From the front porch of Uncle Eldon’s little wood-frame house in Texas, Cousin Mary-Louise and  I spent our ninth summer watching the hobos scurry out of the cool of the abandoned ice house to hop the freight train as it rumbled through the Tyler station.    The train  ceased carrying legitimate passengers  in 1956, and, with the advent of diesel engines, it no longer stopped to take on ice for the steam boilers.  The few trains that continued to run merely slowed to pick up the mail bags, but seldom stopped to load or unload freight.

I loved the hoboes, imagining them to be creatures with  no cares nor burdens to hold them down, concerned with traveling free  and seeking  adventure, the t he personification of  heroes in the stories I had read.

[Image from The Designer (January 1920)]

I found  some burlap and made a sort of bag —  a bindle — in which I imagined hoboes carried all their worldly possessions. I secured my bindle with a rope, stuffed it full of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, my sling shot and my Brownie canteen filled with Kool-Aid.  I carried it on a stick over one shoulder  in proper  hobo  fashion. Then  I donned a dirty old floppy hat from the garage, which Mary-Louise assured me must have “cooties,” and searched through Uncle Eldon’s cigar ashtray for a “stogie” to complete my new summer look.

One particularly sweltering night, I slipped away to  follow the mournful tones of a mouth harp. (I feared  hoboes far less than I feared the wrath of Momma if I got caught.)  Squatting in the shadows was a ragged, bleary-eyed  man with an easy grin and the handle Hankerin’ Blue. 

He lit a stump of a candle and held it up to see my face.  I bought my way into its small circle of light with a PBJ. “What’s it like to be a ‘bo?” I asked him.  “Well now,”  he said,  “I’s free to travel where I likes, when I likes and I don’t gotta answer to no man.  But mos’ly it’s cold dark nights, no food and no body.  Nobody to care if I lives or I dies.” 

Undaunted, I begged him to take me along., offering all my PBJs and even my Kool-Aid. I could just picture myself waving goodbye to Mary-Louise and her dolls as that train pulled out of sight, headed for exotic Destinations Unknown. My mind’s ear was full of the rhythm of a rattling car, a  howling wind, the sounds when the train crosses a bridge of wood or steel. I could see  the trees and foliage zipping by, and hear  the clanging bells at a grade crossing.

“Your  time is not yet come, ”  he said.  You got to grow  your legs a mite longer ‘fore you can flip a freight car on the fly,  Just you  wait and listen, Child.  You’ll hear the whistle of your own train soon enough.”

 Nevertheless, the thought of becoming a hobo was a great consolation:  a kid could get through many a rainy day by thinking of that prospect.  All summer long I wore my floppy hat and kept my bindle crammed with dreams and  PBJs   More than ever, I wanted to  ride that rail far as it would take me.  The destination didn’t matter.  Only the journey was important.

I never did hop a train hobo style .  It was some twenty years, in fact, before I actually “rode the rails” for the first time. at all.  It was hardly the train ride of my childhood fantasies.  I wore a business suit. I rode in a passenger seat.  I went to Madison Square Gardens. 

The little wood frame house is gone now and so is Uncle Eldon.  The Tyler station has been rebuilt.  I don’t know if it still has its hobos or not.

Sometimes a wanderlust in me recurs just like malaria, -- hobo fever never  satisfied.   I’m drawn then to railroad tracks wherever I may find them. They remind me of abandoned dreams, journeys not taken and opportunities missed.  

These days, I  hop the freight trains in my mind,  although I carry a bit more baggage now.     The best trains and  the best rides take me inward. I’m attune to the rhythm of my own heart,  the wind of hope howling through my spirit and the freedom to be myself.  At last, I have heeded the whistle of my own train.

 It’s still the journey itself that’s important.   But perhaps before my journey’s end, I will reach that greatest of unknown destinations--  Who I’m Meant to Be.