Amherst Reads Transcript

Ted Conover ’80: This is Ted Conover, and I’m here to discuss the book Nomadland: Surviving America in the 21^st Century with its author, Jess Bruder Amherst ’00. I am Amherst ’81, and it’s really cool to be doing this with another Amherst person who’s written a road book, I guess we could say. Nomadland is about Jess’ travels, but more substantially about the travels of people she got to know in a multi-year project to write about, I think you could say, downward mobility among older Americans, or end of retirement as a New School professor says in the book. The book to me is sort of about the abandonment of America’s mostly white and well-mannered working class, RV culture sort of turned on its head. People using trailers and RVs not to take a vacation but to survive when housing is too expensive. One of the delights of this book is your voice, Jess, which despite being confronted with some kind of terrible situations people are in, you are always attending to their own sense of humor, your own sense of humor, and… you know, I ended the book not in a cloud of despair, but more just sort of really concerned about… the way things are going, and the way the economy is depending upon this reserve of good will you found among people who are really in sort of desperate straits, many of them. The book opens with you following Linda May, your main character, as she arrives at a campground east of Los Angeles, where she’s about to take a job as a camp host. And you had met her about six months into recording this story for Harper’s Magazine. When did you think “this is a book”?

Jessica Bruder ’00: Well, when I was out there for Harper’s, it’s funny… my editor, the fantastic James Marcus, mentioned they could probably have me stay in a hotel for two days or so, and I thought to myself I am not going to get anything in two days.

TC: [Laughs]

JB: I love that you’re laughing, because as another immersion journalist, you can relate to the fact that two days sounds like five minutes. Hard timeline.

TC: [Laughs] Yeah.

JB: So I borrowed a tent, and I rented a car, and I basically ended up camping in the desert for a couple weeks in an area where many people go financially dormant in the winter. When seasonal labor is scarce, the job opportunities are few… they just kind of hang out there. And I met so many people. Linda is actually one of the people I met last. So I just met a lot of people who had ended up there from a whole bunch of circumstances, many of them getting pushed out of the middle class and retiring a little differently than they might have expected to. I kind of called it “pseudo-retirement” in that people referred to it as retirement but were doing some pretty hard work. And when the story went in, I had so much B-roll that I thought could be A-roll, and… just notepads and notepads. And I still had a lot of questions. So I think that’s when it occurred to me, when you feel like you’re getting a lot of space in a magazine, and then when all is said and done it’s under 10,000 words and it feels like just a tiny drop in the sea of information you’ve gathered and there’s so much more you wonder and… yeah, I think that’s how it occurred to me.

TC: Sure. So, you did not come out of RV culture yourself, I imagine. And I wonder… what it felt like to enter it, in the way you did. You described camping which is part of it, but… at a certain point, in addition to your other research, you decide to get a van yourself… could you talk about that?

JB: Yeah, absolutely. So when I did the Harper story, I pitched a tent and I was told by the rangers that I had to be within 500 feet to a vault toilet, that I really couldn’t go kind of into the back country. So when I started doing the book, the van was really a practical thing, because I was told I could go further out if I was self-contained; which means if I had all my set-up in my life support box that was shaped like a van. So I found online this 1995 beast of a thing, and just started preparing it to go out there. And we had spoken about this before in terms of immersion, but it’s interesting because… there’s a participant-observer continuum, right. And you’re on the outside looking in, you’re also getting very very close. And one of the things I want to stress, by getting a van, I didn’t think I was joining the subculture I was trying to document.

TC: Right.

JB: It really was always my intention to get very very close in a way that would make me a more keen, more sensitive chronicler of these stories. Basically other people’s stories. And to show up occasionally as a foil, because I’m there and people are reacting to me, but to mostly understand the sensibility and be on the scene 24 hours a day in a way I couldn’t do if I was commuting from a hotel room.

TC: Right. Well, I felt very comfortable with the way you did that. You never claim to be a part of this group. I imagine you’re happy not to be, at least I was--

JB: Yeah.

TC: --the more I learned how strenuous it is, for a lot of them. But I did feel it let you speak their language, perhaps, in a way you may not have been able to otherwise. Do you wanna talk for a sec about the bigger picture here? This is a book about a woman in her 60s who is really struggling to make ends meet, but she’s part of a lot of people in this situation, you say it’s a coast-to-coast phenomenon but most of the book is set out west. So tell us about Linda May, and about where she goes, and where she works.

