HITCHHIKING & TRAINHOPPING–Part III

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THE CONFESSIONS OF FOFI LITTLEPANTS

PART III

by Fofi Littlepants

III. OTHER PARTICULARS

The following information is provided because, of the people that learned of our hitchhiking / trainhopping venture across the country, a number expressed a surprising amount of interest in the details, making particular inquiries about this mode of travel such as: how did we pay for such a trip, where did we sleep, what did we eat, whether we weren’t afraid of serial killers, tattoed truckers, the police, and the KKK?

Financing

Joey and I were able to finance this trip because we were doing remote work with non-profit organizations part-time, on a flexible basis that could accommodate our trainhopping and hitchhiking schedule (and being the responsible little people we are, we adjusted our travels to our work demands of course).

I don’t know how most hitchhikers and trainhoppers make a living. Traditional hobos by definition hopped trains to look for jobs from town to town. Of those that might be termed “tramps” (who travel for adventure), like many of the kids that we would see on the road, begging seemed to be very common: one trainhopper/hitchhiker I met on the street seemed to assume that it was part of the package ~ when I asked for advice on train routes, he happily gave me specific information on those, as well as unsolicited advice on clothing, equipment, and the most effective techniques for begging (his advice was to try to make people laugh). In addition to begging, some trainhopping kids seemed to stop and look for work for certain periods. One we met was working on a record deal and spoke about his dream of finally having something work out for him. (We didn’t meet any recreational travelers like the professional computer geeks, doctors and lawyers that Duffy Littlejohn describes (we were probably the closest to that than all the other people we met); presumably they would use their savings while on the road.)

Throughout our journey, Joey and I received multiple offers from people that wanted to give us money. We never asked for it, people would just come up to us and try to hand us some, ranging from one to twenty dollars. I guess they assumed that nobody with any financial resources would be traveling in this manner. Some people looked at us mournfully and said that they had daughters our age. One girl, who seemed to be a teenager, thought we were runaways and really wanted to give us ten dollars.

We had a general rule against taking money because we were in the habit of obsessing about social and ethical questions, and didn’t think that it would be appropriate. Wouldn’t it be disingenuous of us to take money, we thought, because people made the offer thinking we were really poor, without knowing that we had jobs? And would it take that money away from another person that really needed it? Later I heard of the term “faux-bo”, which means someone who pretends to be poor for fashion or other reasons. I certainly didn’t want to be that, and one ethical line I felt we should draw was to not exploit the kindness and sympathy of people under false pretenses.

We never accepted any offers of cash, except for $1 from a mom who said she was a recovering co-dependent who would not let us out of the car without giving us some money and saying an extremely long, drawn-out prayer for us. Though later, I wondered if we should have accepted a tiny bit from a few other people too, just because it would have made them happy to be able to help someone.

Gear

Duffy Littlejohn recommends the following gear for trainhopping: dark clothing to sneak around at night in the trainyards; food that doesn’t require cooking; lots of water; sleeping bag; cardboard for insulation; layers of clothes for cold and heat; gloves (for grabbing onto trains); bandana (for dust in tunnels); and for women, a milk carton to pee in (!). All gear together should not be more than 20 pounds, because they must be thrown on and off the train. We did our best to collect such an assortment of things, all in black.

We did have more cheerful, colorful clothes for hitchhiking though ~ we thought we might scare possible rides away if we looked like practitioners of the Dark Arts. We also had realized, after trudging away many a morning from the trainyard after a night of failed trainhopping attempts, that walking around during daytime with completely black clothing and gear is a blaring signal that you were seeking to do something illegal.

Unfortunately, while we did assemble the gear recommended by Duffy Littlejohn, we had much more: we were definitely not the romantic Depression era hobos, but internet-age railriders ~ we were loaded down with a wide variety of electronics. In addition to my Mac, I had a Blackberry with phone, email and web service, which could also be used as a modem for the laptop, plus a camera (though just a small point and shoot ~ I decided to ship away my digital SLR early because it was really way too much), an assortment of cords and cards, two computer batteries, three Blackberry batteries, plugs of all kinds, and headset to be able to make international calls on Skype. (I had also explored getting roll-up personal solar panels to juice up all this stuff, but couldn’t afford the more reliable looking ones.) We did hear that some trainhopping kids have GPS systems (!), which I was envious of ~ we just had old fashioned compasses attached to our bags, which is probably why we were lost much of the time.

Our gear was the primary reason that we ended up hitchhiking more than trainhopping. We just couldn’t get ourselves on to even the most slow-moving of trains ~ it had to be completely stopped for us to laboriously climb on safely. It was a pretty obvious lesson in life ~ carting around too much baggage really limits your freedom and options.

Accomodations

While Joey and I felt guilty about begging for money, we had no qualms about exploiting every free form of accomodations in the country, including squatting. Land, we figured, could never really belong to anyone, and private property was a false construct. (Further, even if land could be put in the care of a particular person/family/community, all title in the United States is suspect because it was all basically stolen from Native Americans; the only exception of course being ancestral lands in the possession of American Indian tribes.)

But we didn’t want to encroach on, offend, inconvenience or scare anyone unjustifiably, so we tried to avoid intruding into tribal lands or anyone’s homes without permission, and were careful not to litter or destroy anything.

The most socially acceptable form of accomodation we used were couches of friends. We both had friends sprinkled throughout the country, and we visited them, bummed around in their places, and amused (or bored) them with our stories as payment.

We also relied on couches of strangers. The network we relied on the most was CouchSurfing, an online community through which people offer (and utilize) free couches for travelers. CouchSurfers consider this to be a movement ~ says its website: “We strive to make a better world by opening our homes, our hearts, and our lives…CouchSurfing wants to change not only the way we travel, but how we relate to the world!” One musician that offered us a place in New York was a committed Buddhist, who considered offering his prime Manhattan floor space to others as part of his Bodhisattva service.

We also camped, in a tiny pup tent that Joey found at a thrift store. It was light blue, not waterproof, and would almost blow away in the wind, but it fit the two of us and our gear (barely). We did camp in some places that were permissible, such as national parks.  However, the principal type of camping we did was “urban camping”, otherwise called squatting. The first time we pitched the tent was under a bridge in the park of a small town in Montana. Other places where we engaged in such camping included in a wooded area on the side of a hill next to an urban housing project, by a stream in a public park in a small alcove off the pathway, and in the back of a rest stop on the middle of the freeway.

We also at times slept in a car. Though “sleeping in your car” is often used as a phrase to denote that you’ve hit rock bottom, after weeks of squatting in tents amidst strange creatures (we would hear them scratching about outside our tent), this seemed luxurious to us. Some of the places we did this included a parking lot overlooking a rocky bay in Maine, in some national parks where we were paranoid about bears, and in the shadows of a tree in front of a house in Salem, Massachussetts, where we scared ourselves by wondering if we would get possessed by evil spirits during the night.

We also at times slept in open air, under big starry skies. This, like camping, sounds beautiful and idyllic, but in fact, was usually pretty absurd. Most such nights we so spent came about because we were in some ditch all night trying to hop a train. Once, after a sleepless night of foiled trainhopping attempts, we startled some people who had come out on their morning run: they stared as they jogged past us lying in a ditch next to the train tracks (we had failed to account for the fact that the tracks were right next to a suburban housing development.) Another time, we spent the night in an open wooden cart parked in front of some houses; it inexplicably tipped over onto one edge suddenly at 3am with a loud BANG! and almost catapulted us out of it. And of course there was the less than glamorous two nights that we spent while waiting for 30 hours at a trainyard. The complete glamourlessness of this was compounded by the fact that we had arrived there only after tromping around a hill covered with chest-high grass in pitch blackness, in the process of which I had suddenly landed in a humongous hole face-first, and after digging myself out of that, had immediately fallen waist-deep into a stream. In a sad, soggy state, we lay amongst scurrying rats at night, whacking occasionally at the bushes to scare them off, and then when day arrived, fried in the blazing sun in our black trainhopping outfits; when night returned, we again lay whacking at the rats.

Another memorable open air moment was when we got dropped off at a gargantuan truck stop in the fringes of Dallas at midnight, and couldn’t find anywhere outside of the truck stop to camp where it didn’t seem likely that trigger-happy Texans would be firing shotguns into our tent. We therefore snuck back into the truck stop and ended up sleeping behind a dumpster. We didn’t even pitch our tents, as it would have been too conspicuous; we just stretched out on a big plastic tablecloth I had brought along for possible deluges. It was actually not that bad, though I was awakened for a moment in the night when a big truck came barreling into the parking lot right next to us; I watched as the driver got out hurriedly, threw himself on the concrete and did a bunch of push-ups, then ran back up into the truck and roared away.

But the coup de grâce for us was in trespassing on corporaty property to spend the night in a tipi on the grounds of a Wild West museum in Wyoming. We snuck in, avoiding being seen by people in neighboring houses by waiting till darkness, darting between bushes to get to the tipi (which was in Plains Indian style), and diving in through the flaps; we laid our sleeping bags along its edges away from the opening. The next night we had fantasies about sneaking into another display tipi that was perched at the main museum entrance, smack at the main thoroughfare, painted in bright red white and blue and lit up with spotlights. But careful investigation, we figured out that the tipi was lit up from the inside and therefore all within its depths would clearly be visible for the world to see. We reluctantly decided against it because we concluded that while this would be fabulous for putting on a shadow puppet show, it would be equally conducive to getting ourselves arrested.

Food

We were vegetarians and had some trepidation that we would starve to death in middle America, but succeeded in surviving with our veggie integrity more or less intact (though I periodically ate seafood.) There was surprisingly more meatless fastfood at truckstops than we expected ~ Subway Veggie Delight, Wendy’s baked potatoes, Burger King Garden Burgers, and the ubiquitous generic cheese pizza. But when we started smelling like that Subway sandwich perfume, we went on a boycott of the place; this made life on the freeway harder.

