Nomad Life: the Day the Desert Almost Killed Me

One of the questions people ask most often about vehicle living is:

“What happens if you get sick?”

It’s a fair question.

When you live in a house, you usually know where the nearest urgent care is. You know which hospital you’ll go to. You have neighbors nearby. Family may be only a phone call away.

But what happens when your nearest hospital is forty minutes away, you’re parked in the desert, and your home has four wheels?

I found out the hard way.

It started while I was camped in Quartzsite, Arizona.

At first, I thought it was just a lung infection. I have asthma and chronic bronchitis, and the desert dust wasn’t doing me any favors.

Several friends had convinced me to spend the season there, and despite feeling miserable, I kept assuming I’d eventually get better.

When my breathing became bad enough, I finally went to the emergency room in Parker.

The wait was seven hours.

Seven hours.

I looked around the waiting room, decided I wasn’t sick enough to sit there all day, and drove back to camp.

That decision could have cost me my life.

Over the next several days, things got worse.

What had started as a lung infection was joined by a bladder infection. My body was clearly losing the fight, but I was stubborn.

At the time, I was working for the National Vehicle Residency Collective. Festival season was in full swing, and we were attending events across the Southwest to promote the organization.

I had already been sick throughout the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous, but I was especially looking forward to Skooliepalooza near Ehrenberg.

So I went.

Looking back, I have no idea why.

I could barely breathe. I was exhausted. I should have been resting.

Instead, I drove out to see my friends.

I wasn’t there two hours before I realized something was seriously wrong.

For once, I stopped arguing with myself.

I packed up and drove to the nearest hospital: Palo Verde Hospital in Blythe, California.

Unlike my previous hospital visit, there was no waiting room debate.

The staff took one look at me and immediately put me in a room.

That was my first clue that things were much worse than I thought.

The diagnosis came quickly.

Sepsis.

I’d heard the word before. Mostly in stories where people didn’t survive.

For the first time since getting sick, I was genuinely scared.

I called my friend Ruth, who was serving as the NVRC’s research director at the time. She was attending Skooliepalooza and came to visit me in the hospital.

She brought coloring books and colored pencils.

It seems like such a small thing.

But when you’re lying in a hospital bed wondering how sick you really are, small acts of kindness become enormous.

A few days later, more of the NVRC crew showed up.

Then my neighbor from Quartzsite came to visit.

One after another, people made the trip to see me.

As I sat there connected to IV antibiotics, something unexpected happened.

I realized how many people cared.

I’ve spent much of my life feeling like I had to handle everything alone.

I suspect many nomads feel the same way.

Independence is woven into this lifestyle. We pride ourselves on solving our own problems and taking care of ourselves.

But there I was, thousands of miles from what most people would call home, discovering that I wasn’t nearly as alone as I’d imagined.

What surprised me even more was how normal my living situation seemed to the hospital staff.

I expected questions.

I expected confusion.

Instead, they barely blinked.

They were used to it.

They had seen vehicle dwellers before. RVers. Snowbirds. Nomads. Seasonal workers.

To them, I wasn’t some strange exception.

I was just another patient who needed help.

The desert nearly killed me.

There’s no dramatic way to soften that statement.

Had I waited longer, the outcome might have been very different.

But that’s not the part of the story I think about most often.

What I remember is Ruth walking through the hospital door carrying coloring books.

I remember my friends showing up.

I remember realizing that community doesn’t always look like a neighborhood.

Sometimes it looks like a scattered collection of people living in vans, buses, RVs, and cars across the Southwest who somehow become family anyway.

The desert taught me a lot that winter.

The most important lesson wasn’t about sepsis.

It was about belonging.

What surprised me most wasn’t the hospital.

It wasn’t the diagnosis.

It wasn’t even the fear.

It was the people.

Back at Tyson Wash LTVA, my camp wasn’t abandoned. Sarah, who was camped next to me, kept an eye on my tent. Other neighbors checked in. People called. People visited.

The life I had built in the desert carried on while I lay in a hospital bed.

One of those friends was Colin, who later helped me tear down my camp when I wasn’t strong enough to manage it myself. Another was a friend I had known years earlier in Vermont who was now living in Mesa, Arizona.

After I was released from the hospital, she opened her home to me so I could continue recovering before making the long trip back to Vermont.

When people imagine vehicle living, they often imagine isolation.

They picture someone parked alone in the middle of nowhere, disconnected from everyone and everything.

The reality can be very different.

I had spent years building relationships in the nomad community without fully realizing how deep those roots had become. It took a medical crisis for me to see them.

I spent eight days in the hospital.

Eight days wondering how close I had come to a different outcome.

Eight days learning that independence and community are not opposites.

In fact, they often exist side by side.

The desert nearly killed me.

But the people I met there helped carry me through it.

The biggest surprise came later.

After recovering in Mesa and eventually returning to Vermont, everyone assumed this experience would change how I felt about desert life.

They were wrong.

As soon as I was able, I went right back.

But because somewhere during those years of wandering, the desert had become home.