Stories of the road—a book review…
Life on the road: freedom, mobile dystopia and resilience
Nomadland. There are a lot of people living there now. Those who have the portable work skills or the financial means can freely choose the nomadic life. For those coping with or escaping broken relationships, unemployment, unaffordable housing or our accelerating cost-or-living it is sometimes the only viable option.
I WAS HOOKED. Here were people living free, living life by moving place to place, the free life of the road. I discovered this decades ago when, by chance and good fortune, I picked a copy of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road from a bookstore shelf. Intrigued by the idea of people living lives well out of the ordinary, my reading took me to John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley-In Search of America, William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways and Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard. Others followed.
It turns out that those books have influenced other people too. Travels With Charley and Blue Highways are favourites among the people Jessica Bruder writes about in her 2017 creative journalism work, Nomadland.
Instagram has distorted the realities of life on the road. I’m not saying that the majority of Instagram posts on nomadism are misleading. Many depict the highs of the freeranging life, if not the downsides. For the most part they are posted people who have voluntarily adopted the mobile life. What we don’t see are the lives of those for whom life on the road has been imposed. After reading Jessica’s book I have a very different picture of some of those living in vans, motorhomes and other vehicles in the US. No, they’re not all on holidays. With an estimated one million Americans living on the road, the book is a necessary antidote to the Instagram-boosted romanticism that surrounds vanlife.
Jessica writes in a straightforward journalistic style that does not get in the way of the story. It is what you would expect from somebody teaching at the Columbia School of Journalism. Her’s is immersive journalism in
which the writer participates in what they write about. Jessica’s research spanned three years during which she spent time in different parts of the country with people living a mobile lifestyle. Her book follows the lives of several of them.
The new nomads
There have been nomads in the US since the end of the civil war in the middle of the Nineteenth Century. Like many retuning from the Second World War and the conflict in Vietnam, they could not fit into society when they came home and took to the road as a way of life. Vagabonds used to travel by foot or by hitching a ride on freight trains. Now they travel by van or some other type of motor vehicle. Modern nomadism is a product of the oil and automobile age.
Jessica’s book is about a particular type of nomad. To put them into context it might help to briefly talk about the diversity that is modern nomadic culture. It is a socially broad cohort classifiable by intent, livelihood, age, wealth and vehicle.
Grey nomads: These are retired people, many living on their superannuation. They sell their home or rent it out long term, minimise their possessions and take to the road full-time in, usually, larger vehicles of the type that we in Australia call motor homes and what in the US are known as ‘recreational vehicles’ or RVs.
Digital nomads: A type of mobile worker who voluntarily takes to vanlife and makes a living on the road by servicing distant clients. Their work is usually writing, graphic design, website development, IT or a similar computer-based occupation. All they need for their livelihood is a laptop computer, mobile phone, camera, software, access to a broadband connection and clients.
Nomadic tradespeople: Read the literature on modern nomadism in the US and you find a few tradespeople who follow the nomadic life. They travel with their tools and pick up jobs along the way. Nomadic tradespeople are another type of mobile worker. Compared to the digital nomads, they are few.
Adventure nomads: Climbers, bushwalkers, skiers, surfers, kayakers, mountain bikers and others whose travels take them to national parks and other wild places where their vans, which they call ‘adventure vehicles’, serve as base camp for their adventure activities.
Vanlife travellers: a relatively new word, ‘vanlife’ is a catch-all term for the above types and others living a mobile lifestyle either full-time or for shorter periods. It includes people on extended travel who may have a fixed home somewhere as well as those searching for somewhere to live. The difference is that they intend to return to fixed-address living at some time.
All of these are people who voluntarily follow a vehicle-based life whether it is in a van, a conventional car or station wagon, converted bus, motorhome or by towing a caravan. Others traverse the country by motorcycle, a few by bicycle. What they all have in common is that they are on the road by choice.
A lifestyle unchosen
Jessica’s book is not about them. She focuses on people pushed into a mobile lifestyle, what we could call economically-displaced people. They include people on low incomes unable to afford high urban rents and utility costs for electricity, gas and water (avoiding recurrent, fixed-address costs is also a motivation of many who voluntarily take up vanlife), others who lose their jobs and victims of relationship break-ups who move out of the home. They include people who lost not only their job or business in the economic crash of 2008, but their home, too. Now they travel the highways living a motorised, mobile way of life.
Reading Jessica’s book, I couldn’t help but draw a parallel between the people in it and those John Steinbeck wrote about in Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck’s people were displaced by the drought in the US Mid-West in the 1930s. They travelled to California in search of livelihood and a new home. Now, we would call them environmental refugees. Like Jessica’s people, Steinbeck’s formed a low-waged itinerant workforce. Unlike those in Steinbeck’s novel, many that Jessica interviewed intend to remain nomads.
They are not people living in shiny new Sprinter vans or restored VW Kombis who post carefully-composed, idyllic photos of their lifestyle on Instagram where a few earn income by featuring the products of camping equipment manufacturers in their posts. Jessica’s people live mostly in older vans, recreational vehicles and caravans (what Americans call ‘trailers’), purchased second-hand.