Good food, especially organic food, is non-existent at truck stops, and difficult to find even in many cities. In some cool places though, like Austin and Providence, there is lots of great, interesting veggie food, if one is willing to pay for it. But we didn’t want to spend a lot so we ate simply, popped our fish oil tablets and vitamins, and tried to cook when we could, either in friends’ kitchens, or on a Lilliputian camping stove we had brought along for the purpose. We also had a few nice truckers cook for us in the truck ~ there was a ton of Korean food from our Korean trucker friends, and another trucker baked us potatoes in his microwave.

Recycling

An additional green challenge we found on the road is that in many states, recycling is not commonly available. Thus we carted around empty bottles and used paper from Montana through Wyoming, South Dakota, and Minnesota to Wisconsin (this surely did not help our trainhopping attempts.) When we reached Madison and saw a recycling bin in the middle of the sidewalk, with three different slots for paper, plastic and glass, we were so overjoyed that we almost hugged it.

Bodily functions

Nomadic life has unparalleled joys, but we did realize that it lacks certain amenities. A fixed toilet is one of them. When you’re on the road, you pretty much take your toilet with you, or find it where you are.

In trainhopping, you could be on a train for hours or even days. In the train that we caught, it took about 12 hours to get from Washington State to Montana. For men this is an easier practical matter; for women, it’s more complicated. Duffy Littlejohn recommended women to take a milk carton, and open it up at the top. We figured out that this was really spoken like a man ~ we quickly figured out that a milk carton is too tall for women to squat over, so we ended up cutting ours in half to make it shorter, but in any case the opening is still way too small. We toyed with the idea of inventing a collapsible funnel of some kind for women trainhoppers, in fashionable black, of course.

I did manage to relieve myself on the train without falling off, but I didn’t survive all peeing episodes unscathed. One early morning, right around dawn, while squatting down to do my business in a peaceful alcove created by two giant pine trees behind a church, a sudden, strange noise started near me. Basically it was a long hissing sound, following by a series of clicks, like so:

Ssssssshhhhhhhh….chkkchkchk……chkchkchkchkchkchk…..SSSSSSHHHHHHHH!

I was frantically looking around, still in position, trying to peer through the branches to see what in the world was going on, when I realized that jets of water had started to shoot through the pines and were rotating toward me ~ the automatic sprinkler system on the surrounding lawn had gone off! Despite valiant attempts to hop away while my little pants were still shackling my ankles, I got my little butt sprinkled.

Security

People talked to us endlessly about how scared they were for us, but we didn’t really feel that we were doing anything that dangerous. In trainhopping, we had done tons of research and were really conservative about safety. And hitchhiking for us, except for a couple of hiccups, felt entirely safe. In our belief, hitchhiking as two women was actually less risky than any other form of hitchhiking, because more normal people pick you up. Thus we didn’t wait around very long, and the people that picked us up were generally not scary. My opinion is that hitchhiking can be more scary for men, because more people are afraid of them and consequently don’t stop, and the people that do stop tend to be more freaky.

I should note though, that I do think hitchhiking alone as a woman is significantly different than hitchhiking as a pair. I had hitchhiked in my twenties across South America (from Buenos Aires to Santiago) with a female friend, and then back the other way alone, and the experiences were radically different. With a friend it was uneventful and smooth, as it was with me and Joey, but when I was alone, I was subjected to a constant barrage of sexual invitations and at one point, begging a rodillas (on his knees); but in order not to completely malign all South American drivers, I should mention that one person took me a very long distance and didn’t hit on me once.

Joey and I agreed to refrain from trying to hitchhike when we were apart ~ our guess was that U.S. truckers would be similar or perhaps worse than the South American ones. For us hitchhiking together, it was all fine 95% of the time, though we did get a handful of bizarre come-ons, which for the most part arose when one of us fell asleep in the truck. (These are described in Part VIII.)

I’m not discounting that there were potential dangers on the road. We heard about a few serial killers that have worked the trucking routes (one was a prostitute killing truckers; others were truckers killing hitchhikers); we also heard a horror story from a woman that said she had gone hitchhiking with a friend in her youth ~ they split up on the way home, and tragically, her friend got murdered by a truck driver.

And I should note that if we had had different gender, racial, class, or immigration status, there might have been significantly higher danger of persecution and violence by others, whether crazies from the KKK, the Minutemen, or the police. This is discussed in Part VI. Yes, we were afraid of the KKK and such, especially in the South. The nature of the South is visibly different than the West; some people glared at us like they positively wanted to kill us. And we didn’t even go through the Deep South, we only went through the Upper South, which is not even as bad. (We did get picked up by someone that we think might have been a current or former member of the KKK, but it was in the Midwest ~ see Part VII.)

With regard to the police, we were a bit worried in the beginning that we would be harassed, arrested and/or beaten up, but as it turned out, cops actually tended to help us more than anything else (a rather embarassing thing to have to report for lefty activists such as ourselves). This will also be discussed more fully in Part VI.

There was just once when we felt that we may have had a brush with some potentially real danger. But it might just have been frivolous imagination. See Part IX.

Objectively, probably the most undisputedly dangerous thing we did was tromping around blindly in the grass in the Plains, which we only realized later abounded with rattlesnakes and spiders.

But as Emerson said, “As soon as there is life there is danger.” We took it all as part of the journey. In the end, belying popular belief, I didn’t think that our lives on the road had much more risk than would have been present in any average city.

–Fofi Littlepants

_________________________________________

Read the complete:

CONFESSIONS OF FOFI LITTLEPANTS

I  Trainhopping

II  Hitchhiking

III  Other Particulars

IV  The Journey

V  Society I ~ Native America

VI  Society II ~ Identity

VII  People

VIII  Penises

IX  Of Dreams And Spirits

X  Conclusion

“Object” by Jonathan Monroe

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Bust of Demosthenes by C.C. Felton (1807-1862)
Bust of Demosthenes by C.C. Felton (1807-1862)

OBJECT

by Jonathan Monroe

Some purpose mounted on the wall. A target date for propositions. Concrete instances in thrall. One magic carpet frazzled, frayed. Sample exhibitions on display. In which direction, nothing moved. The shape of the shadow the shadow made. What size manacles did he wear? The finders free when less is more. Minimum strategies. Maximal selves.


Jonathan Monroe is a Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. He is the author or editor of several scholarly books. “Object” is from his 2009 collection of prose poems and short fiction, Demosthenes’ Legacy. The poem is reprinted here by permission of the author.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: BARBARA GUEST

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BarbaraGuest

PARACHUTES, MY LOVE, COULD CARRY US HIGHER

by Barbara Guest

I just said I didn’t know
And now you are holding me
In your arms,
How kind.
Parachutes, my love, could carry us higher.
Yet around the net I am floating
Pink and pale blue fish are caught in it,
They are beautiful,
But they are not good for eating.
Parachutes, my love, could carry us higher
Than this mid-air in which we tremble,
Having exercised our arms in swimming,
Now the suspension, you say,
Is exquisite. I do not know.
There is coral below the surface,
There is sand, and berries
Like pomegranates grow.
This wide net, I am treading water
Near it, bubbles are rising and salt
Drying on my lashes, yet I am no nearer
Air than water. I am closer to you
Than land and I am in a stranger ocean
Than I wished.

From The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest, Edited by Hadley Haden Guest, © 2008 Wesleyan University Press


Barbara Guest (1920 – 2006) is one of the most impressive and inspirational poets of this century. By the time she passed away at age eighty-six she had been writing poetry for sixty years. She stands out among the group of American poets born in the 1920s, a generation various enough to include poets as dissimilar as Allen Ginsberg and James Merrill, Adrienne Rich and Robert Creeley, and was associated with the New York School, including poets John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara. Guest’s bibliography is extensive, including several books of poems, plays, and prose, and cannot be captured in this space alone. Her primary task in writing poetry was, in her words, “to invoke the unseen, to unmask it.”


Editor’s Note: Barbara Guest is, to me, one of the most influential and important poets of all time. Her place among 20th and 21st Century poets cannot be overstated. This Saturday Poetry Series would not be complete without a shining spotlight upon her and her work, and this particular poem is my personal favorite.



Want to read more by and about Barbara Guest?
Barbara Guest Author Home Page
Barbara Guest on Poets.org
Barbara Guest: Fair Realist by Peter Gizzi
Ceaselessly Opportuning: On Barbara Guest by Barry Schwabsky

RUSSELL-EINSTEIN MANIFESTO

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Bertrand_Russell

Bertrand Russell

RUSSELL-EINSTEIN MANIFESTO (1955)

by Divers Hands

IN the tragic situation which confronts humanity, we feel that scientists should assemble in conference to appraise the perils that have arisen as a result of the development of weapons of mass destruction, and to discuss a resolution in the spirit of the appended draft.

We are speaking on this occasion, not as members of this or that nation, continent, or creed, but as human beings, members of the species Man, whose continued existence is in doubt. The world is full of conflicts; and, overshadowing all minor conflicts, the titanic struggle between Communism and anti-Communism.

Almost everybody who is politically conscious has strong feelings about one or more of these issues; but we want you, if you can, to set aside such feelings and consider yourselves only as members of a biological species which has had a remarkable history, and whose disappearance none of us can desire.

We shall try to say no single word which should appeal to one group rather than to another. All, equally, are in peril, and, if the peril is understood, there is hope that they may collectively avert it.

We have to learn to think in a new way. We have to learn to ask ourselves, not what steps can be taken to give military victory to whatever group we prefer, for there no longer are such steps; the question we have to ask ourselves is: what steps can be taken to prevent a military contest of which the issue must be disastrous to all parties?

The general public, and even many men in positions of authority, have not realized what would be involved in a war with nuclear bombs. The general public still thinks in terms of the obliteration of cities. It is understood that the new bombs are more powerful than the old, and that, while one A-bomb could obliterate Hiroshima, one H-bomb could obliterate the largest cities, such as London, New York, and Moscow.

