Hard Travellin

by Kenneth Allsop

  In his boomer form he was often, says Holroyd, ‘actuated by a restless desire to see what lay beyond the next hill or to follow the wild ducks northward in the spring and southward in the fall. Others had an irresistible urge to punch some trainmaster on the jaw for a real or fancied insult and then collect their pay. Still others hit the bottle too much, or carelessly let a boxcar fall off the dock, or perhaps caused a wreck by failing to deliver a train order, and flew the coop…

  ‘Boomers were generous, worldly-wise, self-assured often to the point of insolence, humorous, resourceful and given to braggadocio, and withal a likeable lot. They knew railroad operations better, perhaps, than the home guard did, because they circulated widely and were continually picking up new kinks … It required plenty of red-eye to make some fellows even want to railroad in the rowdy wooden-axle days when the industry was young, hard as steel, and sprinkled with blood.’

  So a million nomads were moving in intricate cross currents about the spaces of America, some purposefully, most desultorily, on the cord lines of the huge net flung over the new country. Some had ‘pulled the pin’ (resigned) and most had ‘got the gate’ (dismissed), and all believed, or tried to believe, that they were taking the primrose path to another job.

  They had learned to ride a train the way an Indian brave could ride a horse: they could hang on to belly, back, neck or rump, and get there. From preference, the hobo rode in boxcar. Even this was always hard travelling, unless there was comfortably upholstered freight for a makeshift bed, but there were risks with most merchandise. Machinery or other heavy consignments could shift and sway on a manifest, or cannonball - a fast through train - and kill or mutilate. Nor was any veteran hobo lured by fine weather to sun himself in the doorway, for a lurch on a bend could hurl the huge sliding door shut and amputate both legs like a bacon slicer.

  To the general public the term most familiarly equated with hobo travel is riding the rods. Certainly the rods were ridden, when there were rods, but then not from choice, not if there was an open boxcar to climb in, for this was just about the most perilous and hideously uncomfortable nook of a train’s exterior. Beneath the old boxcar - not on today’s streamlined models - the iron frame was underbraced by gunnels, or iron bars, running lengthwise eighteen inches below the belly of the car, leaving a space into which a reasonably slim hobo (and they were seldom fat) could sidle and so be borne, stretched flat on his back like a kipper on a grill, cradled between the thundering wheels and a few inches above the sleepers and spraying cinders.

  The indefatigable who were ever willing to truck it the hard way also often carried in the side pocket a piece of board about ten inches long and grooved down the centre. This was slotted on to the yard-long slender lateral strut parallel with the cross section and the axles of a passenger coach, thus forming an improvised, and very painful, seat.

  The ingenuity of the practised train limpet was impressive. He could use almost every excrescence to render himself portable. He rode on the iron plate, yet another toehold in the ‘guts’, or lower berth, of a steamcar. He rode the ‘death woods’, the narrow plank above the couplings of a boxcar. He rode the couplings themselves - the whipple trees or swingletrees - and the bumpers. He bur rowed in the coal of the engine tender. He rode among the sheep and cattle of the livestock cars. He rode in open gondolas piled with granite.

  He rode on the top deck, the boardwalk along the centre of boxcars, and, if that was loaded as at harvest time, he rode on the grab irons and ladder on the side. He rode ‘possum belly on the tool or supply box under a car. He rode the toe path, the narrow loading platform bolted on the walls of some rattlers. He rode the footrail at the rear end of tankcars.

  He rode the steps, the cramped compartment formed by the closed doors of a passenger car vestibule. He rode on the blind, or blind baggage, the space between the locomotive tender and the baggage car, ‘blind’ because the forward end door is locked - the place incidentally for which W. H. Davies was jumping when he fell and had his foot slashed off. He even rode, if desperate to be on his way, under the headlight on the pilot or cowcatcher, the grilled scoop which projected afore the front wheels to clear obstructions from the line.

  He rode on the water tank and in the empty ice boxes of refrigerator cars. There was even one obsessional hobo who perfected a method of stowing away in the battery box, an oblong container suspended under a passenger coach for spare lighting system storage batteries. Frisco was his name and, according to Mullin, he cased the battery boxes in the depot yards until, finding an empty, he crawled in, jack-knifed with knees under chin, pulled up the flap door and secured the screw-eye with a hook of wire, letting himself out in the same way at the end of the run.

