Constantly Sobbing Forrester Has A Moment

Point of Rocks - E. Baldwin, Architect - photo by Joe

Constantly Sobbing Forrester was lost. Again. He had been striding confidently along the B&O tracks through Harpers Ferry, across the Potomac and southward into Brunswick. He turned left onto Maple Avenue and was about to take the next left at Potomac Street, where he knew of a church that never failed to provide a bite to eat and a glass of milk to a hungry hobo.

Suddenly, he had no idea if left was the way to go, or right. Or was it straight for another block, up the hill to "A" Street? He stood there on the corner, turning slowly and studying the street and its buildings and storefronts, and just when he thought he had his bearings, a terrible panic buzzed through him. Not only could he not discern which was the right direction to go to reach the - what was he looking for? Diner? Hobo jungle? Church? Before he could come to terms with not remembering that, a second, heavier panic wave hit him, nearly knocking him off his feet. How did I get here? I can't even retrace my steps, he thought. I can't remember ANYTHING. He sat on the curb and sobbed.

At sixty-one, Forrester was impressively old, for a hobo. It was October of 1940, and he'd been a card-carrying member of the nation's wandering poor (note: they did not carry cards) for twenty years. He was born to a Civil War vet - would never divulge whether Union or confederate - and his nurse-turned-bride, in 1879. He carried with him vivid memories of ice skating on a frozen pond, and wintertime trips to the outhouse, and the sound of chalk on slate. Clear as day, he saw his mother, young and strong, showing him how to blow out the candle on his birthday potato pancake. He could still feel the sting of his father's belt, from that time when he unthinkingly swiped a few bits from the collection bowl at church. He was so little, and he saw coins, and grabbed them. Why? Why did that warrant such an assault. Things were never quite the same, after that.

He knew every curve of the B&O tracks, from DC and Baltimore to Cleveland and beyond. He could tell you what kind of train was coming - and the name of the engineer - from the signature of its whistle as it echoed off the hills of the Potomac Highlands. But he couldn't tell you how he got to this intersection, in this town he'd visited a hundred times. Lately, he was sobbing more often than not. His body was still strong - well, strong enough - but his mind had gone. He could see his childhood and his mum and his pretty, doting sisters with sparkling clarity, but he couldn't remember the steps leading from the train tracks to this spot, a hundred yards away. 

It was beyond cruel. Forrester sobbed, and sobbed. After that, he went on sobbing. After an hour - or maybe forty-five seconds - a strong but caring hand on his shoulder.

"Friend," a voice said, neither a question nor a statement.

"Sob," Forrester sobbed.

"Friend, you seem lost," said the stranger. "Let's get you back on track, before trouble finds us both..."

"Okay..." Forrester felt himself rise to his feet.

"This way," the stranger said. "Back to the tracks. I saw you earlier. Looks like you were headed south..."

Forrester shrugged.

"Toward Baltimore? Or maybe DC?"

Forrester knew those words. Those were cities. Small, but with many trains. He nodded.

"Let's go," urged the stranger. "Are you okay? Can you walk?"

Walk, thought Forrester. I know what walk means. I understand! He nodded again.

The stranger led the old hobo back to the railroad, and they walked southward (which here, in railroad terms, is "east") for two hours, past the east end of Brunswick yard, and along the Potomac past Catoctin creek and round the big curve to Point Of Rocks. He asked the old man questions, and the old man shrugged or said "I don't remember." 

Forrester sobbed off and on, as they trudged onward. He knew that these rails were his home. He knew what a hobo was, and that he was counted among them, but for a million dollars he wouldn't have been able to tell you how he had come to join their ranks - or why.  But then they rounded the rocky outcrop that demarked the north end of Point Of Rocks, and he saw in the distance the churchlike structure that was its train station.

"Baldwin," Forrester managed to say, between sobs.

"Beg pardon?" said his new friend.

"That's Point Of Rocks station," Forrester declared, wiping away some tears, "Designed by Ephraim Francis Baldwin. You can tell by the roofing, and the way it looks like a church. Devout Christian, he was. I'm not - but I can feel his faith in his designs. He did Kensington and Bryn Mawr and all kinds of other stations. I remember this place."

They walked on in silence until they reached the bricked passenger platforms of the station, and Forrester stopped and gazed up again at the church-y train station, illuminated by an autumn sunset, with a pile of cottony clouds behind its spire. "I know this place," he said. "I don't know how I got here, but I know where I am. This is good."

The stranger looked up at the structure and tried to see what the old hobo, who was once again sobbing, although now somewhat differently, could see.

"This is good," he agreed.

