A Hobo Sort of Day
“Play Merle Haggard I Take A Lot of Pride in What I Am on Spotify.”
*Beep*
“Sure. Playing Merle Haggard I Take A Lot of Pride in What I Am on Spotify.”
Things I learned in Hobo jungle / are things they never taught me in a classroom
Like where to find a handout / while bummin’ through Chicago in the afternoon.
Merle’s timeless voice floated out of the Kia speakers. The gauzy shade blew by outside the window at a mile a minute. Cruising speed, all month, 31 shows for March. Here and there.
A hobo is a thing, an ecological niche, a proud tradition, something painted and set to banjo, sprinkled in rust and iron from the rail yards and soot from the engines. He’s an outsider, but he’s a thing.
Pushing a button and selling your voice to the Cloud and listening to hobo music from the bytes and bits and a reliable cell network seems a double outsider.
But the spirit of the day carried the moment, and it was a hobo sort of day.
The shade in the woodlands and craggy mountainsides seemed a little deeper as the leaves unfurl, and suddenly, I rolled into that jarring twilight of a cloud shadow on the spring woods.
The morning show had faded into a memory of laughter and smiles. The Chicken Dance had been re-interpreted. If I hung my mouth open and shook my head fast enough, my face jiggled in a poultry sort of way. The old folks found it uproarious.
(I have a new used volume of the history of American literature on the shelf, but I don’t think it balances things out. No matter.)
The wind remained, riding along at the window, and for once, I eased down the mountain pass in the daylight.
Online banking and certificates of insurance awaited me, but that hobo whisper hung in the spring air. I turned off the highway to visit the little town.
Mountain hamlets seem to have a conversation with the landscape. I come from the flatlands, where bulldozers settle things quickly and with a crushing finality. But a mountain town contends with the frowning cliffs overhead eternally.
Every place is different, and it’s an insult to group them. Sometimes I think it’s an insult to catalog them, as the academics insist on doing.
“Here’s forty bucks if you’ll talk about if you feel represented accurately in the books.”
Have you ever been there, man?
(And this is coming from a guy who pushes a button to hear hobo songs in a plastic car.)
There’s a strange ring of pitying in their papers and fawning, of “studying the noble savage”, of painting with a brush broad enough to wipe out the two narrow streets like Helene when they talk about “mountain towns.”
I’ve never resided in one, but have found new life in many, in an early chapter. Now I’ve returned, Merle Haggard ringing in my ears, with a little humility, too.
The antique shop was open, sunny, and without a soul around, save for the rusty tools and waiting books, whispering secrets in their yellowed pages. So I left, and walked into the art store, and almost left without buying anything. What, will Wal Mart have something cheaper? So I turned back around, mumbled an excuse, and found the note cards. I like them. The guy told me where the buildings drawn where. I went back into the street, sleeping in the sun, the highway snoring in the distance.
The post office had stamps from the Appalachian Trail. But they seemed drawn by somebody far away, picturing what life must be like in those mountains, and loading my hobo songs into the algorithm. Plastic.
(But better than the Betty White stamps. I mean, they’re tempting, but there are things men shouldn’t mail, and Betty White stamps are one of them.)
The road stretched south, and I thought useless things about how to know things, and could you ever really talk about somewhere you’ve never been, or only swam through once, and realized it was anthropological musings of first-rate hot air , and let it blow away out the window to chase the cloud shadows.
Sometimes it’s a good day to remember the hobos.
I never been nobody’s idol / but at least I got a title / and I take a lot of pride in what I am.