Hobo Lifestyles #3 - Hoboes on the Road

In Search of Dignity in America

by Tyler Carey

This little cabin in a little Yankee town, on the edge of a lake, just a few miles from the Canadian border, is where my family went on many vacations when I was a kid. Around when my brother and I were in high school, we decided that we didn't want to have any part of a family vacation anymore, and we stopped going. In hindsight (always 20/20), doing summer jobs was a worse choice than swimming in a lake and hiking. What had always been a subtle charm of this place, though, was how removed it was from trash culture and all the bullshit that by age eight, I already thought was tired. My brother and I used to hole up in the local five and dime for an hour at a time, reading old issues of Creepy, Eerie and The Flash. It may have been 1982 or 1983, but back issues from the 70s were still on the stands. Progress was not an appreciated ideal up here.

Was is the operative word. As I pulled off the highway, last week, and onto what was once a barely paved one lane each way road, I immediately noticed Duane Reade drug stores and a McDonald's. There were two chain drug stores across the street from each other. In a town of only a few thousand people they needed not one, but two chain drug stores. Slowing my car in between them, I was reminded of Lewis Black's now classic bit about the end of the universe existing between two Starbucks. I was also staggered to see a bar that was still open at 10 o'clock at night. I guess not all progress is bad. The cabin at the top of the lake was now equipped with a digital satellite. No more cheap UHF programs from Quebec, I suppose. I now had almost 1000 channels at my disposal, to distract me from the view, the lake, the hiking trails, and the need to do absolutely nothing on my vacation. I turned on the TV, and a late night rebroadcast of Larry King was on. Yikes. Believe me, I didn't want to see his skeletal face at all over my vacation. I swore off the TV for the rest of the duration, right then. A few days later, during a torrential downpour that lasted ten hours, I decided that I needed some sort of distraction. I flipped on the tube, but found that the satellite was incapable of picking up a signal during a torrential downpour - a horrid irony that reminded me of the kind of sick logic that had prompted me to take my first vacation in a long while.

The first morning up at the cabin, I dove into the lake for a nice swim. The water was warm, and I was surprised that considering it was almost noon, nobody else was in the lake. On my way out of the water, I tripped over a signpost that I had missed on my way in. It said something to the effect of "Warning: Don't swim here. Lake contaminated. You could get sick. Have a Nice Day. - Board of Health." I don't recall the exact wording, but you get the gist of how professional an operation we were dealing with. After showering intensely for an entire hour, I pulled on some clothes and went walking up the road. I recalled my old man walking towards the town hall and package store in a pair of corduroys and a flannel when I was quite small. On the way up the hill, I ran into an old family friend. We shook hands, he asked about my family and I about his. "Say," I said, "Know anything about the lake?"

His face sank. "What about the lake?"

"Oh, there's some signs down there about contamination or something..."

He cut me off. "What signs?"

"About the contamina..."

"What about the lake?" he asked.

"Oh," I said.

After a few moments of silence, he explained. "Some dingbat decided he'd do us all a good service by testing the water for bacteria, pollution…that sort of thing. All reports suggest that he doesn't know what the hell he's doing."

"Did he get some test result back that was positive for something?"

"Claimed he got a high reading for e. coli, but I don't buy it. I mean, maybe he got the reading, but y'know, he took it on a windy day."

"Huh?"

"The wind was blowing towards this end of the lake, so I'd assume that all the bacteria and such blew up here, too. Wouldn't you?"

"Uh...of course."

"Yeah so, go nuts. Go swimming. Don't lose any sleep over it."

As I ran into each successive neighbor, they all said the same thing. Well not quite. Some said that the so-called "Health Supervisor" was just a volunteer. Most agreed that he was not a scientist, but a moron. Still others believed in a conspiracy theory that he was trying to drive down property prices. I'm still trying to figure out why he'd want to do that, as according to about 80% of the stories, he'd lived on the lake for years.

On my third day up, one of the neighbors asked me what I was doing that day. "I dunno," I said. "I was thinking of hiking, but it's getting a little gray."

"You know what you should do?" suggested the neighbor. "You should go to Ames."

"Is that a town or something?" I asked.

"No, it's a store in Newport [, Vermont]." He explained that it was the greatest store in the world, a cornucopia of items hitherto unavailable in these parts. He gave me directions and highly encouraged me to go. "Of course, it's not gonna be the same for you. You're not a senior."

"Huh?"

"Tuesday's senior discount day. But, even still, I'm sure you'll find some good bargains."

This New Yorker went shopping, and quickly learned that Ames is just the Walmart for those who live in towns that aren't highfalutin enough to have a Walmart. I got some tube socks, wife-beater t-shirts and boxers and retreated to the downtown of Newport.

I am a recovering hippie, and so it came to me a great surprise that I wasn't welcomed with open arms at the local vegetarian restaurants, head shops and mercantiles. As I walked into one establishment, and every barely bearded head (both male and female) looked up, I could sense their groupmind response: "Narc!" My prematurely thinning hair, In-n-Out Burger bowling shirt and khakis didn't make me look quite yuppie-ish. What was their damage? I guess I must have looked like a middle aged guy trying to look hip - what hip was like when he was twenty-something.

Sulking, I got back in my car, and drove for miles and miles, trying to regain a bit of what was lost. Back in town, I hunted for something that seemed familiar. The five and dime that had stocked all the out-of-print magazines in town was gone. The girls in the grocery store were all dressed like Britney Spears. The lake in the end was not contaminated, but there had been a good long scare that it had been. This once verdant oasis, away from American culture and man's grasp, was now grabbed by the balls. Nothing was right. It was like Bizarro vacationland.

Just earlier tonight, the night before I leave, I found a little of what I was looking for. A local bluegrass band played at an amphitheatre near the cabin. No alcoholic beverages allowed. Five dollars admission. Bring your own blanket. Two hours of better-than-Allison-Krauss bluegrass. After the show, folks chatted and smiled. There was a sense of community, and I think that's what had been absent throughout my trip. It wasn't that I had this pretentious idea that only us New Yorkers should have cable, or that the locals shouldn't have a big Kmart-type store to supply them with tube socks, fishing tackle and discount nightwear. When I focused on those individual bits, I lost sight of what I had been looking for up here. It was the folksiness with the neighbors - the genuine interest in what was going on in each other's lives. I realized that I know the names and life stories of more people up here on the rim of this lake where I hadn't been in years, than I do in my entire neighborhood near my apartment in New York. That, I think, is very hobo - this clinging to nostalgia and a culture that MTV tells us is passé, and our own activities often prevent us from enjoying. Be your own man, but try to bring us all along for the ride.