Hobo: A Young Man's Thoughts on Trains and Tramping in America

"A hobo works and wanders, a tramp dreams and wanders, and a bum drinks and wanders."BEN L. REITMAN "Bums loafs and sits. Tramps loafs and walks. But a hobo moves and works, and he's clean." WORDS OF AN "EXPERIENCED HOBO" FROM THE BOOK AMERICAN TRAMP AND UNDERWORLD SLANG by Irwin Godfrey If a man says he's a hobodon't believe him If a man says he's a trampbelieve him Because every man is a tramp Waiting on a Train I looked like Rudolphmy nose was red and hard from the cold. Alabama (the tramp who taught me trains) and me were in Wyoming and there were icicles hanging on the trees. The Burlington Northern railroad tracks sat on a hill of rockquietexcept for the whisper of an autumn gale that had frozen them solid. I could have tapped those tracks with a hammer and shattered them like glass. In that silence between trains you can hear your toes wiggle in your boots. I had gone a thousand miles on one pair of socks. There was a turkey vulture up in the air, looking for ghosts. On the hills where the tracks disappeared a cold rain fell like needles and the hidden sun glowed silver through the broken clouds. I lay back on my bedroll and closed my eyes. The luck of the tramp changes as the whistle blows. Under his wool poncho, beneath his metal flask, his heart leaps like a jackrabbit. Out of his sleeping bear slumber a tramp comes running with a bedroll on his shoulder. He is a joker in the deck, this little man with a bandanna around his neck, a trucker hat on his head, and a hole in his boot. I took off running. I caught up with Alabama. He had his hand on the grab iron of a freight car and his boots were skipping along the gravel. He climbed up the ladder and wrestled himself onto the platform. I grabbed the ladder and it froze my fingers stiff. I ran along like that, my hand frozen to the ladder, until I got my other hand on it, and when I did the train lifted me off the groundlike an angel. I climbed up the ladder and hopped onto the platform. I stuck my head out into the air. The cold wind pushed my hair back. And there I was, steady rolling with icicles hanging on the trees, just like Robert Johnson, the blues singer, sang about. I'd never hopped a freight before, but goddamn it if it wasn't exactly what God had intended for me. It reminded me of barreling down the highway in my dad's trucklooking out the windowdaydreamingcounting mile markerscrossing state lines like they were telephone poles. Back then is when I first got it, "the fever"white line fever, as truckers call it. And I've never been the same since. Black diesel billowed up from the head end of the train. There were four monster locomotives up there, pulling boxcars like sled dogs and coughing smoke out of their big diesel smokestacks. The bark of those diesel engines held the cry of a million pistons and cracked the silence in the Wyoming prairie apart. A light snow fell on the back end of the train, where the black oil rigs, flatcars, hoppers, and refrigerator cars wobbled over the rails like crippled old men. The only other soundsa cricket grinding her legs, the lonely sputter of a grasshopper hopping, and the silence of dust settlingquiet as death. Above the fire pit we had just abandoned, I could see the ash of a few smoldering branches. Alabama said the car we were on was called a grainer because it hauled grain. On the side of the grainer right above the words ace center flow (the name of the freight car) was a hobo tag drawn in white chalk. It was a little sketch of a palm tree with a Mexican hobo hunched down underneath it. He was wearing a poncho and a sombrero, andCotton, Eddy Joe is the author of 'Hobo: A Young Man's Thoughts on Trains and Tramping in America' with ISBN 9780609607381 and ISBN 0609607383.