaking tired feet, Epsom salts, and bottles of Aleve and Advil. If the workers ran out of pills, that wasn’t a problem—Amazon had wall-mounted dispensers offering free over-the-counter painkillers in the warehouse.

The Apperleys used to think they would retire to live aboard a sailboat, funding that dream with equity from their three-bedroom house in Beaverton, Oregon. They’d bought the home for $340,000 at the top of the market and put another $20,000 into it. Then the housing bubble burst and its value tumbled to $260,000. Before the crash, they’d been doing alright. Bob worked as an accountant for a timber products firm—he hated that job, but it paid the bills—while Anita was an interior decorator and part-time caregiver. Neither could imagine spending the rest of their lives servicing a loan worth more than the value of their house. So they bought a 2003 Cardinal fifth-wheel trailer and hit the road. “We just walked away,” Anita said. “We told ourselves, ‘We’re not playing this game anymore.’” Bob blamed the bad guys on Wall Street. He spoke almost defensively about his decision to abandon the house. He rushed to add that he’d always paid the bills on time and kept good credit. His downfall was putting his faith in the gospel of ever-increasing home prices. “I never had any experience that a house would drop in value,” Bob said, shaking his head. He compared the “slow-dawning reality” of his new life to waking up in The Matrix: learning that the pleasant, predictable world you used to inhabit was a mirage, a lie built to hide a brutal dystopia. “The security most people take comfort in, I’m not convinced that isn’t an illusion,” he added. “When you find out what you believed to b...

Workampers are plug-and-play labor, the epitome of convenience for employers in search of seasonal staffing. They appear where and when they are needed. They bring their own homes, transforming trailer parks into ephemeral company towns that empty out once the jobs are gone. They aren’t around long enough to unionize. On jobs that are physically difficult, many are too tired even to socialize after their shifts. They also demand little in the way of benefits or protections. On the contrary, among the more than fifty such laborers I interviewed in my first year of reporting on workampers, most expressed appreciation for whatever semblance of stability their short-term jobs offered.

Amazon reaps federal tax credits—ranging from 25 to 40 percent of wages—for hiring disadvantaged workers in several categories, including aging recipients of Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and anyone on food stamps. Savvy CamperForce members know all about that incentive. “The Work Opportunity Tax Credit is the reason Amazon can take on such a slow, inefficient workforce,” noted one itinerant worker on her blog, Tales from the Rampage. “Since they are getting us off government assistance for almost three months of the year, we are a tax deduction for them.”

THE PRO-ELDERLY LABOR ATTITUDE isn’t unique to Amazon. During an online recruitment seminar for the annual sugar beet harvest, Scott Lindgren, a managing partner with temporary staffing firm Express Employment Professionals, praised the steadfastness of older RVers. “We’ve also found that our workampers have great work ethics and for that we applaud you,” he said. “We know that you’ve worked hard your whole life and we know that we can count on you to get the job done and you’re some of our best workers.” David Roderick, a seventy-seven-year-old workamper, agreed. “They love retirees because we’re dependable. We’ll show up, work hard, and are basically slave labor,” he told me, recalling the winter of 2012 when he and his wife, also in her seventies, sold Christmas trees at the San Mateo Event Center in California while living in their fifteen-year-old Lazy Daze RV. His job involved carrying conifers that were up to nine feet tall and boosting them atop customers’ cars and trucks, for eight to ten hours at a time, six days a week.

As workers like David told their stories, the Amazon encampments began to seem more and more like microcosms of a national catastrophe. The RV parks were jammed with workers who had fallen a long, long way from the middle-class comforts they had always taken for granted. These were standard-bearers for every economic misadventure to afflict Americans in recent decades. Everyone had a story.

MANY OF THE WORKERS I met in the Amazon camps were part of a demographic that in recent years has grown with alarming speed: downwardly mobile older Americans. In the heyday of a place like Empire—the era of a strong middle class, complete with job stability and pensions—their circumstances had been virtually unimaginable. Monique Morrissey, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, spoke with me about the unprecedented nature of this change. “We’re facing the first-ever reversal in retirement security in modern U.S. history,” she explained. “Starting with the younger baby boomers, each successive generation is now doing worse than previous generations in terms of their ability to retire without seeing a drop in living standards.” That means no rest for the aging. Nearly nine million Americans sixty-five and older were still employed in 2016, up 60 percent from a decade earlier. Economists expect those numbers—along with the percentage of seniors in the labor force—to keep rising. A recent poll suggests that Americans now fear outliving their assets more than they fear dying. Another survey finds that, although most older Americans still view retirement as “a time of leisure,” only 17 percent anticipate not working at all in their later years.

