Blessed Are the Poor

Blessed are the Poor

One morning in the fall of ’74, I woke up under a tree on the campus of the University of Montana.  My cousin Katy was just starting law school, and I had helped her move in the day before.  Later I’d hitchhike back down to California, but first I wanted to explore downtown Missoula.  The most interesting part of any town to me is the area surrounding the train station, certainly true of Missoula, where a cluster of vintage buildings had been converted to coffee houses, art co-ops, and funky cafes.  I ate breakfast in a paisley-curtained little dive, and then wandered over to the old railroad depot where I saw a guy sitting on his bedroll reading a book of poetry.  I asked him if he was waiting to catch a freight. He said yes, so I started pumping him about the art of train-hopping.  Luckily, he was a rare mix of hobo and scholar, and turned out to be a helpful mentor.  

“Jumping a freight out of Missoula is pretty easy,” he said, “because the train dicks here don’t go out of their way to bust people.”  

“Are there any trains going to California?” I asked.

“There’s a freight in a couple of hours that goes to Spokane,” he said. “That’s the one you’d start with. Get to Spokane and spend the night in the hobo jungle, then tomorrow morning catch a freight going south to the main switching yard in Pascoe.  There’ll be lots of trains from there down to California.”

“What do you do, just jump in an empty boxcar?”

“Well, that’s one way to do it, but on a nice day like this it’s better to ride outside so you can see the scenery. Look for a grain car like that one.” He pointed to a car on a nearby siding. “Find one with a solid platform on the end of it and hop up there.  That’s the best way to travel in this weather.”

I asked him how I’d know for sure which train was the one going to Spokane.  

“It’ll be the only one coming through at noon heading west,”

“Is that the one you’re waiting for?”  I asked, hoping he’d be there to hold my hand.

“Nope. Goin’ the other way.  Mine comes in about twenty minutes.”

He was an interesting guy, a laconic introvert who said he preferred to travel alone, not wanting to associate with other guys on the rails, since they were usually alcoholics whom he found dull and depressing.  He told me that he liked philosophy and poetry and that, after a career in business, this was his lifestyle of choice.

“Total freedom,” he said.  “That’s what I like.”

“Okay,” I said.  “Maybe I’ll try it.”

I walked back toward the campus to retrieve my duffle bag, pondering the pros and cons of jumping a freight rather than hitchhiking.  Along the way I decided that yes, what the hell? I’d do it.  It was something I’d always wanted to do, and I might not get a chance like this again.  When I said goodbye to Katy and told her what I was planning, she just laughed and shook her pert, already lawyerly, head.

“Greggie, you are something else!”

The train arrived right on time and, following the instructions of my mentor, I started jogging next to the slow-moving cars, picked out a clean-looking grain car and, with my duffle bag slung over my back, hopped up on the little platform in the front. Soon the train picked up speed and I arranged my duffle-bag into a comfortable seat. It was a hot Fall day and the breeze from the moving train felt cool and relaxing as we whisked through the outskirts of Missoula up into forested mountains whose beauty would never be seen from a highway.  I couldn’t believe how lucky I was.

By mid-afternoon we started descending the mountains of the Idaho panhandle and entered the flat countryside of Eastern Washington.  Around dusk I felt the train slow as it began to weave its way into a desolate expanse of empty tracks and idle freight cars, then finally come to a stop after much lurching and squealing of brakes.  I looked around for anything resembling a station, but there were no buildings of any kind, just empty fields and tracks. Off in the distance I saw a grove of trees and what looked like human figures moving underneath them, so I slung my duffle-bag over my shoulder and headed in that direction, picking my way over weed-shrouded rails and across a dusty field full of old cross ties and rusty debris.  When I reached the small clearing at the edge of the trees I saw the “hobo jungle” my Missoula mentor had told me about - six or seven guys sitting around on the grass and two others cooking something in an old blackened bucket sitting in the middle of a small bonfire.  Whatever was in the bucket was giving off a rich, sweet-smelling aroma.

No one said anything when I came up, though several of them nodded curtly when I greeted them.  I put my duffle-bag down and sat on the grass, laying back against it and trying to look nonchalant, like I was an old hand at this stuff. The conversation, which had stopped with my arrival, gradually started up again, halting spurts of self-conscious bravado and gentle ribbing - well-meaning, if awkward, attempts to break the ice in this despair-clad circle.  This was a brotherhood of sorts, I realized, but one based on distrust and vulnerability, made up of fragile men whose weathered, taciturn faces had long since forgotten how to register pain or joy.  Several seemed angry, but it was a muted anger, softened perhaps by a fear of their own weakness. Maybe under alcohol they could assert themselves, but alcohol also made them vulnerable to outside forces over which they had no control, so they lived here, apart from society, bonding only with their own, and doing even that tentatively. 

