Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

by Jessica Bruder

Being human means yearning for more than subsistence. As much as food or shelter, we require hope.

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.

Woodswoman: Living Alone in the Adirondack Wilderness

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.

According to 2015 census figures, among older women living alone, more than one in six are below the poverty line. Nearly twice as many elderly women in America are poor (2.71 million) than their male counterparts (1.49 million). And when it comes to Social Security benefits, female recipients get on average $341 a month less than men because of lower total payroll tax contributions, an under-recognized consequence of the gender wage gap. In 2015, women were still making just about 80 cents on the male dollar and more likely to work as unpaid caregivers to young children and aging parents. (Apart from raising her two children, Linda later became a live-in helper for her mother, who developed an aggressive brain cancer in the mid-1990s.) Women have lower lifetime earnings and accrue less in savings. And since they have greater longevity—outliving men by five years on average—those dollars must stretch further into the future.

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.

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.

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.

She used the wish list feature on Amazon’s website to catalog “all the amazing and awe-inspiring shit we put on shelves.” These included live waxworms, a five-pound gummi bear, a diver’s speargun, a book titled Venus with Biceps: A Pictorial History of Muscular Women, a butt plug attached to a plush foxtail, a pound of obsolete U.S. coins, a set of cotton briefs with four leg holes called “undies for two,” and a Batman-themed dildo.*

America’s appetite for sex toys— indicated by the sheer number and variety of dildos and butt plugs passing through Amazon warehouses— is a subject of fascination to many workers. And though most “adult novelties” get wrapped in black plastic as soon as they come off the loading docks, a few squeak past unnoticed. One CamperForce stower recalled gleefully the time she received a case of sixty suction-cup mounted dildos. She arranged them on the shelves with each one suctioned at the front of a bin and standing upright. “When you turned the corner, around that aisle all you see is these peckers,” she said, laughing. “Of course, we all had to go around, telling everybody, ‘Go look at C23!’” Usually she would have worried about pissing off management, but “it was the last two weeks of work there, so what are they going to say?”

almost everyone visits Reader’s Oasis on the east end of Main Street. 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.

he’s still impressed by the campers’ neighborliness. “We can have that guy who rides up on a bike with his dog on a leash and throws down his tent next to a guy in a $500,000 custom-built motorhome, and they get along just fine,” Bill told me. “That ability to coexist is based simply on their desire to enjoy the public land, and the fact that it belongs equally to the guy riding the bicycle as to the guy in the motorhome.”

(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.)

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.

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.

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.