Ridin the rails

[KaBar]

The Key is "Choice."

 

If you are living on the bum because you have no alternative, you have no money, you have no friends-family-future, then yeah, one's life as a "vagrant" would suck. But the truth is that living this way is a CHOICE, and if you don't like the result, you can alter your choice, and thereby alter your life.

 

The idea that "poor people" are "oppressed" by someone who has more power-money-education etc. is a fallacy. I have been poor, very poor. I chose to be different, and I am now firmly in the middle class. Anybody can do it if I can do it. I deny that I am anybody special, anybody more talented or more gifted, or luckier than Joe Average.

I have bored everybody on this website more than once with a long recitation of my efforts to go from welfare-poor welder to college-educated registered nurse, so I won't repeat it here, but take my word for it, 90% of the battle was deciding to change the way I lived and most of all, my attitude about the World.

 

Very few people are so unintelligent that they cannot make the same changes I made and radically alter their lives. Those that do not most often will not. If you don't like tramping, change your self. I know more than one mentally retarded person who owns his own business. One actually has a part-time employee. It's not about how smart one is, but how hard one wishes to work, and how much responsibility one is willing to assume.

 

Usually, it is a matter of whether or not one is willing to do what is necessary to become productive and economically viable. When I was tramping, I drank a lot and smoked dope pretty often. I didn't want a steady job or any responsibility. As long as I behaved like that, and refused to go to college, and refused to learn a trade or hold steady employment, my economic life was pretty bleak. Hanging out, being a hippie, and participating in the IWW are not things that are likely to make one an economically productive person. Those were the things I liked best. Not getting up and going to work every day in a "wage slave job" was keeping me from being able to make any economic progress. It wasn't thai I couldn't do it, it was that I was refusing to do it. And who's fault was that? MINE, that's who.

 

I look upon my tramping days with nostalgia because it was a choice, not a necessity. Probably some guy living in a cardboard box without any options on the same train with me hated it. But I loved the life.

[Guest mikro137]

Originally posted by steelcitytvc

The bad thing about being a hobo is that freights don't have any plumbing, toilets, or water. That can get nasty.

 

with all due respect to KaBar , i have to speak about this comment.

 

you are a fucking suburban nightmare. you will never need to know about this shit , so why bother talking. you will NEVER leave your neighborhood , let alone hop trains. so shut up.

 

KaBar , thank you for all of this info throughout my time reading this message board. it is handy , and interesting. you are an asset to the good people of this community

[KaBar]

Every kid dreams of adventure

 

Mikro137-- No criticism, brother, but take it easy. Every kid dreams of adventure, including me, when I was 13 or 14. It was so damned frustrating to want to be out there doing some cool shit like hunting, or camping in the mountains, or white-water rafting, but to be unable to do so because my parents were such successful, straight-arrow, early-1960's suburbanites. My day-to-day life was boring as shit. I lived in the working-class suburb of West University, in Houston. The most exciting thing I usually got to do was ride my bicycle overr to the old neighborhood, where I grew up, South Park. At least over there, my old buddies were still working at being full-time hoodlums.

 

I didn't get to actually start hopping trains until about 1970. I was about 20 or 21. I would have loved to have started when I was in my teens, but there was nobody to show me any of the stuff I needed to know. To be honest, at 16 or 17, I was too scared to try it, because I had a strong feeling that there were a lot of hidden dangers about trainhopping that I didn't know about. And I was right. There were.

 

My very first hop on a train, more like a joyride, really, was when I was ten or eleven. We got on a slow freight to Galveston, about sixty-five miles south of South Park. We went down and back in one night, on easy-to-catch, slow-moving trains. My parents thought I was spending the night at my friend Gary's house. Gary's Mom and Dad were alcoholics, passed out by eight. At nine, several of us were hopping a freight train. We got home about three or four o'clock in the morning.

 

We can live out our adventurous fantasies, if we plan them carefully and learn everything we need to know. My friend Dusty used to go camp out for a week at a time in an Army surplus pup tent (shelter half tent) in the same area where the jungle at T&NO Junction was. He talked to tramps all the time. Frankly, at age 11, I was afraid of them. Dusty's Dad got killed in Korea serving with the Marine Corps. His mom was a hard drinker who could not care less where Dusty spent the night. I admired Gary's and Dusty's courage, but ity was courage born of neglect and necessity. Camping out by the tracks was preferable to being at home with a drunken shrew.

I was grateful my Mom wasn't a solid drunk. But at the same time, I wanted to know the stuff Gary and Dusty were learning. I remember the first time I saw a tramp gunboat. I was amazed at the simple intelligence of the idea. A gallon can and a wire coathanger--"poof", instant camp cooking gear. It was just so--clearly intelligent. Poor, but smart--that's how I'd describe tramps.

[LeopoldBloom]

Originally posted by UnionPBS

...i still cant really find out how to reach a destination point, even one within a 100KM of where i am going...

 

Try Rand McNally's Handy Railroad Atlas of the United States at any major bookseller. It's a good first stop. And take the time to study that bastard like it's your best friend's girl... it's also useful for finding those out-of-town spots. It's pretty, well, handy.

 

KaBar said it best... the more you study, the better off you'll be. Damn, all that knowledge and a Wobbly to boot. Very nice.

[KaBar]

LeopoldBloom--- I'm no longer in the IWW, and I haven't considered myself an anarchist for years, but I sometimes mention it if there's a receptive audience. I got frustrated at our lack of progress in the IWW and dropped out. I was, at one time, a member of both the General Executive Board and a founding member of the Industrial Organizing Committee (IOC) of the IWW. I'm afraid I gave up on them before they gave up on me. But I still have a soft spot for both Wobblies (especially the old Wobs) and anarchists who aren't complete nihilists. I'm more of a Libertarian-oriented Republican now. I'm sure that would piss off my old Wobbly buddies. Oh, well. You can't please everybody. If we had seen more working class members with skills and fewer completely un-experienced college kids with a fetish about the 1930's, maybe I'd still be in. Bottom line, the IWW was too much like a 'historical society" to suit me. But it was still a lot of fun. Punching it out with the Trotskyists in Irish bars in Chicago, and provoking the Stalinists in San Francisco with shouted taunts of "TWO LEGS BAD! FOUR LEGS GOOD!" was definately a life experience worth the pain. Most Communists back then couldn't fight worth shit--it was sort of like thumping your little brother. Fighting the Klan was a different matter, though. Those SOB's do know how to fight, and they were certainly not afraid of us.

[LeopoldBloom]

Originally posted by KaBar

...If we had seen more working class members with skills and fewer completely un-experienced college kids with a fetish about the 1930's, maybe I'd still be in....

 

Kids go and read one Steinbeck or Dos Passos book and it's all over. Trust me, I speak from experience. But I still have that youthful idealism on my side... ha. I'm still young, so maybe I'll have second thoughts yet. And everyone know you don't talk ploitics (or religion) in a bar... espically those Irish ones.

 

Wait, wasn't this thread about hopping? Let get back to the subject now, kids, and save this political stuff for channel zero.