The notion of retirement was evangelized in early twentieth-century America by William Osler, a celebrated and outspoken physician who helped found the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Workers peaked at forty, he argued in a 1905 speech, then went downhill until they hit their sixties—at which point, he prankishly suggested, they might as well be chloroformed. These remarks came to be known as the “chloroform speech” and they provoked a national scandal. The New York Times’ editorial board likened his position to that of “savage tribes whose custom it is to knock their elders over the head whenever the juniors find their elders in their own way.” Meanwhile, “Oslerize” enjoyed a brief heyday as a popular verb. (That coinage wasn’t entirely fair, however, since the plan for compulsory euthanasia had been borrowed from Anthony Trollope’s The Fixed Period, a dystopian tale that was quite possibly that author’s least popular work, selling just 877 copies.) The pension advocate Lee Welling Squier expressed a similar sentiment in 1912, in considerably less comic terms: After the age of sixty has been reached, the transition from non-dependence to dependence is an easy stage—property gone, friends passed away or removed, relatives become few, ambition collapsed, only a few short years left to live, with death a final and welcome end to it all—such conclusions inevitably sweep the wage-earner from hopeful independent citizen into that of the helpless poor.

So iconic—and dreaded—was the poorhouse that it was awarded a square in the earliest version of Monopoly. Situated on a corner of the board, this civic institution was the space of last resort for any player who “has not enough money to pay his expenses, and cannot borrow any or cannot sell or mortgage any of his property,” according to the 1904 rules. In later versions, game designers paved over the poorhouse and put up a “free parking” space.

since the 1980s, employers have been replacing defined-benefit pensions that are funded by employers and guarantee a monthly sum in perpetuity with 401(k) plans, which often rely on employee contributions and can run dry before death. Marketed as instruments of financial liberation that would allow workers to make their own investment choices, 401(k)s were part of a larger cultural drift in America away from shared responsibilities toward a more precarious individualism. Translation: 401(k)s are vastly cheaper for companies than pension plans. “Over the last generation, we have witnessed a massive transfer of economic risk from broad structures of insurance, including those sponsored by the corporate sector as well as by government, onto the fragile balance sheets of American families,” Yale political scientist Jacob S. Hacker writes in his book The Great Risk Shift. The overarching message: “You are on your own.”

FACING AN INSURMOUNTABLE PROBLEM—her low Social Security benefit—Linda did what anyone would: consulted the internet. She came across a website with the following words: Maybe you were a gypsy, vagabond or hobo in a past life, but you think you could never afford to live the life of freedom you long for? Perhaps you are just sick of the rat race and want to simplify your life. We have good news for you, you can, and we are here to show you how! 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. “The key is eliminating the single highest expense most of us have, our housing,” Bob wrote. He urged readers to eschew traditional homes and apartments in favor of what some nomads call “wheel estate”: a van, car, or RV. He noted that there were vandwellers subsisting on $500 a month or less—a sum that made immediate sense to Linda—and drafted a sample budget stretching that pittance across life’s necessities, including allowances for food, car insurance, gas, cell service, and a small emergency fund.

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 trailers 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 recou...

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.

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.”

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.

“Live in Your Van 2” attracted thousands of newcomers, including Bob Wells, and kept gaining momentum. In the four years following the 2008 economic crash, the ranks more than doubled, growing to 8,560 people. A description of the group read: VanDwellers is the meeting place of [a] far-flung tribe. It is the Circle of Elders, the Nurturing Cradle for those who find themselves entering this cultural world by choice or by circumstance, the place for the Rites of Passage of newbies, a place where the Hunters and Gatherers of Information share the bounty with the tribe.