No doubt in an H-bomb war great cities would be obliterated. But this is one of the minor disasters that would have to be faced. If everybody in London, New York, and Moscow were exterminated, the world might, in the course of a few centuries, recover from the blow. But we now know, especially since the Bikini test, that nuclear bombs can gradually spread destruction over a very much wider area than had been supposed.

It is stated on very good authority that a bomb can now be manufactured which will be 2,500 times as powerful as that which destroyed Hiroshima. Such a bomb, if exploded near the ground or under water, sends radio-active particles into the upper air. They sink gradually and reach the surface of the earth in the form of a deadly dust or rain. It was this dust which infected the Japanese fishermen and their catch of fish. No one knows how widely such lethal radio-active particles might be diffused, but the best authorities are unanimous in saying that a war with H-bombs might possibly put an end to the human race. It is feared that if many H-bombs are used there will be universal death, sudden only for a minority, but for the majority a slow torture of disease and disintegration.

Many warnings have been uttered by eminent men of science and by authorities in military strategy. None of them will say that the worst results are certain. What they do say is that these results are possible, and no one can be sure that they will not be realized. We have not yet found that the views of experts on this question depend in any degree upon their politics or prejudices. They depend only, so far as our researches have revealed, upon the extent of the particular expert’s knowledge. We have found that the men who know most are the most gloomy.

Here, then, is the problem which we present to you, stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war? People will not face this alternative because it is so difficult to abolish war.

The abolition of war will demand distasteful limitations of national sovereignty. But what perhaps impedes understanding of the situation more than anything else is that the term “mankind” feels vague and abstract. People scarcely realize in imagination that the danger is to themselves and their children and their grandchildren, and not only to a dimly apprehended humanity. They can scarcely bring themselves to grasp that they, individually, and those whom they love are in imminent danger of perishing agonizingly. And so they hope that perhaps war may be allowed to continue provided modern weapons are prohibited.

This hope is illusory. Whatever agreements not to use H-bombs had been reached in time of peace, they would no longer be considered binding in time of war, and both sides would set to work to manufacture H-bombs as soon as war broke out, for, if one side manufactured the bombs and the other did not, the side that manufactured them would inevitably be victorious.

Although an agreement to renounce nuclear weapons as part of a general reduction of armaments would not afford an ultimate solution, it would serve certain important purposes. First, any agreement between East and West is to the good in so far as it tends to diminish tension. Second, the abolition of thermo-nuclear weapons, if each side believed that the other had carried it out sincerely, would lessen the fear of a sudden attack in the style of Pearl Harbour, which at present keeps both sides in a state of nervous apprehension. We should, therefore, welcome such an agreement though only as a first step.

Most of us are not neutral in feeling, but, as human beings, we have to remember that, if the issues between East and West are to be decided in any manner that can give any possible satisfaction to anybody, whether Communist or anti-Communist, whether Asian or European or American, whether White or Black, then these issues must not be decided by war. We should wish this to be understood, both in the East and in the West.

There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.


Resolution:

WE invite this Congress, and through it the scientists of the world and the general public, to subscribe to the following resolution:

“In view of the fact that in any future world war nuclear weapons will certainly be employed, and that such weapons threaten the continued existence of mankind, we urge the governments of the world to realize, and to acknowledge publicly, that their purpose cannot be furthered by a world war, and we urge them, consequently, to find peaceful means for the settlement of all matters of dispute between them.”

Max Born
Percy W. Bridgman
Albert Einstein
Leopold Infeld
Frederic Joliot-Curie
Herman J. Muller
Linus Pauling
Cecil F. Powell
Joseph Rotblat
Bertrand Russell
Hideki Yukawa

–Issued in London, England, July 9, 1955. Albert Einstein signed the draft declaration before his death on April 18, 1955.

HITCHHIKING & TRAINHOPPING–Part II

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THE CONFESSIONS OF FOFI LITTLEPANTS

PART II

by Fofi Littlepants


II. HITCHHIKING

Hitchhiking, like trainhopping, is an activity that was intertwined with romantic images of independence and adventure in the Beat era and the 60’s, but has since hit upon hard times. It’s unclear which one now has a more sordid image in the mainstream imagination ~ while trainhoppers could be deadbeats and drunks, hitchhikers after all could be serial killers. And  hitchhiking is illegal around prison areas because it might facilitate the getaway of escapees; in some states it is illegal everywhere, prison area or otherwise.

Still, there were quite a number of people that picked us up that seemed thrilled to have us. Some wanted to help us out, some wanted to talk, and some were pleased to reminisce about their own meanderings as hitchhikers, back in their hippie days.

***

While we were trainhopping washouts, we became masters at hitchhiking. We hitchhiked from Northern California up through Oregon and Washington in a single ride ~ spanning 3 days in the same truck, and involving a lot of kim chee, rice, and spicy instant ramen (our friendly truck driver was a Korean social worker, accompanied by a trainee friend that had just arrived from Seoul.) From Montana to South Dakota then to the Midwest and then south to Texas, and then all the way to the East Coast (D.C./Baltimore), all of our transport was through hitchhiking, except for a couple of detours that required cars for a few days (to be explained.)

But we discovered that it doesn’t require Sissy Hankshaw thumbs or an inordinate amount of intelligence to become blackbelts in hitchhiking ~ we clearly had neither. The only special attribute we had was simply that we were women. For two women hitchhiking together, less people are afraid to pick you up. Thus we would get rides with all kinds of people, including couples with infants, who would say that they had never picked anyone else up before but felt they should help us out. Thus in general we would normally get a ride within maybe 20 minutes, provided we were standing in the right place. The only places that we had some difficulty were some small towns in South Dakota, and cities in the East Coast; we could only guess that it was because of the greater level of conservatism and paranoia engrained in those cultures.

***

So how does one go about hitchhiking? Again, I’m not recommending or not recommending it to anyone, but for ourselves, what we figured out to be the best rules of thumb for thumbing around the country were the following:

(1) The first rule of course, when hitchhiking in the United States, or anywhere in the Galaxy [see the Hitchhiker’s Guide to], is DON’T PANIC;

(2) Make a sign indicating where you’d like to go, in large friendly letters;

(3) Stand on the right road going in the right direction, in a visible spot which also allows space for a car or truck to pull over;

(4) Try to look as (a) non-threatening, (b) friendly, (c) cute, (d) interesting, or (e) pathetic as possible, depending on what you think will work with the target population; and

(5) Take the sign and your thumb and stick it out for all passerbys to see.

Usually a driver that is interested will need a few seconds to look you over, think, and stop. Sometimes they pass you, reconsider, and then come around the block. The usual procedure is that he or she will stop and then talk to you a bit, usually asking you where you’re going, but in truth trying to ascertain if you are going to murder them if they let you into their car, and weighing the potential risk against any possible benefits or good samaritan urges.

Like trainhopping, hitchhiking has online resources, for instance, Hitchwiki.org, a hitchhiker-edited website, and www.digihitch.com.

***

It is quite interesting to observe the reactions of people when one hangs on the side of the road with backpacks, thumbs, and a sign composed of friendly letters hand-drawn in black magic marker on a piece of office paper taped to a beat-up manila folder. Some people demonstrated a consummate amount of skill in avoiding eye contact, like New Yorkers on the Subway; others scowled at us tremendously like ultra-constipated American Gothics; and one man, who had a hairdo that looked like it involved a toupé and who reminded me of the character in Milk that fires the fatal shots against Harvey, came up to us and said, positively angry, “Do you know how dangerous this is?!” and then walked away (without offering us a ride or anything).

Others, however, laughed and looked amused, with one car in the middle of South Dakota U-turning hurriedly to release two tourists from Virginia who eagerly asked to take a photo of us. And some, of course, actually stopped and gave us rides.

Though we rode most frequently with long distance truck drivers, we also got rides with a plethora of people ~ individuals, couples, families, teenagers. They included artists, musicians, farmers, a preacher, rodeo riders, a nurse, a doctor, a prison guard (female), co-dependents, ex-hippies, ex-hitchhikers, ex-convicts, ex-drug addicts, ex-drug dealers, cancer survivors, a suicide attempt survivor, a white supremacist, immigrants, refugees, migrant workers, truckers, bikers, veterans (Vietnam and Iraq), fast food managers, a fashion designer, a firefighter, a cage fighter, a gang member, a soccer coach (and former player on a national team), a male stripper (and aspiring porn star), and a swinger.

We discovered that the psychologies of people that tend to stop for hitchhikers might be categorized in the following way:

  • People that are going long distances and don’t want to fall asleep;
  • People that want to talk to you, or, simply want to hear themselves talk;
  • People that feel sorry for you, and/or, want to help someone out: these include co-dependents (who seek to have others depend on them in order to increase self-esteem), as well as paranoiacs (who are so worried about the badness of the world, that they feel like they have to rescue you before someone else kills you);
  • People interested in fringe people, who are often fringe people themselves; and
  • Would-be serial killers or the like.


***

We discovered hitchhiking in cargo trucks to be the fastest and cheapest way to travel long distances. Cargo truck drivers can drive 10 or more hours in one day; once we covered 4 states in a single ride. They were perfect modes of transport for cross-country travel because one could find a truck going almost anywhere ~ every town in the U.S. seems to be addicted to imports from other parts of the country or world. One trucker driver told us that the gas price crisis that hit in 2008 was brought under control because truck drivers went on strike ~ they refused to work because they could not make a living when a gallon cost $4; the whole country was paralyzed when the trucks were not moving, and gas companies brought the prices back down to around $2.

In order to get a ride on a cargo truck, the best thing to do is to find the nearest truck stop, make a sign, and stand somewhere that is visible to truckers going in the right direction. There is a vast network of truck stops servicing the world of truckers. Some are like small cities – they have restaurants, laundry, showers some LED shower heads if you are lucky, convenience shops, gift stores, etc. Flying J and Pilot are examples of chains that operate truck stops all over the country; many truckers have memberships to them, and one can get a little book telling you exactly where to find the next one along any freeway in the United States. But when trying to get a ride at a truck stop, one should be somewhere that is not obvious to the store workers or management, because they might call the cops. They might just not like vagranty-looking people, or might be paranoid you’re a hooker. Apparently there is a sex industry that accompanies the trucking industry, and prostitutes tend to work by trolling truck stops and climbing into trucks for sex. Someone told us that truckers call prostitutes “Lot Lizards”, which we thought was kind of mean.