Troglodytic Amory Funt's New Roommate

Scram, Norfolk & Western - this is a B&O story! Photo by Joe

"Did hoboes ever establish a kind of home base," I'm never asked. If only someone - preferably someone pretty and/or young - would ask me that. I would then have the life's-trajectory-altering opportunity to say, "Yep." Or maybe, "Oh, you betcha, ya."

Amory Funt's road from boy to hobo was just like most others of his time. We've heard it repeated so often, it's hardly worth mentioning. Fourteen-year old boy wakes in his family's Adamstown, Maryland farmhouse to find a note from his parents, curtly informing him that they and his sisters are fed up with his constant throat-clearing and have left him there. "Don't try to find us," the note closes, followed by the post-script: "Oh, and you'll need to find a place to live, as the bank will be foreclosing on the house any minute, now. Bye!" 

Sound familiar? That's what I thought.

So he gathered his stuff and went. But his family left a lot of their belongings behind, and even at fourteen he understood the utility of a couple of pots and pans, some extra blankets, and tools and oil lamps and candles and all sorts of whatnot. He knew that as soon as he left the house, all those useful things were fair game. It was 1930, and if opportunistic poor folks didn't find this trove, the bank would be there soon enough. So he found a cave in a hard-to-reach spot near the confluence of Catoctin Creek and the Potomac River, and he spent the next 72 straight hours hauling cartloads of household materiel to his new home. On his final visit to the house, there was a new note, informing him that his parents had returned to retrieve some of their belongings, and something about wanting to talk about it. He scribbled "Don't try to find me," across the page and was gone.

For the next two years, Amory was technically not a hobo. He wandered the Baltimore and Ohio, from Sykesville to Point of Rocks on the old main line, and from Harpers Ferry down to Barnsville, on the new metropolitan branch, but he wasn't truly homeless. He just lived in a cave. It was the best-furnished and equipped cave on the eastern seaboard, but it was still a cave. He told other hoboes he encountered that he sheltered in a cave, but was careful not to give away the location, and was doubly vigilant about ensuring he was never followed there. He also sold its contents, so for a while he wasn't even poor. He would sell an old lamp or woodworking tool, and then eat for a month or more. This system worked for him, and helped to ease his transition to real hobo-ing.

There weren't a lot of other hoboes along this stretch of the B&O, and most of the few he met were "city 'boes," from Baltimore or DC or Rockville, so Amory Funt found it difficult to relate to them. But in 1934, about two years after he'd sold the last of the things he was willing to sell (he kept a pitcher and two glasses, a pot, an iron skillet, a couple of blankets, cooking utensils, and a tree saw), he met Fossilwise Opie Fingernail. Opie had heard of Amory, and it was he who was the first to share with Amory the hobo moniker he didn't even know he had.

"Do you get sore when people call you 'Troglodytic Amory Funt,'" he asked, almost in passing, as they walked the tracks between Tuscarora and Point of Rocks, not two hours after they'd met, further down the line in Dickerson.

"WHAT??? Troglodytic - as in like a neandertal or something?" Amory demanded.

"Not exactly. It's just that you always tell folks you have a cave that you kinda live in, is all. So they figure it's like you're a cave man, I suppose. You know - in the literal sense."

"Ah. I see. That's fair. I don't love it, though. So, how'd you get tagged with Fossilwise Opie Fingernail, and what's your story, friend?"

"Name really is Opie. Last name was Huffnail, but I have fingernails that could dig through the walls of Alcatraz..."

"What's Alcatraz," Amory interrupted.

"It's a prison in the middle of San Francisco Bay. Thick stone walls. No one's ever escaped. Anyhow, I grew up on a farm in Lusby, near Calvert Cliffs, down on the Chesapeake. Starting in second grade, I loved fossils, and I read every book I could find about them. Every chance I got, I was down on the beach near the cliffs, looking for shark's teeth and anything I thought might be a fossil. I became an expert on the subject. I still have about two pounds' worth in my bindle sack. Hence the name Fossilwise."

"Why ain't you a college professor or something? What happened," Troglodytic Amory asked.

"Same story as any hobo," Opie sighed, "My mother took off - literally - with some hot shot zeppelin pilot from Patuxent Station, my father had a shoe-tying accident and lost a fingernail, which got infected and before long he was dead - from running over himself with his own tractor..."

"Same ol' story," Amory nodded thoughtfully. "Boy, if I had a nickel..."

"Yeah, so that was five years ago, and I've been walking the rails and hopping trains ever since."