  Frisco had heard it rumoured that somewhere under the boiler of a certain make of locomotive there was a crevice which had been used as a nacelle by a few exceptionally audacious hobos; but he never, he grieved, located it himself. Perhaps it was but a camp fire boast. (I know of only two attempts to adapt this machinery parasitism to the newer potentials. In April 1966 a Spaniard secreted himself in the undercarriage bay of an Air France Caravelle: his corpse was found at Orly Airport after the aircraft had returned from a round trip to Moscow. In October the same year a seventeen-year-old Mexican rode in a jet’s landing gear assembly from Colombia to Mexico City, a five-hour flight at 35,000 feet and 600 mph - theoretically ‘biologically, technically and humanly impossible’ - and survived.)

  All these places, inside and out, were at the least comfortless and at worst hair-raisingly dangerous. Most of the open ledges could be used only under cover of darkness, because of the likelihood of being spotted, which meant that nodding off to sleep for a second could cause the hobo to lose his grip, and hence his life, by rolling off.

  He always had to decide whether to lash himself to a brake beam with his trouser belt, thereby being safer from injury but an easier snatch for a detective. On the deck he was even more exposed to discovery - he could be seen by the brakeman from his caboose cupola and was open to attack from gun, sap or pick-handle; he was safer from surprise on the slanted roof of a mail or passenger train, which no official would walk when the train was highballing, but there again it was a more precarious ride.

  On the blind baggage there was always the risk of being pelted with coal lumps or hot ash by a hostile fireman. Even inside, and if riding without interference or accident, it was a villainously cold and gruelling journey.

  On top of the bow end, the outside rider bound a rag around his eyes and pulled coat collar over his head as shield against cinders from the smoke stack, and tied string around his trousers to keep out the draughts. He also had to watch for deliberate booby traps: one trick employed by brakemen to discourage rodriders was to lower a rail spike or coupling on a wire through the floorboards so that it bounced on each tie, whipping like a javelin at the hobo’s head and body.

  The degrees of predilection were fine but when the daughter of Jay Gould, the railroad baron’s daughter, was making her deathbed bequest, the dirtiest turn she could think of was, according to the hobo song:

  Father, fix the blinds so the bums can’t ride.

  If ride they must, let ‘em ride the rod,

  Let ‘em put their trust in the hands of God.

  The hobo trusted to his own quick wits and self-sufficiency.

  For his improvised landlouping along the cinder right-of-way he evolved a one-man band equipment. All travelled light, but the bindle stiff, with his quilt or blankets, was less spry, limited by his snail-load impedimenta mostly to boxcars. The do-anything-go-anywhere casual labourer carried his necessities economically distributed about his person.

  His benny, or overcoat, served also as pillow or bedcover, with sidepockets enlarged into pouches for razor (or a substitute sharp sliver of glass), soap, needle and thread and patches, bag of coffee, knots of sugar, salt and pepper, a couple of onions for the next jungle mulligan stew, a bottle of sugared water if nothing stronger could be paid
for, newspaper as additional underwear and shoelining, a grain sack with three holes cut out as a windcheater, if he could afford it a slicker or mackintosh cape, and a ‘frogsticker’ knife for both peeling potatoes and self-defence. When he slept he tied his boots around his neck, for these were the one possession he could on no account have stolen, and, if he ever had any to put by, he sewed a few dollar bills into the bottom of his necktie or in the lining of his jacket.

  He was in business and henceforth able to cultivate an epicurean taste for the available varieties of transport. There were those, the ‘scenery tramps’, who frankly owned to an aesthetic pleasure in the country they sailed through free. ‘I think that’s one of the reasons we kept on moving as much as we did,’ Dick Brazier, the Wobbly poet, told the labour folklorist Archie Green. ‘In addition to searching for the job, we were also searching for something to satisfy our emotional desire for grandeur and beauty. After all, we have a concept of beauty, too, although we were only migratory workers.’

