Hard Travellin

by Kenneth Allsop

  By the time he arrived on the stage the character ‘was fully born’ and Chaplin explained to Sennett: ‘You know this fellow is many-sided, a tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure.’

  Patently Chaplin’s conception of the tramp - his pathos, his dignity a spot absurd but unscathed, his wiliness learned from being the butt of every man’s boot, that side of him that was ‘a poet, a dreamer’, and his exit at the end of a movie ambling into the sunset, a colophon twirl to his cane, a solitary but at one with himself - was not divined out of thin air.

  Without being aware of it he was drawing from the public notions about the hobo, breathing the kiss of life into the bundle of rags. Beautifully evolved though the character was, with his swagger and flyblown genteelism, his sweetness and meekness marking him the loser in a cruelly competitive environment, it was a pathetic cartoon.

  The outcast, the itinerant without home or shelter, first appeared fully fledged in The Tramp, a two-reeler made in 1915. The mood was hit in the opening scene, a long-shot of an interminable scorched highway bordered by scrubby bushes, up which is paddling the preposterous, skimpy figure, repeatedly being flipped over into the dust by cars roaring on regardless.

  In The Bank, The Vagabond, Easy Street, The Pawnshop, and The Immigrant the tramp continued to wander in and out, his steps surer into their inconsequential blunders as Chaplin worked on his emotional signals without deliberate thought about the reality of the character he was intuitively feeling his way toward. The spores of ‘the poet, the dreamer’ had been abroad in the air for some time before Chaplin hatched them into living tissue.

  The moony, ruminative hobo, the ‘stand and stare’ Edwardian model, materialized strongly in the poems of Henry Herbert Knibbs, who peeped through here and there in the columns of The American, or The Smart Set or the Los Angeles Graphic. In 1914 these were published as Songs of the Outlands: Ballads of the Hoboes and Other Verse.

  Out There Somewhere was typical of the genre, with its hazy yearnings and Kiplingesque jog-trot:

  As I was hiking past the woods

  The cool and sleepy summer woods

  I saw a guy a-talking to the sunshine in the air…

  And though he was a Bo like me

  He’d been a gent once, I could see

  I ain’t much strong on poetry, but this is what I heard

  Then follows the refrain: We’ll dance a merry saraband from here to drowsy Samarcand, the central reference point being a lady named Penelope, waiting with roses in her hair and kisses on her mouth. This soliloquy to the sun arouses the restlessness of the narrator, who cries:

  Then let’s be on the float; you certainly have got my goat

  You make me hungry in my throat for seeing things that’s new

  Out there somewhere we’ll ride the range a-looking for the new and strange

  My feet are tired and need a change

  Come on! It’s up to you…

  We kept a-rambling all the time

  I rustled grub, he rustled rhyme

  Blind-baggage, hoof it, ride or climb…

  Overland’s Delight goes:

  When we quit the road at night,

  And the birds were folding up their music-bars,

  Just to smoke a little bit; rub his chin awhile, and sit,

  Like a Hobo statue, looking at the stars.

  It is doubtful if these verses of Henry Herbert Knibbs had much currency among the jungle clan, or indeed if Knibbs himself had. Their interest is that this slim volume, with its sickly Indian ink sketches of sunsets and camp fires, was very much of its period, a romantic anodyne for city book stores where idealistic young ladies and mildly radical young men might browse on Saturday afternoons.

  Along with the lonely ruefulness was the call of the wild and winsome revolutionary preaching. The Sheep and the Goats begins:

  Say, mate have you ever seen the mills,

  Where the kids at the looms spit blood?

  dilates on the dangers and suffering in steel mill, desert, railroad engineering, and oil field, and denounces the bondage of the company store.

  The solution? Freedom as enjoyed by ‘a traveling man’:

  With a quilt and a rope and a kind of plan

  Of hitting no one place twice …

  I keep my shoes for the road

  The long gray road - and I love it mate…

  Contempt is there for the sanctimonious hand-out and religiosity in Hash where in ‘one of them “Come in, Stranger” joints’ a gang of hobos whose ‘hands were raw and stomachs flat’ are sawing wood and having to listen to a lecture on the Infinite:

  I reckon I got too rash

  And I says, ‘Nix Bo, on the Infinite,

  What we’re needin’ most is hash!’

