Among the tales of joys and hardships of hobo life
the poetic philosophical insights
come at you like a runaway train.
Excerpts from RIDING TO EVERYWHERE
by William T. Vollmann
The act of train hopping in and of itself stimulates the same feelings in me that a schoolboy has in spring when he contemplates summer: an infinite, wild green freedom will soon be in reach!
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- - - When I steal a ride on a freight train, I honestly don't care where it goes. What could be more ridiculous that that? Isn't going anywhere the same as going nowhere? What does one usually see from an open box? - - - Well, a long vista of fences, boggy fields, mountains in the distance - - - In which case, why not stay in bed for the rest of my life? This would doubtless become its own adventure. After all, like the Montana bridge under which some hobo has written, with or without irony, Rest Here.
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What do you need? asked the woman in the bushes.
To catch out.
No, what do you need?
The other bush people waved me away, not threateningly but urgently. They were accomplishing crystal deals; oh, yes; they were buying and selling the Big Rock Candy Mountain. Nobody would tell me where the freight trains stopped.
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Departing the yard always feels to me somewhat like crossing a bridge over a deep gorge; one commits oneself to someone else's defense against the void. By the time the signal has fallen behind, and many tracks have gone to one, the freight's velocity is usually too great for the rider to do anything but ride.
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- - - the fact that one of reality's fundamental characteristics is constraint is something that freight riding seduces me into denying whenever I can. On the iron horse I experience the state of unlimited expansion.
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All the waiting, that living fieldmouse-small in the grass, was a necessary part of our experience, because it transformed motion into salvation. When I hitchhike, I experience the same feeling. And I wonder whether life can be good without the hard times.
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Dark and lovely tree-shadows raced across the long white gallery, and the shadows of my two comrades continually glided toward me, getting devoured by the pursuing shadow of the door frame. Then all of a sudden, red signal-luminescence rushed into the box car and flushed us with the blood of the entire
world!
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(FTRA - Freight Train Riders of America - was, or still may be, an unorganized murderous gang of misfits that rode in "bully packs" and terrorized hobos and train hoppers a few years back - The Kid)
You ever run into the FTRA? I asked the hobo in Missoula.
Yeah. I met T. All he is is an overgrown kid with a bad attitude. And I know the Goon Squad. If they know you got five dollars' worth of food stamps in your backpack, they'll kill you. Goon Squad runs from Portland to Seattle. FTRA goes all the way up through Montana. Wrecking Crew goes everywhere. They're the same. They're nothing buy killers.
Years later I asked a friend where the FTRA were nowadays, and he replied: "Mostly dead."
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Such is train hopping, with its myriad reversals of fortune and feeling. Because these impress themselves on me so intensely, I never perceive even defeated attempts to catch out as any kind of failure, for one truly lives more on these occasions, whose memories, however obscured by night and rain, remain on my mind's tracks as numerous as the trains themselves. - - -
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Who can understand me? I ride freight trains in the belief that I can trust myself, that I deserve to be trusted even to be a reckless fool if circumstances so turn out ---and, after all, if I am dead as a result of my own folly, I am no worse off than if I died safely and soberly. The most cogent thing to be said against training hopping is that it is the unauthorized borrowing property of others---corporations, to be sure, not fellow citizens who would be inconvenienced; I am a microbe hitching a ride upon an elephant's trunk. - - -