***

Truck stops are a different universe, where physical reality and rules of normalcy are distorted ~ everything about the trucks, the truckers, and trucking seem to be abnormally large and/or a bit strange (no offense to truckers).

On a ride through Iowa, we happened upon the “World’s Largest Truck Stop” somewhere along the I-80. A garantuan trucker’s Disneyland ~ with attractions including a 300-seat restaurant with a 50-ft. salad bar, one-of-a-kind Truckers’ Warehouse Store, 24 private showers, Dolby Surround Sound movie theater, Driver’s Den, Game Room, Embroidery Center, Barber, Dentist, TA Service Center, Truckomat, CAT Scale (to check weight of the loads), Fuel Center, and Food Court ~ it had its own logo that was emblazened everywhere, including on towering signs around the property; we took a picture under one of them. You could also get souvenirs like postcards, T-shirts, and other paraphenalia with the logo (Joey was so swept away that she sent a bunch of these postcards out to her friends.)

Another time we got dropped off at a truck stop late at night, in which innumerable, mammoth 18-wheelers pulled themselves slowly around in the foggy darkness. Each had heads of fantastic colors, shapes, pipes and antennas, making them uniquely resemble some kind of mythical beast; with the thrumming of idling engines in the air, I felt like a marmot in a lost land of dinosaurs and dragons.

***

During the course of our journey we spent a lot of time with truckers, and I have to say that I developed a general liking to them. At least the ones that picked us up were for the most part very nice people. We discovered that truckers as a whole are very independent folk that like to travel; some of them encouraged me to get a CDL and join their ranks, because they thought I was of similar temperament. While some Borg-like corporations owed fleets of hundreds of trucks, it is still an industry where an individual could invest and build a successful small business ~ we met a lot of the truckers that owned their own vehicles, or worked in a very small business. They were the ones that had the freedom to pick us up ~ the corporate employees were prohibited. Many truckers were also bikers ~ they had motorcycles (usually 2 or more each), and biked around on long trips on their free time.

Some did fit the stereotype of tattoed, foul-mouthed, racist, sexist, homophobic, gun-toting, conservatives. But for the most part, the ones that picked us up were genuinely generous and gentle, opening up to us at a human level, and being willing to listen and discuss our pink and green views on issues like race, gender, and sexual equality, while patiently accomodating our vegetarianism and obsession with recycling.

***

How does hitchhiking compare to trainhopping? There are at least three major dimensions where they diverge greatly: speed and convenience, comfort, and sociability.

Relatively speaking, hitchhhiking is a much more efficient endeavor than trainhopping. Unlike trainhopping, you can plan your itinerary by only accepting rides that fit in with it, and while clearly never completely controllable, you can have more of a general sense of when and where you are going to arrive.

Hitchhiking is also worlds more comfortable and safe. With trainhopping, you’re catching a ride either inside a cargo car or outside of one; neither place is made for people, and so consequently don’t have seats, temperature control and the like. That’s not true with hitchhiking (unless you take a ride in the back of a pickup truck.) With hitching, you can usually sit in a cushy seat, with aircon or heating as the case may be, as well as ask to stop to go to the bathroom, purchase food and water, and even listen to music.

18-wheeler trucks also have additional amenities than a regular car ~ the cabins are pretty spacious and can be luxurious (well, at least compared to a freight train) on the inside. It is usually the size and shape of a box about 10 feet on each side. The ones we saw usually had a drivers’ seat with bouncy suspension mechanism, with a similar passenger seat; a dashboard that looked like an old war plane or a space ship; for older trucks, a supersized stickshift that sprouts from the floor, between the two seats; beds in the back (usually a full size bed with a smaller bunk bed on top); and in addition, through shelves and cabinets built around walls and extending to the ceilings, enough room to stash a wide assortment of food, beverages, luggage, and electronics. Most truckers have small refrigerators and microwaves, and some have a full entertainment system including stereo, television and DVD players.

Further, hitchhiking is a different world than trainhopping because it is a much more social activity ~ you have to have people stop for you, and make them feel comfortable before and during the ride. Thus hitchhiking requires some amount of social finesse, because it depends on another person. Trainhopping, on the other hand, is much more independent, and can be exercised as a lone activity in which you only engage with the train. In hitchhiking, you are constantly engaged with the driver; Kerouac called this social requirement “one of the biggest troubles hitchhiking.”

I didn’t mind talking to people but I realized it was quite challenging to try to figure out what to talk about with someone you don’t know for 1 to 50+ hours. It occurred to me that those “geisha manners” that I had scoffed at when my mother had attempted to instill them in me in her efforts to marry me off, might actually be useful when applied toward noble purposes (such as hitchhiking). Geishas, those mysterious Japanese entertainers somewhere between hostesses and prostitutes, were highly trained to be able to entertain and converse with anyone about anything: traditionally they received instruction in music and dance, as well as studied a wide array of topics including literature, politics, economics and currrent events ~ some knowledge was required to be able to discuss, or even listen and sympathize, with the potential client about his cares (he might after all be a high level power player.)

We discovered that being able to converse with people very different from you is indeed a useful skill in life, especially in hitchhiking. Silence freaks many people out, particularly if it comes from a hitchhiker ~ they start wondering if you’re going to serial kill them. A flowing conversation makes the driver more relaxed and comfortable, and keeps him or her awake. We learned also that the happy driver was more willing to try to help us out, and to not drop us off somewhere weird; some people took us much farther than they were initially planning to because we were good listeners and conversationalists.

For 95% of the people we encountered, we genuinely liked talking to them, so we didn’t have to fake anything ~ we bestowed our geisha gifts liberally as grateful recompense for their niceness. The visible gratification this seemed to provide made us aware of the extent to which many people don’t seem to have anyone that really talks or listens to them.

***

Whether greased by geisha manner, anonymity, or something else, a sort of confessional relationship can arise in the course of hitchhiking. The hitchhiker and the hitchhikee don’t know each other; they will likely never see each other again. They share a few moments in which their worlds intersect, opening up a hallowed dimension in time and space where they can choose to distill and reveal their core essence ~ the passion and pathos, the pride and shame ~ of their brief, mortal life.

One man that picked us in South Dakota chatted with us, and in a short span of time, maybe 15 minutes, we grew to know something about each other. He shared with us that his name was Fred, he grew up in Apache land in Arizona, had become a Marine, and later was an alcoholic for many years, but now was recovering. When asked how it was to be a Marine, he looked at me, but without rancor, said, “Well, I killed a lot of women and children.” I was taken aback, but kept listening. It had been in Vietnam; that’s why he had started drinking. I asked him if he was better now. Yes, he said, he had received a lot of help. At the end of the ride, he told us to be careful and wished us well. He had an extraordinarily tattered cowboy hat that seemed prone to succumbing at any minute to entropy and scattering in pieces off his head, and poignantly hard working hands.

Another man that picked up in Wyoming was clearly curious as to why we were standing in the middle of road. When we told him that we had hitchhiked there from California, he exclaimed, “You girls got balls!!” He seemed invigorated by the idea.

He was probably in his thirties, a quiet man, who we learned lived on a ranch down the road. He had ridden for rodeos in the past. He had recently gone through a divorce; he lived with only his dogs and the cattle, taking care of their every need. He was obviously happy to talk to us, and the contact seemed to be generating a percolating enthusiasm that wanted to brim out of him, but he was clearly out of practice with that language thing and unable to express all he wanted.  Yet although he didn’t have the words for it, I felt like he had also given us a confessional, one speaking of loneliness, memory, and longing, but also of hope, energy and renewal.

–Fofi Littlepants

_________________________________________

Read the complete:

CONFESSIONS OF FOFI LITTLEPANTS

I  Trainhopping

II  Hitchhiking

III  Other Particulars

IV  The Journey

V  Society I ~ Native America

VI  Society II ~ Identity

VII  People

VIII  Penises

IX  Of Dreams And Spirits

X  Conclusion

JÜRGEN BECKER

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brandenburg


Three Poems by Jürgen Becker

translated by Okla Elliott

Jürgen Becker was born in Köln, Germany, in 1932. He is the author of over thirty books—novels, story collections, poetry collections, and plays—all published by Germany’s premier publisher, Suhrkamp. He has won numerous prizes in Germany, including the Heinrich Böll Prize, the Uwe Johnson Prize, and the Hermann Lenz Prize, among others. Becker’s work often deals with his childhood experience of WWII and the political consequences of the postwar division of Germany.

I first discovered his work when I was a student for a year in Germany and only later decided to contact him about translating his work. I can say that spending as much time as I have with his poetry has been hugely rewarding, and there are days when I enjoy being the conduit for his work into English as much as I enjoy doing my own writing. The following three translations have all appeared in print journals (A Public Space, Absinthe, and Indiana Review, respectively). I hope they give some idea of how wide-ranging and engaging Becker’s work is.

***

In the Wind

Blackbirds, then other voices. It doesn’t stop
when it snows, when with the snow
a newness comes that is
entirely essential this morning. Or how
do you see it? I see the pear tree and how it
(the pear tree) reacts to the wind (to the
wind). This morning, yet again,
the decision fell. War
between magpies and crows, only this war,
no trappings, only this clear understanding.
Yet another voice, the next commentator; it’s all about
(yet again) the whole. Are you standing
in the garden? The you know, tsk tsk, the blackbird
warned above all else, you know, I’ll say it yet
again, in war, in the new snow, in the wind.

***

Belgian Coast

Toccata and tango; the afternoon
not bright. One hotel
weathered after another;
postcards of emigrants.
Doors, doors
are blown away by the sand,
disappear behind the sand. The calm
of anglers. Invisible England; reports
from the British transmitter, wartime.
Children run
with balls, wheels, propellers;
and paratroopers all about.

