The Real Burning Man

QUARTZSITE, Ariz. — “Road Virus” is a 32-foot-long matte black “skoolie” that is the rolling home and bookstore of Emily Black, 35, a former librarian and an alumna of a Bay Area tech startup, and Sade Black, 27, a musician and writer. From it, the couple sells horror, science fiction, erotica and other so-called fringe lit, along with oddities like raven skulls, preserved scorpions and postcards sent by Charles Manson. For the last month, they have been parked here in front of Reader’s Oasis Books, an idiosyncratically stocked emporium presided over by Paul Winer, a sinewy former rock ‘n’ roller otherwise known as the naked bookseller because he wears only a sock over his private parts.

Skoolies are school buses that have been turned into houses on wheels, and the Blacks, who bought theirs through Craigslist for $7,500 and have been on the road for a year, are new members of a sprawling and disparate tribe of vehicular nomads that flock to this dusty desert town each winter. They come for the boondocking — nomad vernacular for free or low-cost camping — on the thousands of acres of federal land that are adjacent to the place, and for the community, particularly that found at a two-week-long rally called the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous.

Organized by Bob Wells, a 62-year-old van-dwelling evangelist who has been living on the road for over two decades, the RTR drew just 45 people when it began in 2010. This year, Wells said, rangers estimated the crowd at more than 3,000. Often called a Burning Man for retirees, the RTR is starting to skew younger, at least by anecdotal measures.

Melody Tilton, a 31-year-old massage therapist, said she had been inspired by Wells’ YouTube videos to take to the road last fall with her husband, Kyle, also 31, who had worked in information technology, in a white ’97 Roadtrek, though she hankered for a skoolie. (Roadtreks are easier to park.) They sold their house in Minnesota, and are running on the proceeds.

“I had been looking for ways to be a full-time hobo,” Melody Tilton said. “I thought you had to be retired.”

Committed nomads come to share tips on solar power, stealth overnights in parking spots on city streets, van conversion, mail, hygiene, finances and low-cost dental care, which can be found over the border in the Mexican town of Los Algodones, an hour and a half away. Aspirational nomads come to test the waters, in rented mini-Winnies and camper vans. And they come to meet Wells, a celebrity here. With his abundant gray hair, lustrous beard and mellifluous voice, he is an amiable philosopher-elder of the road: Bruce Chatwin in a GMC cargo van.

Twenty-three years ago, Wells went through a bitter divorce that upended his finances. He couldn’t afford to rent an apartment on his own; with his last $1,500 in savings, he bought a box van and moved into it, stealth-parking on the streets of Anchorage, Alaska, where he worked at a Safeway and where his ex-wife and two sons lived. The first nights, he cried himself to sleep. “I came into the van life kicking and screaming, but I fell in love with it,” he said.

The pressures of sticks-and-bricks living, as nomads call traditional dwellings — the mortgage, the taxes, the maintenance — currently holds no allure for Wells. “The Titanic is going down,” he said, alluding to the general state of the economy and environment, “and this is a lifeboat. This is a hope, a promise of a better, more meaningful life.”

Radical simplicity is his credo. From his YouTube channel, Cheaprvliving, which has more than 120,000 subscribers, and his website of the same name, he dispenses practical advice such as how to live on $500 a month (Wells has a pension from his years at Safeway), or tips for camping with pets, along with musings on the psychological and environmental benefits of road life. Some tutorials are winning combinations of the pragmatic and the esoteric. “Pooping in a Car, Van or RV” is one of his most popular videos, with more than 230,000 views. As for the method, suffice it to say that Wells is extremely fastidious and has perfected a bucket system that is a concert of Howard Hughes-like moves involving two garbage bags, antibacterial wipes, gel alcohol and water. “We’re out here to be comfortable and happy,” he says in the video, “not to prove how tough we are.”

