Hobo Wannabe

Sometimes I wish I was a hobo. I realize that's not the most ambitious goal in the world, but it just looks like fun. Well, not "fun" like "playing XBox on my couch in my comfortable apartment." More like "reducing all my possessions to a bindle and hiding from the railroad cops." I guess I just admire the combination of poverty and reckless style.

I've known some people who claim to have ridden the rails. It's not easy to disprove their allegations, but I have my suspicions. I ask them simple questions (like "how can you tell which freight train is going where?") and they just brush me off. Probably hoboes don't travel on a strict itinerary, so it's not that big a deal whether they end up in Lincoln, Nebraska or Eugene, Oregon.

I did almost become a hobo once. Well, not an official hobo. But I was in Casper, Wyoming, and I wanted to go to San Diego for the Comic Convention (that's not the hobo-specific part; I just add it for color). And there was this train yard right there. There were trains in and out of there all the time, and it really doesn't look that hard to jump in a car. And from what I hear, you can hop out at any time, as long as you're good at rolling when you hit the hot gravel at 40 mph.

Really, it's just the traveling-by-train-illegally part that I like. I'd be happy to give the other parts a miss, especially when you're supposed to stand over a barrel with a fire in it to warm your fingerless-gloved hands. And I don't know if I want to wear a sprung top hat, either. I guess you could skip the old cinematic cliches, but then you just have to be more modern. And I don't want a heroin addiction either. I'm willing to go to some effort, because "hobo" is a funny word, but I don't know if it's quite that funny.

You'd think that riding in a mostly-empty cargo car would be uncomfortable, right? That it would be cold and hard and generally terrible? That's what I thought too, but then I went more deeply into it. First of all, you have to put it in context. Is it going to be worse than a coach ticket on an airplane? Will it be more unbearable than driving cross-country? At least you'll get to stretch out. And you might even get some exercise if the bulls (that's what they call railroad cops in old folk songs) see you.

I don't know if they have as many railroad cops as they used to. It's hard to tell, but there were probably more hoboes awhile ago. You hear about the "problem of the homeless", but you don't see stories in the New York Times about swarms of people hitching rides on trains. Come to think of it, you don't hear much about trains at all. I know Amtrak is still out there, and there are certainly enough trains to occasionally block traffic. But the golden age of trains is pretty clearly gone. They may not have enough extra money to pay beefy guys to bang on empty cars with nightsticks and yell "Get outta there, youse!"

Obviously, I'm not going to do anything. I like the idea of simplifying, of carrying everything I own in one bag (because you never know when you may have to jam), but I'd be the only hobo with a bag full of books and a portable dvd player. Of course, that would only last until I got a knife in the belly.