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| 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.”
