The author bound for glory on a suicide coal car, Nevada plateau
Alighting from my moving ride on jelly legs, I risk a face full of gravel. My oversized stride brings me to my left knee, but the rest of my body cleaves to an image of Nadia Comăneci nailing a Yurchenko triple twist in a rucksack and steel-toe Docs. By my reckoning, I’m about a mile shy of the railroad yard in Cheyenne, Wyoming, but 24 unbroken hours on a bone-shaking freight train hasn’t done much for my sense of direction.
I’ve been on the rails, and sleeping out, for five days now. The purpose: to track down the latest wave of a subculture that pays homage to the king of the road, the train tramp, one of the founding fathers of mythic America in its guise as the Land of the Free. In fact, the plan is to wash up, unwashed, at his headquarters, the National Hobo Convention, by which point I’ll have cleared 2,000 snaking miles and five states – Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska and Iowa.
I clambered onto my first freight in the Reno-Sparks rail yard, Nevada. It pulled up like a half-mile stretch limo care of Casey Jones Car Rental. Beginner’s luck, my guide told me. Steven “Doc Bo” Keeley, an expert in vagrant transportation with 400 boy’s-own adventures under his belt, had cautioned that, for all its intense bursts of activity, train-hopping is a waiting game, and a well-upholstered caboose is your best friend.
Braced between steel beams, the rumpled seat of my trousers just 12in from a churning wheel, I could see Doc’s point, but – carried through pine-swaddled sierra, picked out for lunch by turkey buzzards in the Great Basin Desert and mesmerised by the celestial ticker tape of the Humboldt River – my mind was on higher things. I stayed awake all night, my pulse firing off paradiddles of dumbstruck delight, like Shelly Manne ascending to heaven on the back of Gene Krupa.
Four days on, I’m nudging trash with a dislocated toe and hoping that is coyote scat. This bored stretch of scrub, rotten sleepers, slashed tyres and contorted chain-link is the Great American Hinterland, which has its place in the popular imagination – underpinned by Hollywood – as an open zoo for homicidal meth heads and frothing dogs. Rooting among scaffold poles for a sidearm already versed in the delivery of blunt trauma, I sense eyes on me. I put up a hand to my audience and they amble over with almost comic affability. “We thought you was going to take a spill,” says Axle, a 22-year-old Oregonian, whose trousers suggest that there’s no shame in wiping out. His companion, from a “shitcan little town in Texas”, is Banjo, who is eavesdropping on railroad communications with a battered radio scanner. Both have packs, tarpaulin rolls, and a certain uniformity of appearance: woollens worn to webs at the joints; infected labrets; hair a thicket of cowlicks and tuberous demi-dreads; and amateur tattoos reaching inexorably for the face.
Touring a nationwide circuit of squatter communities and “scenes”, Axle has been hopping freight trains – or “catching out” – for eight years, Banjo for three. High-school dropouts with elaborately abusive upbringings (“trust me, dude, you do not wanna know”), they represent a new breed of rider and claim to have superseded the “derelicts with their walking sticks and whiskey and their willingness to be treated like slaves”.
Down in the dumpster: portrait of the artist as a youth no longer
The hobo is not your average homeless guy. If in Britain the word conjures up little more than a stray german shepherd or Rutger Hauer with a shotgun, in the United States it embodies a myth of near-classical proportions. And that’s only proper, because the hobo has a history. He started life as a migrant worker, typically a Civil War veteran separated from his family – by what we now recognise as post-traumatic stress disorder – and hardened to life in the open. Following the harvest, he propped up the US economy for at least 60 years, and stole rides from what has become his insignia, the freight train, to do so. Society took exception to his vagabond lifestyle, however, so he learnt to live outside its boundaries, in Hobohemia, in the flop houses of skid row, the doorways of the main stem or makeshift “jungle” camps.
To the uninitiated, the hobo, tramp and bum are interchangeable – simply three types of human detritus – but a mantra I hear, with minor variations, every day for a month offers a kinder taxonomy: a hobo wanders and works, a tramp wanders and dreams, and a bum does neither. “I guess we’re tramps, then,” shrugs Axle. “The old guys call us ‘Flintstones’, ’cos they think we’re savages, but we’ve got the hobo spirit – we’ve seen what they’ve seen, the mountains and rivers, that’s only had God’s eyes on’m. We live free, dumpster-dive for leftovers, maybe fly a sign [beg for change] if we’re in a big city – we cost nothing to no one except what an individual wants to give us. We ride freights – thousands of miles a year, to festivals, parties – and we love it, but it ain’t easy like it was. The trains are hell-quick and the bulls [special agents] treat us like terrorists.”