JB: Yeah. So Linda May… gosh, she had all manner of jobs in her lifetime. From working as a cocktail waitress to a general contractor to, I believe once she was feathering hunting birds at the game lodge. Linda’s kinda been everywhere, done everything. You know, she’d never accrued a pension, like a lot of women she’d done the unpaid labor of caregiving, both as a single mom and for her own mother when her mom had terminal cancer. And her social security checks were gonna be abysmally low. We’re talking around 500 dollars. So Linda did what a lot of us do nowadays when we have a big problem, and she went to the oracle known as Google, and started to look around. [Laughs] Basically found this guy who said, look, you can be free, you can live on 500 dollars a month and here’s how, and basically… he was one of the figureheads of this entire community of people who were living on very little money, often in very hard-pressed situations. He’d gotten divorced and was still supporting two households and couldn’t afford to do it, lived in a van outside a Safeway… but these people had come together and formed a pretty impressive community. So, with advice from the internet, this guy, and just this very hearty spirit, Linda bought a battered RV and… started taking jobs that she’d also learned about online. One of these jobs was campground hosting, you mentioned in the front of the book she was up in the San Bernardino mountains.

TC: Right.

JB: This was to do a job that, when it’s advertised, sounds like you’re going to summer camp. You read the advertising brochures and you see pictures of gray-haired women on a dappled lake shore, you read testimonials saying “this is the most fun we’ve had, we feel so healthy and active”… But I know multiple people in their 70s who’ve broken ribs doing the job, you’re cleaning toilets three times a day, it’s not really how most people would want to spend their retirement.

TC: Right.

JB: So Linda was doing that kind of work, and then she ended up going to a program called “Camper CamperForce, which is run by Amazon and targets this demographic. Basically, in the months leading up to Christmas, that commercial bonanza, Amazon needs more people in its warehouse and has this dedicated program called CamperForce that actually began within just a few months after the 2008 housing crash. And has grown into this thing that basically recruits all over the country, to bring people in RVs and vans to several warehouses where they provide some of the extra labor. So, you know, I’ve met a gentleman in his 70s who walked 15 miles a day doing this job.

TC: Right.

JB: That’s not an easy piece of work either. [Laughs] So when I first met Linda in the desert, she had just been on the road for a few months, but she’d already done both of those jobs, and that kind of made my brain explode.

TC: No kidding. The uh, [inaudible] “work campers” is used to describe people like her, and another neologism you use is “van dwellers”. So are these commonly used phrases? Would Linda identify herself as a work camper?

JB: Linda, when she was work camping, would have IDed herself as a work camper. This is a phrase that I believe came up in the 80s, but again, when we saw more and more of these people on the road following the housing crash… which, for a lot of people that planned to retire on the equity from their homes…

TC: Right.

JB: You know, they tell you, “oh, if you have time you can recover from the market crash”. But not everybody has time.

TC: Yep.

JB: A lot of people were done. So, between the fact there were people facing that… the fact that, I mean the great recession never ended for a lot of people… the fact that we have a situation where wages are stagnant, the housing prices continue to rise… there’s just been this bubble of people on the road. So they intersected with what existed as a smaller culture before. “Work campers”, it’s kind of a branded term. There’s a magazine called “Work Camper News”, and to me it has bit of that false cheerful ring, too, that we see so much--

TC: Yes! Can we talk about that for a sec--

JB: in this positive psychology culture. Sure.

TC: That was just one of the most poignant parts of this, was people who are obviously in, you know, hard straits and are putting… a positive spin on it. I was just looking for a quotation from a guy who… an old man, who has to walk… I think more than 10 miles a day in his Amazon warehouse job. And he says: “I prefer to think of it as exercise”. Like, that’s the middle class talking. This is my workout. This is a healthy thing, it’s not exploitation.

JB: It’s a gym membership you get paid for! Yeah.

TC: Right, exactly! Thank you.

JB: Yeah, absolutely.

TC: And there’s [inaudible] as, I don’t need to tell you! The Amazon recruiters talk up the social aspect of this, you’ll meet lots of people like yourself, they’ll become sort of like your new family, and this whole, it’s not just a job it’s an adventure thing. It’s sold by Amazon, but it seems to be embraced by a lot of the people themselves.

JB: Yeah! Well, the interesting thing… it’s complicated, it’s fair to say, but it’s deeper. When it comes to the corporate side, I actually do find it fairly sinister. You have employers who know that what they’re doing is… and getting out there is hard work. And rather than being remotely transparent about that… there is a theme park called Adventureland that has had work campers for a long time, and the display for their recruiter booth is “hey work campers! Time for fun!” and… you know, these are people running amusement rides in the hot sun, a couple years ago one of them died. It’s, you know, again, it’s not play time. So I kind of find that fairly infantilizing. And Amazon does it too. I remember reading one of their newsletters where they said… oh gosh… “the value of friendship is something that cannot be quantified”. But essentially the camaraderie that comes up in a lot of these jobs is kind of war buddies.

TC: Right, exactly.

JB: It’s like recruiting people… I mean, which happens too, people do get recruited to join the army being told it’s all about travel and adventure and camaraderie.

