Author purchased and modified Halen, began living in the car for interviews

The reporter’s purchase and conversion of Halen, a used GMC Vandura, turned a study of nomadic life from a series of interviews into an extended, mobile form of fieldwork. The van made it possible to stay among the people being reported on, but it also brought the practical limits of that life into view: shelter, power, parking, addresses, weather, and mechanical reliability all shaped where the reporter could go and what could be learned there.

From interviewing to immersion

When the reporter began preparing Halen, workampers had already been the subject of months of interviews and reporting across five states. The accounts encountered in the media often presented workamping as a cheerful lifestyle or an unusual hobby, while the reporter understood it as a response to people being priced out of conventional housing and struggling to earn a living wage. Early interviews had not resolved that contrast. Some nomads presented themselves in upbeat terms; others warned against portraying them as people in crisis. The reporter came to see that hardship and optimism could coexist, but still lacked the sustained proximity needed to understand how.

A tent had allowed the reporter to camp off-grid in the desert, but it could not provide the kind of access needed to live alongside many of the people being followed. Near the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous, tent campers had to stay close to outhouses, leaving the reporter sleeping four miles from the gathering and commuting to it. A more capable shelter would allow the reporter to sleep, cook, and write in the backcountry, with a basic toilet setup. In RV terms, it needed to be self-contained. The van was therefore not just transportation or a place to sleep; it was a practical condition for the deeper reporting the project required.

Buying and outfitting Halen

After months of searching Craigslist for a van that was not rusted or rotting, the reporter found a white 1995 GMC Vandura with a teal stripe and 64,000 miles on the odometer. It had spent most of its life on the California coast, had avoided harsh winters, and already had a camping conversion. Inside were powder-blue velour walls, a small dinette that folded into a bed, a twelve-volt mini-fridge, a propane stove, and a portable chemical toilet. A pop-top roof allowed the reporter to stand upright, though raising it made the van conspicuous rather than discreet.

The reporter named it Halen. The name drew on the rock group Van Halen, while the van’s decorations included a black velvet painting of Ernest Hemingway bought at a Quartzsite swap meet and a strand of blue glass beads hanging from the rearview mirror. Linda May later found a squirrel skull while camp hosting. These were personal touches, but the essential conversion was less ornamental: Halen needed a reliable way to produce and store electricity while parked away from hookups.

The reporter and journalist Dale Maharidge collected Halen in California and worked on it at his uncle’s homestead in northern San Diego County. They cleaned hardened maple syrup from a cabinet and removed surface rust. The more demanding alteration was mounting a hundred-watt solar panel on the pop-top. Because a conventional cargo-rack arrangement would not suit that roof, they drilled two holes in its rear section to secure a tilting aluminum frame, then sealed the openings with waterproofing compound. Inside, they installed a charge controller and connected the panel to two six-volt golf-cart batteries stored beneath the dinette. An inverter supplied 110-volt power for the reporter’s laptop and camera. That system made writing and documenting possible while boondocking, but its installation also made the van’s roof and interior part of the reporting apparatus.

The road as fieldwork

The reporter spent the next two years living in Halen intermittently, on trips lasting as long as two months. The travels covered more than 15,000 miles, from the Mexican border to Canada and from coast to coast. Those distances did not make the reporter an expert overnight. Halen became stuck twice in soft desert silt, each time requiring a passing motorist with a Jeep to winch it free. In the mountains, a blizzard froze the toilet and water tanks. On an empty Kansas highway, the alternator failed and the van lost power near a rest stop. Near Fort Worth, torrential rain entered through a failed seal above the rear doors, soaking the bed and damaging part of the electrical system. On another return to a long-term parking lot, the reporter found the driver’s window broken and the van ransacked; the Hemingway painting and a bottle of hot sauce were still there.

Other constraints were less dramatic but just as revealing. During one trip, a pharmacist asked for the reporter’s home address. The doctor, uncertain how to answer, explained that the reporter was living in a van. The exchange made plain how strongly ordinary systems assume that a person has a fixed address. The reporter, meanwhile, slept in truck stops, Walmart Supercenters, a casino, an abandoned gas station, deserts, mountain wilderness, and suburban streets. A night of stealth camping in Mission Viejo required lying silent inside Halen while a landscaper worked a few feet away; later, Linda May and LaVonne Ellis teased the reporter for being paranoid. The van offered mobility, but not freedom from the scrutiny attached to parking somewhere one might not be welcome.

What living in the van changed

Life in Halen also changed how ordinary spaces and routines felt. After the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous, the reporter followed the group to Ehrenberg and shared supper in a neighbor’s van. The covered toilet bucket served as the support for the food tray. In the confined space, using what was available seemed unremarkable. Back in the reporter’s apartment in Brooklyn, New York, the effect reversed: after the van’s close walls and everything within reach, the full-sized bed, high ceiling, and open space felt unfamiliar and exposed. For several mornings, the reporter woke disoriented, briefly mistaking the apartment window for Halen’s rear windshield. The confusion passed after about a week, but then the reporter missed the van and the nomads and wanted to return to the road.

The reporting also exposed how unevenly vehicle dwelling could be experienced. The reporter reflected that a nighttime traffic stop in North Dakota had ended with a warning and friendly recommendations for local attractions, and recognized that being white likely helped explain that outcome. In residential areas, stealth camping could mean suspicion or contact with police; for people vulnerable to racial profiling, the same practice could carry greater risk. Living in Halen did not put the reporter outside those conditions, but it made their consequences harder to treat as abstractions.

A method, not a resolution

The project’s first decision to buy Halen began as a way to get closer to the lives already being documented. It became a method built around repeated presence: following nomads between places, sharing cramped daily routines, and experiencing the vehicle’s dependence on power, parking, and workable shelter. Even a makeshift table in a neighbor’s van could reveal the practical adjustments through which people made a home in limited space; a failed alternator or a request for a fixed address revealed how readily that mobility could be interrupted.

That immersion did not remove the distance between the reporter and the people whose lives were being described, nor did it turn a reporting trip into a permanent change of life. Instead, Halen made the conditions of observation more visible. The van enabled the reporter to stay longer and listen more closely, while its breakdowns, exposure to weather, need for discreet parking, and vulnerability to institutional requirements showed that movement depended on fragile material and social arrangements. By taking up residence in the vehicle, the reporter gained access to stories that brief visits had missed and a more grounded understanding of both the adaptability and the constraints of nomadic life.