FreeCampsites.net, logged idyllic places in nature where visitors could stay for free, from small city parks to sprawling national forests. Another, AllStays.com, tracked businesses that allow overnight parking, from truck stops to casinos, Cabela’s sporting good outlets and Cracker Barrel restaurants. It also sold a smartphone app dedicated to “Wallydocking,” or boondocking at Walmart. Walmart has long endeared itself to RVers by letting them stay overnight in its parking lots. Some believe founder Sam Walton, an avid bird hunter, started the tradition in solidarity with outdoorsy types. Others think it’s a canny strategy to capture more shoppers. Either way, nomads appreciate the invitation, though it frustrates paid campgrounds and RV parks that don’t like losing business. The policy, however, isn’t in effect everywhere. Some Walmarts are located in cities that ban the practice. Others have revoked the privilege because visitors started overstaying their welcome, setting up barbecues and lawn furniture, building semipermanent encampments. In March 2015, a melee between police and an eight-member family of Christian musicians from Idaho, who’d been living out of their Chevy Suburban in the parking lot of the Walmart Supercenter in Cottonwood, Arizona, ended in a struggle over an officer’s gun that left one of the travelers dead. The store started rousting overnighters after that. (“It is so sad that a few morons have to ruin a good deal for everyone,” wrote the editor of...

The little “W” icons and notes feel like an updated version of hobo signs, the glyphs used by drifters to share place-based knowledge in what passed for crowdsourcing during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Marked on walls and doors with chalk or coal, sometimes carved into trees, the signs warned of threats—zealous police, vicious dogs, bad water—or pointed out resources: safe campsite, kindhearted lady, work available.

(While most readers don’t seem to begrudge traveling bloggers compensation for the work they do, it’s easy to see how ads running on minimalist, anti-consumerist sites might sometimes seem off-key. On Cheap RV Living, for example, a post called “Getting Rid of Stuff” with a quote from Bertrand Russell—“It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly”—strikes an odd chord positioned beside a column of Amazon links flogging such products as a twelve-volt portable stove and a “luggable loo” toilet seat.)

As the nomads met over campfires in forests and deserts around the country, they began to form the kind of improvised clans that the novelist Armistead Maupin called “logical”—rather than “biological”—family. A few even called it a “vanily.” For some of them, spending holidays together became more appealing than reuniting with actual kin. A typical scene: Christmas dinner on a barren, moonscape-like stretch of desert near Interstate 10 in California draws more than a dozen vehicles, whose inhabitants range in age from their twenties to seventies. They share a fifteen-pound turkey that has been deboned, halved, and cooked on a pair of portable grills, with sides of mashed potatoes, gravy, and cranberry sauce and two kinds of pie, until even the dogs licking leftover crumbs from the plates are sated.

Increasingly Bob Wells found himself the de facto social coordinator for this growing band of isolates. And after the rendezvous dispersed each year, some of them started migrating with Bob to his next campsite. (Many free public camping areas, including where the RTR takes place, enforce a fourteen-day limit; when that expires, you’ve got to move to a new site at least twenty-five miles away.) Bob welcomed them, and they parked at a respectful distance to give him space. When a blog reader noted that folks had taken to following Bob around and referred to them, tongue-in-cheek, as his “disciples,” he joked back, “Despite my best efforts at mind-control, brain-washing, and manipulation, I still don’t have any disciples!” Bob’s tone wasn’t always so upbeat, though. In a more serious conversation with a reader, he wrote, “I think you are right, many, many more people are going to be forced into a much simpler life. My goal is to help them make the transition as easily as they can and hopefully eventually find joy in it, just like so many of us have.”

Amazon’s treatment of warehouse workers had been making headlines since 2011. That’s when an investigation by the Allentown Morning Call newspaper revealed what were—quite literally—sweatshop conditions. When summer temperatures exceeded 100 degrees inside the company’s Breinigsville, Pennsylvania, warehouse, managers wouldn’t open the loading bay doors for fear of theft. Instead, they hired paramedics to wait outside in ambulances, ready to extract heat-stricken employees on stretchers and in wheelchairs, the investigation found. Workers also said they were pressured to meet ever greater production targets, a strategy colloquially known as “management by stress.” Amazon monitors productivity in real time, analyzing data from networked scanner guns that employees use as they move and sort merchandise. Laura Graham, a CamperForce member who worked as a picker in the Coffeyville, Kansas, warehouse, told me each time she scanned a product, a countdown began on her screen. It indicated how many seconds she had to reach the next item, as if she’d graduated to the next level in a video game. Her progress toward hourly goals was also tracked. When an accidental trip down the wrong aisle left her more than five minutes behind schedule, a supervisor arrived to scold her.

Linda rededicated herself to quitting with a new vigor. This time it stuck. When she worried about slipping between AA meetings, she called her sponsor. Oddly, that’s how she learned some of the same techniques that helped her keep going through long shifts at Amazon. She became an expert at focusing on whatever challenge lay immediately ahead, parsing large problems into bite-sized chunks until she felt she could manage anything. “Are your dishes done? Okay. Go do your dishes then and call me back,” her sponsor used to tell her. Linda would scrub the plates and glasses until they gleamed, then call again. “Did you make your bed?” was the next question. Linda went and did that, too. And so on, and so on, until she had muddled through.

