New River, Arizona

New River, Arizona, enters the narrative through a single trailer and a Thanksgiving crisis. Before Linda May began life as a nomad, the town was where the sixty-year-old grandmother confronted unemployment, housing constraints, and a sense that she had run out of options. Her choice to accept a friend’s invitation instead of acting on despair became an early turning point in the story of her eventual search for another way to live.

Setting and Circumstances

On Thanksgiving Day in 2010, Linda was living alone in a trailer in New River. She could not afford the utility bill, so the trailer had neither electricity nor running water. Her unemployment benefits had ended, and she could not find work. Returning to her older daughter’s household was not possible: after the family moved to a smaller apartment, its three bedrooms were already shared by six people. The trailer thus represented not simply a home, but the limited shelter left to Linda amid financial strain and a shrinking set of alternatives.

The Thanksgiving Crisis

The day brought Linda close to giving up. She considered ending her life and the lives of her two small dogs, but their presence made that course impossible for her to accept. Instead, she took up a friend’s invitation to Thanksgiving dinner. The immediate outcome was modest—she went to dinner—but the choice interrupted a crisis that she later remembered as evidence of how completely she had lost sight of a way forward.

A Turning Point Before Nomadic Life

Linda regarded herself as someone who was usually happy, and she had not previously seriously considered abandoning life. In New River, however, financial hardship had narrowed her sense of possibility until something had to change. The episode gives the location its narrative significance: it is the place where her pre-nomadic life reaches a breaking point, before the later search for a more sustainable way to live. The book presents the trailer and its lack of basic utilities as concrete conditions of that crisis, rather than offering a broader portrait of the town.