When I was young, meaning 10 or so, I began to worry about how people survived in the world. Yes, that was me, Little Miss Sunshine, skipping merrily along through my carefree, happy childhood. Age 10 or so was when I came to realize that adults had to work every day, AND that no one’s job was safe. People could lose their jobs or their money at any time, through their own fault or through the caprice of forces beyond their control. This was a sobering realization. It didn’t seem fair that people could be thrown into poverty for any reason or no reason, and that a person or a family might go hungry just because the economy no longer needed a certain set of skills or because a person made a mistake or grew too old or sick to work. Like all ten-year-olds, I was preoccupied with fairness, and this seemed very unfair. More than unfair, it seemed cruel. It still seems cruel.
This was what I thought about as I read Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century. I saw the movie first. “Surviving America” might seem hyperbolic or inflammatory to a settled middle-class American raised on the myth that all you have to do is work hard and do the right thing and be a solid citizen, and you’ll be rewarded with a dignified and comfortable life. But for most of us who do enjoy a middle-class life with a house and a car and decent healthcare and Wi-Fi and easy access to consumer goods, good luck is a big component of our so-called success. I work for a living, and so does my husband. We both work pretty hard, actually. But even the most casual observation of the last 20 years or so of American life makes clear that hard work is no guarantee at all that we will stay as secure and comfortable as we are. One lost contract, one serious illness, one bad investment, and the whole operation could fall to pieces.
*****
Nomadland's true-life nomads live in RVs, trailers, vans, and even cars. Like the itinerant farm workers of John Steinbeck’s Depression novels, they wander from job to job, spending the summer working as campsite hosts in national parks, and the fall months working 10-hour shifts in Amazon warehouses. They harvest sugar beets and they operate rides at carnivals and amusement parks. They prefer the term “houseless” to “homeless.” One of Bruder’s nomads is a man named Bob Wells, who created a website that teaches people how to live in a vehicle. He considers vehicle-dwelling as both a lifeboat for those who slip through the cracks of middle-class security, and a form of rebellion against middle-class norms. Rather than think of themselves as homeless vagrants, Bruder writes, nomads become “conscientious objectors to the system that had failed them.”
Wells likens the illusion of middle-class security to “The Matrix,” explaining that people on his side of the illusion, the people who fell out of the middle class, have suffered a “radical pounding,” an event that opened their eyes and forced them to abandon the illusion and accept the reality that most of us don’t want to accept, that we’re all just one big medical bill or one lost job away from losing what we think of as our place in the world. “At one time,” he says, “there was a social contract that if you played by the rules...everything would be fine. That’s no longer true today. You can do everything right...and still end up broke, alone, and homeless.” For most of us, Wells points out, downward mobility is now just as likely as upward mobility.
*****
A determined, resolute optimism is characteristic of the nomad, vehicle-dwelling subculture. Many of the people Bruder writes about are relentlessly upbeat, afraid that if they drop the smiling veneer, they will become objects of pity. Media coverage of people who live this way tends to stick to this script, too. As Bruder writes, articles and broadcasts on nomad workers, or “workampers” makes “workamping sound like a sunny lifestyle, or even a quirky hobby, rather than a survival strategy.” The nomads themselves like to perpetuate this image. Bruder writes of nomads who speak in “cheery platitudes” when describing their very difficult lives. They urge her not to write about them as “Americans in crisis,” and they are proud of their “no whiners” ethic.
*****
Among Nomadland’s real-life characters, Linda May is the most prominently featured and the most endearing. Linda May has been through some things. She spent a good part of her early and middle adulthood doing what she was supposed to do; going to work and taking care of her home and her family and paying her bills. And then a series of misfortunes forced her to move in with her adult children, who were also struggling to pay their bills. And then she decided to buy a mobile home and hit the road. A veteran of Amazon warehouse work, sugar beet harvesting, and camp hosting (among other jobs), she is the exemplar of the workamper lifestyle, and of its smiling, no-nonsense, no-complaining philosophy. In her case, the cheerfulness is not forced or faked. She is a naturally optimistic and resilient person, perhaps as ideally suited to life as a nomad as anyone can be. But reading between the lines, it’s clear that this life is hard even for a hardy soul like Linda May.
