How to Kill a Day

Dallas, TX —

The day was balmy for December as stretch and I rolled into Jackson, Tennessee. Seventies and sunny, which you think would have been welcome to Stretch after days of single-digit lows in Indiana, but he doesn’t like having to remove his coveralls, his fleece hoodie, his flannel and his long johns, and then having to hump them to the next train.

Stretch out of his coveralls on an unseasonably warm day

We’d skipped breakfast in Kentucky and were peckish by the time we arrived at The Old Country Store and Casey Jones Village there in Jackson. The Old Country Store and Casey Jones Village is a little strip mall tourist attraction that hosts a train museum, a false-front series of shops and a small hobo gathering each year. It’s a family-run affair headed by a devout, rotund man of impeccable southern breeding called T. Clark Shaw.

T. Clark Shaw treated the Hobo King 2008-2009 to a free country buffet (full disclosure: he treated the Hobo King’s reporter companion to a free country buffet, too: we are dirt poor graduate students, after all), where Stretch piled on the food in three trips through the line. The food, as T. Clark Shaw said, was “real Southern cooking” which as far as I can tell means things with great viscosity that are bad for you, and usually delicious.

T. Clark Shaw and Stretch in the offices of The Old Country Store

Our train wasn’t leaving until about 8:00 that night, so we lingered everywhere we went, killing time. I tried to get stretch to talk about the Freight Train Riders of America. He mostly demurred. (More on the FTRA next week when Eric and Meredith report from one of the organization’s Founders’ homes in Montana.) We took a walk with Burlington dog. We scouted places to stash my car for the night.

The day dimmed; the hour approached. I dropped Stretch and Stretch’s stuff and Burlington dog at the train yard. He put his pack together and hoofed it quickly across the tracks and dove into the brush to drink beer and sit and wait. It was four or so and crews would be changing. He didn’t want to be seen by the train master or any other authorities.

Stretch, packing up

100 lbs. of stuff

I pressed back to where I would park my car, popped the trunk and stuffed my pack willy nilly with the necessities. I couldn’t find my headlamp. Is a liter-and-a-half enough water? Bring a sleeping bag, or no? No. It’s a short trip and I’ll be fine. A jar of mixed nuts (with which my mom diligently provides me every time I hit the road) and a few cereal bars and I was pretty sure I was set. It was warm out, why would I need anything warmer than my down puffy jacket? I struck out.

The implicit adventure that comes with wandering down railroad tracks is great, but man, railroad ties are just the wrong distance apart for a body like me. To skip ties makes each step a sort of leap. To step on every tie is an infuriating, oxymoronic combination of rapid activity and creeping progress (like pedaling down your flat street on your first ten-speed in granny gear). To step in between ties is to roll on rugged ball-bearing cobbles across the backdrop, which in this case was a west Tennesssee countryside wiped in quickly warming light. Stretch, at six-foot five, must loaf without a second thought between skipped ties. I don’t often envy the tall, but on the tracks I do.

Stretch warbled at me from the brush when I crossed his line of sight. I piled into the tall grass, set my pack down and plopped on top of it.

From the brush

We sat. I asked him questions, brandishing my recorder. He answered them kindly. I pressed the shutter on my camera (which is really the school’s camera). We sat some more. He talked on his pay-as-you-go cell phone, which a friendly hobo in Wisconsin sponsors for him. He called people to let them know where he was and where he’d be headed. He drank what we called in college Beast Ice after Beast Ice. We watched our train chug into the yard. We heard them building the train for the trip to Corinth, Mississippi that night. We waited for darkness to settle.