Cheryl Strayed (2012) Wild: A Journey From Lost to Found.

I’d picked this book up and put it down several times. Cheryl Strayed’s Wild was nearer Lost than Found. I got it was some kind of travel journal. Cheryl Strayed had walked part of the Pacific Crest Trail that stretches from the Mexican border in California to the Canadian border and goes through a lot of places I’ve little or no knowledge but might be vaguely interested in because of the naturalist John Muir (a fellow Scot and honorary American). That doesn’t sound interesting enough for a book.

But I was wrong. Strayed nails it, while walking most of the way and loosing six of her toenails in boots that are too small for her and carrying a backpack far too big for her called Monster.

She segues in and out of the life she had been living. Her mother had married her father when she was nineteen. He beat her and was a violent presence in their little lives, but they didn’t know that because they were children. Three children. How her mum found the courage to leave and find the cheapest apartments and worked as a waitress to live and somehow survive. They gained a stepfather along the way, Eddie, who broke his back. Then her mum got cancer and died, when she was 42.

Cheryl was 22. She was carrying a lot of grief on the trail. Grief for her marriage to a good man she’d fucked up, because she wasn’t mature enough yet to settle down. How her new man got her into smoking heroin. Then injecting. But she wasn’t a junkie. Not really. She was just trying to live. Trying new things. Joe went one way. She went another.

Her determination to walk the 1100 miles of the trail is dented on the first day. She can’t lift her pack. She needs to cross the ice and snow of the Sierra Madre. Where Humphrey Bogart cheated and got cheated by another fusty old prospector in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. And she had to cross deserts and avoid stepping on rattlesnakes. But first she had to get the Monster on her back. She couldn’t do it. It was too heavy and cumbersome. Hiking hurt, even before it started to hurt.

‘I didn’t know how living outdoors and sleeping on the ground in a tent each night and walking through the wilderness all day almost every day had come to feel like my normal life,  but it had. It was the idea of not doing it that scared me.’

Strayed brings what it feels like to be alone in the world, but figuring out the costs of not being alone, of being someone she was not. She had to bury her mother, not in the ground but in remembering her as she was. Fully human. Fully alive. Read on.

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Nomadland (2020), Channel 4, Film 4, written, produced, edited and directed by Chloé Zhao. Based on the 2017 nonfiction book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder.

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/nomadland

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomadland

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/02/nomadland-living-in-cars-working-amazon

‘I’m not homeless, I’m houseless,’ Fern (Frances McDormand) corrects a young girl she’d tutored after a chance meeting in a superstore, who’d heard she was homeless. In other words, Fern had gone from being one of us to one of them. A person to be feared and derided.

‘I want to work,’ Fern tells a job advisor. She lists all the things she can do and has done. The job advisor remains sceptical. Fern is old.

Cannot afford to stop working, or retire, but cannot afford to pay rent. Nomads are presented in a positive way. It’s the journey that matters and living hand-to-mouth is the price they have to pay. Fern’s sisters says much the same thing when Fern has to ask her for her a loan to get her van out of a garage after it has done too many journeys and broken down.

Who does the shitty and worst paid jobs when everyone else has gone home? People like Fern. Jeff Bezos, one of the richest men in the world, makes use of transient labour. An estimate of one-in-four RV and those who live in cars help make him wealthier. They actively recruit such workers. They are the Joads of modern America, as in John Steinbeck’s classic novel The Grapes of Wrath, without the wrath. Used up and spat out again by middle- class Americans.   

There was a real hatred for the Okies and the mobile poor in Depression-era America. States with larger urban areas and high housing costs, such as California, Washington, Oregon, Hawaii, and New York, have been reported to have relatively higher numbers of people living not only in RVs but mostly cars. Their presence, as with the Okies, has been criminalised.  

Fern goes to a show and sits in Camper Van or a house on wheels. She makes brumming noises like a kid. The average cost of a new single-wide manufactured home can range from around $50,000 to $100,000 or more, while double-wide homes or larger models can cost upwards of $100,000. The Okies had to sell their mules at a carrion price that had once helped them plough a field. Those living in cars or camper vans are as likely to buy a mule as being able to pay for those creature comforts.   

The selling point here is Frances McDormand. Without her helping raise the money to make the film, there is no film. Without her as the main character, there is no film. But with or without McDormand an increasing number of Americans are being criminalised for being poor and homeless. I don’t expect the moron’s moron Trump to win the next election, but if he does, shit flows downhill. There’s an in-film joke in a scene about different-sized containers and taking care of your own shit in cars and RVs. My worry would be closer to home. But my kinship and compassion would increase for people like me. The nomads, immigrants, outcasts and Okies of our modern world, when state-sanctioned hatred grows exponentially into a black hole that swallows us all and benefits only the super wealthy. We’ve already lost the propaganda war to the super-rich like the Koch brother’s shrink-tank tactics and sponsors of Trump’s hatred and lies. We’re already on that road. Nomadland is a feel-good stopping-off point.