Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

by Jessica Bruder

THE LONDON FINANCIAL TIMES called Quartzsite “one of America’s more bizarre and seriously demented places.” But Quartzsite is not a national aberration. You’d be hard-pressed to find a town that is so quintessentially American—hyper-American to the point of caricature. Here the native inhabitants are mostly gone and, in their place, visitors snap up souvenir dreamcatchers made in Pakistan and beaded moccasins from China. Winter doesn’t exist. Soothsayers and spiritual seekers and discount shoppers come together around the shared belief that the best way to escape life’s problems is by filling up the gas tank and hitting the road. Quartzsite has always been a refuge for travelers, outsiders, people trying to reinvent themselves. And it has perfected the art of the boom and bust cycle.

We walked back toward the Hi Ali swap meet together. When I asked where she slept at night, she replied that it was easy to stay in her van, which was parked just across from her vending tables. Nobody bothered her there. She told me I was crazy to live in New York and that she was grateful she wasn’t stuck in a “concrete jungle” somewhere. “If the birds can live in the park—or they can live in the city—then why can’t I?” she said. “We don’t have to live wherever people are supposed to live—that’s what it’s all about!”

Old-timers say the high season used to bring so many RVs to Quartzsite that you could cross the desert by stepping from roof to roof. But attendance has gone down sharply in recent years. No one seems to know quite why, but everyone has a pet theory, from local political strife, to property tax hikes and increased fees for flea market vendors, to the U.S.–Canadian exchange rate and fluctuating gas prices. Some think the thousands of rockhounds who visit Quartzsite’s gem and mineral shows are defecting to similar events in Tucson. Yet others believe it’s symptomatic of a larger economic malaise, meaning fewer people can afford long drives in a gas-guzzling motorhome, let alone the luxury of free time. “As a Quartzsite native, I remember the early 1980s when we would have over one million visitors during the height of the season. Now it is more around 300,000 people,” Philip Cushman, the president of the local chamber of commerce, told me in an email.

At the Church of the Isaiah 58 Project on South Moon Mountain Avenue, a biker-turned-pastor named Mike Hobby and his wife, Linda, started a seasonal soup kitchen to help them. After experiencing homelessness firsthand—a medical crisis drowned the uninsured couple in unpayable bills—they founded the church in 2003 with a mission to help the dispossessed. The program grew and now serves thousands of meals to elderly and homeless people from November through March each year. Unlike many church missions where guests aren’t served until they sit through a sermon—“ear banging” is what insiders call it—there’s no such requirement here.

One of the liveliest seminars taught the art of stealth parking. Aimed at urban vandwellers, who often dodged anti-camping laws, the lessons were about blending into one’s surroundings to avoid getting the dreaded “knock” of a police officer tapping on the door, a drunk pounding the walls, or passersby squinting through the windows, asking “Is someone living in there?” Everyone knew about “the knock.” It was a common enemy. Swankie even had nightmares about it. “I have this strange surreal dream of someone knocking on the van,” she once wrote. “Usually happens if I am not 100% comfortable with where I am parking or boondocking. It’s annoying as heck. Never anyone there. Well, sometimes someone is there, but if it is police or security, they usually SPEAK.”

Bob also emphasized: police were not always the enemy. Some vandwellers and RVers recounted getting “the knock” from concerned officers who just wanted to ask if they were alright. There were reports from one vandweller in Ohio about a friendly cop who sometimes brought her coffee. By researching a town in advance or talking to other vandwellers, you could learn a great deal about local attitudes. In friendly places, the best choice might be going straight to the police station, telling a hard luck story, and asking where in town it would be safe to park overnight. And remember: No matter how sneaky you’re being, it’s quite likely the local police are aware of your presence. “Cops are pretty smart. They’re going to realize something’s up if you’ve been ‘just passing through’ for the past six months.” Everyone recognized, however, that it was often preferable to avoid police altogether. Some had clever ways of doing it. One vandweller online talked about installing a police scanner app on his smartphone. By listening to chatter on the local law enforcement channels, he could determine if anyone had reported him for illegal camping and get away before the cops showed up. And it had another purpose, too. If hooligans approached, he could scare them off by playing the police radio loudly, with all its static and squelches, to make his rig sound like an undercover law enforcement vehicle.

After her departure, LaVonne posted a photograph of Linda on her blog and wrote: Another new friend has moved on, and I am sad all over again. One by one, they are leaving for other places. I will see some of them again, I’m sure, but this sadness is an inevitable consequence of nomadic living. People come and go in your life. You don’t get to hang onto them forever.