TC: Yeah.

JB: It’s doublespeak. The flip side of that is the people themselves. When it comes to the people… [sighs] I’m a pretty big skeptic of positive psychology, and that movement in our culture, and companies’ use of it to recruit people. But when it comes to people using it to get out of bed in the morning? I’m not enough of a hard-nosed, cold-hearted person that I can find fault there. What I can say is, poverty is considered such a shameful thing in our culture right now. Particularly with you-know-who as president… if you don’t make it in the casino of the economy, in the growingly unequal economy, the economy that is really the most unequal of all so-called developed nations… it’s your fault. And you are a capital-L loser. And, you know, there’s a corrosive shame in that. Frankly, when people aren’t telling other people “I’m working hard because I need some money”… I think it’s pride. And I think that’s something people do to keep their spirits high. So it’s hard for me to critique that – it bums me out, but with companies it makes me angry.

TC: Sure. So, you have a chapter entitled “The H Word”… spoiler here, the H word is “homelessness”! So yes, there’s a lot of positive thinking, but there’s fear too, don’t you think? And people really don’t want that label applied to them, in most cases?

JB: There are so many strata of fear here that I don’t know where to begin. You have the remains of the well-to-do RVing class, and they are totally freaked out that anyone is talking about the people I wrote about, because they don’t want people to think of RVers as folks who might… have some challenges.

TC: Right, right.

JB: And there are people who are in the strata I talked about, and they are totally freaked out that people might consider them homeless. They are houseless, as they told me they have shelter, they have transportation, and frankly… when it comes to dignity and identity, and when you look at the way our culture treats people who don’t live in houses? It’s hard to blame them. After one of the recent hurricanes down in Florida, they took people to a relief shelter, and a bunch of people there were just from living around Florida, and there were some people from a local homeless shelter. Those people were given yellow bracelets, and segregated from the general population.

TC: Oh my gosh. Amazing.

JB: Yeah, yeah. It’s wild. Homeless is one of the least neutral, most loaded words I know. It doesn’t mean what it says it means. And it implies culpability, and laziness, and all manners of sins.

TC: Yeah. Absolutely it does.

JB: So you can’t blame people for wanting to carve out an identity that doesn’t make them a part of that class.

TC: Yeah. At the same time, did you imagine… your research was probably done before the election, but some of this is Trump country. Did you meet Trump voters among the newly mobile?

JB: Thank you for bringing that up. I should clarify that, all of my reporting, and 99% of my writing, was done before the election. I think the election has caused these trends to sharpen, but this is so systemic and so wide-ranging of an issue. Just… the whole notion of pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps, the fact that the economic divide is growing, definitely predates Trump. I just think Trump brought it out a lot. So the people I met, a lot of them were almost what I consider “post-political”? When you’re living in a van, or in an RV, you have to legally have an address of a domicile, but… so many of these people use mail forwarding services, they rely on family to accept their mail, and often when the polls open, they aren’t anywhere near the state where their domicile is. A lot of them feel like they’re living kind of outside the law, and sometimes they are. A lot of places have outlawed sleeping in your parked vehicle. So a lot of them just really feel… alienated almost sounds so harsh, because they’ve created a community, they just kind of feel… DIY-extreme, like they don’t expect the government to come, and they don’t look to Trump for hope, and they don’t really look to the previous administration for hope either.

TC: Right, yeah. That makes sense, I guess. We’re going to run out of time before we know it, but there’s a note you bring up early on that one of Linda’s dreams is to buy land out west and build an Earth ship, sort of eco-friendly house where the walls are… discarded tires filled with dirt, the center of this culture is this town in New Mexico which is kind of expensive but she has her eyes on some land further west, the dream seems to ebb and flow, and at the end of the book she has bought some land off of Craigslist for 2,500 dollars – five acres, in Arizona, not far from the Mexico border, and you arrange to meet her. She wants to see it, then she has to cancel. Could you tell me what you did then?

JB: Yeah. So, the funny thing is about writing about reality is that you’re always kind of dragging off the back of the horse that’s galloping off and you’re…

TC: [Laughs]

JB: You know, you can’t always tell where the horse is going to go. For a long time, I thought the end of the book might be following Linda when she just went to look for land, and seeing through her eyes what it would look to see this home, this earth ship, a passive solar environmentally friendly house that in a way actually takes care of you because you can grow food there… in a way it’s really a habitat you build for yourself. So to be there with her and to see it sounded amazing. And Linda leap-frogged ahead of my mental timeline and found this piece of land and bought it, sight unseen apart from snapshots off of Craigslist. So, with some trepidation, I decided I really wanted to go out there with her, but Linda needed money. Linda got the chance… got the chance makes this sound exciting, but Linda ended up getting a job to work way out in Kentucky – she’s on the west coast – to drive all the way to Kentucky and do another bit of CamperForce. And at one point she referred to it as feeling like a bank robber doing her last job in order that she could retire.

