Customer Reviews

Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America's Hoboes

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As a young man, in his early 20s, Ted Conover traveled on foot and by rail over most of the Western states, first with hoboes and then with undocumented farm workers from Mexico. In his travels, he discovered two itinerant worlds, sometimes overlapping, that are often misunderstood, and invisible to most Americans. In many ways naïve and sometimes too trusting, Conover also discovered the limits of his middle class upbringing. His first two books, "Rolling Nowhere" and "Coyotes" were based on his experiences. Together they represent a kind of coming of age in America.

With little knowledge of real hobo life, Conover left college in the East, jumped a train in St. Louis and headed west. In the months that followed, he crossed and recrossed 14 states, meeting and traveling with a dozen or more modern-day hoboes. He learned from them how to survive, living off of handouts, sleeping rough, avoiding the railroad police. And he learned about loneliness and loss of identity.

There are moments of pure pleasure, a tin cup of steaming coffee on a cold high plains morning, the unbroken landscape gliding by open boxcar doors. And there are times when the romance of adventure disappears completely -- in bad weather and bad company. I greatly enjoyed this book and was often touched by Conover's youthful pursuit of independence and experience, often taking risks and crashing head-on into realities he does not anticipate. At the end, the romance of the rails has been pretty much stripped away; he's not sorry, but he's had enough.

His book "Coyotes" is a great companion to this one, as it shows him a little older and somewhat wiser, on yet another risk-taking adventure that throws him into yet another marginal world.

You've got to give Conover credit, the kid has guts. Discontent with his college studies, which seem a bit unreal and removed from real life, he decides to do some hands on research and give the life of a hobo a try. Predictably, things are not what he expects. The life of a hobo (more accurately known as a tramp) is far from romantic and most often full of hardship and danger. However, Conover also discovers a world of fascinating folks who, when push comes to shove, are not so different from the rest of us.

There is Lonny, the eternal optimist whose head is full of dreams that never materialize, Pistol Pete with his injured hand and jealous sidekick BB who propose a 3-muskateers deal and then run off with most of his gear, Forrest and Bill with whom he discovers the depths of being a tramp, and Monty who is pursued by personal ghosts.

Equally important to Conover's education is his personal transformation from a well-dressed, polite city kid to a rail smart tramp who won't let anyone take advantage of him. His hair grows, his clothes become dirty, layered and ragged, he learns to smoke and drink cheap booze, to scavange in dumpsters for leftover food and how to apply for food stamps. Even more revealing to him is how he is treated as his physical appearance changes. Suddenly people look away, a policeman finds a reason to arrest him for walking on a public sidewalk and he is treated with mistrust and even disgust when he goes into stores.

Conover emerges from his adventures with a bad case of head lice but nothing worse physically. However, it is clear that his inner psyche has undergone a transformation. He has questioned the assumptions of his middle class upbringing and dared to immerse himself in the lives of one of our country's most misunderstood groups. In writing frankly about his experiences, he forces the reader to see hoboes for who and what they really are - people like the rest of us doing the best they can to get by in this world. Such a revelation is always a bit of a shock, but in this case it was also heartening. The people in Conover's book are full of life and memorable quirks. They are real characters in every sense of the word, who force you to respond to their lives. The book is not an appeal to save the downtrodden, a psychological dissertation on the causes of poverty or a condemnation of a society that produces hoboes. It is simply one man's quest to understand another way of life and himself in doing so. You'll come away challenged, touched and questioning some of your own assumptions about how life should be lived.

The hobo has been declared extinct many times, just as
America is always declared robbed of her innocence.
However, it IS true, I can vouch as a freight-train rider
myself, that economic and legal changes have greatly
reduced the number of tramps in recent years. What Ted
did as a very young man was to explore a shadowy and
dangerous world that is full of unforgettable memories
and vast scenic rewards and to come out the other end
with a great book. He captures the longing, the pain,
the exhilaration of exploring the country in a way shunned by its
increasingly organized and comfortable citizens. He captures
the agony and durability of the (almost entirely) men who
wind up in this underworld and manage to stay alive and
sometimes even defiant. This is a great book. Along with
"Good Company" by Doug Harper (1980), it is one of the very
few testaments to freight-train riders to come from recent times.