*****
Every time I read a memoir or a true-life story, I imagine myself living that life. Everyone does that, right? Well, I do. And I know without even thinking hard that I wouldn’t last one day on the road with Linda May and Swankie Wheels and Bob Wells. It’s not the lack of material comforts that would bother me so much. I do enjoy comforts and luxuries, but I think that I could live, and pretty happily, without lots of the material comforts and things that I have. It’s the moving from place to place, and the driving a heavy and unwieldy vehicle through rough desert terrain and up and down treacherous mountain roads, and the unexpected breakdowns and flat tires that would do me in. And then there’s the work. Don’t get me started about the work. I know my physical limitations, and I’m pretty sure that a week working in an Amazon fulfillment center or harvesting sugar beets would just about kill me. And I’m not as old as Linda or Swankie. Respect.
****
Like lots of other fortunate, employed, middle-class people, I spent a lot of money during the pandemic. In my defense, I donated a lot of money, too--about $5,000 so far, to food banks and diaper banks and disaster relief and other emergency causes. But I also bought a lot of unnecessary handbags, and a ton of clothes to wear to places where I no longer go, and a lot of books, and another streaming service subscription.
I thought about all of these things, the momentary enjoyment of opening the packages and looking at my new purchases, as I read about Linda May and all of the other nomads who thought that they were fine, money-wise, until a combination of events and circumstances left them near-destitute, near-homeless, near-the-edge-of-the-proverbial cliff. Many of the itinerants whose stories appear in Nomadland thought that they were on solid middle-class American-dream ground, and that the lives that they took for granted were secure, and that homelessness and poverty were things that happened to other, less careful people. And then they found themselves on the street; or on the road, as it were, working long and physically exhausting hours for low pay. It could and did happen to them. It could happen to anyone. It could happen to me.
*****
For five minutes after I finished reading Nomadland, I thought “that’s it. No more spending. No more takeout food, and no more books that don’t come from the library, and no more jackets, and absolutely no gosh-dang handbags ever again.” And I knew that this resolve would last no more than a week, because I know myself better than that. But I also looked around my house, my cheerful, colorful, but slightly shabby old house, and I decided that the worn-out family room couch has at least another five years of useful life, and the ugly-but-serviceable tile in the master bathroom is just fine, and the old-fashioned not-at-all modern kitchen is still a perfectly good place to store, cook, and eat food and so it’s all going to stay just the way it is for the foreseeable future.
And I’m also going to think twice before I buy unnecessary stuff, and not just because I don’t want to spend myself into penury. It’s because there’s too much stuff; not just here in my house, but in the world. And there’s a huge human cost to producing and shipping and storing and selling and delivering all of that stuff to people like me. And because what do I do with all of that stuff if things hit the fan, and I have to hit the road or move myself and my family into a tiny apartment? We could have an estate sale, I suppose, but there’s no guarantee that anyone else would want all of our stuff. And sometimes, when I look in a closet or a drawer, it all feels like a burden. It feels like we’re carrying all of this stuff with us, all the time, even when we’re not home. And it’s heavy.
*****
Nomadland the book and “Nomadland” the movie are very different, and it almost doesn’t matter if you read the book first or watch the movie first and read the book afterward, as I did. Oh, but HUGE SPOILER ALERT if you haven’t watched the movie:
SWANKIE DIDN’T ACTUALLY DIE! The book came out several years before the movie was made, of course, and I thought that perhaps Swankie had become ill during the filming, and that the producers wrote her death into the story. But this event was fictional.
Even though many of the characters (including Swankie, Bob Wells, and Linda May,) are real people, played by themselves, much of the movie is fictionalized, including Frances McDormand’s entire character, Fern; and Fern’s sort-of boyfriend, played by David Strathairn. I don’t think the movie would have worked as well otherwise. I suppose it could have been a documentary, and Linda May and Swankie Wheels are more than engaging enough to center a whole movie around, but the addition of fictional characters allowed the filmmakers to tell the story as the story of a life and not the story of a lifestyle. Does that make sense? It’s the best I can do, other than to advise everyone to watch “Nomadland,” the most beautiful movie I’ve seen in a long time, and to read the book, and to think about the people who pack our Amazon orders and harvest our food and work seasonal jobs at resorts and amusement parks and ski resorts, and who deserve a decent paycheck and a decent place to live, whether it's stationary or mobile.
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