A guy in my doctoral cohort was this neo-hippy type of guy. I’m not sure how else to describe him, but he was an archetype. I’m pretty sure his name was Brian, and I’d run into him a lot at the coffee house close to campus where I would sit and read sometimes. Brian was a nice guy, super friendly, but he was also a crunchy shitlib; a sort of fake and manufactured left-wing worry just dripped off of him, and he only took half-and-half if it was organic, which he made a point to tell me, and he always seemed a bit spaced out, but I never knew him to do any kinds of drugs; have you ever known a person like that? He biked everywhere, had this kumbaya attitude about life.
We got to talking and he told me about this house party that was happening down in Johnstown at this old converted hotel, and how he was reading some poetry or some shit like that there, and there was some sort of theme to it that had to do with the Beats and Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and I never understood that at all, the connection they were trying to make between this party and literature, but I let that go and then we started talking about Kerouac because I’d read a lot of Kerouac back in high school, and so I got invited to this party. Brian must have spoken to the host of the party, a guy named Blair, and Blair called me asked if I would give a talk about Jack Kerouac, and I agreed to that even though I had no idea what I would say, because I hadn’t read or thought about Kerouac in years, and I still didn’t understand the audience, or even the point of it all. I had formed in my mind some sort of image of a vaguely academic audience of shitlibs like Brian that would be able to follow along. That’s not what I found, though, when I got there. It was one of the worst parties I’d ever attended. It was like an anti-party, even. Every single person in attendance was rude and unfriendly, and I found abolutely no one to talk to. I milled around in there, in that huge but dilapidated old hotel in some old section of Johnstown; all of these people dressed exactly the same, somehow, these goth/dark hipster types wearing lots of black and some plaid and with wierd piercings in their ears and noses, the men sort of girlish and effette on the whole, and the women sort of rude and unpleasant and absolutely depressed. I hated these people; I told Blair I wasn’t going to talk about Kerouac to these people, that that would be a waste of my time, and he didn’t seem to like that, but I didn’t fit in, and I had no desire to fit in, and so I got out of there. That’s the irony here, an irony that I’ve witnessed all my life, that the countercultures always feel so fucking homogenous.
The romance of it, the title of this post, refers to the gap between what you think it is going to be and what it actually is. The gap between imagination and reality. It is about sitting in my car at a train crossing and watching the train go by and imagining getting a running go and jumping on it and just going where it takes me. I bet a lot of people have that same thought when they get stopped at a train crossing. The romance of it, of saying fuck it to all the rules, responsibilities, various ties and tethers of all sorts, and just going, following the spirit.
The all-mighty YouTube algorithm showed me a couple of channels made by modern-day hobos, namely Hobo Shoestring and Stobe the Hobo. What’s a hobo, though? Turns out, a hobo, traditionally speaking, is a traveller who is willing to work; a tramp is a traveller who is not willing to work, and a bum is a person unwilling to work and unwilling to travel. Niether Shoestring nor Stobe seemed too concerned about work, but they seemed to finance their lifestyles with their YouTube channels, so I suppose that counts as work. But more than anything, hobo in their context seems to refer to illegally riding on fright trains, and I should note here: Both of these guys come off to me as the real deal. They would be hobo-ing even if YouTube didn’t exist. Their videos strike me as authentic.
It also strikes me that Hobo Shoestring and Stobe the Hobo deserve the old compare and contrast, because they come to the same place but via different routes, and for different reasons. These are two guys who checked out or opted out of regular society, and instead they operate in a gray space on its periphery. They are not chasing women and siring children, working jobs, paying taxes and mortgages. They are outliers. That’s obvious, of course, but I think it is still worth pointing out. These are the guys who just can’t tolerate or function within the systems, such as they are. These guys simply can’t do it.