***

Oderbruch

The camera’s broken? It’s cold out,
and there are crows bigger than crows
usually are, scattering smoothly over there
across the fields.
Nothing over there. Twilight. Gold gray twilight
spreads out. A tree in Poland
is over there the lost barren tree.
Lighted and empty, the bus drives over the levee.
On the riverbank, two men with their backs
to the dam, which neither begins nor ends.
You don’t hear anything. You hear the slippage
of the floe, the circling floe. You hear
for a long time yet, later, in the dark, the drifting ice.
The camera’s broken, else why are the pictures
blurry now? Two men stood on the riverbank.

They came back. They could tell the story.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: BETH MATTSON

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BethMattson

ROME

by Beth Mattson

The US is totally just like ancient Rome.
The perfect analogy.
The participatory democracy,
The classic over-extension,
The silly dress code.
And do you remember when Rome fell,
To the walking-dead,
Flesh-eating,
Tooth-gnashing zombies?
We could be next.

From My Own Devices – A Word Comic. © 2006 licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.


Beth Mattson lives in San Francisco, where she writes zombie fiction and poetry about your mom. Originally from Wisconsin, she earned her MFA at California College of the Arts.


Editor’s Note: Beth Mattson is at the forefront of the New Humorist movement in modern poetry. Through the use of short, simple language, with an expert application of levity, she is able to communicate her message to a widespread audience. But there is nothing elementary about Beth’s tackling of topical issues such as war, politics, sex, sexuality, and self-esteem. Through the use of sarcasm and absurdity, she is not making light of weighty issues, but rather giving her audience the gift of humor in an age when it is much needed. I hope to see more poets fighting for the future of the art by creating work that the masses can and will embrace and appreciate.



Want to read more by and about Beth Mattson?
My Own Devices – A Word Comic.
California College of the Arts 2009 MFA in Writing

EVE TOLIMAN

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url

MEMORIAL

by Eve Toliman

I grieved so much.  I saw you pale and fearing.
That was in dream.  And your soul rang.
 
All softly my soul sounded with it,
and both souls sang themselves: I suffered.

Then peace came deep in me.  I lay
in the silver heaven between dream and day.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke (translation by Herter Norton)

Ira was an old family friend, one of the last people who had known my father. At the end of his memorial service, Ira’s colleague stood at the podium and said “We’re alive as long as those who remember us live.” I shuddered. I might end up alone with my father after all. Sorry, Papa. Who would want to be kept alive as a burden? I wish it were different but no matter how I come at it, it always ends up heavy.

Ira was a prominent psychologist who, ironically, got to watch one of his best friends, my father, incarcerated in various insane asylums until the cycle finally ended in 1969. Two days before Neil Armstrong took a small step for man and a giant leap for mankind, my father killed himself. After her father’s service, Ira’s daughter Joanne and I stole away for a precious hour alone. We had a drink at Jake’s Place and hurriedly caught up. How can you cram a year or more into a stolen hour? It’s what we’ve been doing for the past couple of decades, feeding our friendship on snatches of conversation, our words like contraband passed furtively and desperately between us.

In the streets nearby, thousands of demonstrators were protesting a US invasion in Iran while Joanne told me about her new book coming out in a couple of months on the cost of the war in Iraq. We sat at a sticky table over pastrami-on-rye and Irish coffee. We reminisced about her father and our childhoods. We swapped stories about our siblings, and fretted and glowed about our children.

Then she told me what Ira had told her to explain the enigma of my father, that brilliant flash of a man who seared into everything and everyone around him until he spontaneously combusted at age 42. Ira told Joanne that as a teenager my father was imprisoned as a spy in his Nazi-occupied home country of Norway. (This much I knew.) The Nazis said he worked in the Norwegian underground. (Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. Most Norwegians resisted in some way or another; not all of them were in the underground. My mother told me the Nazis were never able to prove he was a spy and, as far as I knew, my father never claimed it.) He suffered from PTSD because while imprisoned he was gang-raped by a group of Nazis. (What?! No, no, no, no…) How many people have played Stingo to my parents’ version of Sophie and Nathan?  How many were captivated by the spells my father wove and the changing stories my mother told? How many people were bewitched by the bright glamour they spun around themselves to ward off a final meaninglessness that threatened to obliterate them at any moment?

There is a certain nobility in being heinously abused by the unquestionably bad while doing unquestionable good. The reality I know is usually a lot murkier. Both my parents were traumatized by World War II, my mother as a child in Nazi Germany and my father as a teenager in occupied Norway. But I fear my father’s real nightmare grew from seeds planted long before the war, much closer to his heart, by hands that cared for him, too. Perhaps he told Ira, his trusted friend, a bit of the spirit of the truth without yet being able to broach the actual details of the truth.

Ten years ago I met his younger cousin, Ingvild, when I went back to Norway to bury my father’s middle sister. Ingvild looked like a tiny, slightly shriveled version of my father. His dashing features looked a bit hawkish and severe on the small woman’s face. Together we revisited that year when I was four, when my family lived outside of Oslo in a small cabin among the trolls that populate the Scandinavian woods. The outhouse froze solid in the winter. The flowers rioted in the spring. Ingvild was a teenager then. She told me that when she visited my parents during that year, she cowered in the corner like a mouse. She watched them with their friends, eating, drinking, arguing and laughing with a gusto that fascinated and terrified her. She said she never met anyone like them, before or since.

Was he really gang-raped? My parents told so many stories, embellishing, omitting, and adjusting facts to construct a picture of themselves and their lives they could tolerate as they searched for a truth resilient enough to withstand the horrors of our institutions and ideas; for a truth that would justify their belief in a humanity that had betrayed them.

When I was pregnant with my first-born child, both my parents already dead for many years, my father’s eldest sister suggested that I name my daughter after his twin. (What?!) Oh yes, he had a twin. Evline died before their first birthday. (Even our names entwine. I’m tied like a dog on a chain, my neck strong and raw from the endless tug of unknown ghosts.)  He never told us he had a twin. My mother didn’t know either. She would have told us. Could she also not have known the truth of what happened to him in that jail? Was he ashamed to admit to the woman who bore his children that his budding virility had been appropriated for — what?  That’s just it: for nothing. Just because it’s what power does, dominates and degrades as an end in itself — meaningless harm, pointless pain.

I got home from Ira’s memorial service just in time to whisk my son to his basketball game. I sat in the gym, still in funeral attire like some kind of vampire. I watched two full courts of 12 and 13 year old boys competing hard. Appropriately dressed family members cheered them on. Could it really have happened? The boys were running, blocking and shooting while these worm-thoughts crumbled my brain. Two realities superimposed. The gymnasium filled with gaunt prisoners wearing dirty, drab clothes en route from one foul place to another. I focused on now-time and clearly saw the boys playing on shiny wood floors in clean clothes. I heard their shoes squeak as they ran back and forth. I focused on ghost-time and the shouts and lights became cold and harsh. I heard orders shrieked from hard hearts efficiently sealed against the pain they inflicted on gray brothers and sisters with bright eyes.

The darkness in our hearts uses the exact same things as the light: our gathering places and our camaraderie commandeered for harm instead of joy, to humiliate and destroy instead of uplift and create; our devotion and our loyalty twisted to serve fear. We get to decide which way it falls, each of us. These ghosts live among us, prodding us to remember, urging us to celebrate our communion without ever neglecting that still, small voice within ourselves. It’s the voice of our own conscience, the only voice that humanity ever has or ever will have. It’s the voice that whispers to each of us, intimately, and when we consent, it’s the voice that speaks through each of us telling the same story over and over, but completely fresh and new each time.

My parents rammed into life hard. They thrashed and careened, dragging us behind them like a game of crack-the-whip. They paid and we paid and our children pay for this expensive tactic. But they survived, for a while, and we learned their ways. They neither fully embraced nor fully abandoned things as they appear to be. They poked and prodded everything, questioning and considering and constructing their own understanding as they went. They used situations and events as building blocks in their Watts Tower monuments to life. While the reign of hell drove beauty underground and bled senselessness over everything, they appropriated what was available — bits of anything — to create rather than destroy. They never succumbed to power. They struggled to hear the true voice within themselves and to express something real. They were not well adjusted. As my German uncle said to his own teenage daughter when she accused him of being abnormal, “If I were normal, I’d be a Nazi.”

I will never know what really happened. The ghosts of my parents and countless others assemble in me and tell me things: the spirit of the truth. I get to fill in the details from bits and pieces of my own life, then and now. I get to tell my own stories, embellishing, omitting, and adjusting facts to fashion, and re-fashion, my own ladder to what’s real. I get to build my own haphazard monuments to life, in homage to my reckless parents, beauty’s fervid crusaders.

Ira’s strange story from the beyond the grave shook me to my core. Whatever happened, my father suffered and today I suffered with him. As I stood in the ruins of what I thought I knew, I felt an endless quiet seep into me.

Today I was alone with my father and I was not afraid.

–Eve Toliman

Further Reading:

GUEST EDITORIAL — JEFF ROCK

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nader-big

Kranky Cartoon by Joseph Rank.

“SPOILER THEORY” SPOILS DEMOCRACY

by Jeff Rock

Progressives are told every election they must vote for the Democrat, regardless of what policies that Democrat supports. We are lectured, we are cajoled and we are scolded if we entertain the idea of voting for a third party candidate. Ralph Nadar is dubbed the ‘great spoiler’ because, so the logic goes, he single-handedly caused Gore and then Kerry to lose the Presidential elections of 2000 and 2004. The Green Party that has consistently promoted sustainable technologies and the preservation of our environment, two cornerstones of progressive thinking, is also considered a spoiler.

However, there is another truism that trumps the fallacious spoiler theory. It goes, “the definition of insanity is repeating the same action and expecting a different result.” If progressives want fundamental change, they must consider making fundamental changes themselves. And the ‘spoiler theory’ is the first myth that must be changed.

