I remember staring out the window of Sister Justine's third grade class. It wasn't that she was a bad teacher; she was a good teacher and I enjoyed her teaching. But what was happening outside the school building was often more fascinating to me than the activities inside - unless it was geography class. On a warm Spring day it didn't take much to draw my attention outdoors; the sound of an airplane engine droning overhead, the aria of a train whistle, or May's whispers of school ending and Summer's promise of untold adventures. My wanderlust is hardwired, a part of my DNA. I was forever wondering where the tracks, a road, or even the irrigation canal made their end.
The tracks of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad passed less than a hundred yards from my childhood front door; it's trestle a gateway for the cars passing beneath it as they entered or left town from the west. As children we would hop a passing train on one side of the trestle, ride half the length of a football field, and jump off on the opposite side. Good training for a hobo in waiting. At night the rhythmic percussion of train wheels steadily lumbering their way along the track soothed my way to sleep. By my senior year in high school I found that if I couldn't catch a ride hitchhiking home from Salt Lake, there was always a train going my direction not too far away.
Just before graduation from high school in May of '71, I, ironically, turned down a job as a brakeman with the railroad. When graduation came, the plans I had made for a ride to San Francisco, where I would begin thumbing around California, were thwarted by a car accident and the ensuing financial obligations. Jobs around the area were hard to come by and I ended up working in a migrant camp near Springville, Utah picking cherries with two friends, Pete and Gary. Home became a two room wooden shack of maybe 100 square feet. We slept shoulder to shoulder on the floor in sleeping bags in one room; the other room was a "kitchen" consisting of a kerosene camp stove, a small wooden table whose finish had worn away many years earlier, and two chairs with barely enough room for as many people to sit in them. One outside tap provided running water for the whole camp, and the bathroom was a community outhouse. It was typical that whole families worked together to earn a living. Little children would even gather cherries from the ground and pick low hanging limbs. The living conditions didn't bother me. What was a concern was my lack of skill at picking. Earning 4 cents a pound and on my best day only able to pick around 180 lbs., it soon became obvious that after I paid for food, I wasn't making any money. After four or five weeks of working to just barely provide enough to eat, I gathered my belongings and about eighteen dollars and took to the highway with Pete, who was picking less than I was. The initial plan was to seek work in Wyoming or Montana where I had relatives in Livingston and Butte.
That trip lingers in me still. In Wyoming an old timer picked us up, looked at our backpacks and figured we were heading into the wilderness. Despite our explanations of how we were just hitchhiking and not really hiking, and in his earnestness to help two young explorers he took us off the main highway leading to Jackson Hole, past the town of Moose, and dropped us off ten miles from any travelled thoroughfare. Though the next next morning brought on a long hike back to a road with any traffic, that night premiered stars larger and more numerous than any I can remember. The same could also be said of the local mosquito population. In Livingston, Montana we helped my aunt and uncle slaughter and process chickens raised without hormones and antibiotics on their small two acre farm. They refused to eat store bought chickens long before "organic" was cool.
At the job service in Livingston, we found little encouragement for finding jobs anywhere in the area and so decided to just follow the road to see where it would take us. We stopped briefly in Butte to visit another aunt and uncle before making our way through Northern Idaho, Southeast Washington and then to Oregon. Along the Columbia we saw tugs maneuvering barges that my desert, landlocked eyes first mistook for islands. In Portland we spent the night in the weeds at a defunct gas station at the crossroads of East/West bound I-84 and north/south bound I-5.
South of Portland we caught a ride with a rather amiable fellow named Tam. Tam, who I remember as being around his late thirties to early forties, had recently moved to Oregon from the Midwest and was living with his brother who was a commercial fisherman. It was the off season for his brother and they were making residence at the Ten Mile boat camp near Coos Bay. We found his brother's family as warm and open as he was. For no good reason I could think of, they brought us into their home, fed us smoked salmon and Blatz Beer for appetizers, and then cooked up fresh sturgeon for dinner. With our bellies full and the summer light fading, Tam guided us into the local sand dunes for a good spot to camp and then disappeared. Pete and I had a good beer buzz going and were sure we would never be able to find our way out of the dunes come morning. As we were about to settle in, Tam reappeared with about a dozen kids around our age, each bearing beer or wine.
