ASPHALT GYPSY
Rubber tramping across Nomadland, The Times, 2021
It was early March, and cold had made a home of my bones. Now, a British Army bivvy bag is all well and good, but if you’ve got nowhere to sleep but your car at that time of year, the American northwest isn’t a cuddly proposition.
But it sure looks a treat. After two weeks of being snowbound at Idaho truck stops, it felt like some kind of redemption to be parked at a campsite near Yachats, Oregon, just off the Pacific Coast Highway. At high tide there, nature puts on a magic show: Thor’s Well, a sinkhole in the coastal rock, appears to suck the ocean into itself. The first time I saw it, dawn was half asleep, so I had a private audience, but I’m told that later in the day the lookout point fills up with Flat Earthers, eager to snap a selfie with “proof” of where the world actually ends.
Considerable discomfort, some small disgrace (should taking nature’s call in a bucket start losing its charm) and the sort of sights that elicit spiritual epiphanies from the easily bedazzled – that’s “van life” for you. And I’m speaking as a blacktop veteran. A freelance journalist covering the contiguous Americas, I’ve been bedding down in my vehicle, off and on, for 20 years – one of over three million people in the United States reckoned to be living, working and, naturally, travelling in some motorised form of shelter for a good chunk of their time.
This rolling existence has recently come under the spotlight, courtesy of three golden statuettes. Nomadland, Chloé Zhao’s semi-fictional adaptation of Jessica Bruder’s non-fiction book, cleaned up at the Oscars, winning Best Picture, Actress and Director. It tells the story of Fern, a 61-year-old woman who, after losing her husband, job and home in the Great Recession, loads up her belongings in a Ford Econoline and sets out on a journey of – yep, you’ve got it – self-discovery, all the while being played, to great effect, by Frances McDormand. We should all be so lucky.
On my own travels across this vast country, I’ve run into every kind of “rubber tramp”. The full-timers are a dogged breed, breezily maintaining that trading “bricks and sticks” for “wheel estate” isn’t about ditching the American dream, but resetting it. They roam solo, picking up unsecured jobs here and there, and find community on public lands overseen by the Bureau of Land Management – 640 million acres of it, most of it out west. Then there are the snowbirds: seasonal nomads, usually retirees, who migrate south for the winter in convoys of pristine RVs. And let’s not forget the Boondockers – extreme campers, really – who willingly forgo basic amenities for a slice of Edenic solitude, even if just for a little while.
As for me, I’m one of those digital nomads you’ve probably heard too much about – I get around, but in the name of work, not Instagram. Though calling it “work” might be a stretch; seven-tenths of the miles I rack up result in nothing publishable. The moment I think I’m onto something, wild geese plot to distract me; the mythic assumes mundane proportions; leads take wrong turns; and promising starts hit dead ends. Only the tall tales keep growing, until, at the first whiff of exposure, their tellers develop an allergy to newsprint.
So maybe “dirtbagger” is a more appropriate term. According to the Urban Dictionary, it applies to someone who “casts off the restraints of a conventional life to pursue their passion”. True, dirtbaggers are usually sporty sorts – free climbers, surfers, whitewater rafters – but writing, least the way I do it, comes with its own dangers.
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After a year holed up in the UK due to Covid, I reunited with my ride in New Orleans on February 16 – the day of the Mardi Gras that wasn’t. It had spent 12 months parked on a Bywater side street, weathering a rowdy hurricane season and a spike in car crime – one of the pandemic's many side effects. But somehow, perhaps just to surprise me, it came through without so much as a lost hubcap, and started at the first time of begging.
Now that I’m fully vaccinated, I’m itching to hit the road again. I’ve got a book in mind, a sort of “Travels without Charley in a 17-year-old slate grey Toyota Sienna with the back seats ripped out” (yeah, the pitch could use a polish), and the car’s name reflects that. In Travels with Charley, his “state of the nation” travelogue published in 1962, John Steinbeck dubs his brand new pick-up and custom camper “Rocinante”, after Don Quixote’s horse. My much humbler convyeance goes by “Dapple” – Sancho Panza’s donkey.
I was made for the road. Sure, I'm housebroken, but I've always felt like a guest in my own places, and a burglar in other people's. Roughing it comes as naturally as breathing. Back in 2011, I wrote a cover story for The Sunday Times Magazine about the new breed of hobo, and I didn’t dream it up. I rode freight trains for 2,000 miles, slept in coal cars, ate out of dumpsters and dodged cops. On the move, I feel smart and capable, a survivor – three-quarters cockroach, Armageddon-ready.
