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11. RIDING THE RAILS
I've decked the tops of flying cars
That leaped across the night;
The long and level coaches skimmed
Low, like a swallow's flight.
Close to the sleet-bit blinds I've clung
Rocking on and on;
All night I've crouched in empty cars
That rode into the dawn,
Seeing the ravelled edge of life
In jails, on rolling freights
And learning rough and ready ways
From rough and ready mates.
Home from China, Harry Kemp paid a visit to his home, his family having moved, in the meantime, to Kansas. He agreed, after much persuasion by his father, to take a turn at High School, but after two years the lure of the wanderer claimed him again. He made a tramp on foot through the Genessee Valley, a copy of Christina Rossetti-- his latest love-- in his pocket. When fall came, Harry took to riding the rails, and his career as the Hobo Poet began.
"I and my buddy, a short thick-set Scandinavian, were both "gaycats"-- that is tramps, not above doing occasional work while in transit on the road. We joined the farm hands during haying time, or picked up a week or two of bed and board in return for harvesting the fall crop of fruit. Together, we drifted along the seacoast South to San Diego, back again to Santa Barbara, then sauntered over to San Bernardino -- "San Berdu", as the tramps call it.
"Chuck Hanson advised me not to worry about lice. 'You'll soon get used to 'em, not feel 'em biting at all.' All you have to do is 'boil up" once in a while'-- that is, take off your clothes and boil them, a piece at a time, to kill the vermin. These and other personal chores the well-groomed tramp more or less regularly performs, were usually attended to during stop-overs in camps and jungles. It was here I learned to shave with the aid of a broken bit of whiskey glass. The toughest method of shaving I ever saw, though, was when one old veteran of the road rubbed another's face with the rough side of half a brick!
"Traveling along with us that second summer, was a fat ruddy-faced alcoholic ex-cook-- the presiding enius of the gang. On days we were in jungle, he would jumble up all the mixable portions of food, we had begged or stolen, into a big tin washboiler, which he had rescued from the dump outside of town. He stewed up quite a palatable mess which he called 'slum' or 'slumgullion.' For plates we used old tomato cans hammered flat; for knives and forks, our fingers, pocket knives, or chips of wood.
"One afternoon, our leader and cook mysteriously disappeared, and returned rolling a whole barrel of beer into camp, which he had stolen during the previous night from the back of a saloon, and hidden in the nearby bushes. Needless to say, there was a roaring good time in the jungle that night, and several fights.... 'Slopping up' is the tramp term for getting drunk.
"Summer time is no cinch for the bindlestiff, but when the cold days of autumn come along, then his troubles really begin. On chilly nights we put up at the freight yards, crawling into some empty box cars, the more in one car the better, for the animal heat of our bodies served to
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