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riding the rails

This is the only time I ever broke the law and wrote about it. The deed was its own punishment, but now I  have on my wall an honorary hobo's certificate signed by the King himself.

    It was cloudy and threatening rain when the King of the Hobos and I sidled furtively up to a section hand at a big Atlanta rail yard and asked where the southbound freight was making up.

    He examined us scornfully.

    "I'd help y'all if I thought you's hobos," he said, "but you too clean to be hobos. You just officials, tryin' to get me in trouble."

    When the ordeal ended 17 hours later, I would have passed his inspection. By then, however, I was a former hobo.

    Once again, my appetite for adventure had outpaced my capacity for it.

It was all the fault of a magazine called the Hobo Times, which is full of color pictures of gorgeous vistas seen through the open doors of box cars and stories about the jolly adventures of the modern recreational 'bo, who rides the rails because he wants to, not because he has to.

    My head was full of this when Luther the Jet, whose peers voted him their king last year, offered to let me 'bo with him. Luther was going to see his mother in the Florida Keys; I vowed to ride three days with him.

    I bounced around like a ninny, telling friends, acquaintances and even a few strangers about the trip. I rented a backpack large enough to hold a sow and a few of her piglets, a fancy pneumatic mattress and a sleeping bag to put on top of it. I didn't even see any of this stuff until the night before we left. After all, what can go wrong when you're riding with the King?

    Just as the section hand was dissing us, a carman pulled up in his truck and cheerfully gave us all the information we needed. "Be careful now," he said as we parted. Clearly, he knew good hobos when he saw them.

    Riding freight trains is essentially trespassing, and every rail company forbids it for reasons of liability, if nothing else. But many trainmen will tolerate and even help travelers they believe to be honest hobos and not vandals or thieves.

    We darted in among the trains, fearful of being spotted by some unsympathetic trainman. But it was hard to skulk under the weight of the blue backpack, which was festooned with the sleeping bag, the pad and an Army surplus poncho, and stuffed with camera, notebook, tape recorder, a change of clothes, enough food to last until Cuba and two bottles of water. It created a tendency to fall over backward and a suspicion that someone was following me. It was my personal albatross.

    Luther, on the other hand, loped along with nothing but a bedroll and a little carryall. He must have known he had a loony on his hands but he was unfailingly kind nonetheless.

After we located our train, we dropped our luggage behind the massive wheels and huddled out of sight. It turned out to be a three-hour wait, during which I learned something about Luther the Jet and the life of a hobo.

    Luther - his real name is Luther Gette, pronounced "Jet" - is a lanky, loose-limbed, scholarly-looking man. He is indeed a scholar, holding a doctorate in French literature from the University of Wisconsin.

    "By the time I got my degree, I was tired of it, so I thought, 'I'll just do something else,' " said Luther, 57, as we hunkered under the edge of a grain hopper. "I got a job at a fleabag hotel up near the state Capitol in Madison. One of the nicest jobs I ever had. I kept that job for three or four years," until the hotel was razed, and in 1980 he took a job in the admissions department at the university hospital.

    Two years ago, just as his house in Madison was paid for, Luther took early retirement from the hospital. He finds his retirement check is enough to support him.

    "I was always fascinated by railroads," he said, "and I rode them as a passenger as often as I could. I didn't do very much hoboing until the passenger trains started to disappear, about 20 years ago. Then I knew if I was going to go on riding trains, it would have to be freight trains."

    Our train was a 3/4-mile-long mixed freight awaiting the engines. It had one drawback; a grievous one, as it turned out. Open box cars, it seems, have become nearly as scarce as free rooms at the Ritz. There was none on the southbound freight. Luther began extolling the virtues of riding on the porch of a grain hopper.

    Three hours passed uneventfully. "I once waited two days for a train in Harrisburg, Pa.," Luther observed, "and then got kicked off five miles out of town."

    Finally, there were signs of activity. We scrambled onto the hopper, whose porch offers only scant protection from the elements, and within five minutes we began to move. It also began to rain.

    I unfurled my newly-purchased Army surplus poncho and was nearly overcome by the reek of old armpit. Luther moved upwind of me.

    The train began to pick up a little speed and we were on our way, waving merrily to the motorists on I-285. The rain was only intermittent and not as much of a problem as my poncho, which was open at the back. It was supposed to snap shut, but it wouldn't, and as a result it occasionally blew up over my head like a pinup girl's skirt.

    Somehow, the feeling of vaunting adventure wasn't welling up in my heart. Instead of being in a comfortable boxcar, I was standing in an inch of foul, unidentifiable ooze, exposed to the elements and deafening noise. Instead of encountering majestic views, we were passing a series of impromptu garbage dumps full of discarded furniture and mattresses and row after row of abandoned apartment complexes. However, I was sure that at any moment we would begin having fun.

    Whatever wealth of knowledge Luther carries on the subject of French literature never emerged during our sojourn, but his incredibly encyclopedic knowledge of railroading did.

Luther recounted the history of early Atlanta from the standpoint of the old Georgia Railroad, although he had ridden in the state only a couple of times. It's that kind of knowledge that gets you crowned king of the 'bos.

    Each year at its convention in Britt, Iowa, the National Hobo Association elects a king and queen. "You have to pass a selection committee of former kings and people who've been around," Luther said. "They generally know you pretty well by then. Like, they asked me where I'd been riding lately.

    "I said, 'Well, I've been riding the B&O (Baltimore & Ohio) a lot.' So they said, 'Tell us the division points on the B&O out of Chicago.' "

    "Then you have to go and give a two-minute speech to the whole crowd, and you're elected by applause. The first time I ran, in 1994, I did a pretty serious speech, and I lost. So this time I decided just to sing a song.