Unlike the philosopher/poet I’d met in Missoula, who had a well-organized backpack and a well-insulated sleeping bag, few of these men had any coherent provisions at all.  Many of them had only the clothes on their back, probably having lost any other possessions during one of their alcohol-induced comas.  A few had dirty old blankets they had salvaged somewhere and several had plastic bags containing . . . what?  Their tobacco?  A half-drunk bottle of Coke? A plastic cup?  A water bottle?  Maybe their ID, if it hadn’t already been stolen.

The conversation gradually became more animated, driven primarily by a bulbous-nosed old Irishman in a moth-eaten tweed coat more dirt than cloth.  He was bewailing the fact that the hobo code was no longer honored.

“Used t’ be, ye could fall asleep with all yer swag and nobody’d touch a thing.  There was no such thing as stealin’ from yer mates.  People were respectful of each other!  ‘Cuz that was just the code, ye’ know.  Nowadays, the dairty bastards’ll steal the shoes right off yer feet.”

Everyone seemed to agree that hobo ethics had taken a dive in recent years, and this seemed to be borne out by the one person in the group besides myself who had a backpack and sleeping bag.  He was an angry-looking young guy with a heavy beard sitting off by himself, a large hunting knife displayed prominently on his belt.  

“Anybody come near me and try to steal my stuff, I’ll cut their balls off,” he growled.

The friendliest, and clearly most resourceful, member of the group was Perry, the self-appointed cook.  Earlier that day, he had walked two miles to the nearest shopping center and had dived the dumpsters for discarded produce and bread.  “I was lucky,” he said.  “The butchers just trimmed a new truckload of meat and threw all the suet in the garbage. That’s what makes the stew smell so good.”

Perry had a ready smile and a slow Southern drawl and he gestured me to join him by the fire. We got to talking and he said that he too was heading to California, so, if I wanted, I could tail along with him and he’d show me what trains to jump.  

“They’ll probably be a train to Pascoe comin’ through around ten tomorrow morning.  We kin catch that one.”

We all ate some of Perry’s sweet suet stew - which actually tasted surprisingly good after my long train ride - and then everyone bedded down for the night.  I laid my bag out next to Perry’s old blanket so we could continue our conversation.  “This is one of the best jungles around,” he said, because the river’s right over there just beyond that grove of trees and a feller could wash up in it if he was of a mind.”

The next morning several of us were standing around Perry’s freshly-built fire when we saw the old Irishman emerge from the trees and limp over toward us.  He was dabbing at his face with a dirty rag and, as he got closer, we could see why.  An ugly gash covered the whole right side of his nose, blood still oozing through some patches of newly-formed scab.  He was cursing to himself as he walked up.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Ah shite! There I am, sleepin’ down next to the river and in the middle of the night I feel somethin’ ticklin’ me face.  I open me eyes and here’s this big fockin’ rat chewin’ on me nose.  Dairty bastard woulda’ taken the whole fockin’ thing if I hadn’t knocked him off.”

Later that morning, the southbound freight came lumbering into the yard, just like Perry predicted.  We grabbed our stuff, jogged across the open field, doing a quick scan for train dicks, and then swung ourselves up into an open boxcar just before the train picked up speed again.

“Ya wanna get these ones with the wooden floors if you can,” Perry said.  “The metal ones get too cold at night.”

We noticed two other figures back in the shadows of the car. One of them was snoring heavily, hung over from an extended binge according to his slightly more sober companion.

Perry and I talked a lot during the trip to Pasco, and I was impressed by his kind, gentle demeanor.  After he found out I had once studied to be a priest, he began to talk more openly about his own life and recalled how, as a kid, he had been sweet on the preacher’s daughter in his small Southern town. “I think she was sweet on me too,” he said, “but even then I knew I just wasn’t right.”

“What do you mean, ‘you weren’t right’?” I said, ready to attack the ill-conceived moral code that had first despoiled this gentle creature of his confidence.   

“Waal, you know, she was from the good side of the tracks, and I was . . waal, you know, just not right.”

“What do you mean?”

“Waal, my momma, she was the one who made the moonshine and sold it to all the fellers on the other side of town - even to the preacher.  So they all knew that I wasn’t quite right.  ‘Specially for the preacher’s daughter.”

“Oh Perry, you’re such a sweet guy.  I bet the preacher’s daughter would have picked you any day over the other guys her dad wanted her to date.”

Perry just smiled at this and shook his head, but I could tell some long-lost part of his soul agreed with it.

We went on talking for the next few hours, about religion, about life, about people we’d known and experiences we’d had.  Perry, I realized, was a rare being, a self-effacing man who made absolutely no demands on life, merely accepting and appreciating anything life sent his way.  I felt like I was sitting next to St. Francis.

 

We pulled into Pasco in late afternoon and the other two guys rolled off the boxcar and stumbled over toward what looked like another hobo jungle on the far side of the yard.  