In 2019, I spent a few days at the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous, a two week-long gathering held every January near the old mining town of Quartzsite, Arizona. Dismissed by cynics as “Burning Man for retirees”, the event, which drew 10,000 visitors when I was there, is the centrepiece of Nomadland. Bob Wells, who started it all11 years ago, features in the movie alongside a number of other real-life van-dwellers.
Wells is no extra, though; he’s a van life evangelist with his own YouTube channel, CheapRVLiving. He's a serious man, and so is the Rendezvous. It’s a place where attendees swap skills, trade goods and hold seminars on the fine art of vehicle dwelling, covering everything from stealth parking to solar panel installation, cheap dental care in Mexico and finding secondhand goods for a song. There’s no hierarchy, no top dogs barking orders. I met a bunch of thirtysomething freighthoppers scouting out a school bus to convert into a communal living space, and they were met with nothing but warmth and a contagious enthusiasm.
Wells started the Homes on Wheels Alliance nonprofit in 2018 to help “nomads in need,” setting up people with suitably equipped vehicles, making essential repairs and keeping an emergency fund. Working out of Pahrump, Nevada, the operation has plans to go nationwide because, well, homelessness isn’t picky about geography.
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Memoir moment. How did I get here, really? Perpetual drifter, hopping freights, sleeping in my car in another country. Well, my presence in the world of broadsheet journalism was not preordained. With bipolar II, an outcast youth and teenage paternity, no formal education and a CV up to the turn of this century with little that was legal on it, I didn’t feel cut out for a life in newsprint, least outside of being reported on.
On my first shift at The Sunday Times, I felt like I’d snuck into a grand old house, its grounds patrolled by exotic birds. It took time to settle in, mostly by mirroring behaviour and mimicking speech, though I never quite shook the expectation that I’d be handed a rake at any moment. So when the chance came for me to get out of the office and write, I turned to the people who I’ve always felt closest to: the marginalised, whose tribes are makeshift, their communities improvised, their career arcs interrupted.
I owe the internet more than I’d like to admit. I couldn’t plan my trips without it. It has given me – and plenty of the people I’ve travelled with – the freedom to live and work on our own terms. Without it, I’d be done for. It makes me laugh when people sneer at beggars for having phones, when a phone’s the one thing the homeless can’t afford to be without.
Campendium.com and freecampsites.net are essential peripatetic aids, listing everything from “friendly” Walmart lots and 24-hour truck stops to Forest Service lands, with users constantly updating available amenities – whether it’s RV hookups, fire rings, drinking water, showers or dump stations. Boondockers Welcome grants access to over 3,500 private spots where I can stay free for a night or two. And I use a police scanner app to keep an ear out for patrols near me. I also make sure my Anytime Fitness membership is up to date – with 3,000 gyms across the States, I’m never far from a power shower.
My need to stretch out, to remind my body it’s built for wider, more open spaces, is real. I’m turning 50 this year, and at 6 foot 3, with a case of driver’s slump – a spine like a crumpled concertina and discs that herniate for the hell of it – it’s clear my body no longer revels in the challenges of in-car living. “Bumbling around in the back of my Toyota, barely able to kneel up” is not a yoga pose. And the gym visits are vital besides. If I roll in late, I can nod off on some crash mats – a welcome break from and for Dapple. After all, it doesn’t pay to fall out with the thing keeping you from homelessness, even if, as one hobo once said, “You can’t be homeless if you live nowhere.”
We do what we can, those of us without medical insurance, to keep mind and body, if not together, then on nodding terms. A trip to the hospital could wipe me out. One-third of all American bankruptcies stem from healthcare bills. An appointment with a GP in the United States averages $125 – and that's before any tests or procedures come into play.
When I’m in New Orleans, where my car is registered, I sign up for clinical trials – the next best thing to insurance. Not only do they pay, they also include a thorough check-up to ensure participants are fit for the trial. And when I’ve been ruled out, usually because my systolic blood pressure is pushing 145 mmHg, I’ve been given medication to get me back into trial-worthy shape.
Dapple’s in better shape than I am. It doesn’t take much to make him habitable: a thin twin mattress, bedding, bug nets, a fan, propane stove, water filter, portable toilet, tyre pump and Reflectix foil to keep the heat at bay. A hotspot booster helps me stay connected, but when I need reliable wifi, I turn to the ever-open fast-food joints that dot the outskirts of every American town. I’ve lost track of the words I’ve filed from McDonald’s at 2am, running on cheap coffee, the dull buzz of flickering fluorescents making my fillings ache. And if the car’s sickening for something, there’s usually a garage or motel nearby.