Troglodytic Amory and Fossilwise Opie became friends, sharing the common ground of their farm-based childhoods and identical hobo origin stories. They walked the B&O as far  east as Baltimore and westward to Cumberland, and did all those hobo-y things that hoboes did. Eventually, Opie talked Amory into letting him share his cave - infrequently at first, but with increasing regularity over time. They became an odd, mostly homeless pair of roommates. 

Until.

One day, Amory had left Opie asleep in the cave and walked to Brunswick to try to score a free meal at one of its churches. He was unsuccessful, and returned at dusk, finding an exhausted and filthy Fossilwise Opie Fingernail sitting on a tree stump outside the cave, proudly holding up what appeared to be a tiny stone skeleton for Amory's inspection and approval. 

"Keen, pal," Amory affirmed. "Where'd you... find... that..." He looked inside the cave that had been his home for years. The once-smooth floors were rutted and full of holes. The walls were riddled with divots. There were little piles of loose soil and rocks littering the entire space. "What did you do?"

"Sorry, buddy. I've been looking for this trilobite for years. Just needed you to leave me here alone long enough to finally dig. I hope you understand. It's the best-preserved specimen anyone's found yet. I didn't mean to destroy your cave, but the piece wasn't exactly where the old Indian said it would be, and one thing led to another..."

"Take your rock and go," Amory spat. "Are you even a hobo?"

"I am not," Dr. Opie Huffnail said. "Again, sorry about your, um, cave."

Amory though for a moment. “Oh, that’s alright, professor. You can stay and help me get my floor smoothed out. Fair enough?”

“Sure.”

“And when we’re done, I’ll kill you with a rock.”

Elffriend Weingarten Spends Christmas

The Church of St. Christmas - Photo by [Maris], 1998

The End.

Okay, jumping the gun a little bit, there. Firstly, know my hobo world... [HERE]. Then, come in, and know me better, friend! There's no fire, but help yourself to a grog and tankard, and have a sit and a listen. K?

Winifred Weingarten left home on a Tuesday - February 11th, 1930 - a cacophony of poverty-fueled domestic violence and home-brewed drunkenness roiling behind her as she strode numbly away, as a too-cool action hero might stride toward the camera with Armageddon exploding behind him (which here means her). She was twenty at the time - on the cusp of spinsterhood.

"Why'd you leave, again?" Molly Bewigged asked. Again.

"I told you," Elffriend (nee Winifred) Weingarten deadpanned, "I was on the cusp of spinsterhood."

"Yeah, yeah - spinsterhood," Molly said, having long ago given up trying to prevent her eyes from rolling like locomotive wheels at such utterances from her occasional friend. "Big deal. Aren't we all spinsters, by now? I mean why did you really leave? What actually happened? Did your pa murder your ma, or visa-versa? My parents were buried alive under a hundred feet of dirty coal at the Allentown Steel Works. That's why I left home. Just tell me what happened to you, Weingarten."

Elffriend closed her eyes and calculated the most efficient way to answer her friend. She loved words, and loathed wasting them. A minute later, she said, "I got bored."

"You got what?"

"Bored?" Elffriend said with a tone that managed to convey her concern that Molly might not have known what the word meant.

"Bored? You got bored? The markets crashed. Our fathers all lost their jobs. Everyone went broke overnight, and hit the bread line at the same time - basically the whole world went to pot - and you got bored?"

Elffriend shrugged. "I didn't have to go. I was tough enough to handle Pop. I wanted to go. I loved trains and I loved men and I had heard stories of the hobo nation - and ofttimes I was so very bored, so I grabbed a few things and took to the rails. That's all there is to it."

"Oh, your poor, poor mother," Molly sighed, shaking her head with a heavy sadness. "We have to fix this." Molly was frequently a fixer, and her inability to fix Elffriend was vexing her. She had fixed the issue of her own abusive father by "accidentally" crushing him under fifty tons of anthracite. The guilt she endured for inadvertently including her innocent mother in said coal-alanche had been fixed with homemade hooch. She had then fixed her ensuing economic predicament by hitting the road at nineteen and learning to survive as a member of the wandering work-seekers known as hoboes. Now, fourteen years later, with the second world war dragging its way toward the end of 1944, she found herself desperate to fix her misguided friend.

"Whaddaya mean, 'fix?'" Elffriend barked, as she and Molly stepped carefully across the B and O trestle over the Potomac river at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, accompanied only by the soft, cold silence of falling Christmas Eve snow. "I left Mother surrounded by love. She had twin four-year olds, and--"

"Oh sweet Jesus, Elffriend! I forgot about the twins. You left her with no one to help with twin toddlers and a depressed, unemployed husband!"