Banjo nods: “A lot of us are political. Protesters. An army, maybe 20,000-strong. I’m not dreamin’. You heard of the Wobblies [the Industrial Workers of the World union]? Hobos were a big part of that. The Overalls Brigade. They couldn’t vote ’cos they had no home, but they took direct action to change things. We want to f*** the system, not support it.”
Banjo’s weltanschauung has not escaped notice. Rail yards are painstakingly policed with post-9/11 solemnity by those “bulls”. The Transportation Security Administration (a Homeland Security agency) has commissioned several studies into the use of “freight rail conveyances and their cargoes as weapons of mass effect” (annually, railroads carry about 1.8m carloads of hazardous materials) and trespassing on railroad property is punishable by up to three months in jail and a $500 fine. Union Pacific, America’s biggest railroad franchise, may have few more than 200 dedicated officers to cover “what amounts to a 32,000-mile outdoor factory”, but has invested heavily in smart cameras, impact recorders and other sensors piloted near bridges, tunnels and sidings – Trids (Duo Technologies’ Train Rider Identification Detection System), which uses “advanced video analytics” to search passing freights for unauthorised passengers, was recently deployed at McNary, Texas, a border town of extreme sensitivity.
Missing Andrew Wyeth in Wyoming
A variety of means allows our self-styled “gutter punks” to keep abreast of security developments, of what “hot” yards to avoid (“It’s getting harder by the day to catch a stationary train”). Extensive use is made of websites such as digihitch and 12ozProphet, but the railroads admit to keeping an eye on train-hopping forums, so itineraries are shared privately and flame-fanning posts – those that exhort or celebrate breaking the law – are taken down.
Outside Comea House, a homeless shelter, I meet a family of five. The children are sharing a bottle of Mountain Dew and the adults plonked on a dirigible-sized army-surplus duffel bag. They have been “on holiday” for three months, since their car – which doubled as their home – was repossessed in Missoula, Montana. “It’s been an adventure and an education,” says Rick, the father, whose talent for breezy understatement confounds even him. He lost his job as an apprentice panel beater when his brother-in-law’s garage closed, which was bad news for his “living situation – it made sharing with my wife’s mum real tricky”. Rick’s truant youth engaged in iron horseplay meant that his decision to decamp to the tracks, even with three children in tow, “wasn’t such a big leap”. Misty, the youngest at five years old, lists the animals she’s seen – pronghorn antelope, black bear, brown bear, wolf, bison… Rick notes my concern: “We eat at missions, stay in shelters. We don’t plan on doing this much longer – it’s just that keeping moving is better than being homeless where everyone knows you.”
Hobo heaven: "Down there where the train goes slow"; Council Bluffs, Iowa
No amount of research prepared me for a re-enactment of The Grapes of Wrath. This is Depression-era stuff. And statistics rush in where incredulity fears to tread. Homelessness in the United States is booming (and families are the biggest growth area); unemployment is running at 9.1% and the slump in house prices since their height in 2006 is greater than the peak-to-trough drop in the 1930s. Last month the Department of Agriculture revealed that a record number of Americans – close to one in six – were receiving government food stamps. Over panhandled cigarettes and conspiratorial smirks in Holliday Park, bums – “the home guard” – push gothic tales of the Great Recession, in which children die like dogs in insurance arsons, and suicides hang, thick as baubles, from the beams of foreclosed homes. It strikes me that the schooling Misty is getting isn’t so wide of her immediate needs.
Not everyone is a natural scholar, though. From the back of the class, in Elko, Nevada, I hear: “Hey, you still there? I got the DTs, my water’s done and I can’t get out. I’m scared.” The desiccated cry barely makes it over the top of the 10ft-high coal car. Trapped inside the empty scuttle is Doozie, whom Doc and I last saw at the Reno rail yard, back when he was an ebullient drunk airing feet that were humming a tune that you couldn’t get out of your nose.
Once liberated, he’s relieved to be on home turf and wildly gesturing. “There’s the party shack, and a mile down there you got a liquor store and the Fish [an emergency refuge].” All I can see is a condemned shed, a lot of sagebrush and the promise of rattlesnakes, but our man plainly knows the territory. “Been doing this since ’85, ’86. An engineer said to give it a go. Hitching’s fine but this way you don’t owe anyone. First time was on a flatbed from Wendover, with cracks in the boards and snowflakes big as plates, but the scenery, man, I was sold.”
Doozie, 48, is a lone wolf, what he calls an “IFTR, an independent freight train rider”. He disdains the “crust kids” as cheap thrill-seekers “queering the pitch for us full-time tramps”. He claims to have been shown the ropes by the FTRA (the Freight Train Riders of America, née F*** the Reagan Administration), a secretive Hells Angels-style brotherhood, founded in the Eighties by Vietnam vets in Libby, Montana, who are said to take a murky view of dabblers – moonlighting students and “weekend warriors” – getting themselves killed and drawing attention to the club’s activities. Much of the blame for the influx of tyros has been laid at attempts to circulate a legendary document, the Crew Change Guide, online. A samizdat how-to-hobo publication, the Guide is intended to be passed only to hoppers who swear on its secrets, and its few appearances on the internet have drawn fearsomely effective opposition.