Between jobs, I don’t stick around anywhere longer than a week unless there are mountains to hike or waters to fish in (I watched a lot of Grizzly Adams as a kid). I rent rods for trout, bass, and walleye, and I noodle for catfish (noodling is fishing with bare hands, using fingers as bait). Summers have taken me through Oklahoma, the Ozarks and the Great Lakes, though I tend to steer clear of the dripplingly scenic spots, where even living in your car seems to be getting gentrified. Dapple has been sniffed at by many an RV the size of a cruise ship, even by solar-powered Kombivans that look like country cottages. To their owners, I might as well be crashing in a shop doorway.
Well, sniff away, “neighbours”– I don’t care that he looks like a giant shoebox filled with trash and, when I’m in bed, an overnourished corpse, he gets the job done. And that job often involves waking up to wave at bears, cougars and elk in national parks that makes Paradise look like a parking lot.
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I’ll stay on the road until March next year, when I’ll be heading to the UK for my daughter’s wedding. If I return to the States – and I can’t imagine staying away for long – I’ll likely slip right back into it. I’ve got friends scattered across the country who’ll put me up if I’m feeling rough, sociable or just plain lazy. And when payday strikes, there’s always a B-movie motel room waiting, with lousy cable TV to keep me company.
And I’m fortunate besides. Yes, I’ve been drugged, beaten and robbed; jailed and fined for vagrancy; had my car towed and impounded in three states; and been asked by a meth head, at wandering gunpoint, to explain myself quicker than I could get the words out. But those weren’t the inevitable pitfalls of life on the road – they were just the occupational hazards of being a journalist who doesn’t take “fuck off” for an answer. No, my real fortune lies in never having to worry about law enforcement taking a fatal interest in my activities.
Let’s be frank: Nomadland is a lie, a beautifully lit, dreamy lie. It barely grazes the realities of van life that the excellent book it’s based on dissects. It doesn’t pretend to be a documentary, of course, although it borrows authenticity by asking people to play themselves, almost as endorsements of the picture it’s painting. It presents the full-timers as latter-day pioneers, heading west, striking a blow for freedom, seen in wide pans, bathed in gold; rather than as discards trying to make the best of it, and what “it” is is best left unprobed. It’s like reality softened by a windfall and a few drinks round a campfire. Or the stories that, on good days, rubber tramps tell themselves, until they run out of money for basics.
There’s no harm in portraying people in a way that preserves their dignity, but we shouldn’t gloss over what put them on the road. The challenge, which Nomadland sidesteps, is to balance empathy for individuals with a critical eye on the forces that leave them vulnerable. The open road, once slick with dreams, has lost much of its appeal. For rubber tramps, though, it offers a way to reclaim some agency in an otherwise unforgiving system, even as it distances them from societal safety nets like stable employment and secure housing – once you’re off the grid, the ways back are few.
And at least they are the right colour. Van life is a white romance, however ruinous it may be. In 2023, over 650,000 Americans were homeless in the United States, a 12 per cent increase on the previous year. That’s one in 514. And African-Americans make up nearly 40 per cent of this population, despite representing only 13 per cent of the total US population. This overrepresentation is largely due to historical and structural racism, a reality that is hard to dispute with any intellectual honesty.
Black culture is predominantly urban, and it's becoming increasingly perilous for homeless individuals to remain in familiar surroundings. According to the National Homelessness Law Center, more than half of the 180 cities it monitors have introduced laws criminalising homelessness. These laws often prohibit sleeping in cars, parking overnight or residing in RVs on public streets. Such restrictions not only make finding safe shelter more difficult but also expose people to fines, arrests and the potential loss of their vehicles – their last remaining refuge.
It’s worth repeating in any discussion of the so-called “Land of the Free” that the privilege to explore its vast landscapes is not distributed equally. For many people of colour, the idea of hitting the road, whether out of necessity or choice, is complicated by a legacy of exclusion and ongoing barriers (in light of continued racial profiling and police violence faced by black drivers, friends born just 30 years ago have told me they lament the passing of The Green Book*). Homelessness in the United States is not simply a matter of personal misfortune but a glaring reflection of deep-seated socio-economic disparities – and this context is completely absent in Nomadland.
* Created by Victor Hugo Green and published from 1936 to 1966, The Negro Motorist Green Book was a travel guide – and survival tool – that listed businesses, hotels, restaurants and gas stations that were welcoming to black travellers, especially in the Jim Crow South, where segregation and discrimination were rampant
