Road Warriors

“Nomadland – Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century,” by Jessica Bruder, 2017

In a recent drive across the northern plains of the U.S. I noticed something dark.  Wedged in among the tourist vehicles of various kinds were what seemed to be the ‘homeless on wheels.’  RV parks that advertise a $60 monthly rate, or rates for a whole winter.  RV parks where the occupants had been obviously staying there for a long time.  Vans that were full of more stuff than a normal camper would need.  A Motel 6 on a rainy, cold night in Wyoming where I meet a grey-haired man who normally camps in the Arizona desert for the summer. What’s going on? 

Not Trailer Trash

Bruder followed these people for 4 years.  She tented, then got her own camper van and detailed a new sub-culture that has grown up since the 2008 housing and foreclosure disaster.  What she discovered is that these ‘new Okies,’ gypsies, houseless ‘rubber tramps’ and ‘workampers’ form an itinerant workforce traveling the U.S., staffing Amazon warehouses, Forest Service campgrounds, Crystal Sugar beet harvests and other no-rent jobs, working for not much more than minimum wage.  They are nearly all older white people - 'the unbearable whiteness of vanning' as one joked. This book is similar to Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel & Dimed,” as Bruder also works for short periods at some of these jobs too.  She most closely follows Linda, a woman in her ‘60s who can no longer afford an apartment, and who buys a small trailer to live on the road, working for as many months as she can.  Linda ultimately buys a bit of cheap Sonoran desert near the Mexican border to build a sustainable ‘Earthship’ house, but she seems to be one of the few.

This is a new ‘mobile’ precariat living in RVs (recreational vehicles!), vans, pickups with covers, trailers and even sedans. They hide on city streets, in WalMart parking lots, in 24-hour business lots, at rest stops and truck stops, state and national campgrounds, private RV parks, in unincorporated wilderness or desert.  They have mail forwarded from postbox forwarding services.  Due to recent right-wing changes, in some states without a permanent address they can no longer vote, as a business address is not acceptable.  Their social-security checks average a small $550 a month. Their children, if they have any, are also in financial straights.  Most don’t see a way back to a permanent home. For them, the ‘American dream’ has become a fraud.

This sub-culture has web sites and annual meetings, especially the big one in Quartzsite, Arizona. They have a camp-fire ‘freedom philosophy’ of sorts and many, many survival skills that they teach each other.  They try to stick together to help each other, even the ‘loners’ and introverts.  You can learn a lot about how to become a mobile gypsy in this book, as there is info on van and RV roof solar panels, the benefits of hybrid vehicles, how to avoid police or nosy people, tricks on how to make your vehicle look like no one is sleeping in it, where the jobs are, where to shower, internet survival, how to stay warm, etc.

Most interesting is how various businesses, like Amazon’s ‘Camperforce’, the US Forest Service and their private contractor California Land Management, or Crystal Sugar in the Red River Valley recruit older workampers en mass to do physical jobs.  They understand that these gray-haired workers are desperate but also hard workers, punctual and experienced.  Reading about walking dozens of miles through Amazon’s huge warehouses, suffering carpel tunnel, back strain and boredom, with Ibuprofen dispensers freely available, tells you something about how the cheap crap at Amazon.com comes your way.  The workampers call it a form of slavery, which it is - wage slavery.  Of course, that is AFTER it is manufactured by lowly-paid Chinese, Cambodian or Bangladeshi workers on their side of the Pacific Ocean, so the model is consistent on both sides of the ocean.  Linda is especially repulsed by the disposable crap that Americans buy when she works filling shelves at Amazon… even the sex toys.  It all has landfill potential…

This is first-person journalism of the finest sort, but goes only so far. It is missing statistics, a more detailed analysis of why housing is a privilege in this country, or even a hint of a solution to houselessness or shelterlessness in a capitalist society.  Bruder works hard to show the sunny side of workamping, but also can’t avoid the pitfalls – cold, heat, poverty, car problems, medical care and legality issues.  For instance for dental care, many workampers cross the border into Mexico, just as Minnesotans have gone to Canada to get cheaper drugs.  Given corporate city councils are now cracking down on unlicensed ‘camping’ while encouraging gentrification; and state governments are demanding permanent addresses to vote, being ‘homeless’ is now being further criminalized or made invisible.

If police see a ‘Quartzsite’ camp sticker on a vehicle, they know the inhabitants might be houseless. Bruder says that the Arizona town of Quartzsite has 73 RV parks, with 40,000 people living there between December and February in various configurations.  This ‘old rush’ or ‘Jurassic Trailer Park’ encampment of nomads can move from Quartsite to a huge federal land area called “La Posa” which allows camping for 7 months for $180.  While Bruder says that ‘class lines’ are blurred at Quartzsite, I would guess they are only put in the background so as to lessen conflict.  Oldsters with $100k of RVs or trailers with all the toys, parked near people with white Econline vans they bought for $2,500 can only induce a rolling of the eyes.

This is a quick and illuminating read.  It introduces you to a world you might not be familiar with, until you have no choice.  Rent, utilities, mortgages, real estate taxes or house insurance are some of the biggest costs everyone faces.  For working class citizens, there is no barrier anymore to rises in every one of them.  Rent and building controls are not solutions on the radar of bourgeois politicians, nor is the socialization of the land. Nor are the corporate politicians talking about putting people in empty houses or apartments, or building actual 'affordable' housing instead of just pretending.  Rising interest rates, home prices and real estate taxes are all built into rentier capital’s control of land, either through the banking, real estate or political sector.  That is, until there is a recession. These van dwellers have decided to dump them all, either voluntarily or more frequently, necessarily.  They are perhaps our road warrior future…

P.S. - now a film starring Frances McDormand.  

Other reviews on this topic:  “Cade’s Rebellion,” “Rebel Cities,” “Reinventing Collapse,” “The Lower Depths,” “Famished Road,” “Hillbilly Elegy," and "The Precariat."   Use blog search box, upper left.

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

October 19, 2018