I have never hopped a freight train, but I sure wish I could say that I have.
It’s one of those experiences that seem to lend more credibility to the life of an American writer than a graduate degree in arts finer than seeing the country from an open boxcar.
About a year ago, I made the acquaintance of a young couple at a Starbucks in Santa Monica, Calif. They were present-day hoboes, bouncing around the country like the “Woody” character played by Marcus Carl Franklin in Todd Haynes’ 2007 film “I’m Not There.”
The young woman had the words “Lost Girl,” tattooed in crude lettering across her knuckles. Her boyfriend had an acoustic guitar and said his name was Danny. Though traveling as if it were 1933, the pair kept in touch with world through cyberspace.
Danny asked if he could check his e-mail on my laptop because they’d hit town after the public library had closed. While he sent notes to people down the line, the Lost Girl — “you know, like in Peter Pan,” she said — told me how jumping off of a moving train was more difficult than getting on.
“The trick is to jump forward, the way the train is moving,” she said, noting that she picked up these tips from the more accomplished Danny. “The first time I jumped backwards and twisted my ankle pretty bad.”
This past summer, the “Hobo Film Festival” made its way to 23 cities around the country, including a stop in Baltimore in early May. Organized by Shawn Lukitsch, a 31-year-old hopper of trains from Thomas Wolfe’s hometown of Asheville, N.C., the festival screened some 30 documentaries about riding the rails.
When the festival hit Brooklyn, N.Y., Lukitsch told The New York Times that such travel — of which he has logged some 120,000 miles — affords a peek at “… pure, unadulterated, un-homogenized America.”
“You see everything,” he said, “from the seediest underbelly of industrial areas to rural places to people’s backyards with laundry hanging on a line.”
When the festival hit Baltimore, a local “itinerant scholar” named Tim Boucher paid $5 to see the films at the Frisby House Punk Hostel in Waverly.
“A guy named Shawn … collected money for gas in a shoebox,” wrote Boucher, 28, on his blog. “The whole event was really fun, even if it did end up making me feel sort of lonesome — but I guess that’s just part of the lifestyle.”
Rafael Alvarez can be reached at [email protected]