    "All I said was, 'I promise you I'll never quit riding freight trains and I'll never quit writing songs, and I'm going to sing one for you now.' I sang one about a trip I took on the Union Pacific when I got booted out of the yard in North Platte, Neb."

    We weren't an hour out of Atlanta when the train ground to a halt and the brakeman headed back toward us.

    We couldn't hide. But he greeted us with a cheerful wave, trudged to the rear of the train, examined it, spoke on his two-way radio, and started back.

    "Trouble with the air brakes?" Luther asked as the man passed us again.

    "Yeah, but it's all right. We'll be goin' in a minute," he said, as though we had been complaining bitterly over the delay.

    In another hour, it was raining steadily and we pulled into a siding to let a series of northbound freights go by. We took the opportunity to find a cleaner hopper and I pulled out the sleeping bag, encased it in a trash bag and used it for a seat.

    Fifty years ago I rode Rock Island passenger trains pulled by steam engines from my parents' home in Oklahoma to my grandmother's in Kansas, and the clackety-clack of the wheels would sing to me before it put me to sleep.

    On the outside of a freight train at 60 mph, the effect is less soothing. It might be compared to being encased in a rusty 60-gallon barrel while half a dozen orangutans beat on it with hammers. The brakes on the next car utter a constant flow of bizarre noises - the tinkle of a wrench dropped on concrete, the clash of small cymbals, a mad scientist's cackle, the hiss of dragons and a demented noise like a boy sucking up the last of his milkshake.

    The ride is bone-numbing, punctuated by terrifying episodes when slack enters the couplings. The result is a sudden bang and a lurch forward sharp enough to throw you off the train if you aren't holding on. In a second, the slack is taken up with another bang and a backward jerk that slams your head against the bulwark behind you.

    It became apparent that what I was coming to think of as the freight from hell was making very poor time, and we began to fear we might not reach Waycross until morning. The freight from hell was supposed to stop in Manchester to change crews. Luther decided we should get off there and spend the night somewhere dry.

    As we began to slow south of Manchester, a strange, high-pitched ratcheting noise rose above the din of the train; in fact, I thought it was some new train sound. But as we ground to a halt, I realized it was frogs in the water-filled ditch along the right of way. Their puissance was awesome, the voice of the living soaring above the yammer of the machine.

    Indeed, the hotshot to Waycross makes its crew change right in downtown Manchester. But we were half a mile behind the engines, which meant we were half a mile from downtown. It was pitch dark, raining hard and the right of way was narrow. Neither Luther nor I felt up to getting off there.

    My watch does not glow in the dark, and I lost all track of time after Manchester. At some point I looked up and saw stars, and the wind dried the water on the floor of the porch. With a groan of pleasure, I took off the infernal poncho, put it on the steel floor, got out the rolled-up air mattress for a pillow and lay down, hunkered on my side with my knees curled up - the only way you can lie down on a grain hopper if you're more than four feet tall.

    I was awakened by water creeping up my arm inside my jacket. It was raining harder than ever. I thrashed around and got the poncho back on - a bad move. It was wet on both sides now.

    Discomfort and misery reached a plane upon which there was a Zen- like existence. Degrees of wetness were a matter of indifference. One would always be more or less wet, and more or less cold. One's head would always pound with the fearsome din of the freight from hell, one's bones would always ache with its rattle. Until Waycross. At Waycross, things would be better.

    Gradually, the wheels did begin singing to me. They sang of warm showers and dry beds and the dancing lights of vacancy signs on motels. My throat felt sore. My leg began to ache where I broke it last spring. I began to wonder if I could survive two more days of this.

Some time later the rain stopped and I lay down again, and apparently slept, because the next thing I remember is Luther nudging me in the darkness. We were backing into the Waycross yards.

    When we jumped off, I could see the face of my watch and it said 1:46 a.m.

    It was dry and reasonably warm. I shouldered the blue albatross and we began to trudge toward the downtown end of the big rail yard. There, as we passed a string of seven open box cars, Luther found the hobo jungle, identified from signs of fires and a grisly looking shack about the size of a privy, with a chair in it.

    "We'll bed down in the weeds here," he said, "and catch the Jacksonville freight in the morning."

    "Luther, I hate to say it," I told him with a catch in my throat, "but I've enjoyed about as much of this as I can stand."

    He didn't seem surprised. I shook his hand, wished him well and began plodding toward the water tower in the distance.

    I had reached a part of downtown Waycross where the sidewalk is sheltered by an awning when a heavy squall hit. I stood there, dry and safe, thinking of Luther.

    The squall finally subsided and I started walking again, still in that state of hypnotic, transcendental misery, thinking about how all my friends were going to have a fine laugh at my expense. I came to a street sign that had a smiling image of Pogo on it, and it cheered me a little. I remembered the mangled proverb his buddy Howland Owl used to offer those who let their ego overcome their good sense: "Pride goeth over the falls."

    When I got to the Holiday Inn, the clerk was nervous but I paid him cash in advance. It was 3 a.m. I had walked four miles in the rain and the dark under the weight of that abominable albatross and found every step of it more enjoyable than riding on the porch of a grain hopper.

    The great hobos all have handles, like Luther the Jet. There's Guitar Whitey and Road Hog and the Santa Fe Bo, Adman and the Texas Madman. I had once hoped that at the end of this adventure, Luther would bestow a handle on me. He didn't have to. I found one for myself.

    Just call me NoBo.  -- Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Feb. 11, 1996

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