By coincidence the last two books I’ve read are about nomads, or perhaps migrants is a better term. Jessica Bruder’s 2017 book, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, is based on investigative reporting she did over a period of several years. It is not a novel, so when I heard it was made into a movie I wondered how the story would be portrayed. I have not yet seen the movie though some critics have noted its lack of depth regarding the working conditions in places like Amazon where many of these senior nomads have to continue to search for work far into their 60s and 70s. Having to do short term work at Amazon is not a way I would want to spend my retirement years - the descriptions sound awful really. Now the movie has won an Oscar!
The second book, a novel, was John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Yes I finally got around to reading that great American classic and it left me with the same kind of feelings I got from Bruder’s book. It would be a feeling of overwhelming despair to have to contemplate the endless struggle to survive on the road, looking for the next opportunity to work and earn enough to eat and pay for gas and the next van repair.
Steinbeck writes of the effect the Great Depression had on hundreds of thousands of “Okies” - a pejorative term given to the poor who were forced off their land because of the mechanization of agriculture, the economic collapse and the dust bowl. The story tells of the journey to California of the Joed family, one of the many families of farmers fallen on hard times in the 1930s, and their exhausting search for work to avoid starvation.
It is interesting that Steinbeck’s book was banned and burned by some county libraries as being too radical. His views were considered “socialist”, and in some sense I guess they were. There is plenty of critique in the book about the economic system in which the large landowners and banks always had the upper hand, and where any who protested were labeled agitators and “reds”. The migrants never come out as winners in this story. Even a recent reviewer of Grapes of Wrath calls the book propaganda for socialism, though overall the book is seen as a great commentary on that period of American history.
Though some reviewers write of how the Joed family overcomes many setbacks and hardships, and how this shows the triumph of the human spirit to overcome hardships, I came to the weird ending of the book feeling depleted of hope. It is interesting that in the midst of the depression there was no social safety net until that was created by Roosevelt’s new deal. That included social security, which, interestingly, most nomads depend on these days. Pretty good rebuttal to the socialism criticism.
Bruder began her research at about the same time as foreclosures and vaporized investments of the Great Recession were pushing many seniors to hit the road. Many elderly Americans were living out of vehicles to save their meager Social Security benefits and performing grueling physical labor to survive. The typical story is one of barely making ends meet with low paying jobs or social security, so they can’t afford rent, and in some cases they had lost their homes in the recession. They talked of freedom from debt while at the same time many are living on the edge.
Judy and I have enjoyed camping for many years. Though we occasionally do cross country trips, we are mostly the kind that goes out for 3 or 4 days to enjoy nature and then return to a nice shower back home. We have met many “full timers'' over the years, and I always try to imagine how that lifestyle would be. In fact, this week while camping in the desert in Southern New Mexico we were parked next to a 57 year old single man in a small R-Pad camper. When I struck up a conversation he rushed over to tell me about himself. He seemed to be starved for conversation. He stays at each campground for a few days, sets up his I-pod and sits in his camper or on a chair outside for some days watching movies or other entertainment. He said, “after all, there’s not much to do here”. His overweight appearance gave me the impression he is not much into hiking. He doesn’t need to work as he is on Social Security Disability, he said - “a really bad heart”. I get the impression of a lonely life, though I hesitate to judge from such a short encounter.
You tube videos abound about the happy life and freedom of the van dwellers, but I have my doubts after reading Nomads. The founder of the movement, Bob Wells, admits to making an enormous amount of money selling the lifestyle on his videos. The videos talk about their community, albiet a mobile one, but in the final analysis, for me it is the lack of community that would be the hardest part of being a full timer. But the nomads do re encounter each other on the road, and friendships and mutual support happens, according to their testimony.
Today we see migrants by the tens of thousands arriving at our borders. Like the “Okies” of the 1930s and many of the nomads of contemporary America, theirs is not so much a life they choose as one that was forced on them by circumstances beyond their control. People living on the edge don’t prefer to live in poverty and insecurity.
What I observed while working with people living at the subsistence level in Latin America is that it is community and coming to rely on one another that ultimately helps people get through hard times. That is the take away I get from these two books.
