Sarah Gabriel found her life’s meaning in a small town in Kansas on a cold autumn morning in 2020. It was the hour before dawn in a Walmart car park and the 63-year-old rolled back the strip of floor underlay that serves as makeshift curtains on the windows of her 2008 Honda minivan to the awesome sight of a full moon looming above the spectral white of Walmart’s security lights.
“Here I was in Kansas, you know, like Dorothy, and the moon was doing her thing like I was doing my thing,” she recalls. “‘Hey Sarah,’ she seemed to say, ‘you’re in your seventh decade and now it’s time for your big adventure.’”
Gabriel is part of a modern movement of nomadic Americans that’s equivalent in size to the population of Chicago: around three million people living on the road, and at the nation’s social margins, in adapted vans, trailers, motorhomes and RVs (recreational vehicles).
They are women who see van dwelling as a quick exit from an abusive or unhappy marriage; or they are empty nesters like Gabriel, embracing a nomadic life on four wheels for its promise of economic freedom and adventure in the traditions of the Beat poets and pioneers.
“Women drawn to this life talk of freedom,” says Anne Hardy of the University of Tasmania, who studies van dwellers in the United States and Australia. “They may have devoted their lives to raising children, perhaps lost a husband or are divorced, but the overriding urge is for freedom from constraints: whether that’s the cost of living or the social expectation that they’ll become grandma in her rocking chair on the porch.”
The most affluent van dwellers are the retirees dubbed “snowbirds”, who travel north to south from Alaska to New Mexico in pursuit of the sun; others are the descendants of 1960s campervan culture who style themselves as “vanlifers”: twenty- and thirtysomething digital nomads who fit their rigs with pop-down patios and yoga mat storage racks.
More notable, if less Instagram-present, are a cohort who call themselves “women van dwellers”. These women have traded, as they put it, “real estate for wheel estate” – priced out of a US housing market which rose 45% in real terms in the six years from 2014 to 2020.
Cost of living was the major consideration for 59-year-old Laurie Nathe, who found work as a cleaner on an RV lot in Escalon, Utah, where she lived for free in an old parked-up RV to see if she’d get along with life in a plywood box. There wasn’t, Nathe admits, much in the way of a plan B. Toxic exposure to rat poison in an apartment block she lived in during the mid-2000s had left her unable to work full-time. She was refused disability benefit, $378 a week unemployment insurance wouldn’t buy much in the way of a roof over her head and she was done with sharing apartments with strangers.
In October, Nathe bought her 2003 Ford Econoline with the federal government’s first coronavirus stimulus cheque: “a real stroke of luck”. Since then, she’s made her way through Colorado and New Mexico and is now parked up by the beach in Texas near to the Mexican border, waiting for a retired female mechanic from Canada to fix her van’s steering (one of the big surprises for her was how mutually supportive the van-dwelling community of women can be).
Tracie Oliver, a 44-year-old teacher from Missouri, also took to the road after struggling with money. Her Nissan RV became home in 2018 after she found it hard to meet the rent on her home and repayments on debts. Becoming “jobless and houseless, not homeless”, and thus below the income threshold for debt repayments, served a financial purpose for Oliver, a black woman who feels that the road has become safer for solo-travelling minorities.
But it also serves a spiritual need. Oliver had never driven further than four hours out of her home state before a trip to Montana in 2015 that, she says, “lit my fire”. Her teenage children were with their dad for the summer, so she “just went for it”, driving her little Honda to Cody, Montana, where she sat in summer snow in her shorts with a view of a plunging mountain pass and “started blubbering because I just felt so liberated”.
Like many van-dwellers, Oliver talks about paring back her possessions as a gesture of self-liberation. Toughest were the photographs of her kids’ early year, her prized 1.4 litre food mixer and the huge ceramic soup bowl that was her comforter after a tough day teaching at a high school: “Man, I had a special relationship with that bowl,” she laughs.
In their paper #VanLife: Materiality, Makeovers and Mobility amongst Digital Nomads, Anne Hardy and her co-author, Ulrike Gretzel, compare this forgoing of material possessions as being akin to Swedish death cleaning or the Hindu life stage vanaprastha, when the householder relinquishes their property and heads to the forest to commune with nature. On van dwellers’ Facebook groups, members flaunt the canny minimalism of their travelling kit: the pillows stuffed with winter jackets; the storage boxes with flaps that double up as a dining table.
After winnowing her life down to two cubic feet, Oliver moved between truck stops, cheap campgrounds and Walmart carparks, where RVers have historically been free to camp in return for serving as an informal security force. She has struggled most with the preconception of being “trailer trash”. Having hoped to pick up teaching work on the road, Oliver found that schools took issue with her living arrangements.