  This type of hobo - more exactly the ‘primitive American tourist’ than the whole drifting population Lomax applies the phrase to - beat his way at a leisurely jog, lounging on a load of sand in an open gondola, a pioneer vistadome trip, in a mixed train (a freight with linked passenger coaches) or a jerkwater switch or a peddler freight or a mechanics’ special, which chugged from station to station with many a halt. Those in a hurry, or who just enjoyed the sensation of 500 mile overnight leaps, took the gran turismo Big Four mails, or a red-tagged highliner freight or a yellow meat manifest or a scarlet cannonball express or even a crack cross-continental Pullman.

  Those are the bare bones of the operation, and a good deal of the technique is still in use, but there is needed the flesh of actual experience to understand what it took of a man. Just here and there, in the few exercises in autobiography which have come from hobos’ pens, there are vivid snapshots of this impossibly arcane undertaking. They jump out from what is often a stodge of stilted moralizing - the sudden sweat of fear, a reek of smoke, the sense of being dwarfed by monstrous machinery, and the wet, cold darkness flickering with headlights and lanterns in the yards of some remote Western anthracite town.

  ‘The bells of the switching engineers were clanging; the car inspectors were calling out orders and numbers … The shouts of the mail, baggage and express handlers … The exhaust valves of the engines sent steam-plumes hissing into the air, shrill peals… The station bell-signal for the Limited to leave. Conductors shout “All aboard”. The engineer, after looking at his watch, climbed into the cab, released the air-brakes, opened the throttle, and with the bright electric headlight showing the way, the ponderous machine’s drive wheels gripped the steel rails… Here in the darkness, hanging under the Pullman betwixt life and death, I watched those wheels ahead and in the rear of me slowly revolve, squeaking as they passed the many cross-overs and switches, and I at last felt that I had given up everything but life itself to please the bane of my existence… Soon we were rushing at top speed, onward.’ (Leon Ray Livingston.)

  ‘The train curled like an immense dark snake before it straightened itself on the main track. As it rumbled along the rails, the engine whistle shrieking for crossings, I stood on the bumpers between two cars and dreamed of many things. I gripped the iron brake-beams until my wrists ached and tiny particles of rust worked their way into the palms of my hands… The roaring train lashed through the air. The wind blew viciously between the cars. It nearly blew the torn shirt from my body. My hair was wind-tangled and full of cinders… Perhaps the gruelling grind of the road, the lashing of the wind, the rain, and cinders combined with the smoke and gaseous grime of tunnels, gave me the courage to endure the keener mental tests that met me at the yearly stations ahead.’ (Jim Tully.)

  ‘It is so dark you can hardly see your hand in front of you… We ease up as close as we can without being seen by the bulls. We scrape our knees and our hands on the sharp pebbles in the tracks and stumble over the ties… You can judge how fast a drag is coming by listening to the puff. This one is picking up fast… I judged my distance. I start running along this track. I hold my hand up to the side of these cars. They brush my fingers as they fly by. I feel this step hit my fingers, and dive. Christ, but I am lucky… I slam against the side of the car. I think my arms will be jerked out of their sockets. My ribs feel like they are smashed, they ache so much. I am bruised and sore, but I made it. I climb to the tops. The wind rushes by and cools the sweat on my face. I cannot believe I made this drag, she is high-balling it down the tracks so fast. I am shaking all over. My hands tremble like a leaf. My heart pounds against my ribs … If you make it, you are lucky. If you don’t make it, well what the hell ? What difference does it make if a stiff is dead ? … But just the same I am glad I am here on the tops and not smashed all to hell underneath those wheels that sing beneath me.’ (Tom Kromer.)

  Those testimonies span about thirty years of hoboing, from the 1900s to the 1930s. In this period, and indeed before and since, when a stiff was not riding a drag or in an upcountry work camp or house car, his alternatives were a jungle or skid row.

