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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.
Driving on, they’re secure in this knowledge: The last free place in America is a parking spot.
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.
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, Winterin’ in the desert sun. I’m an old gypsy soul with new goals, Queen of the Road! My friends think I’m insane, But for me their life is way too tame. If sometimes I sing the blues, Small price for the life I choose. I’ve found all space is hallowed ground, If we will but look around In our sacred search for the New Earth. Queens of the Road! I know every back road in five western states. If it’s a blue highway I don’t hesitate. I learn
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stand-alone systems for providing food, electricity, climate control, and water, would act almost like a symbiotic organism. If she could create and maintain such a dwelling, it would take care of her, too. That kind of stability felt reassuring.
“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 be true isn’t true, it’s disorienting. What you believe to be true is so embedded. It takes a radical pounding to let go.”
Sometimes I felt like I was wandering around post-recession refugee camps, places of last resort where Americans got shipped if the so-called “jobless recovery” had exiled them from the traditional workforce. At other moments, I felt like I was talking to prison inmates. It was tempting to cut through the pleasantries and ask, “What are you in for?”
“Since they are getting us off government assistance for almost three months of the year, we are a tax deduction for them.”
“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.”
“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.
That pep talk was surreal, but not entirely surprising. Positive thinking, after all, is an all-American coping mechanism, practically a national pastime.
“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.
Such laws prioritize property over people. They tell nomads “Your car can stay here, but you can’t.” In communities across the country, whether this might express a dark shift in civic values has been left largely out of the debate.
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.
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.
In the widening gap between credits and debits hangs a question: 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.
These indignities underscore a larger question: When do impossible choices start to tear people—a society—apart? It’s already happening. The cause of the unmanageable household math that’s keeping people up at night is no secret. 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.
No matter what, the octopus got out. “Sometimes people can be like that,” I suggested. “Yeah, if you try to keep us in a box,” Linda said. She laughed.
