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!]



                    

Zaxxon Galaxian's Extra Life - A 700 Hoboes Story

Zaxxon Galaxian was made of magic.  And water.  And carbon.  Mostly water, actually.  And some nitrogen and other stuff.  Okay, to be clear, he was composed of water, carbon, nitrogen and some elemental odds and ends, but he was made of magic.

In school in 1927, when the other boys were drawing stick-figures doing The Charleston, Zaxxon was doodling 3/4-view industrial landscapes in 256-colors.  And none of that simplistic vertical scrolling for young Zax, either.  It may have been good enough for his father, back in the stone age, but these days it was all about scrolling right-to-left, rendered to appear 3-dimensional.

Mr. Galaxian

Zaxxon, age 8

By the time he turned fourteen, Zaxxon had already known loss.  His mother died of pneumonia when he was ten, and at thirteen his father, then a blurry after-image of his once-vibrant self, was blown up three times by marauding space wasps.  But by then, Zax had also begun to realize that he had a gift.  In 1934, he ran away from the East St. Louis Industrial Arts School For Boys, carrying nothing but his beloved colored pencils and crayons, a pad of cheap sketch paper and a hat.  His mother had always made him wear a hat from the first week in September through mid-June, so he was sure he'd need it.

Like many hoboes, he kept mostly to himself.  He was tall, but thin and not very strong, and he knew nothing of fighting.  His self-defense was centered primarily around the avoidance of others.  He wandered east and found a stretch of woods and rails along the snaking Potomac River border between western Maryland and northeastern West Virginia, a few miles east of Paw Paw.  

He hunted small game, fished what little could be fished from that part of the river, and hid in the hills above a nearly-nonexistent place called Magnolia.  There, he worked on his craft.  When he ran out of paper or drawing implements, he'd venture into Paw Paw or hop a train to Cumberland and conjure up some more.

"Conjuring" was Zaxxon's term for his unique brand of panhandling and supply-replenishment.  He would go into town and find a park or a school - someplace with children - and he would trade his artwork for fresh paper, pencils, crayons, occasionally pennies or a new hat.  He was comfortable around children.  He trusted them, and they trusted him.  His hard life had spared his naive and loving heart, and in many ways he remained utterly childlike.  Kids could sense that.  Sometimes, the older children pitied him, but most found him fascinating, and absolutely adored him.  They came to look forward to his visits as though he were Santa Claus himself.

Their parents, many of whom were railroad men, were less trusting.  To them, he was just a creepy man who was too old - and far too filthy - to be skulking about the playgrounds giving weird drawings to their kids.  Once, a group of men set upon him with furious fists and one set of brass knuckles, and fractured his skull, leaving him for dead in an alley.  A few months later, he tried a little conjuring in Hancock, Maryland.  He was stabbed by two men who took exception to his fraternizing with their children, and left face-down and unconscious in a creek.  The following winter, he was pretty sure he froze to death in his makeshift tent near Magnolia.

He was well-aware of the three-life limit that afflicted his family on his father's side, so he knew that he must have somehow earned that elusive "free guy," the bonus life.  He was not about to squander it.

It took him a year to find a job in a department store in Cumberland, another year to earn the trust and support of a benefactor and two more years to find his way to the front of a classroom, teaching art to sixth-to-ninth-graders.  The magic in his drawings inspired the kids of that mountain railroad town for the next thirty-two years.  His students were never quite able to explain the magic of their teacher's works of art, except to say that to look at one was to fall into another universe, complete, moving and real.  

Orion Nebula

The grownups never quite warmed to him, nor he to them, but he was at least accepted.  The kids, until the day he died for the last time, loved him.

Zaxxon Galaxian and his gift had found a home.