There are many solid progressive Democratic Congresspersons, but a small group popularly called the “Blue Dogs,” within the ranks of Democrats, renders their efforts wholly ineffective. Until recent years these traitors to the progressive agenda have flown under the radar, almost unnoticed. It was not until they repeatedly voted with Republicans on key issues throughout Bush’s years in office that we began to see how Blue Dogs have compromised progressive ideas. Corporate lobbyists cleverly manipulated the Democratic Party to create this situation. They knew it would be difficult, if not impossible, to convince large numbers of progressive Democrat Congresspersons to vote against Americans’ interests. They also realized it would be very expensive and unnecessary. Only a few million in well-placed campaign contributions were required to reap billions in corporate rewards. Only a small number of key Democrats were needed to sway the balance of power. On popular emotional issues, such as gay liberties and a mother’s right to choose, Blue Dogs carefully contrive their speeches and votes to appear to be liberal. But when it comes to corporate friendly legislation, the oligarchs can count on their Blue lap dogs to vote for corporate welfare and removal of all forms of corporate regulation.

Examples of this phenomenon abound. Clinton signed NAFTA into law. The repeal of the Glass-Steagall act also occurred under his watch. Democrats voted for the war in Iraq, the Patriot Act and Bush appointees. Diane Feinstein even “sponsored” Condoleeza Rice for her appointment to Secretary of State. In 2006 the Democrats took control of Congress and failed to enact any meaningful progressive legislation. They knew it could damage their ability to raise money from the corporate lobbyists if they voted for any real progressive change. No longer able to use the excuse of being the minority party in Congress they invented new reasons to explain their spineless appearance. Suddenly bipartisanship became the Democratic talking point du jour.

Democratic Blue Dogs are worse than Republicans. At least most Republicans openly promote their cherished neo-conservative policies. But Blue Dogs promise change, gain their seat in Congress and proceed to concoct every possible reason for blocking such change. True wolves in sheep’s clothing, Blue Dogs are the bane of the Democratic Party and have guaranteed their corporate sponsors that no progressive agenda will ever get past their vote.

In spite of this circumstance progressives continue to vote for Blue Dogs and so-called ‘moderate’ Democrats. Progressive Democrats take little effective action to isolate the traitors and remove them from office. Many Blue Dogs are deeply entrenched in Congress, serving multiple consecutive terms largely because of their ability to wage effective campaigns funded by large corporate donations. Max Baucus is only the latest Blue Dog to be exposed.

Why do progressives repeat this failed approach? Why do they place in office shills of corporate oligarchs whose only concern is accumulation of personal and corporate wealth and who have no care whatsoever for our nation, our people, and our Constitution? The answer is simple. Fear. Fear causes progressives to repeat the same actions each election cycle while hoping for a different result. It is a recipe for utter failure and decades of neo-conservative legislation are the evidence. What more do progressives need after witnessing Obama renege on his promise of change? The change we were promised is no more than the “new improved” detergent changed from the old and tired detergent. The direction of our nation has not changed one iota. Wars rage and expand in the Middle East. We support an extreme right wing element in Israeli politics. The DoJ is full of Bush appointees. Illegal eavesdropping persists without abatement. Bush’s old ally, Gates, runs the Defense Department. Education, healthcare, civil liberties are no better off today than under the Bush Cheney regime. The environment continues to be under attack and no significant effort has been made towards promoting alternative sustainable technologies.

So who are we kidding? The “spoiler theory” has only succeeded in perpetuating politics as usual. There is no new direction our nation has taken. There is no change. The neo-conservative mantel has been changed for the neo-liberal version. The ‘new improved’ detergent come in a blue box instead of a red one.

Let’s examine what really could happen if we vote for true progressives and reject the politics of the spoiler theory. Would we be any worse off? Not likely. Instead of second-degree burns over 95% of our body we would have third-degree burns over 70% of our body. Instead of destroying the environment in 25 years, we would destroy it in 20 years. The end result is the same. The direction of the Democratic Party is no different than the Republican Party, it is only a matter of degree. Can we honestly say that voting for a third party progressive candidate would really spoil anything?

What we need is real change. It is well within our power to achieve this goal. We who have been powerless for so long find it hard to believe that we can create real and fundamental change. But we can foster massive change in one short election cycle. We can change the face of US politics forever and change the direction of our nation, if only we can overcome the fear of standing up for our beliefs.

Let’s imagine what would happen if we did. If large numbers of progressives voted for the candidates who represented their policies and agenda many Democrats might lose their seat in Congress. It could mean that by 2012 the Republicans control both branches of elected government again. However, it would send a message that no Democrat candidate could ever ignore again. Democrats would be shattered and their party in ruins. Heads would fly, careers would end and new ones begin. By the mid-term elections of 2014 we would begin to see real results. No Democrat would be able to coddle their right wing corporate sponsors and hope to survive. No longer would politics as usual govern over Washington.

We have to be careful in this undertaking to not eject true progressives from their office. We have to be careful not to create the appearance of a Republican victory by simply avoiding the polls due to our general disillusionment with the lack of Democratic Party accomplishments. We need to vote in large numbers, as we did for Obama in 2008, but we need to vote for progressive and third party candidates in every moderate and Blue Dog constituency. We need to clean house by unseating all those phony moderates and Blue Dogs who perpetuate the fallacy that we cannot change our nation. We need to act as one, get smart and make real changes in our own ranks before we can expect any real change in Washington.

Most of all we need to overcome the fear instilled by the notion that if we stand up for our beliefs and vote for progressive candidates that we are somehow playing into the hands of the Republicans. We need to bury the fallacious and self-destructive spoiler theory once and for all.

Our nation depends on us. If we fail, politics as usual will reign for decades to come. If we succeed, by the year 2016 we will have succeeded in freeing our nation from the grip of the corporate oligarchs who are heading us off a cliff. We may even still have time to overcome the environmental destruction that has given rise to climate change, poison oceans, poison air and a truly unsustainable society. As you contemplate next year’s election have courage to stand up for your beliefs and values. Reject the fear that has kept us in chains for decades and vote for true progressives no matter in which party they belong. Do it for America, do it for your children, do it for the Earth.

–Jeff Rock

This piece was first published in OpEdNews on 10/11/09.

Jeff Rock is an economist of thirty-three years. He has spent his entire career in the building industry working in a capacity that allows him to witness daily the inner workings of the so-called ‘free’ market. Jeff studied at US and French universties earning his Economics degree from Antioch College in 1976. He is bi-lingual. He supports and promotes green building and tries to incorporate green principles in every project on which he is assigned. He has built high rises in the US and Africa. He is a committed to left wing policies and strongly believes in a regulated market with emphasis on equalizing income distribution and strong social programs. Jeff believes that Friedman’s economic philospophy is a scam and that Friedman was chosen by the neo-economists as their mouthpiece simply because he equated democratic freedoms with market freedoms, a fallacious argument that has misled America into a blind faith in a deregulated ‘free’ market that has in turn led to oligoply and monopoly, the very antithesis of the free market as envisioned by Adam Smith.

HITCHHIKING & TRAINHOPPING — Part I

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

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THE CONFESSIONS OF FOFI LITTLEPANTS

PART I

by Fofi Littlepants


INTRODUCTION

What follows are some reflections from my journey hitchhiking and trainhopping across the United States, from California to New York City. This was accomplished over a period of three months, together with a friend, one sizzling summer in the time of global warming.

It didn’t occur to me that these travels were of such incredible rarity or fascination per se that the interest of humanity requires that I write about them. Many people hitchhike and trainhop (ride clandestinely inside or outside a freight train), and quite a few have written on their experiences, most of which are much more colorful and interesting than mine. But I’m sending this along for three reasons. Firstly, because I was asked to give a history of the undertaking, by a friend who I discovered is hopeless to attempt to deny.

Secondly, most trainhopping and hitchhiking accounts are by men. I know that there are women out there that do it, but I don’t know how many there are, and certainly judging from the reactions of the people we met on the road, there didn’t seem to be lots. Apparently “small” women like my friend and I still aren’t supposed to be running around in this free country without the protection of [big] men. We were told over and over how shocking it was that we as women were hitchhiking and such.

Combined with this, the usually unspoken implication was that it was mind-boggling that cute little women of our socioeconomic background were hitchhiking.  I guess the dominant mainstream attributes a variety of vices onto hitchhikers and trainhoppers, most of which are associated with the poor and marginal underclass, and we didn’t seem to fit into those stereotypes ~ we were not runaways, vagrants, alcoholics, drug addicts, sex fiends, felons, prison escapees, serial killers, mentally ill, or prostitutes. In contrast, we were squeaky clean: we didn’t have criminal records, didn’t even smoke cigarettes much less do drugs, barely ingested any alcohol or caffeine, and didn’t sleep around; we were also vegetarians, had completed higher education, and were gainfully employed in professional positions. This was all incredibly confusing for most people, because while we could accurately be classified as low-income (since we had a penchant for working at pitiful non-profit wages with organizations on the brink of bankruptcy), we were really glaringly “middle class” in most other respects.

According to many people we encountered, the only (middle class) individuals in their right minds that would stoop to hitchhiking are those whose cars have broken down. Thus we were treated to constant admonitions to be careful and to go take a bus. A travel book I purchased on the U.S., a British publication which compiles helpful travel tips and dry humour on the foibles of the country, provided but one paragraph on hitchhiking:

    The usual advice given to hitchhikers is that they should use their common sense: in fact, of course, common sense should tell anyone that hitchhiking is a bad idea. We do not recommend it under any circumstances. (Emphasis in the original.)

The book does not even mention trainhopping as an option to be disdained and discarded, presumably because it was unthinkable, being an even more illicit and potentially physically dangerous activity than hitchhiking. This, from the “Rough Guide” to the U.S.A.

But as the stated purpose of this venerable blog is “to encourage thought and action related to contemporary political and cultural matters”, and sometimes bad ideas can unearth new pathways for the imagination, here follow the Confessions.