It was around this point that several remarkable things happened. We lost the sense of time. Neither Pete nor I were sure whether it was July or August. We had no watches, and really cared less about the arbitrary numbers of the clock. We got up with the sun and slept when it got dark or we were tired. We began to travel without any grand plan of where we were going, how long we would stay anywhere or what we would end up doing. We lived in the present moment.
We had little money when we began our journey. After spending about a quarter of our funds the first few days on a hamburger in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, we quickly figured out we would have to be much more frugal if the trip was going to last more than a week. For the two months we were on the road, we thrived mostly on bread and peanut butter, which made the generosity of our fisherman family all the more precious. Somewhere along highway 101 in Northern California, we spent the last of our funds on one shared cup of coffee at a Denny's Restaurant. We were literally penniless. Far from experiencing any fear or consternation due to our financial lack, we found ourselves joyful and content, living without need or want.
The trip came to a quasi end in Petaluma, California where our forward motion finally came to a rest. Pete had an aunt and uncle he hadn't seen in years living in the area and we decided to visit. His aunt was eager to have us stay and encouraged her sons to help find us jobs. One of Pete's cousins got me on as a painters assistant where he worked. (One of the few things worse than painting, for me, is prepping for painting.) Pete went to work as a personal orderly for an older paraplegic gentleman who another cousin cared for. He found that he liked that type of work - caring for people who had difficulty caring for them selves. (As an aside - when it came time for him to administer his first shot to the old gentleman, Pete's only frame of reference was witnessing my Uncle Frank in Livingston give a shot to a horse - holding the syringe between thumb and forefinger and then gently slapping its hind end with the back of the other three fingers two or three times before hitting it with the needle, so as not to startle it. I can only guess at the old guy's confusion on receiving his medication in this manner.)
Pete decided to stay with his relatives and see where his new job would take him. I found there was still had a stretch of highway before me, leading me back to Utah. In another series of cosmic coincidences I also found a job as an orderly, working at the local nursing home in my hometown of Price. Less than four months later Pete would return home to take the orderly job I was vacating to lose myself in America once again.
A Hobo Koan: What is the magic in the sound of tires traveling the highway on a moonlit night?
Just before graduation from high school in May of '71, I, ironically, turned down a job as a brakeman with the railroad. When graduation came, the plans I had made for a ride to San Francisco, where I would begin thumbing around California, were thwarted by a car accident and the ensuing financial obligations. Jobs around the area were hard to come by and I ended up working in a migrant camp near Springville, Utah picking cherries with two friends, Pete and Gary. Home became a two room wooden shack of maybe 100 square feet. We slept shoulder to shoulder on the floor in sleeping bags in one room; the other room was a "kitchen" consisting of a kerosene camp stove, a small wooden table whose finish had worn away many years earlier, and two chairs with barely enough room for as many people to sit in them. One outside tap provided running water for the whole camp, and the bathroom was a community outhouse. It was typical that whole families worked together to earn a living. Little children would even gather cherries from the ground and pick low hanging limbs. The living conditions didn't bother me. What was a concern was my lack of skill at picking. Earning 4 cents a pound and on my best day only able to pick around 180 lbs., it soon became obvious that after I paid for food, I wasn't making any money. After four or five weeks of working to just barely provide enough to eat, I gathered my belongings and about eighteen dollars and took to the highway with Pete, who was picking less than I was. The initial plan was to seek work in Wyoming or Montana where I had relatives in Livingston and Butte.