A liberated Doozie, right, needs to rinse his liver
Still, in hopping terms, a violent shade of green, I take my “basic training” in the Roper rail yard, Salt Lake City. Doc walks me round the perimeter fence, identifying gaps and riffing on their strategic importance. We skulk, but there’s a lot of construction traffic, so we might as well be turning cartwheels. We find cover in a patch of ragwort and moth mullein – fellow noxious aliens – and watch the main line for an hour, trying to compile a map of our surroundings (imagining Magellan had launched his career in a bathtub), and then start looking for suitable steeds among the string of freight cars facing us. “Frisking the drag,” Doc is all know-how.
Shelter and security are key. The classic boxcar – with a door that slides back to reveal a “TV screen” view – is still the people’s choice, but it has its downsides, notably a 5ft-high floor, which, attempted at speed and on loose ballast, is the answer to your sickest prayers. The rear porch of a curve-sided hopper used for hauling grain and cement is good, so long as it has a floor, and some models even come with a “hobo hotel room” (left), a foxhole into which a stowaway can remove himself from all but the most persistent scrutiny. The gondola is an open-top box, usually littered with scrap iron, that is ideal for a short hop in fine weather, but an invitation to heatstroke or hypothermia a degree either side of clement. “Piggyback” truck trailers offer some protection from the elements and prying eyes if you nestle under the axles. I practise climbing on our best options while Doc reads me a script of a disaster movie about freight trains in which all the protagonists die horribly: “There are a thousand ways to become rail grease…”
Train-hopping is a dangerous business. There are few killers more monstrously violent than a freight. They are adepts, but not connoisseurs – they don’t spit you out and call for more salt. Passenger trains conceal their armoury, but freights put it all in the shop window, uncased – reminders that you don’t belong there: what doesn’t throttle, crush, impale or catapult you, will shear off in a blizzard of rusty metal… for fun. According to the Federal Railroad Administration, railroad trespassing accounted for 576 fatalities and 633 injuries in the US last year. In September Anna Beninati, a 17-year-old freshman at Colorado State University, lost her legs after slipping from a coal car at Longmont, near Denver.
Jughead tag, Roper yard
Death hops with you
Outside the Lost Art Tattoo parlour in Ogden, Utah, where the “golden spike” was driven to mark the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, I stumble across Clyde. He is holding a rough sketch of his namesake (the orange ghost in the Pac-Man arcade game) lugging a bindle, the traditional hobo’s cloth tied on a stick. He has tagged trains with this “moniker” from South Carolina to Washington, but the ink shop won’t do him the same favour. Winningly mistaken, the 32-year-old finesses his association with the slowest and stupidest of Pac-Man’s adversaries thus: “He goes his own way. He’s no slave to the game.” Clyde was “rechristened” by the hopper who coached him: “I was taught well. I never damage railroad property and I show bulls respect. It’s a job, they got kids. I don’t envy them their responsibilities. If you’re polite, the workers, the brakemen and switchies, even the drivers, will help you out, tell you what trains are being made up and where they’re headed. I’ve met the best people on the road, people who’d split their last nickel with you, but they’re not always good to themselves.”
Reflexively, Clyde looks down at his arms, which are puckered and minutely crusted at the crooks. “Yeah, I use. Wetback black [heroin]. A lot of us do it, keeps out the elements. Them trains get cold as Pluto. I’m dope-sick at the moment, trying to clean up. I got cash for some food stamps, 40 cents on the dollar. I’m gonna buy some groceries, stay with friends. They’ve got a baby and won’t have junk in the house.”
Rail-riders are largely displaced people who have regained a measure of control over their lives by choosing to live nowhere. The train is their deliverer from homesickness. They form a kind of cargo cult, except they are the cargo. Some chat about the broken homes, dead marriages, failed businesses and secure units that they left behind, but many more keep their own counsel. Most carry a weapon: a sap, blackjack or blade, occasionally a gun. I tell no one I’m a journalist until I reach Britt, but the rest of my story, which encompasses mental illness and destitution, I give freely, even if I have to wrap it in an understated Alabama accent, the least wayward of my tiny repertoire of voices.
