Ehrenberg, Arizona, is a desert gathering place in the book’s account of nomadic life, where the road’s temporary encounters become practical companionship. Linda May and LaVonne Ellis return or camp there among other travelers, while Bob Wells prepares a major Rubber Tramp Rendezvous. The location brings together the book’s recurring strands of mobility, mutual aid, and community without turning any one stop into a permanent home.

A Desert Base on the Nomads’ Circuit

After the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous, Linda decamps with other nomads to Ehrenberg. Their move extends the gathering beyond its formal event: the travelers continue together into the desert, where shared time can become concrete care. The location is also part of the author’s reporting geography; Halen, the van used during extended reporting trips, is pictured in the desert near Ehrenberg.

LaVonne Ellis returns to Ehrenberg after spending two weeks at Standing Rock with protesters opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline. In the desert’s quiet, she works through writer’s block and completes her childhood memoir, The Red-Feather Christmas Tree, which she publishes on Amazon. Linda May is acknowledged in the memoir. LaVonne later visits Los Algodones for inexpensive eyeglasses and begins imagining a different kind of foothold: land near Taos, New Mexico, where she could park an old school bus as a home base between van trips. Ehrenberg thus belongs to a continuing circuit, not a final destination.

Care and Community

During Linda’s stay with the nomads in Ehrenberg, she develops severe bronchitis and becomes too weak to cook in the Squeeze Inn. Neighbors arrive with food, including boiled eggs, tomatoes, and sausage. The episode makes the community’s support visible in ordinary provisions: people who share a mobile life can respond when one of them is ill, even though their own stays and resources are temporary.

That care fits the book’s broader depiction of roadside kinship, but the Ehrenberg episode gives it a particular form and circumstance. Companionship is not only a feeling of belonging; it is food brought to someone who cannot prepare it herself. The settlement’s significance comes partly from these acts of attention among people whose lives are otherwise defined by movement.

The Rubber Tramp Rendezvous

Bob Wells is in Ehrenberg preparing to host what he expects to be the largest Rubber Tramp Rendezvous yet. Anticipating hundreds of attendees, he sets rules against loud music and unleashed dogs, and removes traditional group meals from the schedule because organizing food for so many people would be difficult. The gathering grows beyond even that expectation: more than five hundred mobile dwellings arrive, many drawn by videos Wells has posted on YouTube.

The preparations show how a dispersed community can gather at scale, while also exposing the practical work involved in making such a gathering possible. Ehrenberg serves as a staging point for that collective event and as a place where travelers’ individual plans overlap. Linda’s recovery, LaVonne’s writing, and Wells’s preparations offer different versions of the same pattern: people arrive from elsewhere, make use of a shared desert setting, and carry their relationships and ambitions onward.