Sharen Peterson

Sharen Peterson, whom everyone called Chere (pronounced “Sherry”), is a seventy-year-old vendor and van-dweller encountered at the Hi Ali Swap Meet in Quartzsite. She had not chosen road life as an abstract ideal: after losing the Minnesota house she had owned for twenty-three years, she made a home in a former fifteen-passenger Ford E350 and pieced together a living from Social Security and seasonal selling. Her resourcefulness is vivid, but so are its limits: fuel, permits, storage, and the hours when she cannot legally remain on a beach all shape where she can go and how she gets by.

Identity and Life on the Road

At her swap-meet space, Chere displayed odds and ends on old wooden doors: a katana, an elk hide, Hawaiian shirts, and housewares she no longer needed. The wares were not merely merchandise; they came from a life reduced to what could fit in a vehicle. She stored her clothes in three plastic bins and rented a separate storage unit for $600 a year. Her current van was plain white, unlike an older hippie van covered in stickers. That unobtrusive appearance mattered when she needed to park without attracting attention.

Her sales pitch blended humor, thrift, and a distinctive personal style. Scraps of paper among the goods carried bumper-sticker sayings, including “Due to rising cost of ammo do not expect a warning shot” and “We’re not snowbirds, we’re snowflakes.” A customer bought four shirts for $17, prompting Chere to exclaim, “The world would be a better place if everyone wore Hawaiian shirts!” Another paid $25 for flatware that Chere had bought for $20 in Santa Barbara. She called thrift-store shopping “the only addiction where you can get your money back!” The small markup was a practical gain, but her joke also framed secondhand buying as a pleasure that could pay for itself.

From Homeowner to Van-Dweller

Chere had bought her Minnesota house in 1989 and spent twenty-three years as a live-in landlord, renting spare bedrooms to help cover expenses. That arrangement ended when she was caught without a required permit and had to stop renting. She blamed bureaucratic restrictions, saying, “The bureaucrats are getting ridiculous.” Losing the rental income meant losing the house itself, and the transition was sharpened by the housing crash: a property appraised at $300,000 in 2002 sold for only $140,000. After the mortgage and broker’s fees, little of the expected equity remained.

She had planned to live on the proceeds of the sale. Instead, the result was a constrained but mobile existence. Her former fifteen-seat van seemed to her like a mobile mansion, with picture windows and a view that changed constantly. That image expressed a real freedom of movement, but it did not erase the economics underneath it. Chere received $600 a month in Social Security after a $100 Medicare deduction. She paid $300 each month for her Quartzsite vending space, another $50 for a town permit, and $600 annually for storage. She joked that Social Security seemed to cover gasoline; if it did not, she stayed put. Mobility depended on knowing when not to move.

Work, Money, and Improvisation

Quartzsite was one of Chere’s selling grounds, not her only one. When away from the swap meet, she sold jewelry along the Santa Barbara seaside. A season pass cost $100, but the beach closed between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. each day. Asked where she went during those hours, she answered, “I hide.” She knew places where a vehicle could be parked unobtrusively, and the plain white van helped her avoid notice. Her account makes concealment a practical component of housing: a place to sleep had to be found in the gaps left by rules and closures.

The details of her budget and routines show how close comfort and deprivation could sit together. At dinner at the Quartzsite Yacht Club, Chere ordered a double hamburger but ate only one patty. She wrapped the other carefully for Skittles, a dog she was watching for a fellow vendor who had made a quick trip to Phoenix. She turned the burger’s lettuce, tomato, and onion into a side salad, dressed with ketchup and mayonnaise. She drank two O’Doul’s non-alcoholic beers and lemon water, then refused to let the reporter pay her share. Afterward, she poured the remaining water into a takeout cup. Ice, she explained, was a small luxury because she could not make it in the van. The meal was also an occasion to care for someone else: the saved patty was for the dog, not for her own next meal.

Memory, Companionship, and Conviction

Chere wore a baseball cap decorated with gold and silver pins, including a seahorse and other marine life; blond braids emerged beneath it. Her tanned face and the photographs she still kept of herself in a Gidget haircut and bikini beside a yellow longboard connected her present to her memories of surfing near Manhattan Beach in the 1960s. She recalled a time when ordinary goods seemed startlingly cheap, using a rule of twenty-fives: “Hamburger, cigarettes, and gas were twenty-five cents a gallon, twenty-five cents a pack, and twenty-five cents a pound.” The remembered prices mark the distance between that past and the thin calculations of her current life.

Her dinner with the reporter also showed a firm insistence on reciprocity and self-sufficiency: she would not have her share paid for, even while living on a limited monthly income. Her care for Skittles, and her careful use of food and water, place companionship and attention to small resources alongside the larger fact of economic insecurity. These are not presented as proof that hardship disappears; they are the practices through which she manages it.

Freedom and the Meaning of Home

Chere slept in the van parked across from her vending tables, where she said nobody bothered her. She contrasted this life with the reporter’s New York surroundings, saying she was grateful not to be stuck in a concrete jungle. Her defense of van-dwelling rested on a simple comparison: if birds can live in parks or cities, she asked, why should people be confined to the places where society expects them to live? She insisted, “We don’t have to live wherever people are supposed to live—that’s what it’s all about!”

The conviction does not cancel the forced sale that brought her to the van, the loss of most of the house’s expected equity, or the costs and restrictions she continues to navigate. Instead, Chere’s account holds those conditions together with her claim to a chosen way of inhabiting space. The van is at once shelter, storage, transport, and a moving view; the swap-meet tables turn surplus possessions into income, while beach closures and gasoline costs set boundaries around movement. Through her, road life appears neither as uncomplicated escape nor simply as homelessness, but as a precarious arrangement in which ingenuity sustains a measure of independence.