  The moral here is that they throw down the saws, spurn the pi-talk and go down the road where they are fed by a rough but kindly saloon keeper. A similar note of slightly joshing grumblings is in Bread.

  Oh, my heart it is just achin’

  For a little bit of bacon

  A hunk of bread, a little mug of brew

  I’m tired of seein’ scenery

  Just lead me to a beanery

  Where there’s something more than only air to chew

  The sublime and the mundane mix in My Heart’s Desire: (log cabin, solitude, rubber boots) and The Grand Old Privilege is

  to chuck our luck and choose,

  Any road at any time for anywhere.

  On The Range underlines the hobo’s growing hubris at being a different, distinct class. There is the ‘rich man ridin’ his limousine’ and there are the unemployed, ‘the guy that is hit by the big machine’ - but there are also the thousands who stand apart from both, ‘a Bo like me’, freer than anyone.

  Nothing To Do But Go more expansively celebrates the whistling rover’s philosophy:

  I’m the ramblin’ man with the nervous feet

  That never were made for a steady beat

  I had many a job - for a little while

  And nothing to do but go

  So it’s beat it, Bo, while your feet are mates

  Take a look at the whole United States

  Oh, the fire and a pal and a smoke at night

  And up again in the mornin’ bright

  With nothing but road and sky in sight!

  And nothing to do but go…

  This after-dinner recitation style is developed with even greater archaicness in Ballad of the Bos, hobo romanticism at high spiral:

  We are the true nobility!

  Sons of rest and the outdoor air!

  Knights of the tie and rail are we,

  Lightly meandering everywhere …

  It ranges across the hurts and the ecstasies of the unattached, finding shade under the boxcars and musing contentedly upon the meaning of life. It ends with a light laugh of pity for the rich and well bred, caged birds behind golden bars:

  Prince, our vulgarity, you declare,

  Shocks your soul and disgusts you so,

  Your pardon, Sire, but accept your share,

  Take your bundle and beat it, Bo!

  Similarly a Shavian strenuity - vegetarianism and Harris tweed knickerbockers - was exuded by Roger Payne, a Cambridge scientist who spent twenty-five years militantly striding about America preaching simple, severe living. ‘The world today is work crazy’ was his message, which urged the reduction of working hours and the reduction of wants, the examples before work-obsessed drudges being hermits and hobos.

  Did all the hobos of the first great wave see themselves as ‘knights of the ties’, as poets of poverty? The evidence to be sifted from the few literate and the larger number of semi-literate rambler scribes does indicate that - even when they were rebutting it in fierce terms of good citizenship - this atmosphere pulsed quite strongly among the fantasts of the jungles and the boxcars. It can hardly have been deliberately traditional yet amid the industrialization of an emerging leviathan
nation there is the ictus of Villon, the poet who lived with roving brigands, and with the later fashion for gipsy yearnings, those of Gautier, and Baudelaire, of Nodier, Richpin, Hugo, Nerval and Mérimée, when the literature of the Romantic movement was espying a way out on a wheeled wagon through the closing fences of organized society.

  Did the hobo himself - the actual working stiff - feel to be a left-over pioneer? Or did he absorb the thought from the nostalgic glories almost gone which saturated the incidental writing after the official shutting of the frontier? Hart Crane in the Twenties was maintaining the admiration for the vestigial hobo, the landless pioneer, as he explained about his ambitious poem The Bridge, whose fifteen parts attempted to clench the size and sense of the nation. The section The River opens in ‘a world of whistles, wires and steam’, where are three hungry men on the tracks:

  Caboose-like they go ruminating through

  Ohio, Indiana - blind baggage -

  To Cheyenne tagging … Maybe Kalamazoo

  And Crane recalls seeing behind his father’s cannery:

  Rail-squatters ranged in nomad raillery

  The ancient men - wifeless or runaway

  Hobo-trekkers that forever search

  An empire wilderness of freight and rails.