"She had my brother. James was twelve when I left, and he was a better helper than I ever was. Mother was fine. She was probably glad to see me go. Can we change the subject? And pick up the pace - I want to make it to Frederick in time for the Maryland Hobo Co-op Christmas Jamboree and Hootenanny, tomorrow, so I can spend Christmas with some men."

"Molly Bewigged shook her head, sending a small shower of snowflakes swirling from her red and white Christmas wig. "We're not going to Frederick, sweetie."

Elffriend stopped. "What?"

Molly continued taking cautious steps along the tracks, looking through the ties at the frozen moonlit river below. "You heard me."

"What are you up to, Mol? We'll never make it to Baltimore by tomorrow."

"Not going to Baltimore, either."

"That's a relief. I thought for a second that you were going to try to take me home, and I've told you many times, there is no home. I tried to go back in 1935, and my family had moved away to who knows where. And even if they were still there, for one thing it's too late..."

"Never too late," Molly interrupted.

"...and for another thing, it's none of your beeswax," Elffriend insisted. "So, where is there to go that's better than a camp full of men?"

"Brunswick."

"Is there a hobo jamboree in Brunswick?"

"Nope. Come on. Keep walking," Molly said.

"Hootenanny?"

"Let's just say there's a Christmas dinner, hobo-friendly, and we're going and that's that."

"There better be men," Elffriend muttered. She felt a tiny warm flicker of relief at the thought of ending this hike twelve miles sooner than she had planned. She was tired, and she was cold. Tired and cold were nothing new to a hobo with fourteen winters on the road, but over the past couple of years, Elffriend had become increasingly aware of the cumulative effect of so many colds, so much tired. As much as she still adored the freedom and empowerment of the hobo life, she couldn't continue to ignore the nagging notion inside her that other lives were a possibility. She'd never be a daughter or a sister again, and probably not a wife or mother, but maybe she could teach, or cook or clean or write books or invent things or fix tanks and airplanes, or run for office on a pro-hobo platform. Just entertaining such thoughts for the first time in so many years gave her to know that change was not only possible, but actually desirable.

She didn't have the heart to admit any of this to Molly, however, because Molly was always adamant that there was no life for them but the hobo life. Going back to the world was laughably nonsensical, and she had ninety-four ways of explaining that to whomever would listen. So, hearing the words "never too late" fall from Molly's lips was disconcerting to Elffriend. On the other hand, a hobo-friendly dinner sounded a lot more Christmassy to her at the moment than did a hootenanny.

Several hours and eight miles later, the double-track main line split into quadruple tracks, before further branching into the yard at Brunswick, Maryland. "Hey Mol," Elffriend mused, "you've never told me how exactly you managed to bury your parents under a pile of coal."

"It wasn't easy," Molly said, somewhat absently. "Okay, here we are - up the hill two blocks to Mooseheart Drive..."

Elffriend followed Molly up a steep hill and along a street lined with skinny houses - basically row houses that didn't touch - until they reached a red one with a driveway and a 1939 Hudson that looked as if it had once been an expensive car. They stashed their bags in the bushes, then climbed six squeaky stairs to the front porch. Molly turned to Elffriend and nervously set about straightening her hair and coat, and wiping dirt from her face.

"What the heck are you doing, Mol? Lay off me!"

Molly rapped sharply on the front door, then kissed her friend on the cheek, leapt from the porch, and scampered off behind the bushes. "Good luck, sweetie. I'm sorry. Merry Christmas! Good luck!"

"What the-- Molly Bewigged! What did you do?" Elffriend heard footfalls inside, approaching the door. At the same instant, she noticed the brass door knocker, on which was engraved, WEINGARTEN. "Aw, shi--"

The door swung open. Molly watched from behind the hedge, as a man in his thirties in an Army uniform emerged and stared at Elffriend for a moment before wrapping her in a huge bear hug, soon to be joined on the porch by a white-haired man and woman, then a couple of additional adults and at least a half-dozen children. There were gasps, there was crying, and laughter, and the entire ensemble retreated into the house.

Molly stood on tiptoes, straining to see over the bushes and into the front windows. She saw only shapes moving behind foggy glass, but the shapes appeared to be hugging a lot. After a few minutes, the door opened and Elffriend Weingarten emerged. Molly resisted the impulse to dive straight back into the bushes, opting instead to stand on the front walk, smiling sheepishly at her friend. "Don't kill me," she said.

"Oh relax, Mol," Elffriend said, smiling and shaking her head. "This is the most wonderful family."

Molly relaxed and let go of a massive sigh of relief. "Hooray!"