This book is part of the "Vintage Departures" series, a group of travel books from unusual angles. Some examples are a book about gamblers and the gambling world, "back country" travel in the most remote parts of the world, inexperienced mountain climbers, and near poetry. This book tries to take a different look at our own country, as as seen through the eyes of a constant traveler, the railroad tramp.

While it does indeed describe some of America, the author quickly loses focus on the aspect of seeing American through the eyes of the hobo to looking at hobo society itself. For the most part, he does this latter quite well, except where he finally intrudes and makes a bald statement of his opinion, and what he deems to be the reader's opinion, in the last page.

Conover is refreshingly naive, in some ways, and not afraid to place his naiveté in what could be considered a work of autobiography. While I doubt someone could use this book as a manual for catching a ride on a rail, it does allow for enough detail to catch some understanding of the complexity and difficulties accompanied thereto. As a travel book, it's interesting and worth the time.

While growing up, author Ted Conover was fascinated by the hobo lifestyle which represented freedom, independence and adventure. So, in 1980, he took time off from studies at Amherst to play hobo and ride the rails through the western states, ostensibly gathering material for a senior anthropology thesis. Hopping a freight in St. Louis, he went by stages to Denver, Salt Lake City, Pocatello (Idaho), Havre (Montana), Fargo (North Dakota), Spokane, Seattle, Portland, Eugene (Oregon), Oroville (California), Elko (Nevada), Oakland, Bakersfield (California), Los Angeles, Yuma, El Paso, and back to Denver. Along the way, he meets and loosely befriends those that wander from one place to the next in search of food stamps, discarded edibles and a safe place to sleep - an autonomy and liberty gained at the sacrifice of loved ones, comfort, security, and the income from a steady 9 to 5. The most interesting was 50-year old Sheba, the rare female tramp, who'd built herself a multi-room shelter out of old tires.

Conover is a talented writer who deftly captures the "romance" of the rails in ROLLING NOWHERE.

About the scenery from a boxcar: "A twisting chasm of waterfalls, spillways, gray rock, and isolated scrub trees hanging on to the canyon walls for dear life, the Feather River Canyon was inaccessible by car, but ... spectacular by freight train."

About the grunge: "Forrest ... scratched his scalp vigorously and pulled out a small something. He flicked it away with distaste toward the other side of the tree where I slept."

About the food: "I ... shared ravenously in the fare: a bottle of cold white port, a small, dirty Baggie of lettuce, and two brown bananas." But hey, the chow isn't all bad. Evidence gathered by Ted suggests that dumpster diving in back of KFCs after closing hour yields a feast of mashed potatoes and fried chicken. And I love fried chicken. ("Say, Hon, what are we doing for our wedding anniversary dinner?" Am I a romantic devil, or what?)

The author's youthful idealism is evident at the book's conclusion when he preaches for fairer treatment of hoboes by the society through which they wander. They are, after all, victims of the system. This is several pages after he describes his welcome of a fellow traveler trying to climb aboard his moving boxcar uninvited: "He was about to leap in when I set my boot down on his fingers, hard. With a yelp, he disappeared." A nice touch, don't you think?

While reading ROLLING NOWHERE, I was struck by the author's almost complete lack of humor in describing a journey that should have afforded more opportunities for such. This is a serious piece written in a deadpan style. I wish Ted had lightened up some. There were also so many instances of deja vu that I soon realized that I'd read this book before - probably back in the early 80's when first published. I need to write myself a note that twice is more than enough such that I don't pick it up again two decades from now. Instead, maybe I can find a book about vacationing in the garbage dumps of Calcutta.

Although twenty years isnce it was first published, the book has a timeless aspect that is quite moving; essentially, Rolling Nowhere is an indictment of how the most wealthy, powerful and materialistic nation in the history of human civilization treats those who have fallen through the cracks. As taken in and enthralled as I was by the author's experiences, I was in the end more saddened than anything alse.

This is the first of Ted Conover's four books available today. I am now reading the fourth. I recommend all of them. Rolling Nowhere is a fascinating look at a fading overlooked culture. Ted's compassion for marginalized populations is evident. I'd love to meet the author and talk about his other adventures that didn't become published books.

Recently I developed an interest in freight hoppin' and the Hobo lifestyle and I began to look around for books to read. Out of the few I found here on amazon I'm glad I choose Conover's adventure.