TC: [Laughs] That’s great.

JB: So I’d already bought the ticket! And my publisher’s kind of starting to look at me askance, saying “are you going to finish this thing or what?”. So I realized I had to go see the land, and I didn’t want it to be about me, so how was I gonna pull this off? And basically… I asked Linda, is there cell reception on the land? And there was. And what we did was, I took my phone and my laptop with me, and the laptop because you can record FaceTime video, and I wanted a record. And basically I told Linda, I’m your Mars Rover, tell me where to go.

TC: [Laughs]

JB: So, Linda had pulled over on the side of the road on the way to Kentucky, and was sitting there with her friend Gary, just telling me where to go. And you know, wanted to know what the consistency of the dirt was, so I let it [inaudible] through my fingers, wanted to know where the [inaudible] cut through the property… so that was really wild, it was something I didn’t expect, and definitely a very modern experience in the middle of nowhere.

TC: It was great, it was such a surprise. And also struck me as an exceedingly generous way of you to help tell her story. You know, she got tripped up, you ended up sticking with the plan, going to the land, basically letting her see what it looked like. And I was struck by how… what an appropriate vision that is, on which to end the book. What she wanted was an immobile home, right? She wanted a home that was not going to keep rolling, and she wanted to get started before she was too old. And the three final paragraphs of the book – I don’t need to tell you – are her imaginative telling of what the ground clearing is going to look like. Do you happen to have the book in front of you?

JB: Believe it or not, I do!

TC: I wondered if, you know, on page 251 is what I’m looking at… I wonder if you might read, like, the second to last or third to last paragraph. Something there so people get a sense of you as a writer.

JB: I can do that. Let me just give the context. The Squeeze Inn is at this point the twelve-foot fiberglass trailer that’s about 5’2” inside that Linda has been living in. And its name is the Squeeze Inn, so I’m just going to give that context before I start. Okay, here I go. First, the excavator clears the overgrown access road, opening a path to her land. Next, it scrapes out a driveway – somewhere the Squeeze Inn can park. Finally, it starts working on the main construction site. The arm extends, the bucket dips, metal teeth bite into the ground over and over as the excavator tears at tough desert scrub. Everything it touches yields – the gnarled brush, the hearty cactus, the heavy stone. These are obstacles standing in the way of Linda’s future. One by one, they get lifted away. Soon, the job is done. When the excavator departs, Linda walks into the flat, blank space left behind. This land is ready for her now, one perfect acre. Something to build on.

TC: It’s a beautiful idea, and a beautiful image, but as we know… you didn’t watch that because she was dreaming it. Has she made progress? Or is that… do you wanna leave readers unanswered on that point?

JB: She has. And I’ll give it away, because there’s something in it that is kind of neat and is almost a metaphor for what… where she’s at with it. In summer, I went out… my best friend and I, the writer, who you also know, he and I went out there in a camper van to help Linda basically put sheeting on this massive 40 foot hoop house she built. Which was basically a staging ground; it’s great climate control, in the winter it’s free heating, it’s shelter… I don’t wanna take credit for this project, Linda had already installed this massive structure with all the ribs, and with her friend Gary, they’d put in a huge system of solar panels… so what they did was amazing, and we were just there to really get all the sheeting on because it takes extra hands to keep it from blowing away. And the first thing I noticed when I got there was that Linda had the Squeeze Inn parked inside the greenhouse.

TC: [Laughs]

JB: [Laughs] The greenhouse was about to be sealed, we were sealing it in there. And basically Linda had taken her life support capsule, and put it into her future home. In my mind, that was her way of saying: wander no more. Or at least, maybe wander sometimes for fun. But the Squeeze Inn was not going to be a road trailer any more.

TC: There was no option of rolling up to Amazon’s next warehouse, that was over.

JB: Yeah, that was done.

TC: Yeah, wow, well, it’s just an amazing--

JB: There were a lot of tough times ahead, but that part made me happy for her, that that part was done. I didn’t think the rest would be, but…

TC: It’s an amazing journey, and I highly recommend it. I put my money where my mouth is and I blurbed this book, which was a great pleasure. And it’s super--

JB: And considering you’re one of my heroes, let me add!

TC: Oh, gosh!

JB: You were the first person to blurb it, and I came up reading you. And have studied all your stuff,  and totally tried to poach strategies for reporting, and then learned that you were as generous and kind a person as one might imagine. So that’s pretty cool, and I…

TC: This is indeed a lovefest. I wouldn’t have blurbed the book if it weren’t really good, and I hope our fellow alumni will pick up a copy of Nomadland.

JB: Thanks, Ted.