Hobo Times

Measuring authenticity

Here is an entry I made in my journal several years ago relating to Hobo authenticity.

It has always been a wonder to me how much Hobos' love trains. After all, does a cowboy love his horse, does a swagman love his walking stick, does a vagabond love his shoes or a hitchhiker his thumb?

The point is that measuring roadworthiness on tangible things like miles, diesel fuel ridden, technical rail know how and crew changes is nothing more than a chest beating exercise.

I measure road-worthiness by how self-reliant and free we are between our own ears. On whether we have discovered a "drift" in time and place that suspends the hold our ‘ought tos’ have on our will. Riding freight trains doesn't guarantee that one has found inner peace. It does, however offer the opportunity to free our minds from the committee of chaotic voices that scatter our inner peace. Some of us are capable of totally shedding responsibility for a time…to walk to the edge of a cliff…and purposely choose to live.

Freedom is about making choices.  Living in civilizations rut, our minds stuck on autopilot…routines followed rather than choices made…makes us a prisoner in the freest country on Earth. But being on the road...living spontaneously...confronting a myriad of incidences everyday, random events poping up so quickly we must read the situation, concoct a story and deliver it in the same moment is living fully and creatively where one cannot count on routine to survive. Having the audacity to live reckless and free in order to live a life in techno-color brilliance! And to do so while drifting across the Dakota’s in the dark of night to witness the firefly’s dance above the sleeping sunflower fields."

'The Drift'

...suddenly it was as if I stepped into a clearing where my spirit was set free. Home, the root that grounds the soul, had come unplugged from "place".  There I lay on the cold rusty steel bed of a piggy-back freight,  wrapped in what was left of my frayed sleeping bag..... feeling cozy, at peace and complete.  Not a soul in the universe knew where I was, yet I couldn't think of anyone I'd rather be with than me.  I had found home... on the road.... in what I would come to call, "The Drift".  And from that moment forward, I would pack myself up every morning and head for the nearest rail yard to catch-out any damn place I pleased...moving, always moving, but toward, no longer away from, life.

In 'The Drift', my life exists within a moment in a stream of moments.  If I was happy where I was, I saw no reason to rush off.  There were no plans and no destinations.  I couldn't get lost because I wasn't going anywhere in particular...and I was never late to nowhere.  Folks who liked me or didn't like me did so for who I was in that moment.  I had nothing to live up to or live down...there was no resting on my laurels but no baggage to carry either.  Guilt, the heaviest load of all... had evaporated.

America became my big back yard.  I traversed the country; catching freight trains like most New Yorkers catch taxi-cabs.  There wasn't a city in the nation that didn't see me as a local.  And yet, I was a visitor everywhere I traveled...peering, as a guest of the dark, at the faint blue light of late night TVs, reflecting through the windows of passing prairie farm houses and big city tenements. 

I owned the horizon, the sunsets, the sunrises, and the trees but I never paid a dimes worth of taxes. I contributed zero to the gross national product, but everything I owned to the gross national spirit.