  If there is an invented glorification there it is a genuine poetical response to a corpus of attitudes which Crane identified in these ‘ancient men’, and which is still to be found in those to whom an engine’s whistle is a Lorelei song.

  20 Voices calling in the night

  These are the untamable. America has always been

  fecund in the production of roughs.

  Bernard De Voto

  Liberal in Kansas has a street named, with exalted banality, Pancake Boulevard, thus proclaiming that it is one of the world’s only two competitors in the International Pancake Race, the other, the pacesetter, being Olney, in Buckinghamshire, England. Liberal’s western approaches are reflected in the commercial motif of the Short Horn Coffee Shop and the Tumbleweed Motel and the Ranch Wagon Steaks offered at the B & G Diner (‘Short Orders, run by Goldie F. Cartzdafner’), and by the U-Rollit stetsons and Bulldogger Hats in the prairiewear shops. Its truer flavour is, not altogether expectedly, to be found on the dowdy northern fringe.

  The suburbs here are far from blue chip: in the baking heat lawn-sprinklers twirl on cramped tufty lawns which lack the power-mower patina; the white wooden houses are not immersed in the cool of big shade trees; the gravel roads are pot-holed and rutted. On a plot at Tenth Street and Oklahoma is an assembly of house trailers, ranging from humpy Airstream caravans to immense oblongs of corrugated silver aluminium looking as long as jet liners.

  This is the Hi-Klass Mobile Home Park which is kept in business because Liberal stands on the eastern edge of the vast Hugo-ton natural gasfield, stretching from Garden City to the North down through the Oklahoma Panhandle to Amarillo in Texas, and is the Great Plains gas and oil hub of South-Western Kansas. It is a transients’ town. The specialist artisans needed during the progressive phases of development in the oilfields and gasfields come in, complete their tasks and pass on.

  Helen, the wife of Wilbur ‘Shorty’ Kneedler, a bulldozer operator with Hall Construction Company, has made a pugnacious gesture against impermanence. Along the cement strip, advertised as the ‘patio’, she has shoehorned in a tiny garden. There is a ribbon of lawn and a few wilting flowers and she has planted a walnut sapling in one corner; she has also entwined red and white plastic roses across the chain-link fencing.

  She is a spry, wizened woman in her fifties who, despite the wrench of leaving her improvised gardens, declares theirs to be a great life. Her husband is sleeping late this Sunday morning.

  ‘We’ve had thirty years of it, following the lines wherever they lay ‘em, through Colorado, Iowa and Kansas, Nebraska and Missouri and Texas. Yet - funny - I don’t really think of myself as a transit. Shorty’s working at Elkhart, sixty miles west of here, but they’re moving him next week to Alva, Oklahoma, to clear the trees and rubbish for putting in the helium plant and main distributing line.

  ‘Having this trailer is just wonderful, it surely is; you always have your home with you. It’s like a turtle. Always a home on your back. I like to park on a farm because there you’ve got God’s good earth to work on and you’re not always too welcome in towns. They get to call us pipeliner trash. Our downfall is that some trailer people get credit from the local stores and then skip without paying their bills which hurts the rest of us. But I think most people know that we help the city when we arrive. We bring them the gas they need and we bring money into the town.

  ‘Shorty’s always in the higher pay bracket on the ‘dozer, even though he don’t read or write. He’s never been able to do any studying about his work because he didn’t take enough schooling, but he knows how to put together and maintain all that machinery and heavy equipment.

  ‘He says it just takes a strong back and a weak mind, but he’s a good ‘dozer man. I like seeing the country this way with him but you never know when you’re going to sit still. And I do wish, yes, I do wish I could roll up my garden and take it with me.’

  Robert Odell Mitchell, a stocky, wind-burned man of forty-eight, pushes blue goggles back on to his brown steel helmet, takes off his Big Mac heat-proof gloves and tucks them into a belt slung with canvas tool satchels: ‘I had a little problem here. The radius angles weren’t set straight, and there was a crack in there.’ He indicates the twin iron pods, like great rusty boilers perched on platforms sixty feet down in a ramped pit in the flat Montana cornland. They are the brain capsules for the launch control centre of a cluster of Minutemen inter-continental ballistic missiles, the last fifty of one thousand tucked in deep concrete silos in these northern states, cocked for two-second take-off to their Soviet Union targets.