“We don’t need to get off,” Perry said. “The train won’t stay here long, just add a few cars, and then head out again.”  Looking across the tracks, I saw a scrawny little man emerge from the group across the yard and hobble over toward us.  As he got closer, Perry stood up and said, “By golly I know him.  That’s old Frank!”

He hopped down from the car to greet him.  

Frank only weighed about 80 pounds, and was wearing a short sleeve shirt, a plastic hospital band circling his thin right wrist.  

“Where you coming from?” said Perry as he shook Frank’s hand.

“Aw, I jest ran away from the hospital,” said Frank.  “I had a heart attack last week, but I’m feeling a little better now and I want to get down ‘n see my sister in Stockton one last time ‘fore I kick off.”

He was too weak to climb up into the car, so Perry and I hoisted him up and made him comfortable.  The wind had come up and it was beginning to feel a little chilly, so I asked him if he wasn’t a bit cold.

“Oh no,” he said.  “I’m okay.”

I had an extra jacket in my duffle-bag, an army dress coat I’d picked up at a surplus store in Denver, so I dug it out and gave it to him.  When he put it on he looked really funny, like a little boy in his dad’s military uniform.  We started calling him “Colonel.”

Frank and Perry had evidently been traveling buddies many times before, and they seemed happy to be reunited for what was probably going to be Frank’s last trip.  I started to worry about how they were going to keep from freezing once night came, since neither of them had a sleeping bag and Perry’s old blanket wasn’t going to keep him warm once the sun went down.  

“Y’see that cardboard stapled on the walls of the car?” said Perry.  “They put that up there to protect the freight from bumping against the ribs of the car.  We just pull some down and wrap ourselves up in it.  Makes a good warm bed.” 

I had never been around truly humble people before.  These two were humble in the deepest sense of the word - “humus” - earth, soil, dirt.  They lived dirt.  They carried it on their bodies, ate it in their food, slept in it, breathed it, wore it woven into the fabric of their clothes.  “Dirt thou art and unto dirt thou shalt return.”  They were returning, day-by-day, to the basic stuff of creation.  And they never complained.  They merely accepted their lot and somehow managed to survive on the gratuity of nature, like the flowers of the field, or the birds of the air.

This survival of simple human beings is a mysterious, almost miraculous process whose creativity and grace become apparent only after one gets far removed from the facile aesthetics of city, suburb, and mall.  Only when a man is stripped of possessions, role, and dignity, does he discover this faculty for essential survival and begin to look to the dirt for his sustenance. Then he begins to find magic in the dust.  

That first morning in Spokane, Perry and I were ambling through the field that skirted the rail yard when he stopped and nudged something with his shoe.  It was a lid to an old five-gallon paint can, flattened and crinkled by multiple truck tires, half buried under the sandy grit of the road.  He bent down and picked it up, turning it over gently in his hands.

“Ya know?  A feller could clean this up and make hisself a pretty good fryin’ pan.”   

Consider the birds of the air.  They neither sow nor reap, yet your Heavenly Father feeds them.  For the likes of Perry and Frank, meals came from dumpsters or from Salvation Army kitchens, never from the sources familiar to the rest of us.  

The next morning, we pulled into a train yard and I spotted a small café across the street.  I invited them to join me for a cup of coffee while we waited for the train to attach additional cars.  

“Oh no!” they both said. “We can’t go in there.”

“Sure you can!” I said. “I’ve got money.  It’s my treat.”

“Oh no, we never go in places like that.”

I realized then that these two were truly living in a separate universe, parallel but isolated from my own.  They considered themselves an underclass, unworthy of any establishment populated by normal people.

I walked over to the café and bought three coffees to go and we drank them sitting on the tracks.

It was Saturday now and, as our train rolled down through Northern California, Perry and Frank were in a quandary.

“You know, Frank, that sally in Sacramento puts out an awfully good Sunday supper,” Perry said. “Maybe we should get off there this afternoon and stay over for supper tomorrow.  Or I guess we could just go straight through to Stockton tonight.”

“Well, you know, Perry,” says Frank, “I’m not sure the sally in Stockton even serves on Sundays.”

“Oh, yer right,” says Perry. “Well, what if we ride down to Stockton this afternoon and find out if they serve on Sundays. If they don’t, we can just hop the train back up to Sacramento tomorrow morning and eat supper there.  ‘Cuz we know they always put out a good Sunday supper.”   

Sacramento was my destination, so I got off there and said goodbye to Perry and Frank.  As I walked off the tracks and waved them on their way, a rich sadness settled over me. I knew I’d never see them again, but somehow it was all right.  The three of us had bonded in a uniquely spiritual way that didn’t demand permanence.  We had shared empty space and time, devoid of expectations, possessions, and commitments.  We had simply survived together, and that was enough.  More than enough.