TWILIGHT OF THE HOBOS

A part of American folklore that dates back to the end of the Civil War, hobos forged a distinct counterculture along the lonely railroad tracks that are the backbone of America. In pieced-together camps (“jungles”) just far enough from town to avoid law enforcement scrutiny, they created a society with its own laws, etiquette and language. Their numbers swelled during the Great Depression as destitute men crisscrossed the country on freight trains in search of work. The post-Vietnam era produced its own surge of itinerant train travelers as veterans, juvenile delinquents and drug culture casualties sought solace and freedom along the American rails. Today the mantle has been passed (however reluctantly) to squatter punks who started arriving on the scene sometime in the early ’90s.

By Chris Simunek

Hidden as it is within the Iowa cornfields, I almost drove right past Britt, host of the National Hobo Convention for the past 107 years. The convention dates back to the post–Civil War era, after migrant workers formed their own organization, Tourist Union #63, in order to skate by stringent vagrancy laws and obtain free passage on railroads. The meeting provided a chance for the union to reconnect once a year and enlist new members. After convening in a different city every year, the union chose Britt as its permanent home in 1900.

As the late-summer sun began to set behind a towering grain silo, a few hundred people gathered in a small park beside a set of railroad tracks that would serve as a hobo jungle for the week. A prayer was said to the four winds, a ceremonial bonfire was lit, and the 2007 National Hobo Convention had begun. People approached the blaze with coffee cans filled with ashes from campfires that had been collected from gatherings held throughout the country and poured them over the flames. In front of a crowd of about 100 people, Iwegan Rick, the current hobo king, recounted what he had been doing with his crown. A skinny, grizzled, suntanned man with a locomotive tattooed on his forehead, Rick said he’d been crossing the country on freight trains and spreading the word.

After sunset, I wandered over to “Sinner’s Camp,” a conglomeration of road-weary vehicles, muddy tents and weathered men and women sitting in lawn chairs around a smoky campfire.

My HIGH TIMES credentials served me well, as I was told by the king himself, Iwegan Rick (“Iwegan” being hobospeak for “a man from Iowa”), that our publication was one of the few that would be accepted here without question.

“Marijuana makes me normal,” he explained. “Marijuana helps me cope. When I’m in a city around a bunch of wing nuts, around a bunch of home guards, around a bunch of seething pieces of shit, these people who aren’t worth a fuck and they ain’t got no redeeming social value… I’ve got to smoke marijuana. I have to.”

For the rest of the weekend I drank beer, smoked rollies and listened as people exchanged rail stories. They laughed about riding dirty-face cars, where you’re on the front with the wind whipping the bugs in your eyes, and about how hard it is to roll a cigarette in the middle of a tornado when you’re on top of a grainer trying to get to Detroit in time to see Ted Nugent. How about that time Texas Red pissed on a railroad cop and when they pulled the crew off the train and asked them to give their names Mutt told them, “Peter Dangling”? There was that woman who slit the throat of one of Iwegan Rick’s friends, then planted the blade in Rick’s sleeping bag; he spent several months in jail telling the cops to go fuck themselves when they asked who did it, until they finally caught her on their own. Funny stories, miserable stories, best-moment-of-your-life stories—the full range of human experience described to me by faces I could hardly see in the dim, dancing light of the campfire.

Iwegan Rick was the black sheep of a law enforcement family, who was “state-raised” three times as a juvenile—twice for armed robbery and once for possession of LSD with intent to distribute. “I was a fuckin’ nightmare when I was 15 years old,” he told me. “I was sticking dope in my arm and sticking guns in people’s faces.” He hitchhiked around the country in the early ’70s until he met a few train tramps in Eugene, OR, who told him there was a better way. “They said, ‘Hey kid, why do you want to hitchhike and have someone pick you up and want to suck your dick? Hell, yeah, let’s go ride a train.’”

“What were the hobos like back then?” I asked.

“Pretty crazy in their own way,” he replied. “A lot of people said that they were mentally ill, because these boys had to live outside, rejected everything, as far as the missions, the Salvation Army. You could say that they were alcoholics, but that wasn’t the reason that they were out there. Leather workers, artists, veterans, disenfranchised—they got smart on their own. The same kind of guys who would have been mountain men.”

“What is it about riding the rails?” I asked.

“It’s stronger than heroin,” he replied without missing a beat. “Being a free man in an unfree world.”