  A jungle can be any hollow or windbreak, only intermittently occupied, where a fire may be lit in comparative security and relaxation, much as every frontiersman has done on the trail. But on the main hobo routes, and outside any big rail junction or work centre, the jungle is quite a complex unit of society. It can be, as Benson writes, a ‘small one-tomato-can affair with a lone hobo, perhaps two, boiling java’ right up to ‘those of California and the North-West, where one jungle was a mile long’. At Dunsmuir, California, there was a fire and a group of hobos under almost every tree - it looked ‘like an Army camp’. A huge one at Jacksonville was Camp Busted.

  The jungle’s siting is based on factors similar to those which decide the siting of any human community: access to water, food, fuel and transportation. So the jungle is usually abutting on a river or a railhead water tower or perhaps on the edge of a city rubbish dump, which provides useful pickings. The site has to be dry enough for sleeping out on the ground, sheltered from winds and for preference coolly shaded from the midday sun. There must be water for cooking and washing, and kindling for the fire. It must be convenient to the track so that new arrivals can find it after dark and so that an eye can be kept on the making up of freights in a division point yard, where locomotives and crews are changed after their hundred miles’ shift, or stops made for taking on coal and water, and where the departing trains can be snagged before picking up high speed.

  The jungle though must not be too near either depot or town, where it would be glaringly exposed to the company detectives and the local citizens. Of course the officials know the local hangout of the hobos. If there is a tramp scare on, or if there has been boxcar pilfering or any other trouble for which the transients are rightly or wrongly blamed, the bulls and town clowns are hotfoot on the scene to arrest or beat up the lodgers of the moment, and, Hotchkiss manner, to tear down their shelters and riddle their cooking pots with bullet holes.

  For this reason, and because all concerned are ephemeral, the jungle is a makeshift home. Its accommodation and furniture are extemporized out of any oddments and materials within snaffling distance. A boxcar door set on two piles of ties may serve as a table. If enough ties are to be had some low cabins may be built of them, three sides and a roof.

  They are seldom so solid. A rag of tarpaulin, some cardboard cartons, orange boxes - anything wind- or rain-deflecting can be converted, and is. A billboard smartly snapped off after dark keeps the damp from the bones, and burlap sacks stuffed with straw make reasonable mattresses.

  Similarly almost anything which can be is used as a receptacle or cooking utensil. The two central domestic articles are the wash pot in which men lousy from bad bunk huts and begrimed from long rides in coal trains can boil up their clothing, and the container for the mulligan, the stew which is kept perpetually replenished by contributions from all, hoppins, or vegetables, and gumps
- meat of any description, butchers’ scraps, bacon rinds, the occasional rustled chicken. All render down into a mess which may vary in savouriness but which is always hot. A fireman’s broken shovel or discarded tie plates are substitute frying pans; meat is kebabbed on bent wire; potatoes are baked in the hot ash; tomato cans or sardine cans are plates for the stew.

  It is all a bit like a seedy Boy Scout camp, a picnic which never packed up and went home. There is little that cannot be made over for use in the hobo jungle, the bag held out under the theory of conspicuous consumption, the public level at which built-in obsolescence is a boon. Here, in Anderson’s words, ‘absolute democracy reigns’. Few - outside the South - draw a colour line and in this ground floor social gathering perhaps the American melting pot really does work, rather like the federative action of the mulligan pot upon its miscellaneous ingredients. Whites, Negroes, Mexicans, Indians and their combinations live and mix in mutual support. No credentials are required and no questions are asked about a man’s past. The jungle is the communications centre of tramps where practical information and tips are exchanged about the whereabouts of other hobos, about work possibilities, about wage rates, about changes in train schedules, about towns which have gone hostile and divisions where the crews are tolerant to free riders. All that is expected of a man is that he collects a share of sticks, washes up the utensils he has used, dries them and leaves them turned bottom up so that they will not rust with rain water, and pitches in to keep the camp clean. In return he gets a place at the fire and a share of what food there is, if he has not got his own lump with him.

  Most old hobos, at all events those with literary airs, give the impression that talk around the jungle fire sparkles with philosophical epigrams and political wisdom, a conversazione of gipsy scholars, with late evenings of concerts and recitation. This gilding of the dandelion has been given another coating by such folklorists as Millburn, with his ‘hobo poesy and balladry’, and the fancy that hobos are ‘imbued with the spirit of the medieval troubadours’.