"I mean, it's not my family, but they're really nice."

"What? That's not your family? Oh no! I'm so sorry. How did this happen?" Molly was mortified.

Elffriend laughed long and hard. "I'm joking, Mol. Of course they're my family - but you had that coming to you. Come on in - they want to meet you."

"Oh, you stinker!"

"Come in. You were right. It's not too late. Can I ask you something, though?"

"Sure, I guess."

"How did you find them?"

Molly Bewigged shook her head. "Well, it wasn't easy - especially since I didn't know that your first name is Winifred. How did you end up with a hobo name like Elffriend, anyway?"

"Oh, I don't know, Mol," Elffriend sighed, "opium is a hell of a drug."

They stepped through the doorway and into the warm glow of an entirely new world.

"Whoa," Molly said quietly, surveying their surroundings.

"I know," Winifred Weingarten said. "Merry Christmas..."

I'm back, I guess. I was spurred to action not only by this week's Two For Tuesday writing prompts (ofttime and/or frequently) from my friends at Our Write Side, but also by the return to blogging of my web-based friend Kelly at Naked Girl In A Dress. Writers gotta write, right?

Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and here's to our collective survival in 2018... 

Sand On The Tracks - A Bum Finds His Beach

It started in a rail yard in 1930...

East Brunswick, Maryland

A hobo was being escorted from the property for the umpteenth and final time.  Scabpicker Rump, whose name is not important, had worked for the B&O, and had helped build and maintain some of the bridges and viaducts that carried the rails over the creeks and rivers that feed the Potomac.  He had been fired for insubordination.

His parents had abandoned him when he was ten, because they had grown tired of his "unflagging need for supper, every single night."  He later learned that they had both been killed in a bizarre ice skating accident the police had labeled "suspicious."  

As he was kicked out of Brunswick yard that chilly fall evening, Lemmy, the burly watchman, who Rump had known for years, gave him a piece of advice that would change his life.  "I know times are tough, old friend, but if you're gonna be a hobo, you gotta head south in the winter - like the snowbirds that migrate from New York City to Florida every fall.  And I hear they still need labor to maintain the FEC's Key West extension."

"That's a mighty long way from here, Lemmy," Scabpicker sighed.

"Think about it, buddy.  Parts of it get washed out by hurricanes every other year, seems to me, and it's all bridges.  They could probably use a man like you."

"Thanks for the tip.  I'll think about it."

Three months of hard hobo-ing later, Scabpicker Rump was working again, helping to maintain, among three dozen others, this bridge...

The old Bahia Honda Bridge, connecting Bahia Honda Key with Spanish Harbor Key - Photo by [Maris]

It didn't take long for him to prove the old "once a hobo, always a hobo" adage I just made up, and within a year, he was fired - for insubordination.  But he had fallen in love with both the Overseas Railroad and the beach.  He occasionally stowed away on trains, but mostly he walked the rails and "his bridges" between Key Largo and Key West.  His hobo name was amended slightly, and he came to be known, down here at the end of road, as Scabpicker Sandy Rump.

And he sat.  He sat on the sand - actually crushed coral, in most cases - and drank and fished and stole coconuts and stone crabs.  Gradually, his hobo life transformed into that of a beach bum.  When the Labor Day hurricane of 1935 destroyed most of Henry Flagler's beloved overseas railroad - this time beyond repair - Scabpicker Sandy Rump stayed in Key West, where he lived his remaining years in challenging but happy homelessness.  

In 1937, his old friend Lemmy received a long, rambling letter from Scabpicker.  Much of it was nearly incomprehensible, drunken blather, but it had one paragraph of clarity:

"People come to these beaches and marvel at the white sand and the iridescent water, but I hardly pay those things any mind.  I love the AIR at the land's end.  I find it utterly delicious.  I am reborn with every breath of it.  It's salty and warm, sure, but there's more to it, down here.  At the beach, even with hardly a wave in sight, the air is filled with sound.  At some beaches, when the wind turns around, the air is filled with sea life aromas that send the snowbirds scurrying back to their hotels, but I love that rotten smell; to me, it smells of life.  During Key West summers, the air is heavy and sticky and the clouds get unruly, but I love that, too.  For it's not just salt or heat or fish, nor is it simply that this place is becoming a playground.  There is something in the air here that I feel blessed and privileged to sense.  This air, my friend, is absolutely soaked through with MAGIC."

Magic Key West Air

[This post was written in response to a prompt - a writing prompt - from my friends at Studio Thirty Plus.  Please stop by and check out some of the fine writers who hang out at S30P!]