Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America's Hoboes (Paperback)

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.

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.

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.