Twenty families become one

An intercalary chapter on the roadside camps. Each evening twenty families pull off 66 near water and become one family; each morning the world is torn down and packed onto the cars. Rights are worked out without anyone stating them — privacy in the tent, the hungry fed, the claims of the pregnant and the sick over all others — and so are the offences that would destroy a camp overnight. Punishment is a fight or ostracism, and ostracism is worse. A man who feeds a hungry man insures himself; coins pile at a tent flap when a baby dies. The families stop being farm men and become migrant men, their worry shifted from rainfall to tyres and petrol. Someone brings out a guitar and the circle closes around him to sing. At dawn the tents come down, with warnings passed about the desert beyond the Colorado.