When I was a child, my father would sing to me to sleep with “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” an ode to hobos and a life lived freely as a wandering bum.
On the Big Rock Candy Mountain, lemonade bubbled up from springs, cigarettes grew on trees and they hung the jerk who invented work. It was an odd lullaby. Maybe it was one of the few songs dad knew well enough to sing.
But the idea stuck, the thought of living as a hobo, the dream of traveling the world without cares or money, sleeping in open fields, jumping freight trains to get around.
Hobos were a mythical part of our growing up. I read every book I could find about them. My best friend smeared burnt cork on his face and put on ratty clothes to be a “hobo” every Halloween. All he lacked was a bindle fashioned from a long stick and bandana.
The idea stayed with me long after I should have outgrown it. During college summers, I hitchhiked a few thousand miles between the Midwest and the Pacific, intoxicated by my first glimpse of the wide open West and the ease of crossing it by thumb.
By the time I earned my degree and a mound of debt for it, my hobo dreams were fading but I still wanted to hop a train.
A friend and I hatched a plan to jump the “Hotshot,” an express freight from Minneapolis to Seattle in mid-August. Hilariously, Tony had broken his leg below his knee playing basketball the day before our departure. Also, we couldn’t find a dog-sitter to take in his black Labrador.
We showed up in the Minneapolis freight yard with an 80-pound dog and Tony in a cement cast below his knee. Hobbled, we climbed into the first open boxcar that wasn’t moving, hoping for the Hotshot. It wasn’t. The train stopped the next morning next to the giant Paul Bunyan statue in Bemidgi.
We’d hopped the northern Minnesota local. We also nearly froze the death in that loud, banging, steel box and we didn’t sleep a wink. I hitchhiked the rest of the way to start a new life in Seattle. Tony returned to his newspaper job in St. Cloud.
About 25 years later, I opened a package to find a book Tony sent me, “A Period of Juvenile Prosperity,” by Mark Brodie. Outwardly it looks like those glossy, coffee-table books of majestic scenery but inside are photos of real hobos, mostly young kids, riding and jumping trains, as Brodie himself did for years, wandering aimlessly in the South in the early 2000s.
An impressive piece of journalism, it includes photos of arrests and scenes from gritty hobo jungles.
The book is now “appreciated as one of the most impressive archives of American travel photography,” according to a review on Amazon. It captures a slice of Americana that’s rarely seen, even in our age of “reality” television, an underground culture that is simultaneously illegal, dangerous, whimsical and exhilarating.
About 10 years ago, I made the acquaintance of Lucy, a petite, dark-haired gal who played violin around town. She had the aura of a free spirit and when I asked her about her travels, she said she made them – across the country – jumping freight trains.
I was skeptical, as jumping freights is dangerous, particularly for women. From what I had read, hobos tended to be a rough crowd, sometimes criminal or predatory. Lucy was good-looking.
But she proved her claim, providing me with a copy of the train-hopper’s bible, a bootleg publication detailing where freight trains run and where and how to get on them. Astonished, I made a copy to send to Tony.
A few weeks ago at the brewery in Haines, I chatted up Josh, a quiet guy with a big heart who is as grateful for the personal freedom offered by Alaska as anyone I’ve met. Turns out that Josh was a freight-hopper, too. Riding across the country on all kinds of trains, and safely, he said. His worst misfortune was dropping his bedroll on a chilly night.
What’s more, Josh knows Lucy from the underground fraternity of freight-jumpers. He told me she’s in France now and married and still playing her violin all the time. I can imagine her atop a flat car, rolling through fields of lavender.
We surrender our youthful dreams with age, but what we gain is appreciation, perhaps even affection, for others who hitched onto the same dream but lived it, irrefutable testimony to the dream’s appeal and possibility.
That Lucy and Josh, two hobo spirits, ever chose to live in Haines, Alaska, strikes me as a poetic tribute to our town.
May they forever ride.