During and after college, Ash worked at a mom-and-pop pharmacy that to her had felt like a family. But a leadership shakeup had changed her supervisors’ attitudes; she watched as loyal, longtime staff got pressured to quit. “Our society is turning to that a lot,” she said. “They don’t want long-term employees, because then you do have pensions, then you do have to keep giving them cost-of-living increases and, if they’ve been working for the company a long time, they’re going to want a merit-based raise.” The new management, she said, “literally wanted disposable people. And to make disposable people you have to have a disposable job. And so everything became automated.”

To Ash, moving into a vehicle and becoming a nomad wasn’t initially the most appealing choice. She thought of the classic Saturday Night Live sketch in which Chris Farley plays a vandweller and motivational speaker named Matt Foley. He warns kids to shape up unless they want to end up living in a van, too. “My first thought was that we were going to be like that guy, saying ‘I live in a van down by the river!’” Ash said. Despite this, she came to embrace the idea.

every winter when days grow mild and pleasant, hundreds of thousands of nomads stream in from all over the country and Canada, turning the town into a pop-up metropolis nicknamed “The Gathering Place.” Some of the arrivals are leisure-loving snowbirds—folks with generous pensions or lucky retirees whose savings made it through the financial meltdown of 2008—while others are survivors, clinging to the ragged edge of the social contract. Their circumstances are reflected in the range of dwellings parading along Main Street.

It’s worth noting—you can’t always size up folks’ economic circumstances just by looking at their RVs. Some of the dwellings parked around workamping sites, for example, resemble the kind of pleasure craft one might associate with well-to-do vacationers. When I started visiting the RV parks where Amazon’s CamperForce workers stay, I wondered, What are those shiny land yachts with satellite dishes doing here? And I learned two things: First, a few of the RV parks were also temporary homes for high-paid oil field workers, who had cash to burn on fancy toys. Second, plenty of folks don’t own their RVs free and clear. Just like in the housing market, it’s possible to overspend and get trapped in a debt cycle, struggling to make payments. And unfortunately, just like traditional homes, RVs can also go underwater.

Dreadlocked teens and twentysomethings in weather-beaten backpacks sit on the curb. Their tribe calls itself by many names—crust punks, dirty kids, travelers, and Rainbows, a reference to the Rainbow Family gatherings that many attend. Some of the kids are hitching rides out of town—to Yuma, to Phoenix, anywhere. Others hold cardboard placards that ask for cash. They don’t call this panhandling, though. It’s “flying a sign,” or “jugging,” or “spanging”—short for spare-changing—and it’s what you do when the gas money runs out. Many of the older folks give them dirty looks, but others play along. A white-haired cashier at Dollar General rings up two six-packs of Miller Genuine Draft for a guy in a brown hoodie and blond dreadlocks; she laughs when he jokingly extends a palm full of colored stones in payment instead of dollars. A spirited debate rises on the post office line between a snowbird and a young drifter with a handlebar mustache. Are humans spiritual beings who transcend this planet? Or just fuck-ups trashing the earth? When evening comes, the kids retreat to desert encampments. They pass bottles of whiskey around the bonfire, strum guitars, roast hot dogs, roll joints, kill time.

Restaurant owners aren’t the only ones scrambling to make a buck. Every year, vendors descend on Quartzsite, setting up temporary booths or reopening storefronts that closed for the off-season, posting signs all over town. “Mr. Motorhome Has the CLEANEST RVS in QUARTZSITE” claims one pitchman, whose photo appears on a series of posters, his grin unsettlingly white. “It’s not a mirage, the deals are real,” blare ads for a competitor, RVs for Less. “FREE PANCAKE BREAKFAST” reads a banner outside La Mesa RV, another dealership. Six mornings a week, seniors line up there for a hot meal in a room called the Silver Buckle Customer Corral, amid televised ads for motorhomes most cannot afford. (They treat the ads like soup-kitchen sermons—obligatory background noise to ignore.) There are dozens of RV supply and service stations, from waste dumping sites to solar panel vendors and roving windshield repair shops. Some use silly names to stand out: Passmore Gas, A Toe Truck, the RV Proctologist. Others make a loftier appeal. At Schartel Pinstriping Services, there’s a tent topped with a giant cross and a sign that says “Hope for America. America for Jesus.” Everyone’s angling for a quick payday, promising rock-bottom prices. “We Stack It Deeper & Sell It Cheaper,” promises one sign. “Everything Must Go!” says another. At salvaged grocery outlets—known as “scratch-and-dent” stores—shoppers find deeply discounted food past its sell-by date in crushed boxes and dinged cans. Behind the l...

