Linda May and Bob Wells

Linda May and Bob Wells are linked less by a documented private friendship than by a chain of influence: Wells published a way of living in a vehicle on a small budget, Linda encountered it when conventional housing and low-wage work left her searching for alternatives, and the community around his ideas gave that alternative a social dimension. Their connection shows how advice intended for strangers could become both a practical guide and an invitation into a network of mutual aid.

A Guide Built from Personal Necessity

Wells’s advice grew out of his own financial and domestic upheaval. In 1995, amid a bitter divorce, he was carrying $30,000 in maxed-out credit-card debt and preparing to declare bankruptcy. After leaving his family’s crowded trailer in Anchorage, he moved to Wasilla, where land he had bought for a future house held only a foundation and floor. He lived in a tent there and traveled about fifty miles to Anchorage for work. This period preceded his move into a vehicle; it also gave his later account of simpler living the authority of someone who had not arrived at it through comfort or choice alone.

Wells eventually moved into a box truck and found that doing without rent and utility bills made him feel unexpectedly relieved. He used the money he saved to make the vehicle more livable: insulating its walls and roof, installing a catalytic heater and a forty-gallon propane tank, and adding a fan, generator, battery, inverter, microwave, and television. When the truck’s engine failed, he sold the Wasilla land and the unfinished house he had continued building on credit, using part of the proceeds to repair it. In retrospect, he understood the move as a break with the expected sequence of marriage, homeownership, work, and deferred happiness. His experience became the personal foundation for advice that Linda would later find online.

In 2005, Wells began CheapRVLiving.com as a collection of how-to articles for people hoping to live in vehicles on limited means. He promoted cutting the largest recurring expense—housing—and replacing a conventional home with what vehicle dwellers call wheel estate: a car, van, or RV. His site described people surviving on $500 a month or less and offered a sample budget covering food, insurance, fuel, phone service, and an emergency reserve. It also explained both boondocking away from paid hookups and stealth camping in urban settings. The message combined concrete instruction with a larger claim: radical frugality could be a route to freedom, not simply a form of deprivation.

How Linda Found the Possibility

Linda discovered the site while considering whether she could make a mobile life work. Its stories and advice helped her imagine that extreme economy need not mean an isolated or joyless existence. Wells’s example was especially relevant because the budget he described made sense against Linda’s precarious finances. Elsewhere in her story, she tells the narrator that she has only $10 left until payday; the appeal of reducing housing costs was therefore practical, not merely philosophical.

The site also introduced Linda to a social world that she had not yet experienced directly. The prospect of meeting other travelers, including women around her age traveling alone, mattered to her. She was sociable and did not want a life defined by loneliness and bare survival. Wells’s writing presented vehicle dwelling as something people learned together: a subculture that circulated strategies, adapted to limited resources, and made a shared life possible among people otherwise dispersed across the country. Linda’s response joined two promises that the site held together—lower expenses and a chance for fellowship.

The reach of Wells’s work widened after the 2008 financial crisis, when people facing unemployment, dwindling savings, and foreclosure sought instructions for getting by in cars and vans. His site offered encouragement to readers who had followed conventional expectations but still found themselves financially insecure. He framed a move into a vehicle as a way to survive and, potentially, to reclaim some control from an economic system that had failed them. That audience helps explain why Linda’s discovery was not simply the adoption of one person’s budgeting tips: she was finding a growing body of shared knowledge directed at people with few reliable housing options.

From Online Advice to a Gathering

Wells’s relationship with readers extended beyond the website through the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous, which he hosted in the desert near Quartzsite. By the time of the gathering described in the book, this was his fourth winter event. He prepared its schedule, posted signs, set up a basic toilet tent, gathered firewood, and laid out a free pile where travelers could leave or take useful objects. Linda browsed among its books. The pile’s contents ranged from clothing and camping supplies to auto parts and a large terracotta flowerpot that someone repurposed as a cooking vessel. The gathering made the resourcefulness promoted online visible in ordinary objects and shared space.

Wells did not profit from the Rendezvous. Its informal, generous organization encouraged participants to contribute what they knew or could spare. A cosmetologist offered haircuts for donations; mechanics taught basic repairs; carpenters made furniture for vans; and people with surplus solar power let others charge devices. One demonstration gave participants a tire to practice repairing, using repeated punctures and plugs to teach a practical skill. Linda valued this kind of knowledge, which later proved useful when she helped forest rangers dealing with a flat tire. The connection between Wells and Linda thus ran through more than written instruction: the event assembled a community in which advice could be taught, tested, and passed along.

The gathering also created routines of hospitality. Lesa NeSmith rose at sunrise to start a campfire and make cowboy coffee for anyone who arrived with a cup, continuing a practice of sharing she had developed in an apartment building. Attendees contributed toppings to a baked-potato meal and ingredients to communal pots of chili and soup; evening bonfires brought people together before the cold and fatigue sent them to bed. These scenes put social infrastructure alongside material economy. A traveler might arrive with little money, but the gathering offered chances to learn, eat, and meet people without turning every exchange into a purchase.

A Practical Bond, Not a Guarantee of Freedom

The relationship’s significance lies in this passage from an individual’s account to a collective practice. Wells supplied a vocabulary and a set of methods; Linda found in them a possible answer to her own economic pressures; the Rendezvous connected that possibility to a community where people exchanged food, labor, skills, and companionship. Later, when Linda became ill near Ehrenberg, neighbors brought her food while she was too weak to cook. That care was not evidence of a personal bond between Linda and Wells, but it showed the kind of support network that the community around the Rendezvous could make available.

Neither the advice nor the community removed the structural conditions that made vehicle dwelling necessary. Nomads were difficult to count because they had to maintain official fixed addresses for registration, taxes, voting, and other obligations, even while living on the move. Public-land camping rules required travelers to leave many sites after fourteen days; at Quartzsite they could move to another public parcel at least twenty-five miles away or pay to stay in the La Posa Long Term Visitor Area. In some places, officials treated signs of long-term vehicle residence as grounds for questioning, tickets, or eviction. The mobile life Wells described depended on access to places to park, workable vehicles, income, and ways to meet administrative requirements.

For Linda, then, Wells was both a source of practical instruction and the point of entry to a larger fellowship, not a simple rescuer or a promise that hardship would disappear. The advice made a different arrangement imaginable; the Rendezvous showed how people could make it more livable together. Their connection rests in that combination of economy and belonging: a set of techniques for carrying less, and a community that helped ensure a traveler did not have to carry every burden alone.