For most people, the American Dream doesn't include living in a van on public land in the middle of nowhere. For others, though, that is the very definition of freedom–a life defined by exploration and adventure, free from the rat race of modern life.

Photographer Andrew Waits spent two years roaming the beaches, forests and deserts of California, Nevada, Arizona and his home state of Washington documenting boondockers, the broadly defined group of people living almost entirely off the grid and on the road. Boondock is a collection of intimate portraits of the men, women and families he met on the road. Some lead the migrant life by choice, others by circumstance. But whatever their reasons, they share a common theme.

“What I boil it down to is this will to survive,” Waits says. “I found that was really the one tie that brought everyone together. If it was something that they needed to do because they were unhappy, they made that decision to change their life to hopefully find happiness–essentially that’s a decision to survive. Losing your job and needing to live out of your van, that is a decision to survive.”

Boondock is neatly divided into two galleries. The first is a set of portraits documenting the boondockers and their abodes; the second is artistic, subjective impressions of them. He was especially fascinated by the different ways people have devised for living out of a vehicle, and how familiar touchstones of a traditional home–a dangling wire basket of fruit, a Duraflame log–found new context in a mobile home.

People of all ages are represented, from an elderly vet living on a pension to a 30-year-old urbanite who wanted to escape a rut to a young writer conducting an “experiment in homelessness.” Many of his subjects chose their itinerant lifestyles and have “sticks and bricks” homes they can return to, but others do not. Waits makes no judgements and strove to maintain the dignity of those who offered a glimpse into their lives.

“I wanted to be really respectful of their lives and not make it seem like they were down and out, or create some type of archetype for who they were," he says. "I just wanted to let them tell their own story.”

Life on the road has been a romanticized dimension of American life since, well, On The Road. It goes much further back than that, of course. A vast swath of the country found their livelihoods in the interstices of society during the Great Depression, and the very history of our country is a story of adventurous people who, through necessity or restlessness, set off from home.

Only the resourceful need apply for such a life, which these days includes tools like GPS and the Internet to make life easier. And dropping out of society need not mean losing community. Waits met many of his subjects through the online community at Cheaprvliving.com. (Its founder, Bob Wells, is featured in Boondock.) Members of this online community stay in touch and hold two meetups annually, yet remain fiercely independent.

"If they really need help they know someone’s going to be there," says Waits. "But the way that they do define themselves, in that particular group, is as a tribe–I heard that word come up over and over again. The Internet has really made it a lot easier for them to do, and really create that tribe sort of feeling.”

One advantage of the online forums is the ability to share tips and tricks. It's important to know what you're in for and what you're doing, because state and local laws often are fuzzy about “non-traditional” living. It's easy to run afoul of the local authorities and ordinances about when and where you can park or camp. That's why many boondockers favor land managed by the Bureau of Land Management or U.S. Forest Service, both of which permit “dispersed camping” that doesn't require renting a sanctioned campsite.

Waits began his journey in Seattle. As he moved further afield, he discovered a distinction between the urban homeless or “stealth parkers” and the boondockers who chose to live on the fringes. He was taken by their mindset, and over time photographed more and more of them. Most were happy to talk about their unusual way of life.

The term boondockers is something of a contentious word among the community, which will debate, for example, whether someone who parks an RV in a Walmart parking lot counts. To Waits, it’s a blanket term describing the frame of mind of those living such a life. To support themselves, boondockers often do odd jobs, or work remotely via the Internet. Many have made the undeveloped pockets of the country their homes, and they are fiercely interested in protecting its natural beauty.

Such a life is not without risk, however. Living in remote locations without family, a reliable income or, in many cases, insurance, can make something so mundane as getting sick a potentially grave matter. That's a tightrope many people aren't willing to walk, but the boondockers and their way of life is an informative contrast to the way of life our society embraces and celebrates.