The bookstore is owned by septuagenarian nudist Paul Winer, who has skin like burnished leather and wanders the aisles in nothing but a knit codpiece. When it’s cold, he dons a sweater. Paul can afford to keep his bookstore going because, technically, it isn’t a permanent structure, and that keeps the taxes down. It has no real walls—just a ramada roof above a concrete slab. Tarps span the space between them. Shipping containers and a trailer are annexes. Trailer Life magazine called it “the ultimate in Quartzsite architecture.” In an earlier career Paul toured as Sweet Pie, a nude boogie-woogie pianist known for his sing-along anthem “Fuck ’Em If They Can’t Take a Joke,” and he still performs spontaneously on a baby grand near the front of the shop, not far from a discreetly covered adult book section. There’s a Christian section, too, but it’s in the back and Paul usually has to help people find it. “They follow my bare ass to the Bible,” he declares.

Most folks who stay in Quartzsite don’t bother with the RV parks, though. Instead they gather on the local equivalent of a low-rent district—the public lands just outside of town—like pioneers swarming the site of a latter-day gold rush. (“The old rush,” the same Scotsman reporter quipped.) There they camp on the hardpan mix of dust and gravel known as “desert concrete.” Rather than pay for amenities, they boondock, using solar panels and gas-powered generators for electricity, hauling their own water in jugs and tanks. What creature comforts they sacrifice are made up for by the scenery. They park beside giant, open-armed saguaros that grow thick and tall as telephone poles; from a distance, the cacti look like giant hitching posts for the motorhomes. They cluster along the edges of desert washes, seeking out rare patches of shade among the creosote, mesquite, ironwood, and palo verde trees. For neighbors they have kangaroo rats, Gambel’s quail, lizards, scorpions, and roving packs of coyotes, whose nighttime yipping competes with the hum of their generators. (There are rattlesnakes, too, but most are dormant and won’t stir until spring, when shimmering waves of heat scour the desert, clearing out most human visitors.) As the campers settle in, they put out welcome mats, barbecue grills, and lawn chairs; unfurl awnings, Astroturf lawns, and weatherproof carpet; fly colorful flags and set up fenced-in dog runs. It looks like a sprawling tailgate party, a spectacle that Nat...

We were all crammed in there together, chatting, when she brought up Quartzsite. I’d never heard of it before. Like Bill, she was fascinated by the blurring of class lines. That’s no small thing against the backdrop of modern America, where income-segregated neighborhoods are on the rise, isolating—and insulating—the wealthy from the poor. Quartzsite isn’t like that. “It’s anybody’s yard,” Iris explained. “Whatever you have, you’re welcome.”

So far as tribes go, there are dozens of desert “rallies”: gatherings of RV clubs whose members share common traits. Some of these organizations are age-based. One of them, called Boomers, is for members of the postwar generation, though so many RVers fit that profile, it almost seems beside the point to have a club. Other groups, including Xscapers and NuRVers, target a slightly younger demographic—the giveaway is the erratic spelling and capitalization, a dot-com-era dog whistle. There are additional sects for fishermen (the Roving Rods), disaster relief volunteers (the DOVES), and gays and lesbians (Rainbow RV, with no relation to the traveling kids called “Rainbows”). There are singles clubs including the Wandering Individuals Network, SOLOS, and Loners on Wheels, the last of which has very strict rules. “If there’s any hanky-panky, you get kicked out,” one member told The Victoria Advocate, a Texas newspaper. The Loners’ credo instructs everyone to “conduct yourself as a mingling single” and states that “members of the opposite gender, not blood related, must not occupy the same camping unit.” There’s even a dedicated group in the desert for nudists. A seventy-five-acre zone at the southern edge of the long-term visitors’ area, called The Magic Circle, is surrounded with posters reading “ATTENTION: BEYOND THIS POINT YOU MAY ENCOUNTER NUDE SUNBATHERS.” (Quartzsite denizens have jokingly referred to it online as “wrinkle city” and “floppy and saggy town.”) Other camps a...