The first thing to say is that neither of these guys lived to a ripe old age. Both of them are dead. Shoestring, whose real name was Wayne Mark Nichols, a native Texan relocated to Tennessee, drowned in a lake close to his apartment. He only had two fingers on one hand from a rail accident, which is about what you might expect, that if one hops trains too many times eventually all that steel is going to get you. Law of averages. Stobe, whose full name was James Stobie, died when an Amtrak train caught him on a bridge as he was walking across. The train caught his backpack straps and drug him to his death. In all liklihood, he was inebriated, which probably didn’t help. He was 33. (That’s the same age as Christ when he was crucified, I think.)
Shoestring pretty clearly doesn’t have much in the way of an education; he is about as country as it gets, while Stobe is pretty clearly highly educated, and I think I read somewhere that he had a degree in music. Stobe scored his videos with his own piano playing. Interestingly, both men have military experience. Shoestring was in the Army, and Stobe was in the Coast Guard. Both men have in-depth and detailed first-hand knowledge about freight trains and how to ride them, and they talk about it all the time. This is the place to wait for a “catch out”, this is a good place to “roll out”, which is something Shoestring talks about all the time. He will “roll out” almost anywhere, it seems, which means to unroll the sleeping bag and get some sleep, and it doesn’t seem to phase him, while Stobe seems to struggle with the sleeping situation quite a lot, often talking about how he needs beer in his system to fall asleep.
Beer is another difference between the two. Shoestring refers to drinking in his past, but he doesn’t drink at all in his YouTube videos, and he claims he quit drinking entirely. Stobe, by contrast, drinks in his videos almost continually. A lot of his videos show him scheming ways to purchase more beer, or in others he laments that he has run out of beer and didn’t buy enough. Both men are about going, going, going. Neither of them stays in any one place for very long. It is always on to the next town, and that is life. For Stobe, jump a train and get to a town. Buy beer. Drink. Get on the next train.
Stobe, though, just slays me, because he is a philosopher at his core, and I completely understand where he is coming from. I recognize a lot of myself in him. I don’t drink anymore; I gave it up six years ago, but in my 20s and 30s, I drank a lot of beer, and what that does for you is it sort of frees up the lower layers. You see, sober, the philosophical mind is like a governor, a weak governor, but a governor nonetheless, trying to referee the lower mammalian and reptilian layers, layers that just want what they want. They want comfort and security and certainty and a mate and social interaction and social status otherwise, and they tug at you to get these things. Get on the hedonic treadmill. Stobe talks about this, kind of. On one of his trips, he talks about how one of his goals is to remain completely unencumbered by thoughts about getting a job, or living the way he is living. He just wants to be. Beer kneecaps that thought process and allows the lower layers to expand. Worries evaporate and life is okay as it is. For Stobe, he needs beer to be able to do any of this. He needs beer to be able to ride as a stowaway on a train and believe that it is okay. Shoestring, by contrast, never seems troubled in such ways. He just is.
In many of his videos, Stobe brings up the “romance” of it all. He says things like, If you think this is romantic, you’re wrong. It’s really hard. It’s not fun. And then he does it anyway. He’ll be out on some tracks twenty miles outside of Dallas or some such place, lamenting that there aren’t any people out there to talk to, that he seems to be alone in his desire to live like this, and he very often laments that no women out there will put up with it. Yet, he does it anyway.
And I get it. He wants to ride a little closer to the groove, to forego the usual comforts and experience life more raw. There’s a little moment in one of his videos in which he talks about how he can’t keep the alcohol bender going forever, that eventually he has to stop and recover, and for anyone who drinks like this, you must know exactly what he is talking about. The perfect drug. The one drug that makes everything better, and which has no side effects. Alcohol ain’t it, but it will do for a time, and you know that going in. The romance isn’t romance at all, but that’s exactly what romance actually looks like in practice. That’s the big realization, and it hits Stobe in just about every single video he posts. I floors me. That thing you are looking for? Odds are, you will never find it out there.
I don’t need to hop trains, thanks to James Stobie. I get it.