The meat of the book consist of a young Conover traveling across the west by freight meeting tramps (as they like to refer to themselves as, rather than "Hobo") He meets a variety of different individuals, and quickly learns tramp etiquette. He also learns how to survive off the system by using "Sally's" (Salvation Army) and "Willy's" (GoodWill) along with the missions and the availability of food stamps (Which most of the other tramps use to buy alcohol with)

On one occasion he finds himself in an awkward position and is unfairly jailed because of his unruly hobo appearance. He remarks had he been neatly dressed he would of never encountered this problem. This really starts to give him an insight into the disadvantages hobos have with the law.

I used to think of the rails as a romantic place to be. The sights from the trains, the freedom, and the adventure, but Conover's journey suggest slightly otherwise. Romantic as they may seem, the rails are a dangerous place to be...other tramps, bulls, kids throwing rocks, etc. After you've been riding them for a while you're hardened and the romanticism slowly dissolves away when you're fighting to survive.

He wrote this in the late 80s as well. I imagine to hop a train these days, in 2007, would be close to suicide with the abundance of terrorism laws. It'd be interesting to see how the Hobo population has changed since then though.

Kudos to Ted Conover for having the guts, shortly after graduating college, to spend time riding the rails in the western United States to learn about the lives of modern-day hobos. He is unclear about precisely how long he spends on this adventure; I think a few months. He finds pretty much what you would expect to find -- lots of drunkards and mentally ill men, plus a few women, who bristle at authority and prefer to spend their time riding from town to town. He quickly learns the ropes of how to get free food and sometimes money in various cities, and he takes great pride in acquiring sufficient expertise that he can identify others who are less skilled than he. Conover also takes pain to make sure we know he is more broadminded than other hobos, making friends with Hispanic laborers as well as white tramps.

The weakest part of the book is Conover's occasional political analysis. The strongest is when he quotes Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, though the quotations from that fascinating book remind us just how much better a writer Orwell was than Conover.

The book is a quick read, but I don't think many people will get much from it beyond that fact that Conover happened to take this trip and that the hobos were pretty much as expected.

There's a certain kind of journalism/travel writing/ethnography that greatly appeals to me, in which the author immerses themselves in a culture or subculture that I find fascinating but have no desire to visit myself. This book is exactly in that vein, as Conover took a break in 1980 from attending Amherst College to ride freight trains as a hobo. I found his experience compelling enough to later check to see if he had written anything else, and only then realized that the naive 20-year-old who rode the rails grew up and spent a year as a prison guard as research for his critically acclaimed book Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing.

As a product of a nice upper middle-class family and a student at a prestigious liberal arts college, he had to undergo a physical and psychological transformation to embark on his trip. And he began his hobo journey with the vague sense that riding the rails would both tell him something about America and bring meaning to his anthropology classes. One of the common pitfalls of such experience journalism is that the author has a somewhat silly romantic notion as to what awaits him. Fortunately, while Conover was somewhat naive, he did enough background reading to have realistic expectations about what he'd encounter.

It's fascinating to watch him dive into the hobo way of life, picking up the tips and tricks that sustain the mostly male subculture. He runs the gamut, from literally jumping on and off moving trains, to spending nights in missions, dumpster-diving food, working welfare systems for food stamps, giving blood for money, calculating the cheapest way to get drunk, setting up camp in hobo "jungles," working in the fields as a day laborer, and much much more. Along the way, his simple and clear writing conveys how he shed his notions of what to expect along the way.

While he's generally sympathetic to the hardships endured by many of the people he meets, he's also honest enough to let their stories speak for themselves. And while some are certainly driven to the nomadic life by their economic circumstances, the hobo life seems to attract a certain type of man who has trouble living within the norms of society and feels the need for freedom from these norms. This psychological aspect of the hobo life is one area where Conover left me wishing for a little deeper insight into the people he meets. He does, however, spend a good amount of time grappling with other aspects of their psychology, especially the instinctual distrust they have of anyone, even those they get to know well.

At the time of his trip, many people were surprised to know that freight-riding hobos still existed and had assumed the practice was long dead. Some 25+ years after his trip, that assumption seems likely to be more on target, if for no other reason than the post-9/11 tightening of all forms transportation security.