To: Gravity
From: Vinay
Subject: Adventures on the other side of the tracks

Well.... here I am, back in civilisation, and loving it.

What a long strange trip it's been.

When I left NY at the beginning of the month to go to the National Hobos Convention in Britt, Iowa, I really didn't realise what I was getting myself into... if I had, I'd have left more of my gear in NY, and brought more ready cash :-).

The first leg was easy, exhilarating, neato: B. Adler and I met in town, took a bus to New Jersey and snuck in the back of a freight yard, through some trees, just as a train was pulling in to a stop. We found an open box car, got in, and a couple of hours later off we went... it's an amazing way to travel - two twenty-foot square windows, thirty to fifty miles an hour, noisy and dirty and intensely real - it's a great thing. That first ride really got me hooked on fright train riding, and it's something I expect that I'll do occasionally from now on. It's that much of a rush for me, and that nice an experience.

Got to Albany - it's only about 150 miles outside NY; we've got three days to kill until Flatcar Frank, our ride to Britt, shows up. I've always been a middle class white boy at heart (even though I did a chunk of my growing up on the british equivalent of welfare); living rough with minimal dough with an experienced homeless person was a real education. I learned lessons that perhaps I'd rather have skipped. Mostly the attitude, the sense of restlessness and mistrust which were a big part of B's world. Little bits of magic too - like B saying he was in the mood for pizza, getting off the bus we were on at "random" and hitting a couple of excellent pizza joints just as they were clearing up for the night...synchronistic dinners taste mighty good.

Just before we were due to meet frank, the darker side of road life made itself manifest - we were accosted by a schizophrenic in the park - all he did was lecture us on chess and military history, but it was unnerving.

Frank comes; he's driving a minivan of electronics and food to Britt - he's a radio geek by trade, not a train rider, but he's still part of the whole scene. Three days pass in roadtrip mode.

Britt.

We get there a few days before things really hot up - it's very much like a gravity fleshmeet in emotional tone - amazing parallels; geographically scattered special interest group, deep bonds formed by shared formative experiences... strong energy. But the people - frankly, scary folks, people who live over the edge. Vets, white trash, totally subcultural punkers, a few "old timers" who've never settled back down, some "yuppie hobos" - all united by a love of the road, of the train whistle, the call of
the wild.

I now perk up, alive, every time I hear a freight whistle. In my blood.

The 96 year old hobo convention is in a time of change - for the first time in years, there's a sizable contingent of hardcore young riders, people in their teens and twenties who live on the rails, punky and unphotogenic and political. Often hardbitten. Quite a few have college degrees and chose this lifestyle with options. Smack stories abound. I meet people who are HIV+ which is a first for me (to my knowledge, that is). There's a lot of despair and violence in the air. The "FTRA" are there - a rail gang prone to violence. They're drunk and unpredictable and hard - sitting by one of their campfires, I know that in another time these would be Attila the Hun's men, the same barbaric vibe in the air, the edge of violence close.

I do a few tarot readings; the usual mix ;).

Drumming is a Big Thing this year - the young riders ("derail camp" - from a sign near our jungle) do a tribal drumming thing for a crowd expecting little old fellows with harmonicas and banjos. To our mutual surprise, they love it!

The power of drumming is more apparent to me here than ever; Grump Lump, a second generation hobo and perhaps a hougan drums with an fervor I've never seen but instinctively try to rise to match... I do OK :-) - but it's strong magic. There's a feeling of potential, of an event trying to pull it's way into existence - dancing, dancing never quite happens, but the energy is so damn ripe - one evening we miss it by... perhaps a single person's energy, just short of the sparking potential, just short of the critical phase transition into ritual space. I really thought it was going to happen, but it didn't. Sad. But perhaps another time.....

I want to say more about the people. More about physical risk and danger and real animal-level circuit one existence. It makes people alive. Many of the forty or so riders present were connected to life in a way I've only very seldom seen - no holding back, no holds barred, no polite shells. Years of making life or death calls about jumping on or off a moving freight train, risking getting jumped by untrustworthy riders or locals, constant hassles with railroad cops... seem to mobilise energy which is usually fast asleep. Edge was a very real thing. And a sense of resilience - literally "well, if you're alive you can bum some money, get a blanket and get back on the road".

I can't convey how much being around this thing changed me, made me feel very complacent and sleepy. It also showed me something of how precious the secure enclaves we've created are, how valuable a safe place to sleep really is.

And then it was over, and people started going home.

Seventeen of us tried to catch the same moving freight out of Mason City. Fifteen got on the train. The group split twice more, and chaotic train luck meant we spent four days trying to get to Minneapolis. Took us four trains, two or three run ins with the cops (who were very nice actually), one almost-getting-left-behind (I hate getting on a train "on the fly"), one encounter with the Mayor of a town who went shopping for us... it was a really superb experience. Slow, but exhilarating and very community bonding. It wasn't travel, it was urban safari.

And then we got into Minneapolis. We did soup kitchens, hung out in the Hard Times, went to Cedar Fest, and three of us eventually got a drive away car and came west. The rest of the crew split again, some to go to the beet harvest in Minnesota, others for an anarchist conference in Chicago. Four days of driving and a greyhound hop, and here I am in Seattle, back in civilisation once more, safe in the tribe.

It's scary out there.

But it's passionate. I'd never put my life on the line by choice before - never rock climbed, parachuted, any of that stuff. Always cautious, always playing it safe. Always afraid of the edge. Now I've been there, seen it, and I want more of it, want the immediacy and the fullness of living life in ways which put me in situations where my decisions and my bodyskills affect not just my superficial comfort but my continuity. I feel like I've been reminded that actually, life and death are as close as the local freight yard, the local mountain, the local street corner. That the civilised veneer has only distanced us from the days when we needed everything we had to survive, when the power to live wasn't granted at birth but won by experience. "don't sweat about the small stuff" they say - followed by "it's all small stuff" - but that's not true.

[rant mode off]

Yeah... it was an adventure. More to follow :-)

love,

vinay