I. TRAINHOPPING

It goes without saying that the U.S. is car country, and the presumptive method of cross-country transport for my socioeconomic strata (middle class professional) was to drive a vehicle of some kind ~ conventional American wisdom is that any adult without an automobile must obviously be a vagrant, indigent, and/or a general loser.

I may or may not be those things, but personally I’ve felt lucky to have so far managed to avoid getting a car ~ I consider them a burden and I’ve always wanted to travel light in life. And both me and my traveling companion, who I’ll call “Joey”, are lefty tree huggers convinced that cars are the earthly embodiment of evil.  Well, not entirely ~ I do concede that things like ambulances and firetrucks are useful, but you get the point.

When we set out to get ourselves across the country, trainhopping and hitchhiking were our transport of choice for a number of reasons: As parasitic modes of travel, they (1) were cheap (mostly free); (2) didn’t increase global fuel consumption by much (the train or the cars were going that way anyway, and we were so skinny that the additional weight surely didn’t make much of a difference); and of course (3) were the most interesting.

***

BUT FIRST, here’s a disclaimer: I want to be very clear that I don’t consider myself an authority in trainhopping, in even the most remote sense of the word. In fact, I was an abysmal failure at it. There are experts out there that can give more useful information, and I try to provide some citations to them. Also, I’m not encouraging anyone to do it, though I’m not discouraging anyone either ~ I try to make few recommendations to others about their lives because I think every person’s road winds uniquely.

Also, all names of the people (and pets) we encountered have been changed.

***

Trainhopping is an activity infused with history and mystique, immortalized in literature and song (Steinbeck, London, Kerouac, Guthrie, Ellington, etc.), and indulged in by millions (famous hobos include Steam Train Maurie, A No. 1, and Jack Black (each of whom also wrote books about their experiences); Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Upton Sinclaire, and William Douglas (the U.S. Supreme Court Justice) etc. are also said to have train-hopped). While the dominant vision of trainhoppers in most Americans’ minds stems from photos of Depression-era hobos climbing onto traintops and boxcars in search of a better life, various waves of trainhopping had already been taking place since the end of the Civil War. But by all accounts, the Great Depression was the apex ~ at least one million and perhaps as many as three million people (men, women and children) were riding the rails in search of work.1

Since then, the activity has obviously declined, but people continue to hop trains, though at present the predominant stereotype of trainhoppers appears to be that of drunks and runaway kids. Many of the young trainhopping people we met indeed had been on the road for years from a very early age (and seemed to drink a lot); we might also have seen some of the old guys that people talk about, but didn’t have a chance to interact with any.

Most people have probably seen at least the young trainhopping kids at some time ~ they often have tattered attire, a dirty pack, tattoos and piercings, a piece of cardboard that they use for insulation on the trains, and often also a dog (for protection and company). They might be hanging out in parks or on the sidewalk; sometimes they ask for money at street corners, shopping centers, or intersections.

But Duffy Littlejohn, author of Hopping Freight Trains in America, claims that trainhopping is also increasingly a recreational pastime for other sectors, such as for yuppie professionals like computer programmers, doctors, and lawyers (Duffy himself is a lawyer, though he had been trainhopping prior to becoming so and continued thereafter). In the 1990’s, Duffy estimated that there were 5,000 to 10,000 people who made trainhopping a full time job, and an estimated 20,000 to 40,000 people who rode the rails for fun.2 We also learned that it’s a popular anarchist activity.

Shawn Lukitsch, a 30-something trainhopper that created a traveling film exhibition about the activity in 2008, describes three types of trainhoppers: (1) hobos ~ persons hopping trains to travel between towns for work; (2) tramps ~ persons riding rails fueled by wanderlust or adventure; and (3) travelers ~ riders (often younger ones) seeking to escape the commercial aspects of mainstream culture.3

Under this classification, Joey and I were probably a combination of #2 and #3, even though we were slowly making our way to New York for a job, so could have perhaps tried to argue that we also fit into #1.  But “hobo” culture has a very long history and is very specific; it developed its own heroes, ethics, songs, lingo, and code (pictographic symbols). There are some tensions between them and the newer generation of tramps and travelers; just one public example manifested during the National Hobo Convention (organized annually in Britt, Iowa by the Hobo Foundation) where there were problems last year that were blamed on drunk, unruly, young tramps. Steam Train Maury, who was one of the founders of the Hobo Foundation, had stressed hobo chivalry, and had spoken in his last years about “pretenders” at the Convention.

Duffy says in his book that recreational trainhopping is increasing, but the last edition of his book was published before 9-11, when controls started getting tighter. According to Shawn, trainhopping is dying in this security-conscious era. Statistics given by train companies seem to confirm that trainhopping is decreasing; for instance, Union Pacific director of Public Affairs Mark Davis reportedly announced that between January and July 2006, there were 20,000 people found, arrested or removed from trains and train yard property, representing a 3000 person decrease from the year before.4

***

How is trainhopping accomplished? Again, I’m the last person that anyone should ask. I would probably be called a pretender by other real trainhoppers, even though I wasn’t purposefully trying to pretend to be anything.

The definitive instructional bible on trainhopping is Duffy Littlejohn’s book Hopping Freight Trains in America. Also there is information online, such as “How to Hop a Freight Train” by Wes Modes at http://www.thespoon.com/trainhop/train1b.html.

If anyone reading this is actually interested in doing it, the book and all the information available online gives good information on safety, which is important because I guess it’s a fairly dangerous activity. According to statistics from the Office of Safety Analysis at the Federal Railroad Administration, there were 990 trespasser injuries and deaths in the U.S. in 2006.5 One of the truckers that we met on the road told us that he used to work for the railroads, and they would quite frequently find shirts, limbs, and bodies tangled up in the wheels. But again, I’m not recommending anything to anybody (or not).

There are also lots of books written by hobos that give more in-depth views of the traditional culture and life (see for instance books by Steam Train Laurie (Maurice Graham) and A No. 1 (Leon Ray Livingston).) For some beautiful contemporary photos of trainhopping, see Amelia Merrick’s at http://www.pbase.com/artandrevolution/travels.

***

Joey and I did not find trainhopping to be a simple matter.

We dutifully did all the research ~ we bought the Duffy Littlejohn book on Amazon (and received it with a personalized Post-It from the author), did lots of Google-searching, and interviewed trainhopping kids in the street, etc., We came to understand the general instructions, which seemed to go something like: Get to know where the trainyards are, and understand the routes of trains in order to identify which ones can get you to your intended destination; check out the target trainyard during the day if possible; go back, usually at night, dressed in dark clothing; find a train going to your destination; find a safe car to ride (you should have previously done your homework to understand the types of cars trains are composed of, and which ones are safe to ride); climb onto the selected car, and finally, hop off when you arrive at the destination.

However, while we understood the theory, we still struggled with various challenges in the reality of implementation. I’m embarassed to have to say that while we tried many times, we only successfully managed to hop a train once.

One challenge was figuring out how to avoid getting kicked out, arrested or beaten up by the “bulls”, i.e. railroad police who are guarding the sacred cow of railroad private property. The recommended method is to be smart, stay off paved roads (where bulls drive around in a truck), and wear dark clothing when sneaking around trainyards at night.

Joey and I were kind of excited to try to get black trainhopping outfits ~ we thought perhaps we would look like ninjas. I had a light blue backpack that I bought on sale, and Joey had a monstruous backpack that had a psychedelic collage of South American tapestry pieces sewn onto it, so we both bought black raincovers for the packs. Joey had black clothes, but light brown shoes, so she tried to color them black with a magic marker (they did get darker, but looked essentially like they had gotten run over by a greasy truck.) For myself, I pieced together a black outfit mostly from thrift stores, except for a khaki canvas shoulder bag that I ended up having to stuff into my black jacket when trying to trainhop. This made me look 6 months pregnant, and was rather cumbersome when I was running after trains in the dark, but I put up with it because I thought it might be advantageous in moments of potential arrest (“Please officer, I jus’ wanna get home to my mama to give birth to my baby!”)

We didn’t get arrested or beaten up, but we did get kicked out of more than one trainyard. The primary problem is probably that while we had the black gear, we failed to have the requisite amount of mental capacity (“smart”). Once, we were sitting in the middle of a trainyard in broad daylight looking so intently at a map that we didn’t notice the security wagon pulling up right in front of us. I’m sure the bull had a good laugh at the sight of us sitting in the grass next to the tracks, covered head to toe in black, holding onto a map with our mouths open. He ambled over to us, and said (rather paternally): “Now you girls wouldn’t be trying trainhop would you? Because if you are, I’m going to have to arrest you…”

All we could provide as a response, after we finally managed to stop catching flies with our mouths, was a pathetic “Nnnnnnnooooooooooooooooooooo…….”

He sat in his car, clearly amused, as he watched us gather up our backpacks and map and shuffle off.

A second challenge we faced was that it was very hard to figure out what train was actually going where, and when it was leaving. We were sometimes able to identify a train that was going basically in the right direction, but we couldn’t really figure out how we would know where exactly it was going ~ it could have been going to our intended destination, stopping much earlier, or veering away at some point to go somewhere else altogether. Duffy encourages us to go right up to rail workers and ask them point blank when the next train to such and such place is leaving, because rail workers are union members and would be happy to help you get one over on The Man. However, that advice was issued before 9-11. We heard through various sources that things have gotten stricter, and this seemed to be true ~ we think we were turned in to the bulls by employees. So we were totally baffled by this. On the train that we did get on, I had to keep checking the compass and the map incessantly during the 12 hour ride to make sure we didn’t end up in Alaska instead of Montana like we wanted.

