Growing Up Southern: November 3, 2017

Once, as a pre-teen, I took a ride with one of the vendors who called on my father’s little grocery store. It was an interesting trip.

We drove out to the railroad yards to see about a shipment of something that my father had ordered and which had gotten misplaced. My fellow traveler’s name was Bill Shepherd, a member of one of my home town’s most prominent Caucasian families, and a hero of mine, hence my going along for the adventure.  As we walked across to the area where the shipment was supposed to be, though, a man accosted us.

“Mr.,” he said, “can you spare a little something for a man who’s on the down and out?” He tipped an ancient hat of undetermined origin and style. All I know is that it wasn’t a Greek fisherman’s hat for he was neither Greek nor a fisherman. He was, instead, one of the last of a long-standing American tradition.

“They don’t treat us hobos very good these days,” he continued, as sincerity, pathos, and noxious odors oozed from him in equal proportions.

I had no money so I looked to my companion. Sensing my pity, I suppose, he fished out a dime, maybe even a quarter, and handed to the man. A quick salute and “thank you,” and he turned. As a railroad man walked up and began conversation with my guardian, I watched the hobo stride quickly away. He eased between two lines of boxcars and I could barely make out a group gathered around a fire, and waiting for him.

Probably, they are all gone now, the hobos. Once you could see them, some still children, standing in open boxcars as trains passed through my home town. Most would wave merrily as if to say, “I was once imprisoned in an automobile just like yours, but look at me now.”

That was years ago. That poor demented kid who was the subject of Jon Krakauern’s Into the Wild, a 1996 non-fiction book, supposedly rode freights on his way to his self-imposed doom. That’s the last I’ve read of the practice. I haven’t actually seen anyone riding the rails in a half-century or more.

Hobos enjoyed a sometimes positive image in their day. Popular entertainment forms cast them as independent souls, belonging to neither boss nor wife. North for summer and south for the winter, they customized life to fit their own preferences and whims. People wrote songs about them. Studios featured them in movies. Folk tales about their colorful lives abounded. Remember Sullivan’s Travels starring Joel McCrae and Veronica Lake?

Some old railroad men from my home town weren’t as charitable. They related tales of co-workers found behind train engines with their skulls cracked, for the cash in an honest worker’s pockets, by a “King of the Road.” Where you stand depends on where you sit, after all.

Still, as the pressures and inanities of the modern world press upon us, it tempts one to, from time to time, imagine sitting on the floor of a speeding boxcar watching America roll by with no need whatsoever of our puny skills and abilities, and no regard for our laughable aspirations.

Yeah. Tempting. I can almost hear the whistle screeching if I close my eyes. Goodbye to stress, troubles, deadlines, and obligations. Can you feel the breeze? I can.

But first, I have to go feed my wife’s cats.