Bruder also worked at an Amazon fulfillment center, among workers in their 50s and up. “We’ve had folks in their 80s who do a phenomenal job for us,” one official for CamperForce, “a program created by the online retailer to hire itinerant workers,” said. “Some walk 15 miles on concrete floors, stooping, squatting, reaching and climbing stairs as they scan, sort and box merchandise,” Bruder notes. “Buns of steel, here we come,” an instructor tells gray-haired listeners. Amazon receives federal tax credit for hiring the “disadvantaged,” which includes those on Supplemental Security Income or food stamps. The CamperForce newsletter was upbeat: “Make new friends and reacquaint with old ones, share good food, good stories, and good times around the campfire, or around the table. In some ways, that’s worth more than money.” But nomads took the jobs for the money, toiling in warehouses where the summer heat could rise above 90 degrees and you could be asked to lift 50-pound loads. Amazon offered its workers free, over-the-counter pain-relief pills.

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How are we to understand the Lindas of our nation? Is she a latter-day Okie, like one of the Joads in “The Grapes of Wrath”? Perhaps, but the Joads traveled together as a family, not alone. Or does Linda resemble migrant workers from Mexico or the Philippines? Like her, many travel alone, but they often do so with an eye to settlement or return. Unlike the black migrants from the South who, over decades, moved North and West during the Great Migration, Linda — like most of those profiled in Bruder’s book — is white; she may fear poverty, but her migration isn’t propelled by racial intimidation. Linda presumably joined black and Hispanic workers in quite a few places she worked; nearly a quarter of workers in Amazon’s more than 50 warehouses across the country are black, and 12 percent Hispanic. Other of Bruder’s nomads join guest workers from abroad picking fruit. Bruder wonders why the van-dwelling community itself, though, is “so white.” She cannot pinpoint a definitive reason among the various possibilities she raises, though she does note that “living in a vehicle seems like an especially dangerous gambit for anyone who might be a victim of racial profiling.”

From time to time, Linda meets other nomads at R.V. desert rallies. Among the largest ones is the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous near Quartzsite, Ariz., an annual winter “pop-up metropolis,” as Bruder calls it. There tens of thousands gather, some workers, some leisured, in small vans and large, parked snugly, not set apart by green lawns as they might be in a suburban tract. As in the community that blossoms around Burning Man festivals, a barber gives donation-optional haircuts. A woman offers banana-nut bread baked in her solar oven. Groups sit around bonfires to burn old bankruptcy papers and share hobo stew.

It’s hard to know how many elderly van-dwellers roam the nation. Many of Bruder’s nomads had lost their homes, jobs or both in the 2008 crash. In 2010, 1,050,500 properties were repossessed. Social Security benefits are modest, Bruder reminds us, especially for women. She also tells us that, at the time of her writing, there were only a dozen American counties and one metro area where a person working full time at minimum wage could afford a one-bedroom apartment at fair market rent.