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I went walkin' out last summer,
Tryin' to find a breath of air.
I went walkin' in the mountains.
A friend had told me I'd find you there.
- David Crosby, The Mountain Song

It wasn't a difficult choice to move outside of the New York metro area, this past Summer. I still work and play in the city of cities, but the day-to-day bullshit had just gotten to be too much. I could give you a litany of all of my own troubles, trials, and travails, but that's really not the point. After the Bowery became far more "Bowery Bar" than "McSorley's", and after McSorley's became more sports bar and tourist trap than "McSorley's", it just became apparent that if I was to continue being a Great Hobo I must do what all hoboes do after a while - pack up and go. Pack up and go, I did - all the way to upstate New York. I kept my job in the city, giving me reason to keep my life here going, but it opened up some doors to explore other avenues. No, this doesn't mean the Great Hoboes is going to be dead and gone as a site or movement, and it doesn't mean that we will be any less about the neighborhoods that made me and the rest of the Hoboes what they are; it just means that it is important that we keep ourselves locked into the mindset that we cultivated, instead of moving with the times, down the slippery slope of gentrification.

Man, I shudder whenever I use the word 'gentrification' - it just brings back awful college memories of kids from Connecticut lamenting the plight of fishermen from Da Nang suffering under the burden of wearing quality cotton pants made by Old Navy and eating Big Macs. The life that I'd want? Hell no, but how dare some snot-nosed 17-year-old think he should dictate the life decisions of somebody from a culture completely alien to said snot-nose's high school days in Greenwich, Connecticut… Likewise, it really isn't my place to dictate what Bowery culture should be all about. If the bar owners want to serve chocolate martinis instead of Lowenbrau, well that's their deal. I'll take my business elsewhere, and hope that a new bar replaces that one; one that serves Pabst. Heck, I've followed exiled bartenders from pub bars that went down the shitter to their replacement pub bars, before. I just hope that this pattern of emulating Stuff magazine instead of McSweeney's does an about face sooner than later - there're only about 3 bars in my new home town after all…

So, while most of the Hoboes have remained within the official borders of New York City, plying their trades, and keeping abreast of the latest and greatest, what does a Hobo in the Bowery diaspora of the lower Catskills do? Well, shortly after moving upstate, I discovered the floating beauty of Greenwood Lake - a Wobegonian once-upon-a-time-Borscht-Belt resort, the drive-in movie theatre in Warwick, the Barnsider home-cookin' restaurant in Sugar Loaf, and the wide expanses of the Appalachian Trail. Don't worry, kids, I won't start quoting Thoreau on you. But, I'll start reporting back to you about non-Urban hobo-ing every once in a while. Nothing's changed; I've just taken the blinders off, allowing me to look for Hoboes outside the concrete jungle. Believe you me, they exist. Now, lest you think I've lost my edge, there's about a half-dozen pints of Lowenbrau at the Karpaty Pub on 2nd Avenue with my name floating somewhere at the bottom of 'em. See you all in all the old familiar places, as well as a few new ones that have fresher air and stricter blue laws.