  The site is just outside the small township of Conrad and the Blackfeet Indian reservation, and sixty miles north of the copper and zinc base of Great Falls. There, too, at Great Falls is the nuclear delivery system’s construction headquarters, at the Malm-strom Air Force station, with its motto Peace is Our Profession at the cenotaph-like shrine of a white-painted upended Minuteman rocket.

  Mitchell is an iron worker, a welder. ‘I was born at Swear-ingen, in middle-west Texas, my daddy was an oilfield worker and I was raised up in the oilfield. Since then I guess I’ve worked for more than fifty contractors in my lifetime.

  ‘I’ve built airplane hangars in Oklahoma and Texas, the Civic Center in Chicago, the University of Louisiana, a fifty-two storey building in Dallas, a structure at the Shepherd Air Force Base in Wichita Falls. I was eight months in Madrid drilling wells for the Spanish government, and I’ve built furnaces and factories. I’ve worked through California and New Mexico and Nebraska and Indiana and Oklahoma and Alabama; I never did like the east too awful much. I started on missile sites in 1946 at Roswell, New Mexico.

  ‘That was an Atlas site and I went on to another Atlas site at Tulsa. I went on to Minuteman in Minot, North Dakota, and from there to Huntsville, Alabama, on the moon-shot rocket stand.

  ‘Round about then I got kind of tired running around. These jobs are so strung out. You wear your car out, driving over the bad roads. I went up into the steel mills in Gary, Indiana, for one-and-a-half years. My buddies there decided to move on to Grand Rapids. I didn’t want to move, but I should’ve went - they were getting four hundred dollars and I was getting two hundred.

  ‘But anyway I pretty soon wanted to get out of the dust of that ole mill, so my wife and me we loaded up the little ole Pontiac with all the dishes and linens and flower pots and ironing boards wives have to take with them, and we lit out here. Well, I like to fish and hunt, and I like iron, and it’s the kind of life I enjoy.

  ‘It’s something you been raised up to. It’s not that I’ve ever found the pastures any greener the other side of the hill, but I got itchy feet; always cared for moving about.’

  *

 
It is difficult to find a hobo, ex or extant, who will commend the life; but it is equally difficult to find one completely inoculated against it. There seems to be at some point a merging of a man hunting for a job into a man for whom the manoeuvres of hunting become more important than the objective.

  Occasionally there is the outright warning to be found, not only the terrors and homilies of the hobo broadsheets, but such considered advice as that given by Cisco Houston, the folksinger and union organizer, who was on the road with Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, and who just before he died in 1961 told a young guitar-happy student who wanted to cut loose from school and bum around America: ‘Sure, see the country. But put first’ things first. You don’t have to go on the road just because Woody and I and Pete and Lee did it. We had to. Everybody wants to live well. That’s what we’re fighting for. Fight for education, clean clothes, and stay away from railroads.’

  The double beat of compulsion and repulsion is almost always embedded in writings about America’s overland adventures. A book published in 1937 entitled We Turned Hobo is of interest because, uniquely in the decade, the author seems not to have had economic motives for moving.

  Carl S. Shockman describes how he and his younger brother Clarence had in 1931 departed from their father’s farm at Cold-water, Ohio. ‘The lure of far places had entered our blood and we had to obey its call.’

  They buy old Army uniforms, stuff blankets in shoulder packs and are ready. When their mother realizes that they shall not be gainsaid, she tells them: ‘Any time you find you can’t get any farther by hitch-hiking, turn back for you’ll always be welcome here, and last of all, please don’t ride the freight trains.’

  Carl and Clarence get as far as Indianapolis by car but then, forgetful of their mother’s pleas, switch to the freights and ride towards ‘the sunny land of our dreams, California’. It is a singularly uneventful journey, yet the author quite genuinely conveys the poignancy of the American venture from home.