Stretching Legs

Houston, TX —

I found Stretch, the elected King of the Hoboes sitting on his pack in the snow with a ruddy smile on his face and a beer in his hand. He was at the rail yard in Avon, Indiana, just outside of Indianapolis. The 2008-2009 monarch wore Carhartt coveralls and was packed for the road. I had organized this meeting with the prolific tramp via a series of calls to his cell phone.

(The fact that he had a cell phone was surprising at first, seeing as he doesn’t have much of a home address, but the weirdness wore off quickly. It’s pay as you go, so no address needed. He said it makes tramping safer.)

Our destination wasn’t yet clear, but he was excited to get out of the cold he’d been sitting through for three days.

He piled his dog Burlington, his 100 lbs. of gear and his namesake 6′5″ frame all into my four door Honda Civic and pulled out the atlas. It was cold outside, about 28 degrees, so the only thing we knew for sure was that we’d head south.

I noticed the smell as soon as we closed the doors. Stretch was two-and-a-half pungent weeks out from a shower and his dog was wet. Alternately blessed and cursed by an acute sense of smell, I was relegated to mouth breathing for the six hour ride. It would have been longer, but I broke the law in the name of my nose so we could just get there.

There, we decided, was Fulton, Kentucky. Nobody has ever been to Fulton, Kentucky. Except for hoboes.

“We get them all the time,” one Fulton Police Department cop told me as he hassled us to move along. “I don’t know why. But we do.”

I know why. There are trains to catch. But none that suited my peculiar holiday-circumventing schedule and so after taking some pictures and getting removed by the cops from our first campsite, we repaired (with police permission) to a nearby abandoned Wal-Mart parking lot. The cops told us it would be “safer—you might not think it, but this is a pretty rough little town,” the lieutenant on duty told us. He had a big white moustache, weathered skin and an alarmingly authentic Western Kentucky accent, and so we believed him.

Fulton train yard; we were removed by the cops, but not ticketed

The night sky looked like rain so Stretch curled up with Burlington under the awning of the building formerly known as Wal-Mart and I knocked the back seats down in my car, stuck my legs in the trunk and crashed.

I experienced the rain as a sort of ominous slamming on the roof of my impermeable car. Stretch got more of the reality of the rain.

“The wind was blowing from five different directions,” he said the next morning. “I woke up when it started blowing up under here…my sleeping bag’s a little bit wet.”

For the record, it was soaked.

We sat and watched the sky change from rain to just clouds to clouds punctured by blue sky sucker holes. Things were looking up and we blasted down to Jackson, Tennessee to catch a train to Mississippi.

More later…