A new, mobile demographic
Jessica’s nomads span the age range between the 40s and the 70s. Those in the older age bracket would previously have been described as ‘retired’. Now they work because their aged or disbability pensions are too low, certainly too low to afford fixed accommodation. They are couples and singles, men and women. Their downshifting is enforced, yet in their minimalism they find a sense of liberation from the clutter and costs of fixed-address living and consumerism.
Many are also working people. Even though the seasonal work they do is low-waged, they look forward to it as a means of replenishing their financial reserves. Jessica reveals the low-income status of some when she writes that a few have a daily food budget as low as US$5.
What about the work they do? There is the traditional fruit picking and vegetable harvesting that has sustained itinerant mobile workers for generations. Jessica graphically describes her experience working the sugar beet harvest. Campground host is a favourite form of seasonal work. The nomads are also seasonally employed by companies contracted to the forest or national parks service to manage their campgrounds. Wages, no campsite fees and free power and water compensate for being available into the night, cleaning toilets and cleaning-up litter left by thoughtless campers. Ticket-taking and crewing sales stalls at events are other opportunities to earn the dollars that sustain the nomadic life.
Now, those established forms of seasonal work have been joined by something new. Driven by consumer culture and digital-platform capitalism, Amazon distribution centres employ the nomads during peak selling season. The corporation has a reputation for poor labour practices and this is verified in Jessica’s book. The work is poorly-paid, working days can be ten, sometimes more hours and there is much walking, lifting, reaching and bending. Breaks? Half an hour for lunch, plus two 15 minute breaks. A nomad working in one of the Amazon warehouses used a pedometer to discover he was walking 18 kilometres a day in warehouses the size of multiple football fields. Another explained to Jessica how he power-walked between aisles and treated the job as a get-fit opportunity.
Age-related unemployment is common in Australia just as it is in the US. Employers dislike hiring people over 50 because of their assumptions about the capacity of older workers to adapt, because their knowledge is thought to be out of date or because they believe older workers will not fit into the culture of a workplace of younger people. The employers in Jessica’s book, such as Amazon, see things differently. They understand how older workers can call on a lifetime of experience and that they are reliable. That is why Amazon and the sugar beet industry have recruiting tables at RV exhibitions.
The lessons
What can we learn from Jessica’s book?
First, a comfortable middle-class life with mortgage and home ownership can rapidly disintegrate when the economy nosedives. Unless you own your home outright you are subject to the fates that come with economic downturn — unemployment, failure to meet mortgage payments, home repossession, homelessness. Any sense of security you entertain is likely illusory.
Second, a good tertiary education is no hedge against retrenchment and enforced downshifting. Many of Jessica’s vanlife itinerants have degrees. They find them no guarantee of a livelihood.
Another lesson is that there are different classes of people living in vans and vehicles. There are those who take to the road voluntarily such as people escaping the high cost of urban living, those whose adventure vehicles take them to the next mountain trail or surfing beach, grey nomad retirees who roam the highways and follow the sun through the seasons, the digital nomads who service clients from wherever they can get a broadband connection, the skilled and the unskilled. Then, there are the people in Jessica Bruder’s book. When many take to van life they are in survival mode. Sometimes, they come to like their mobile life and drop any intention of returning to fixed-address living.
A mobile precariat
Jessica writes that the growth of this mobile precariat, so-called because of its precarious financial circumstances, portends the future life of many more. That is not only in the US but in other countries with similar economic systems.
She talks of the end of conventional retirement, a time when aged people roam the highways to engage in poorly-paid and exhausting seasonal work in Amazon warehouses, picking vegetables, minding campgrounds and working in other industries during peak-demand times. It is a matter of doing whatever work becomes available, accepting low-pay then moving on until some other short-term job comes up someplace else.
If this sounds like the gig economy, it is. The nomadic life preceded the gig economy and has been absorbed by it. Fruit pickers are perhaps the better-known among the traditional mobile lifestylers, however in Australia the low-wages, travel, dislocation and costs associated with fruit picking have deterred many locals from the work and made it the provence of low-waged foreign visa holders. The flaw in that strategy was amply displayed when the pandemic of 2020 cut off the supply of cheap foreign labour.
Are there parallels between Jessica’s book and Australia? Some, I think. Like the pensioner and his teenage daughter I met while living in a caravan park. They lived in a small car-camping tent because the scarcity and high cost of rentals put a fixed address above what he could afford to pay. There were others in that caravan park living the mobile life. Some did so voluntarily, like the couple with their young son who were on the road for years, travelling from state to state and working where they could find employment. Others planned to find somewhere fixed to live although their prospect for the foreseeable future was life in their vehicle and tent. Jessica says this lifeway is the prospect of an increasing number of people.
Nomadland is the mobile nation of modern times. In describing it through immersive journalism, Jessica Bruder’s book is a tale of personal resilience as much as it is of economic hardship.
Nomadland; 2017, Jessica Bruder; WW Norton & Company Inc, New York. ISBN 978–0–393–35631.1. No ebook version currently available.
Books mentioned in the story
Jack Kerouac — On The Road
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Road
John Steinbeck — Travels With Charlie-In Search of America. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travels_with_Charley
William Least-Heat Moon — Blue Highways https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Highways
Peter Matthiessen — The Snow Leopard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Snow_Leopard
John Steinbeck — Grapes of Wrath.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grapes_of_Wrath
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