The road from Quartzsite to the site of this year’s RTR was pocked with muffler-scraping craters. (“End Arizona Dept. of Transportation Maintenance,” read a helpful sign.) Most nomads left the rutted tarmac for the dusty shoulder, bucketing along until they hit a dirt track. It wasn’t easy to discern the shape and scope of the rally, or figure out where it actually began.

Converted delivery trucks, Roadtreks, vintage RVs, skoolies and even a few cars (Wells likes to say that those who are living in Priuses are the saints of the community) were camped along the washes at decorous intervals from each other, in distinct contrast to the more conventional RV campgrounds that also surround Quartzsite, where gleaming Winnebagos park nose to tail and side by side.

Many attendees did arrange themselves by category, however. There were seven vintage “step vans” (delivery trucks you can stand up in) parked along a wash at the invitation of Seven Grey, a shy 52-year-old former publisher who had chosen this particular vehicle type for its interior dimensions (he is just under 6-foot-6).

One afternoon, he and Giuseppe Spadafora, 34, a former video editor who has been on the road for over a decade serving tea at no charge and a manifesto of anticonsumerism that is a continuing social experiment he calls Free Tea Party, held a book swap and social. Spadafora has been traversing the country in a white 1989 Econoline he has outfitted like a bohemian wooden boat, with snug banquettes covered in satiny-damask pillows. Grey is helping him put together a manual about “eco-friendly mobile living systems,” using his vegetable-oil-fueled tea bus as an example.

The Rubber Tramp Rendezvous agora was a centrally located patch of chalky ground ringed by creosote bushes and giant saguaro. There were seminars on creating YouTube videos; a tin can Q&A, and show-and-tells of favorite gadgets. Two tarps were neatly arrayed with books, clothing, housewares and personal care products. Attendees could leave unwanted goods from decluttering their rigs or pick up needed items for free.

A bulletin board was festooned with notices for, variously, the Fabulous RVing Women (FRVW on Facebook); a lost cat; entreaties for help installing solar power; a self-defense class for women; invitations to caravan to Los Algodones or Slab City, the outsider community on an abandoned Navy base in California’s Badlands that is a de rigueur stop for this set; and a beading class at the RTR “art camp,” which was two trestle tables strewn with art supplies set out by Sue Soaring Sun, a 62-year-old artist. One sign printed on green construction paper read: “Wanted: RTR Kindness & Generosity Stories.”

One afternoon, the faint smell of charcoal briquettes wafted over the crowd, sunburned men and women planted in camp chairs and trying to keep snuffling dogs not used to leashes to heel. As Wells was extolling the virtues of camping above 7,000 feet, a late visitor wondered why.

“He doesn’t like to get hot,” one woman whispered.

A man raised his hand. “I’m an introvert,” he said softly. “You’re an introvert. So what are we doing here?”

Wells nodded and asked all the introverts in the crowd to raise their hands. Mostly everyone did.

“Good question,” Wells said. “Why have we driven thousands of miles to be together? It’s because we need each other so much. Even the most introverted of us knows that. We’re looking for like-minded people who will let us be our authentic selves. Together, at a distance. Humans are funny things. Don’t worry. The RTR is going to end, and you’ll be alone again soon.”

These days, Wells does break his solitude occasionally to camp with Carolyn Higgins, 50, a two-year road veteran who left her marketing business in San Francisco and is now, like Wells and others, a YouTube star. They met last summer, and their bond — much remarked upon — has made them the mother and father of the movement.

“Are you dating?” a woman in the crowd asked.

They are not, though they like to tease their audience.

YouTube is the glue and engine for the road-bound. Stars like Nomadic Fanatic (a full-time RVer who travels with his cat, Jax, and has 130,000 subscribers) provide inspiration and technical advice, along with a forum for a tribe that can feel isolated from each other and society. It is also a revenue model, albeit a modest one. This is a community that has no relation to the social media phenomenon known collectively as #vanlife, for the Instagrammable adventures of attractive young white couples in their atmospheric vintage VW vans, doing yoga, surfing and accruing sponsorship from the makers of hipster products. (Though the odd festival fan will show up at the RTR, having seemingly confused Quartzsite with Coachella, only to be confounded by the lack of swag and services, like the guy who came two years ago and complained on an online forum that there was no sound stage or bathhouse.)

