I know three people who could be hobos.. they're homeless. and they get around.. but I don't know if they qualify for the term or not.
Joe from Brazil. He speaks english, sorta.. he's from Brazil.. he always introduces himself as Joe from Brazil.. I believe he's in Portugal now with a girl he met on the street here. While I've seen him all over the city, I've also heard of people running into him in butt-fuck nowhere country towns.. he's just everywhere that the train goes.
Kurt the Viking.. this guy is an asshole.. ex-neo-nazi covered in Viking tribal tatoos.. He hangs around with other Viking tattoed people and their dog.. a big white wolf-dog (not quite a huskie.. He lost part of his thumb from the cold and tells me that Coors Light is the drink of choice for skinheads. He said he was originally from Washington state.
Rick the Zombie.. streetpunk, not sure where he came from or where he's going, apparently he had a brain tumour that fucked up his head.. he used to cut himself and rub dirt into the wounds to try to make them fester. now he has facial tattoos meant to make him look like he's dead. Good guy.
Tipping Sacred Cows
I don't know if it fits in to the lighthearted tone of the write up, but an interesting (if dated) book on the subject is James Spradley's You Owe Yourself A Drunk: an ethnography of urban nomads (originally printed in 1970, reprints available.) (Not much to link to on the Net.) An impassioned look at the lives of tramps, there's still a ton of information to be gleaned despite the bias-- Spradley really wants to (en)lighten the way the larger culture looks at folks who fall asleep drunk under the bridges in their town. If you feel that compassion for the homeless has led to making the matter worse, this may not be the book for you.
Fifty pages in the beginning are notable, though, for being one half of the correspondence of between the author and a tramp named William Tanner, a very literate man who can't stay in one place, or stay sober for long unless he's in jail. Lost jobs, blackout drinking (first time at age 20!), trips in and out of jail ("the bucket", slang that's probably changed in the last 35+ years), dealings with the police, all in the light patter of a man who's realized he's never going to "get better", but aware enough to know what's going down. Instead of being written about by others, Tanner writes about tramping from his own perspective, and the results are fascinating.
Also thought provoking are the charts or taxonomies. The different types of tramp: fifteen, at least by this author, broken down by either transportation or ways of making money: rubber tramps own cars (transportation), but dings are beggars (income.) ("Never trust a rubber tramp.") The different kinds of flops are listed-- over 100, though the breakdowns are a bit hair splitting eg. box car, coal car and flat car are all listed. All the different kinds of work prison trustees can do, is listed, but again the list is bit too fine, breaking down sweeping jobs for each floor of the jail. If more pages had been spent elaborating the charts, the book would have been duller but far more informative.
Most interesting is all the casual details that spring up about the ways these men (very few were women, something Spradley deals with briefly.) Tramps with actual flops that they'd paid for still sleeping outdoors, because even a couple blocks walking home could land them in jail for a week or a month. Getting picked up and arrested even when holding down a study job, or being chased out of a town simply because the bulls won't let you walk down the street because they know your face. One man relates being picked up at a bar for public drunkenness, and when he objected (he hadn't actually had a drink yet), the cops shoving a bottle in his pants, breaking it with a night stick, and arresting him for smelling like booze. On a personal note, many of these accounts are bits of the history of my home state of Washington that happened when I was very young (birth to five, to be exact), and the whole area was still rather wild and woolly compared to what it became when the population explosion started taking place in the early 80s. (And has barely slowed down since.) Ace and maml, you might think about tracking down a copy, just for kicks.
Worth taking a couple minutes to look for at the local library, that's for sure, even if you don't live in the Northwest.
Ex ignorantia ad sapientiam; e luce ad tenebras
While I have a few favorite expressions of hobo culture*, Ive always been more interested in the particular death of the hobo. Lou notes above that this vagabond lifestyle got started with the end of the Civil War. It ended, however, at about the same time as Eisenhower started the superhighway project. After that, you rarely see popular culture hobo icons.
This implies that hobos were a specific dynamic culture established and maintained through a symbiotic** relationship with the railroad. As soon as the population became rich enough and robust to support cars, the dynamic changed.
* The Golden Palominos' "Boy" ("On the porch chewing ice/ Daddy drew the money sign") and the movie Sullivan's Travels, most prominently.
** The technically more apt word is "parasitic", but I avoid it here to prevent any implied character judgement.
The itinerant dreamer and schemer, for me, is almost a perfect personification of what defines Americans.
When you consider some great American novels, the theme is consistent through the ages: Twain, The Adventures of Huck Finn; Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath; Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March; Kerouac, On the Road; and most recently, McCarty's The Road. The American in search of him/herself within the expansive disparity of his/her own country has been, and will continue to be, a theme of American art because it speaks to American roots, to the genesis of the nation, and to the ever-questing nature Americans are so justly famous for.
I think the hobo is rightfully celebrated for all these reasons. And I hope that despite the embracing of the automobile (as gerrymander astutely pointed out above), the heyday of riding the rails is taught to all future generations as a benchmark of American spirit.
(He's not everyone's cup of tea, but William T. Vollmann has a wonderfully evocative piece in last month's Harpers about hobo culture, and its sense of really being alive in your environment, and your life.)
There is the hobo song stylings of Lecil "Boxcar Willie" Travis. Personally, I rather listen to a cat having its tail ground up in a meat grinder, but my distaste is largely informed by having to share a bunk in the Army with a stone Boxcar Willie fan.
Illegitimi non carborundum.