Third, we realized that trainhopping requires a lot of patience, as you have to wait for the train to actually arrive or depart ~ sometimes this can take hours, or even days. Wes Modes described it thus:

    Train hopping is time out of time. You wait and you wait and you think and you fidget and you wait some more. You sit in the weeds and the dirt and you read and you smoke a cigar. You pull the seed heads off of grasses and pick stickers out of your socks. You write for a while. You watch the sun set. You put on more clothes. You watch the moon rise. You have one of those absolutely perfect moments and then it passes and you smile and wait some more.6

This is definitely not for ADHD people on a schedule. Once we waited for a train for thirty hours (30!) in some ditches. I guess this is not that unusual for trainhopping; Duffy considers such experiences to be good for building the life skill of patience, and Wes says “Train hopping is the closest thing to meditation that I do.”7 I struggled to build such life skills without tearing all my hair out. I wish I had been a bit better at meditation, because I might have reached enlightenment during all that time we spent waiting for trains. Instead, I was constantly checking my Blackberry and being annoyed by the rats scurrying about us in the tall grass.

(Later, it occurred to me that I might also have had more patience had I approached these situations as Whiteblack the Penguin, who leaves the comfort of Penguinland to see the world to collect stories for his radio show, would have. Whiteblack, in the face of an endless variety of bizarre misfortunes, invariably enthuses, “This will make a great story for my radio show! And besides, I’ve always wanted to [get shot out of a canon / be stranded in the desert / fall off the top of a plane / etc.] So following his model, I should have maintained equanimity thus: “This will make a great story for my AIOB blog entry! And besides, I’ve always wanted to wait for a train for 30 hours straight while battling flesheating rats that are probably carriers of bubonic plague!”)

The fourth type of challenge for us was that it really was not that easy to hop on a train. Prior to attempting it, we studied the different types of train cars (boxcars, hoppers, piggybacks, gondolas, reefers, auto racks, rear units, flatcars, engines, etc. etc.), so that we would know which ones were rideable, and where we could sit or lie safely without falling off, freezing to death, or suffocating. Duffy’s book has a helpful description and photos of each type of car. On our trip to our first railyard, we felt a youthful (rookie’s) pride at being able to point out and name the different types of cars.

But actually getting on a train was more difficult. The books and stuff say that you can board a train while it’s still parked in the yard, and hide yourself and wait till it takes off. But for us, since we never really figure out how to know what train was going where, we couldn’t tell which parked train we should get onto.

This left us with having to attempt to hop a train when it was pulling out of the yard (and we could tell that it was actually going in the right direction.) This meant, of course, that we were supposed to get on the train while it was moving. To do this, you have to be able to make split-second decisions to identify and select a rideable car. Then you have to hop on. You are supposed to run after it and throw your pack (and then your dog, if you have one) onto the train and then jump on yourself.

For ourselves, we ran around through many a night chasing many a train, but most attempts fizzled into failure: many trains did not have any rideable cars at all, and even when we finally found one that did, we didn’t manage to hop on very easily, so the train would just cheerfully chug by, leaving us in the dust. A large part of the problem was that we had too much stuff ~ Joey and I both had large, heavy laptop computers in our backpacks, along with other electronics and crap (yes, it’s ridiculous, more on this in Part III.) At least we didn’t have a dog we had to hurl onto the train.

The fifth challenge was that when you actually get on a train, you have to make sure that you are safe, i.e., that you don’t fall off, suffocate, get locked into a car, die of wind or rain exposure, starve or dehydrate to death, etc. And try to avoid being kicked off or arrested and/or beaten up. This wasn’t our biggest problem, since we didn’t get on too many trains (sad), but with the train that we did got on, we were lucky to find that we could sit comfortably outside, on the back of the cargo container, so we were shielded from the wind. It did get pretty chilly, but we had good sleeping bags so it okay, and we went through some tunnels (which can get pretty bad with exhaust ~ many hobos have historically suffocated from trains breaking down in tunnels), but we survived. The hardest part was trying to pee into a milk carton as Duffy Littlejohn recommended.

The final challenge was that, once we got on a train, we then had to get off it too. We were worried about whether we would have to jump off while the train was moving ~ it’s in the process of getting on and getting off that people seem to most frequently get hurt, losing limbs and sometimes life. Duffy’s book has various instructions about how you throw your gear and then yourself off in such circumstances, but they all seemed rather cryptic to us. But in the end, our one train actually stopped in the ideal position (slightly outside the trainyard, which helps you avoid the bulls), so we easily tossed our gear (I think this is must be how I got that mysterious dent in my stainless steel water bottle), and hopped off. But before that, while we were crouched on the train looking for the right moment to jump off, we spied a hobo on the side of the tracks, looking for his right moment to jump on. He looked like the real thing ~ he was sprouting hair from everywhere on his head and face, was pretty tattered, and had a dog. We had a momentary mutual thrill when we connected and waved at each other, and then the train rolled on and he was gone.

***

A different challenge we faced is that we had much difficulty picking cool trainhopping names, which we had heard was required.

Traditional hobo names are very colorful and long, like “Hard Rock Kid” or “Slo Motion Shorty” (see John Hodgman’s spoken word poem listing 700 historical hobo names ~ my personal favorites are  #602 “Amesy Squirrelstomper, the Chipmunk Preferrer”, and #633 “Whistling Anus Mecham, Le Petomaine” 8); contemporary trainhoppers on the other hand seem to have mono- or bi-syllabic noms de guerre like “Dust”, “Bebop”, and “Vomit”.

What trainhopping name should we adopt, we wondered? And it suddenly occurred to us ~ was “Duffy Littlejohn” a fake trainhopping name??

We discussed this issue extensively. “Joey” (meaning baby marsupial) was the suggestion I eventually gave for my friend, because she liked fuzzy animalitos, and had a diminutive gray, furry, corduroy backpack (in addition to her jumbo South American tapestry one), which, when hooked onto to her shoulders, looked like a baby koala that had imprinted on her. She was pleased with this, and decided that “Sancochado” went well with it, thus forming “Joey Sancochado”. She also tried on a few other names, including “Fox Minestrone”, but discarded those. A Chicana friend later suggested “Punky Pozole”, which was my personal favorite but by then it was too late. (“Joey Sancochado” had already been written onto her luggage tag.) (And I don’t know why all my friends are obsessed with soups. (Sancochado is a Peruvian stew/soup. The word could also mean, if used as an adjective rather than a noun, “boiled”, but I’m sure that’s not the meaning Joey intended ~ she would have cried to contemplate the idea of a “boiled baby marsupial”.))

We were trying to think of a name for me, but never really could. In the end, after a few complicated transfigurations, the nonsensical “Fofi” arose (“Fofy” incidentally is an African mattress company, but the origins are more convoluted than that.) Joey decided that “Fofi Littlepants” would fit the bill ~ she had the bright idea of “Littlepants”, because then the whole thing would be a play on “Duffy Littlejohn”. I don’t know where she got “Littlepants”~ I certainly didn’t go through this trip wearing tight hotpants (and I refuse to admit that I’m kind of little so even my baggy pants might be too.)

And we didn’t end up ever using these names ~ I didn’t encourage it because I thought that rather than endearing us to other trainhoppers, they were so not cool that they might rather increase the likelihood of us getting our butts kicked.

But on one, special occasion, we did use the names: when we signed the wall outside of Graceland as “Joey and Fofi” (with a hearted “i”). We didn’t think the Elvis fans would mind having the extra little bit of tackiness, there in that Shangri-La of tack.

***

The One Train we did manage to catch came through the grace of a dear trainhopping friend we met in Washington ~ an 18 year old that seemed to have been on the road since he was 15. He had been back and forth across the country many times, and gave us tons of tips. He was very sweet, and we wanted to give him a hug (though clearly he had his edge ~ he was nursing a hand in which he had cut his tendons a month before, in the process of cracking a bottle over someone’s head (“the guy deserved it”)). He told us exactly the best spot to lie in wait in Spokane to hop a train ~ on the overpass where the trains pass above the city, coming often to complete stops.

And so they did ~ and after a bit of tribulation darting around in the dark in our railninja outfits, hanging off a billboard, and holding our breath behind a wall while hiding from a bull’s flashlight, we found that miracle moment, the opening in which we managed to climb aboard a piggyback (a car that has two freight containers stacked on top of each other.) There was a space behind the containers, a small indented platform where we could sit more or less comfortably, as well as stuff our backpacks underneath.

The act of clamouring onto that train, in that moment, was to us akin to climbing onto the back of a winged unicorn. We were in pure, magical bliss. And the ride was beyond anything we had imagined ~ clanking, rolling, and rhythming through pine forest mountains in Washington, following the edge of rivers through canyons, gliding over the waters of Lake Coeur d’Alene in the Idaho panhandle, and into the majesties of Montana. It was resplendently breathtaking. It really was indescribable, and I won’t waste any more words on feeble attempts.

***

Alas, that was our first, and last, successful trainhopping exercise. But we consider ourselves lucky for having gotten a taste of this anachronistic, dying of arts, going rapidly the way of fax machines, film photography, newsprint, and hopefully, SUV’s.

–Fofi Littlepants

FOOTNOTES:

1  Duffy Littlejohn, Hopping Freight Trains in America, 258.

2  Littlejohn, 260.

3  Colin Moynihan, “Train-Hopping Traveler’s Life, Captured on Film”, New York Times, May 18, 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/nyregion/18hobo.html?_r=1

4  Saxon Baird, “Forget Greyhound, Hop a Train”, The Rearguard: A Monthly Alternative, accessed 26 August 2009, at http://www.therearguard.org/june-2007/forget-greyhound-hop-a-train.html

5  Melissa Hiebert, “The last great adventure”, Street Sheet Canada, March 3, 2008, at

http://www.streetnewsservice.org/index.php?page=archive_detail&articleID=2344

6  “Seven Questions”, Interview of Wes Modes by Tom Mangan,

http://www.thespoon.com/trainhop/articles/sevenquestions/

7  “Seven Questions” (Interview of Wes Modes by Tom Mangan)

8  You can see the names, and an ambitious project to illustrate all of them at http://www.e-hobo.com/hoboes/list

_________________________________________

Read the complete:

CONFESSIONS OF FOFI LITTLEPANTS

I  Trainhopping

II  Hitchhiking

III  Other Particulars

IV  The Journey

V  Society I ~ Native America

VI  Society II ~ Identity

VII  People

VIII  Penises

IX  Of Dreams And Spirits

X  Conclusion