No kemosabe. On me Jack. Waiting in Ogden weeds for the ride of my life
It is early evening before a train – a mixed bag of gondolas, fuel tankers and “double-stack” containers – appears for my first solo hop. It’s crawling but doesn’t look like it’s going to stop. Doc has warned me against catching “on the fly” as the quickest way to acquire a new nickname – Stumpy, Pegleg, “the former…” – but my steel needs flexing. I select a squat blue gondola with a generous recess on either side, keep pace with it, sling my rucksack ahead of me and then heave myself up into the rear well, overcompensating for gravity and landing on my hands. For 10 unbearably tense minutes the train struggles to clear the yard – heaving, lurching, throwing fits – but as the last outbuilding ducks out of sight my heart explodes with joy, as though I’m carrying the boy I was high on my shoulders, and I’m roaring obscenities like a docker possessed. This is what all the songs are about: I’m bound for glory on the Wabash Cannonball, sharing lookout duties with Woody Guthrie, Johnny Cash and Tom Waits; next stop, Big Rock Candy Mountain.
The temperature dips with the sun, and I stuff my clothes with newspaper, remembering Doc’s dictum: “Tramps, bums and hobos all use The Wall Street Journal for insulation, but the hobo reads it first.” The night clears and the stars come out like nobody’s watching. I am lulled by the symphonic racket of a thousand train parts in seeming revolt against one another. Peace in pandemonium.
Freight trains exist to mock schedules, but my luck has been in since Ogden. At the notoriously security-conscious Bailey yard in North Platte, Nebraska, that luck turns to gold. Eight miles long and two miles wide, Bailey is the biggest switching yard in the world and, being a nightmare for the interloper to negotiate, is an all but guarantee of arrest. I climb down gingerly from my “Cadillac” grain car and into the gaze of a hard-hatted Latino worker. I explain my mission in splintered Spanish but fluent desperation. Plainly amused, he gestures for me to kill the volume, produces a piece of paper, turns me round and, using my back to steady his hand, sketches a safe route out of the yard and a spot from which to catch out four miles east.
St Christopher’s kiss has worn off by the time I get to Iowa. The privations of my journey begin to tell. A trance is as close to sleep as I get. Loved ones appear to me in blazing aureoles; I make them promises they don’t want me to keep. It takes 18 hours to cover the 125 miles from Council Bluffs to Des Moines in an airless container further fogged by the joints of a surly marine, who has been “Awol for a week. I couldn’t get permission to go to the funeral of a friend who couldn’t handle his s***”. It is time for a change of pace.
Bring us your tattered delegates
The first National Hobo Convention in Britt, Iowa, was held in 1900, at the invitation of three novelty-minded investors keen to put the town on the map. Civic pride continues to power the proceedings. Main Avenue is lined with craft and memorabilia stalls and faux carnival booths. Neatly bearded men stretch T-shirts bought at train shows, steam fairs and previous conventions. In the parade, a float bearing last year’s hobo king and queen joins the usual cast of small-town America – Little Miss beauty champs, gleaming John Deeres, school marching bands and befezzed Shriners in their tiny cars. An air of modest prosperity prevails, and I wonder what it all has to do with how I got here.
Minnesota John: 'I'll ride till I die'
The answer arrives in the form of Minnesota John, whose presence I first register as the space people make for him. John makes the solid burghers of Britt parish and some of the visiting “fauxbos” very nervous. His face is an accident report, the ink still wet. To hear how it was reattached to his skull is to marvel at man’s ingenuity and resilience. He’s been riding, more or less continuously (“time off for boot rot”), since he was released from prison for killing the man who molested him at the age of 13. His tattoos articulate the compromises you must make as a guest of the American penal system, and his words the miracle of being alive (“I’ll ride till I die, but as long as I’m riding I won’t be dying”).
Former hobo king Adman, a successful marketing executive who hit the road in 1964 and still spends a couple of months a year on it, is likewise bemused by the nostalgic pageantry: “This isn’t real. Out there is real. Out there is where we live our best. The kids deserve more credit. Misbehaving is what free-thinkers do. We all got into this young – it’s not an old man’s game – and we’ve all got up to our fair share. You know the expression, ‘A rap sheet as long as your arm’? Well, I should have been an octopus.”
The westbound ain't no cush
At the Evergreen Cemetery, where, uniquely, hobos have their own section, there is no generational scuffling. A memorial is held for three train tramps of the old school – Iowa Blackie, Road Hog USA and Railroad Randy – who “caught the westbound” this year. Joining them, later, to the strains of Hobo’s Lullaby by Arlo Guthrie, are the ashes of Jason Litzner, an activist musician who fell, aged 25, from a floorless “suicide” container in Washington state five years ago. In her book, Railroad Man, their sprinkler, Tina Wald, offers a profoundly affectionate portrait of a movement of radicalised refuseniks for whom the lonesome whistle is the only sound around. The baton is passing; the romance – so often torrid and troubled – continues. I’ll see you down the road.
This piece was excerpted as The Railway Children in the October 23, 2011, edition of The Sunday Times Magazine. Photography: Joseph Sullivan Furey
