Riding the Rails

America from a BoxcarReading selections from Ben Reitman's Boxcar Bertha got me thinking about traveling as a hobo. Until now, we've focussed primarily on travel for leisure (tourism) or for work (documentary photographers and writers) or to get to a place where one might find work (migrant workers). However, we haven't paid much attention to people who live the hobo life and travel as a hobo, not because they have to, but because they choose too.

The stories Bertha tells the reader about her life and the stories of others that she relays do often come across as tales of the unfortunate and down and out, but at the same time, many of Bertha's stories indicate that she and her mother and many of her companions chose the hobo life, because they felt it suited their ideals. Within that life, travel played a great role. Though Bertha moved around from one job to another, it is apparent that it was not her dire need for a job, but rather her wanderlust that blew her from one end of the country to the other. Hitchhiking and riding the rails was a part of her experience and being a "hobo" or homeless actually facilitated acting on her desire to move around. For so many, travel is considered a luxury because one must take time off from a job or school, fork up sums of money for transportation and accommodation and food. Yet if one has no life to worry about leaving behind, if one travels like a hermit crab or snail with everything he needs and owns on his back, travel becomes a freer experience, one of many possibilities. Yet society condemns people like Bertha and her hobo friends...why? Do we all secretly envy their detachment? Their free spirit?

This got me thinking about people who travel the country by hitchhiking and riding the rails today. Author William Vollmann wrote a collection of personal essays published in 2008 titled Riding Toward Everywhere, recounting his experiences illegally riding the rails around the United States and the people he met for whom it was a way of life. Vollmann had been interested in the life of train-hopping hobos for some time, and finally teamed up with a friend who had been riding the rails "for sport". The two acted as a team, Vollmann the people person hanging out with drunks and bums, asking questions about their lives and the shady American homeless underground, and his friend as the expert on train-hopping. Vollmann writes about massive hobo tent towns, a rail-riding gang known as the FTRA (supposedly violent and crazy, though Vollmann never really discovers anything of substance about it) and the thrill of riding in boxcars. He seems to conclude that this may be part of the reason so many people train hop, however the experiences of a writer with a family, home and plenty of income from his books who chooses to ride the rails to find adventure, cannot really be compared with those of true rail-riding hobos.

Bertha and Vollmann do however, have something in common - an adventurous nature, wanderlust, a desire to speak to people and experience the grit and hardship of America and Americans. We can learn from their example that travel does not have to exist within the organized and expensive and even legal boundaries that we believe it does (not that they are condoning crime and neither am I). They are both encouraging themselves and others to think outside the box (maybe by traveling in one!).