David Roderick

David Roderick’s path from college teaching and international educational work to seasonal manual labor makes him one of the book’s clearest portraits of downward mobility in old age. At seventy-seven, he was still working—first selling Christmas trees and later in an Amazon warehouse—not because his career had been slight, but because the financial supports on which retirement depended had been diminished or lost.

Identity and Earlier Career

When the narrator first met Roderick at Desert Rose RV Park, his turquoise Amazon CamperForce T-shirt marked him as a current itinerant worker. White-haired and goateed, he was also a grandfather whose earlier life had taken him well beyond seasonal employment. He began his career teaching chemistry and oceanography at California community colleges, then launched a pioneering ecotourism company. Later, he worked in Jordan as a State Department English Language Fellow.

That record did not protect him from age discrimination. He received offers for subsequent teaching posts in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, but administrators rescinded both after learning that he was over seventy, beyond their regional age limits. The reversals show how an experienced worker could remain willing and qualified to teach while being screened out because of age. Roderick had rarely struggled to find jobs, he later told the narrator; the difficulty was that the work still available paid far less than the work he had once done.

Seasonal Work and the Amazon Warehouse

In the winter of 2012, Roderick and his wife, both in their seventies, lived in a fifteen-year-old Lazy Daze RV while selling Christmas trees at the San Mateo Event Center in California. His duties included carrying trees as tall as nine feet and lifting them onto customers’ cars and trucks. He worked eight to ten hours a day, six days a week. He enjoyed selling the trees, but the cutting and hauling required by the job was strenuous work, and he recognized that it was better suited to a much younger worker. Several members of the team, like him, were already retired.

At Amazon, the physical routine changed but not the basic bargain. Roderick demonstrated the squat-and-reach movements he repeated hundreds of times a day in the warehouse. He said he was fortunate not to have the aches and pains his wife experienced, a difference that made the bodily cost of the work unequal even within their household. He estimated that his Amazon earnings amounted to one-fifth of his peak income. His assessment was that the program depended on older workers’ reliability while paying them at a level far below their former professional earnings.

The book places this experience alongside employers’ praise for older workampers’ dependability and work ethic. Roderick’s own account complicates that praise: being counted on to show up and work hard did not mean the job offered compensation commensurate with his experience or past earnings. His story shows how praise for steadfastness can coexist with the economic necessity of accepting work at a sharply reduced wage.

Lost Retirement Security

Roderick’s diminished income had a history. During an earlier divorce, he had to cash out prematurely the pension he had earned during sixteen years of teaching at California community colleges. With the state’s matching contribution, the pension might have grown to at least $500,000. Instead, its value at the time was $22,000, which had to be divided between him and his first wife. The difference between the projected pension and the amount actually available makes the loss concrete: years of employment and contributions did not translate into a lasting retirement income.

His later marriage brought another financial loss into the household. His wife had lost a $650,000 annuity from her first marriage when Executive Life collapsed in 1991, then the largest failure in the history of the insurance industry. Their separate losses left the couple with far less financial protection than their earlier careers might suggest. The book does not present either setback as the result of a single choice by Roderick; instead, it records how divorce and financial collapse could erode the resources on which later life depended.

An Individual Life in a Wider Reversal

Roderick’s situation belongs to a generational shift the book identifies among older Americans. The number of people aged sixty-five and older who were still employed reached nearly nine million in 2016, a 60 percent increase over the previous decade. Economists expected the numbers and the proportion of seniors in the workforce to continue rising, while only 17 percent of older Americans in one survey anticipated that they would not work at all later in life. Continued employment, in this context, cannot simply be read as a preference for activity: Roderick’s account makes visible the losses and barriers that can make work necessary.

The contrast is sharpened by the book’s history of retirement security. The post-New Deal model was often described as a three-legged stool: Social Security, private pensions, and savings or investments. But the shift from employer-funded defined-benefit pensions to 401(k) plans moved more responsibility onto individuals, while market losses could further reduce household assets. Roderick’s prematurely cashed-out pension and his wife’s lost annuity give this institutional change a personal scale. His life does not stand as proof that every older worker shares the same history; it shows how multiple setbacks can converge in a household already beyond the age when stable career earnings might be expected.

Narrative Significance

Roderick’s account unsettles the assumption that a long, varied, and accomplished career guarantees a secure retirement. He had taught science, built an ecotourism business, and worked overseas, yet later carried trees and repeated warehouse motions for a fraction of his former earnings. The sequence connects professional achievement not to a comfortable ending but to continued labor under changed conditions.

His description of this period as a new kind of retirement is borne out by the contrast between the word and the work: older people may be called retirees while still depending on physically demanding jobs. Roderick’s story gives that contradiction a specific shape—lost pension value, age-related job exclusions, a household’s separate financial losses, and wages reduced to a small share of former earnings. In the book’s wider portrait of workamping, he represents not an unusual failure to plan, but the fragility of retirement when pensions, assets, and access to work do not hold steady.