As a result, the USG company town was emptied as its whole population rented their homes from the company. In 2011, United States Gypsum shut down its mine in Empire, Nevada. When not walking miles on the concrete field of these warehouses during her 10-hour night shift, Linda would find work at outdoor crop harvests or camp sites. She also belongs to CamperForce, an Amazon labour source made up of mostly workers in their 60’s and 70’s living in vans and trailers parked on RV lots near Amazon warehouses. Linda has worked as a Camp Host, which pays $8.50 per hour for her to welcome campers, settle them in, clean toilets, maintain campground, and be a service person and problem solver at all hours. A positive outlook is the sustenance of the nomads Bruder has come to know personally in her research in situ. “It’s 5’3” inside and I am 5’2”… Perfect fit,” she says. Inside dimension is ten feet from end to end and room enough for Linda to stand up straight. Towed behind the jeep is her home, a trailer she calls the “Squeeze Inn.” It’s a “fiberglass relic” built in 1974. She drives a salvaged Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo. Linda is a sixty-four-year-old grandmother.
What she has revealed in her book is eye-opening.
In the book, Bruder stayed close with them for a year, Linda May, Swankie, Bob Wells, LaVonne and many others, all in their 60’s and 70’s but still active as itinerant workers. Many of them are fallout of the 2008 financial meltdown when they lost their homes, jobs and investments. These are van and RV dwellers in California, Nevada, Arizona and several other Western States. Journalist Jessica Bruder has followed some modern-day nomads and chronicled their lives in her 2017 book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century. Or in more recent years, Jeannette Walls’ family when she was a child in The Glass Castle (2005). Or, maybe the famous image of the migrant mother with her children captured by photographer Dorothea Lange (1936).
When you hear the word nomad, what do you think of? The Bedouin in the Arabian desert? Now, what about American nomad? Maybe John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) comes to mind, dust bowl families on a wagon heading to California to escape poverty.
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