The Rubber Tramp Rendezvous is a different kind of van-dweller mecca, said Jessica Bruder, whose 2017 book, “Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century,” followed a small posse of retirement-age women forced into the van life through economic hardship, part of a new — and growing — labor force of older Americans working seasonally as campground hosts and Amazon stockers.

“The world stigmatizes people who live differently,” Bruder said. “The RTR is full of kindred spirits, like a non-blood family. People there feel heard and understood and valuable. There can be a sense of isolation out there in the world. When they get to the RTR, it melts away.”

While van culture may be growing because more and more people are caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of flat wages and rising home prices, Bruder added, “I also think people are frustrated by consumer culture and what they are supposed to want. People who are constrained by economics are also saying, ‘I can opt out.’ I think that can be tremendously liberating.”

For her research, Bruder bought a white GMC Vandura, named it Halen, for the 1980s hair band, and learned to correct for its sideways drift on the highways. Despite aching shoulders from keeping it on course, she loved being out in her van, she said. “There was one day when we were driving in a caravan, like horses galloping across the desert. I was following a 70-year-old woman named Swankie, and we were on our way to see an ancient earthwork in a petrified forest. My heart was in my throat. That sense of constant motion on the road, when everything feels new. The mythos of the desert landscape. It got me.”

Higgins, who cashed in her 401(k) to buy a balky RV named Matilda after a month hiking on the John Muir Trail erased any lingering attachment she had to the apartment she was renting for $1,600, now has more than 50,000 YouTube subscribers: “Patrons” who pay from $7 a month get extra content.

“I think a lot of women my age have a feeling they’d like to take control,” Higgins said, noting that her videos seem to have struck a chord. “Maybe they are recognizing that mainstream society doesn’t feel safe anymore. For many of us, we’ve been fed the lie that we have to have the heels, the makeup. That we aren’t complete without a man. We’ve been fed the lie we have to get married and take care of everyone. I think women are saying, ‘What about me?'” Perhaps more of an introvert than Wells, Higgins has struggled with her YouTube fans, who crowd her at campsites — “Imagine it being Halloween for two weeks straight,” she said — clamor for her autograph and send her marriage proposals. At the RTR, she was parked so far away from the action that this reporter nearly got lost among the washes trying to make her way out. But Higgins gamely led a caravan of nine rigs with her to the Women’s March anniversary rally in Las Vegas, and to a meet-and-greet with Wells at the RTR.

“This event has changed my life,” she said then, tearing up. “I’m very proud that I found my voice, and that it matters.”

On the final Saturday night, the RTR had lost much of its crowd, but those remaining made a merry bonfire of the small cardboard van built by art camp volunteers, an RTR tradition. (Midweek, someone called the Bureau of Land Management rangers, warning that there was a plan to burn an actual van.) The mock van was about knee-high, and in its window was a Sharpie portrait of Wells and his dog, Cody. When it burned, the group sang the RTR anthem, to the tune of the Willie Nelson hit “On the Road Again.”

Rubber tramps again Like a band of Gypsies we go down to Quartzsite We’ll see Bob again We’ll share our tales at campfires in the nighttime Warm fire time

The Blacks and their Road Virus missed last year’s RTR by a few weeks, and they vowed to return. They had spent the early part of the summer in Maine; by late September, they were in the Mojave Desert at the Wasteland Weekend, “which is like Burning Man but with less drugs and fancy people,” Black said. Next month, they will head to Sacramento to meet friends they made there.

“We follow good weather, we meet fascinating people, we sell some books,” Black said. “This is about the happiest I’ve ever been.”