Linda went to clear out a storage unit she’d been renting for four years in the Phoenix suburbs. (“I would like to just throw a match in there, I think,” she’d reflected earlier.) She loaded a moving truck with the contents and went to a friend’s five-acre property in New River, Arizona. She set aside mementos—a kindergarten watercolor of a catlike creature from her grandson Julian, a birthday card from her younger daughter Valerie with a pinup girl in a cactus bikini. “You’re still looking sharp!” it quipped. But everything else—the old record player, the matching glass lamps with tufted shades, the piles of cookware—had to go. She held yard sales. After deducting the cost of trucking everything to New River, her take for the first weekend was $99.75. “I will never rent a storage unit again,” Linda vowed. Not long after, she wrote to me, sharing a quote she’d seen online and found poetic: “Inevitably bouts with obstacles offer discouragement as you cut every tether holding you from freedom.”

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.

I saw a similar “no whiners” sentiment in Workamper News, a bimonthly magazine that targets nomads. “Do you need an attitude adjustment?” asked one headline. The column below it urged unhappy workampers with on-the-job problems to seek solutions by turning inward. “See if you can change your attitude and not let it get to you by soothing yourself with some of these statements,” the writer suggested. “ ‘We won’t be here forever. It’s a means to an end. We’re getting to travel, spend time in this area exploring (or visiting family), and living our dream.’” That pep talk was surreal, but not entirely surprising. 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 truth as I see it is that people can both struggle and remain upbeat simultaneously, through even the most soul-testing of challenges. This doesn’t mean they’re in denial. Rather, it testifies to the remarkable ability of humankind to adapt, to seek meaning and kinship when confronted with adversity. As Rebecca Solnit points out in her book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, people not only buck up in times of crisis, but do so with a “startling, sharp joy.” It’s possible to undergo hardships that shake our will to endure, while also finding happiness in shared moments, such as sitting around a bonfire with fellow workampers under a vast starry sky. In other words, the nomads I’d been interviewing for months were neither powerless victims nor carefree adventurers. The truth was much more nuanced,

During one long reporting trip, I had to get a prescription refilled. My doctor called a drugstore. Later he told me that, when the pharmacist demanded my home address, he didn’t know how to answer and blurted out, “She’s living in a van!” The pharmacist let it slide, but the episode made me think. In America, if you don’t have an address, you’re not a real person.

Experiences like these were the background music to my reporting this book. Without living in Halen, I don’t think I would have gotten close enough to people to really hear their stories. But it’s fair to say that, in the beginning, I anticipated very little of this. I had no idea what I was getting into, though I did have the good sense to feel a little freaked out at first.

I brushed my teeth and curled up in my sleeping bag, thinking about something Bob Wells had written in his book. “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.” I hadn’t thought those words would apply to me. After all, I was just a writer with a digital camera, recorder, and notebook, not someone making a radical lifestyle change. I planned to live in my van for months, not years. Cars swung through the parking lot, strafing Halen with their headlights. The shades glowed bright white as each approached, dimming to red as the vehicles passed. Shadows wheeled around inside the van. Was that driver slowing down? Was this one parking too close? Did they know I was in here? I closed my eyes and tried to relax, but it was hours before sleep came.

Swankie and Vincent were quite the pair. The vibrant, gray-haired vandweller stood at least a head taller than her bearded young apprentice, who had a testosterone molecule tattooed to his wrist, and a mischievous smile with a gap on the upper-right-hand side. Pulling that tooth had cost $250, Vincent told me, while a crown would have been $1,000. For many nomads I met, missing teeth were the badge of poverty of which they were most ashamed. Some tried to avoid smiling when my camera came out, or asked me not to share pictures that revealed empty sockets. (It’s sad—but not surprising—that teeth have become a status symbol in a country where more than one in three citizens lack dental coverage, which isn’t included with standard medical insurance.) But Vincent called the gap his straw holder. He flashed it with pride. “Anyone who has a problem with it isn’t someone I’d want to hang out with anyway,” he explained.

Swankie had joked earlier that RTR felt like a “white van convention” and, in a literal sense, this was true. Most of the vans were painted white, glinting in the bright desert glare. Since commercial fleets often use white vans, the vehicles are ubiquitous. They are easy to buy secondhand and blend in just about everywhere, making them a popular choice for vandwellers. Living in a white van comes with its own set of challenges, though—what one guy at the RTR called the “creepy factor,” the cultural stereotype that connects them with child molesters and other noxious predators. A fifty-three-year-old contractor from Salem, Oregon, told me that, after his business collapsed and he moved into a white Ford E150, his friends nicknamed him “Rape-O Van Dan” and started asking him for candy. The friends meant well, but their jokes stung.