TBTS Reviews: Hobos

It was a dark, gray evening in Missoula, an October day right on the lip of winter. My friend S, a Seattle native, wanted to watch the Mariners, so we’d walked to sports bar downtown, a sports bar in Missoula being a prison-like gray room with concrete floors and tables. S was pouring from our third pitcher when they saddled up, one tall in a blue parka and with a white mustache, the other short, fat, with shaggy white hair and a nicotine stained beard. They asked if they could bum a beer from our pitcher. We obliged.

As the game ground on, the conversation turned to freight hopping. It seemed the two guys were hobos. S started to tell about how he used to ride trains.

“Fuck you. You used to ride?” Tall and Skinny said.

“He says he used to ride,” Short Round said. “Fuck you, you never rode no train. Where’d you ride?”

“Up and down the West Coast,” S said. “From San Diego out to Albuquerque and across to San Antonio.”

“Anybody ever put a rag on you?” Short Round asked.

“No,” S said. He started to get quiet and eye me nervously. I was oblivious to what was going on, except that Short Round’s speech and gestures were becoming increasingly agitated. Even Tall and Skinny seemed leery.

Short Round suggested that they take S out and put a rag on him. This would consist of kicking S’s ass, pissing on a bandana, then tying the bandana around his neck. Putting a rag on someone was a how the FTRA, an almost mythological hobo gang, initiated members.

If there’s anything as quintessentially western as the cowboy, it’s the hobo. Having grown up in Kentucky, I’d never given them much thought because they just weren’t around. In Missoula, if you drank in Jay’s Downstairs or the Silver Dollar, you couldn’t walk the length of the room without bumping into one.

We left them more than a third of a pitcher and made our way out of the bar. Though they were not the first hobos I’d met since being in Missoula, they were the first I’d talked or listened to at any great length.

Ever since that meeting, I’d had a kind of obsession with hobos and with freight hopping. So did Eddy Joe Cotton. The difference between me and Eddy Joe? He had the stones to hop freight. After traveling for six years, he wrote Hobo: A Young Man’s Thoughts on Trains and Tramping in America (Harmony Books).

Part travelogue, part history, and part how-to, Hobo reads like an updated On the Road, though perhaps without all the angst. Like OTR, Hobo is rife with a lust for an America that exists beyond the newspapers, websites, and television shows that dominate most of our lives. As he updates this vision, Cotton is quick to pay homage to a time when the words “hobo,” “tramp,” and “bum” had their own distinct meanings.

Though the writing in this book is clean, clear, and often downright good, there are many instances where Cotton gets a little swept up in the romantic nature of his subject. At those times, he overwrites, his prose weakening and spiraling out of control. Because I came to the book with an interest in the subject matter, I was able to get past those moments. For others, these could be a real deal breaker. However, by interspersing history and hard facts about hobo life into the narrative, Cotton mostly stays on track. Just be warned— there is no denying that his eyes are wide.

Curiously enough, it was another book by an even younger author (at the time of its writing) that better captured the negative aspects of hobo life. You may know Ted Conover from some of his more recent books, namely Newjack. Whether you want to call him a hands-on sociologist, a proponent of “new journalism,” or “new new journalism,” Conover is one of those writers who lives the subject he’s writing about before he writes about it.

Rolling Nowhere (Vintage Departures), his first book, comes straight from this school of writing. In 1980, while still a college student, Conover took time off and hoboed around the West. Published when he was just 24, RN is his account of that time.

Originally, RN was subtitled, “A Young Man’s Adventures Riding the Rails with America’s Hoboes.” This begs the comparison with Eddy Joe Cotton’s book, also billed as a young man’s reflections, and leads me to ask, “Where are the old man’s reflections on riding the rails?” Most likely, the old timers are dead or just not interested in publicizing their lives.

While you would expect any book written about hoboing by a person under 35 to have a sheen of romance about it, RN does an exceptional job of portraying the hardships of the hobo life. Contrary to the wistful notions many of us have, it’s not an easy one. Many of the lifers are drug and alcohol addicted or suffering from long term mental illness. Others have just run into the sorts of personal tragedies that lead a person to drop everything and strike out on the open rail. Where Cotton often romanticizes in a polemic of the free life of the hobo versus the wage life most of us live, Conover tends to keep a certain critical distance, if only in his mind.

In fact, there are passages in Rolling Nowhere that read more like a senior thesis. Although the writing is strong, these almost “academic” moments distract and reveal the youth of the author. It’s almost as though Conover was telling himself that his ramblings were justified because he was studying his fellow travelers and their lifestyle. That mental safety net creates a level of disconnect that is sometimes unpalatable, if for no other reason, than you know that there is a nice middle class home waiting for him when he’s finally had enough.

The middle ground lacking in these books can be created by reading both. For the sheer joy of the hobo lifestyle, check out Cotton’s Hobo; for a dose of some of the more grim realities, check out Rolling Nowhere.