The Vanishing Knights of the Road

I had to look twice at the figure trudging along the railroad track because I'd not seen the likes of him in years, an honest-to-goodness hobo with a bindle sack, and apparently only a few minutes removed from a box car and heading toward the downtown Rescue Mission.

In another time, he wouldn't be going in this direction, but to a nearby grove of eucalyptus where hobos cooked and huddled around smoldering fires.

Catching up and falling in stride, neither of us spoke for a minute or so. Although not as colorful as hobos of old, he did possess a number of traditional trappings: rag-tag clothes, frying pan dangling from the bindle, red bandana around the neck and a water pipe opener.

“You a cop?” he asked with a surly glance and grimace that exposed a black hole left by two missing front teeth, and a scraggily lock of grimy hair curled from under a battered gray felt.

No, I told him, that I was out on my morning stroll and hadn't seen a hobo in years and did he mind if I tailed along.
He grunted something unintelligible, apparently it was in the positive.

But rather than continue downtown, he headed toward a smoldering campfire beneath a freeway ramp where a couple of disheveled men were eating something they'd prepared in a gallon can. One quickly held a hand against the left side of his face as we approached and scowled at me.

“What the hell you looking at?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said, careful not to look at him. But I did before he concealed a large ugly birthmark that covered most of the left side of his face.

Assuming this was a sort of hobo jungle, I looked around for a resident tramp but apparently there wasn't one as there would have been when the world and I were young.

Folks used to believe tramp was just another name for hobo but that was rarely the case. Hobos were generally on the move, although now and then taking temporary field work but always with itchy feet to be moving on down the line to the next place, while a tramp was pretty much a camp regular, living on leftover food in hobo pots and discards of nearby residents.

Back on the farm, we lived about a half mile from the track and now and then a hobo came to the kitchen door for a handout, offering to chop wood or hoe weeds in payment. Papa hired a few of them over the years to help with the haying but they never stayed long because mama was by no means a gourmet cook.

Nevertheless, mama was a God-fearing, hymn-singing, heaven-praising, heathen-hating Missouri Baptist with a passion for helping folks out, and always managed to fix something for a hungry hobo. One day in particular that I remember, she fixed one a liverwurst, peanut butter, mayonnaise and dill pickle sandwich and the hobo took one bite, yelled “rat poison,” spat it out and threw it toward our old dog, Spareribs, who wasn't having any of it either and ran to the barn and hid out most of the afternoon.

I told the story and one of the hobos – grizzled, unshaven and in dire need of a shower – grinned.

“That sandwich sure don't sound appetizin' to me either,” he said. “In the old days when we ran into houses where the missus was a poor cook, we made a 'skull and bones' pencil mark on a post warning the next 'bo not to stop there.”

I asked how it was riding the freights today and the birth-marked man, still holding hand over the left cheek, spat a wad of chewing tobacco on the fire and listened to it sizzle.

“They ain't many of us old-timers out on the road no more,” he said. “Not many open box cars doors for one thing, some downright nasty bulls (railroad police) for another, but worst of all, there are some mean 'xxxxxxx's' on run ridin' out there nowadays who'd cut your throat for a dime.”

I would guess he is right. And I saw it coming on my last ride back in 1988.

“The old days were best days,” added the hobo I'd walked with to the underpass, a melancholy tone in his voice: “In the olden days, we protected each other, and we didn't steal from one another either. We were truly 'Knights of the Road.'”

Then reaching into his bindle sack for a pencil, on a piece of brown wrapping paper drew some crude signs he said hobos left on buildings, fences and other places to advise the next passer by what to expect.

Comments: Woody Laughnan, vallefox@accessbee.com