Iris Goldberg

Iris Goldberg appears in the book as a nomad who lived with a talking parrot and as a witness to the risks facing people who travel without stable support. Her stories connect the everyday independence of life on the road with the possibility of dying alone, a possibility she also confronts in her own words.

Identity and Place in the Book

The narrator identifies Iris Goldberg as one of the nomads encountered during the reporting journey. A distinctive detail of her life on the road is her companionship with a talking parrot. The acknowledgments later include her among the couple hundred nomads who shared their time and left traces in the book, recognizing her as one of its contributors rather than merely a passing subject.

Accounts of Death on the Road

Iris recounted the death of an acquaintance named Ron, who drank himself to death while boondocking in a Walmart parking lot thirty-six miles from Quartzsite. According to her account, no one found his body for a month. The distance and delay make the parking lot more than a stop along the route: in her telling, it is also a place where someone could die beyond the notice of others.

Her account sits beside a separate story the narrator heard from Becky Hill, a volunteer with the Church of the Isaiah 58 Project. An eighty-year-old man had taken shelter at the church for three months before he was found dead in his RV in the desert near Ehrenberg. Becky’s lament that he had no one to help him underscores the vulnerability that links these stories, though the book does not identify the man as someone Iris knew.

Her Stated End

When the narrator asked Iris about her own wishes, she replied, “Just find me dead in the desert,” and added, “Put rocks over me and let me go.” The answer is brief and unsentimental, and it echoes the deaths she had described: the desert is both the setting of her nomadic life and the place she imagines for its end. The book gives no further account of her plans or eventual fate; her words remain a stark expression of how she envisages being left alone after death.