Two Trains Running

“Bein’ FTRA don’t get you nothin’—not the way people are sayin’. Your brothers and sisters’ll help you out, now. There’s a lot of helpin’ goin’ on out there. One time I’m gettin’ married on the tracks in Spokane up close to the Welfare Bridge. Gettin’ married to Cherokee. Manny the railroad bull—he’s an ordained preacher, he’s doin’ the ceremony. We didn’t have no money for rings, so these two sisters from Helena bought some rings and hopped a train to come all the way up and give ’em to us.

“That was somethin’ special. But mostly it’s little things. Like when Joshua Longgone lost his dog, and everyone spent hours beatin’ the weeds for him. Or when you haven’t got money for food, and someone’ll hand you over a few dollars. Or when you bring a bottle to someone who’s startin’ to shake all over, goin’ for the DTs, just dyin’ for a drink.”

The day after New Years, 1998, and I’m at a hobo gathering in New Mexico, maybe a hundred people jungled up on a patch of desert figured by saguaro and mesquite and sage and a big, dark lizardback tumble of rock that sticks up beside a section of Southern Pacific track. Atop the rock, several flags are flying—American, Confederate, MIA, Anarchist. The raising of the Anarchist banner caused a minor dust-up earlier in the day, when one of the encamped riders, said to be a KKK member, objected to its presence; but he’s been appeased. He and his family spend a good deal of their time zooming around on motorized all-terrain bikes, making an aggressive show of having fun, and don’t mix with the rest of us.

I’m perched on a ledge close to the flags, gazing down on the place. Below and to my left, some elderly hobos are sitting beneath two small shade trees, occupying chairs arranged in a circle around the remains of the previous night’s campfire; beyond them, a communal kitchen has been erected, and people are busy cooking hash for breakfast. Farther off, there’s a trailer on which helium tanks are mounted; they’re used to fill balloons, which now and again can be seen floating off into a clouded pewter sky. Children scoot about, playing and squabbling in the dirt. Tents scattered here and there; vehicles of every description—pickups, campers, old shitboxes. The whole thing calls to mind a scene from a low-budget film about life after some civilization-destroying disaster, the peaceful settlement of the good guys in the moment before the motorized barbarians come swooping down to rape and steal gas. Trains pass with regularity, and when this happens, rockets are set off and people move close to the tracks and wave. The engineers sound their whistles, wave back, and on occasion toss freight schedules from the engine window.

The King of the Hobos, Frog Fortin, an FTRA member whose coronation took place last summer at the hobo convention in Britt, Iowa, was supposed to put in an appearance here, but to my dismay, he’s a no-show. The majority of the attendees are railfans, people who’ve done some hoboing but now have day jobs and families and can’t be classified as hobos—they simply love trains. There are also, as mentioned, some old-time hobos, men in their sixties and seventies; and there are staff members of the Hobo Times, “America’s Journal of Wanderlust,” a publication given to printing treacly hobo poetry.

Most of these folks don’t feel like talking about the FTRA. Some disparage them, passing them off as drunks who’re more likely to harm themselves than anyone else. Others are hostile when I mention the subject. They feel that the FTRA has brought down the heat on all riders, and don’t want to contribute to more bad publicity. Most of those who are willing to talk don’t have much to add to what I already know, but I meet a photographer who’s ridden with the FTRA, who tells me about black FTRA members—New York Slim, the Bushman, et al.—and attributes FTRA racism to the enforced racism inherent in the prison system. It’s more habitual, he says, than real. Another rider, Lee, agrees with him, and says that although the FTRA use racist iconography in their tattoos and graffiti, they are “oddly egalitarian racists.”