Covid, says Oliver, has made the travails of life on the road – “van work”, in van-dwellers’ parlance – more complex. Where do you wash your clothes when launderettes are closed, or warm your bones when malls are shuttered and Starbucks is takeout only? Federally owned land, where van dwellers can park for free, is now closed to overnight stays, as some communities have singled van dwellers out as vectors of disease.
However, the American economy has become dependent on van dwellers’ hyper-mobile shadow labour force. The Oscar-nominated film Nomadland, inspired by Jessica Bruder’s 2017 book of the same name, depicts a widow who moves into her van after the closure of a Nevada plant town. Fern (played by Frances McDormand) is cast into the annual migratory work circuit, moving from summer campground-maintenance to winter work as part of Amazon’s CamperForce, a labour unit made up of van-dwelling nomads who work the Christmas season in Amazon’s fulfilment centres. A raft of gig-economy apps, including WorkAmp, advertise seasonal and cash-in-hand work to this liminal city of nomads.
Nomads are deeply rooted in the American psyche: the cowboy, the covered-wagon migrants, Huckleberry Finn on his raft, Thelma and Louise, and the Beats. In a touching moment in Nomadland, Fern’s sister Dolly (Melissa Smith), who lives in a polite, middle-class suburb, says: “Fern is part of the great nomadic tradition – like the pioneers.” There’s a truth in that, but it also rings hollow. The pioneers pressed west to the promise of brighter futures; many solo van dwellers are simply trying to get by.
In her 1990 memoir Off the Road, Carolyn Cassady – Jack Kerouac’s lover and the wife of his travel buddy Neal Cassady – depicts a time in which the kicks of route 66, that Kerouac portrayed in his era-defining novel On the Road, were preserved for privileged white men. Certainly not black people, or the working class, or women like Cassady, who were left to hold fort in suburban homes when they inconveniently got pregnant. So should we see the cultural advent of the solo van woman as a sign of progress?
Melanie Moseley thinks so. The 56-year-old became a full-time female wanderer in 2018, after leaving her marriage for a polyamorous relationship with a married couple in Portland. Moseley now spends 10 months of the year in the 17ft Chinook she nicknamed Diane, performing her one-woman autobiographical show about her journey from monogamy to polyamory.
“I was divorced, I’d lost my job and there was basically no way I could cover my mortgage,” Moseley recalls. “I figured, well my son’s 16 and he’s about to be independent, so what are my options? If I move into a van, I get this money monkey off my back, plus I get to see the world.”
Moseley bought Diane with the proceeds of her marital house sale, and it has a cedar interior, a butane cooker and a flush toilet. Like many solo female van dwellers, Moseley worries about safety. It’s not her style to carry firearms (although many do). Instead, she relies, she says, on the “mirror neurons” she developed in acting training to suss out shady characters.
Like many van dwellers squeezed out of free parking by the pandemic, Moseley is temporarily “moochdocking”, a term for parking up on a householder’s driveway. Apps such as Hipcamp offer strangers’ driveways for a modest fee. “I think a lot of Americans are looking at how batshit expensive this country has become, whether it’s mortgages or healthcare, and saying: what do I literally need?” Moseley says. “But this is the first time in my life I’m not reliant on a man for a roof over my head and that’s really something.”
Van dwellers worry that bans on overnight parking, at national parks and across much of southern California, will outlive the pandemic, pushing them out of the state that’s the traditional end destination on an east-west coast-to-coast. Jenelle Loye, a 69-year-old scientist who’s lived in her van, on and off, for the past four decades, says: “They’re using the homelessness epidemic to crack down on all van dwellers. But they’re up against all those filthy-rich boomers with their RVs who want the same thing; so it’s a battle they won’t win.”
The growing popularity of converted vans over factory-built RVs is down, in part, to the ability to stealth park. Many female van dwellers style their vans to look like builders’ vans. No one expects a white Dodge with a ladder on the roof to have a woman sleeping in it overnight.
Like Moseley, Oliver has temporarily parked up, accepting a teaching job that comes with an apartment – though she plans to be back on the road soon. “I have ‘hitch itch’ and want to get back out there,” she says. The decision will probably lead to a showdown with her adult children, followed by a promise to keep her GPS turned on so they can track her path. Like many van women, Oliver has faced disapproval for giving up on being a stay-put mum for life on the road.
Anne Hardy often finds that what these women seek is less about finding independence, or even finding themselves beneath those big southern skies, but more about the constant pursuit of freedom. “All I wanted was to go somewheres; all I wanted was a change, I warn’t particular,” says Huckleberry Finn in the opening chapter of his adventures. For many van women, maybe that’s enough.
Nomadland is released on 30 April on Star, on Disney+