That trip lingers in me still. In Wyoming an old timer picked us up, looked at our backpacks and figured we were heading into the wilderness. Despite our explanations of how we were just hitchhiking and not really hiking, and in his earnestness to help two young explorers he took us off the main highway leading to Jackson Hole, past the town of Moose, and dropped us off ten miles from any travelled thoroughfare. Though the next next morning brought on a long hike back to a road with any traffic, that night premiered stars larger and more numerous than any I can remember. The same could also be said of the local mosquito population. In Livingston, Montana we helped my aunt and uncle slaughter and process chickens raised without hormones and antibiotics on their small two acre farm. They refused to eat store bought chickens long before "organic" was cool.
At the job service in Livingston, we found little encouragement for finding jobs anywhere in the area and so decided to just follow the road to see where it would take us. We stopped briefly in Butte to visit another aunt and uncle before making our way through Northern Idaho, Southeast Washington and then to Oregon. Along the Columbia we saw tugs maneuvering barges that my desert, landlocked eyes first mistook for islands. In Portland we spent the night in the weeds at a defunct gas station at the crossroads of East/West bound I-84 and north/south bound I-5.
South of Portland we caught a ride with a rather amiable fellow named Tam. Tam, who I remember as being around his late thirties to early forties, had recently moved to Oregon from the Midwest and was living with his brother who was a commercial fisherman. It was the off season for his brother and they were making residence at the Ten Mile boat camp near Coos Bay. We found his brother's family as warm and open as he was. For no good reason I could think of, they brought us into their home, fed us smoked salmon and Blatz Beer for appetizers, and then cooked up fresh sturgeon for dinner. With our bellies full and the summer light fading, Tam guided us into the local sand dunes for a good spot to camp and then disappeared. Pete and I had a good beer buzz going and were sure we would never be able to find our way out of the dunes come morning. As we were about to settle in, Tam reappeared with about a dozen kids around our age, each bearing beer or wine.
It was around this point that several remarkable things happened. We lost the sense of time. Neither Pete nor I were sure whether it was July or August. We had no watches, and really cared less about the arbitrary numbers of the clock. We got up with the sun and slept when it got dark or we were tired. We began to travel without any grand plan of where we were going, how long we would stay anywhere or what we would end up doing. We lived in the present moment.
We had little money when we began our journey. After spending about a quarter of our funds the first few days on a hamburger in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, we quickly figured out we would have to be much more frugal if the trip was going to last more than a week. For the two months we were on the road, we thrived mostly on bread and peanut butter, which made the generosity of our fisherman family all the more precious. Somewhere along highway 101 in Northern California, we spent the last of our funds on one shared cup of coffee at a Denny's Restaurant. We were literally penniless. Far from experiencing any fear or consternation due to our financial lack, we found ourselves joyful and content, living without need or want.
The trip came to a quasi end in Petaluma, California where our forward motion finally came to a rest. Pete had an aunt and uncle he hadn't seen in years living in the area and we decided to visit. His aunt was eager to have us stay and encouraged her sons to help find us jobs. One of Pete's cousins got me on as a painters assistant where he worked. (One of the few things worse than painting, for me, is prepping for painting.) Pete went to work as a personal orderly for an older paraplegic gentleman who another cousin cared for. He found that he liked that type of work - caring for people who had difficulty caring for them selves. (As an aside - when it came time for him to administer his first shot to the old gentleman, Pete's only frame of reference was witnessing my Uncle Frank in Livingston give a shot to a horse - holding the syringe between thumb and forefinger and then gently slapping its hind end with the back of the other three fingers two or three times before hitting it with the needle, so as not to startle it. I can only guess at the old guy's confusion on receiving his medication in this manner.)
Pete decided to stay with his relatives and see where his new job would take him. I found there was still had a stretch of highway before me, leading me back to Utah. In another series of cosmic coincidences I also found a job as an orderly, working at the local nursing home in my hometown of Price. Less than four months later Pete would return home to take the orderly job I was vacating to lose myself in America once again.
A Hobo Koan: What is the magic in the sound of tires traveling the highway on a moonlit night?
