The Train-Time Continuum (part 5)

It's a good thing that I had several days of train riding between my departure from the "real" world and my arrival in the monochrome Disneyland that is the National Hobo Convention in particular and Iowa in general, because a quicker transformation would be very difficult to pull off. The Midwest must be experienced gradually, like sipping a bowl of hot soup, because this place is just really, really different. In the jungle there were people dressed like hoboes milling around and people dressed like tourists observing them mill around. The "hoboes" didn't look like any of the train riders I'd seen out West — they looked like hoboes in a Hollywood movie about hoboes. It was as if in all the years when I was growing up at home, with my Dad bringing out the presents on Christmas Day, he had suddenly been replaced by Santa Claus himself. Something was very different. Different but commonplace at the same time. You're at a zoo and the lions have been replaced by ordinary dogs, the tigers by housecats, the elephants by horses... strange, but strange in a normal sort of way.

Leaning my pack up against a tree in the "jungle", I was set upon by first one "hobo" and then another who wanted to instruct me in the lore of boiling water for coffee, or some other hobo-themed activity. At first it was fascinating to meet these real old timers, even if they'd arrived in Winnebagos, not side door pullmans, but after the third or fourth fellow elbowed his way in and boasted that his way of doing whatever was far superior, I realized that the only way I was going to get a cup of coffee in a reasonable amount of time was to walk into town and find a café, which I did. On the way I checked out a street fair that was going on, and noted that the worn and rusted old tools that were on sale for pennies would go for several dollars back in California. I wished that I had a U-haul van at my disposal, because I could make a fortune re-selling this stuff when I got home.

Not quite ready to re-enter the time-warp in the jungle, I saw a poster on a phone pole about a county fair that weekend at the fairgrounds (where else?) so I hoofed it over there to indulge in Americana, and what an indulgement it was. Just like in the movies, there were hogs, and 4-H kids who resembled hogs, and pie contests, cake contests, pickle contests... after awhile I couldn't absorb any more wholesomeness, so I stopped by the liquor store on my way back and got a six-pack of 3.2% beer. Powering it down because I didn't have any way of keeping it cool, I let out a burp that probably scared some of the livestock back at the fair, and looked around for a place to take a nap. The jungle was now vacated because the City was spraying the grass with some insecticide to kill the zillions of mosquitoes that were all over the place, and I mused at what would happen if somebody pulled that shit in People's Park in Berkeley...

It seemed to be impossible to get away from the hordes of tourists who stalked every person even remotely resembling a hobo, and I came to the realization that I had ingested a year's worth of anti-culture already, so I stocked up on food and water and walked out to the highway, where I got a ride in no more than 5 minutes all the way back to Mason City, with the driver and his wife asking me non-stop questions the whole way. When they dropped me off next to the tracks I swore that I would not talk to or go near another person for at least another few days.

That night a southbound stopped, I got on, and I left that whole weird scene behind me. We went south for a few hours, then joined the east-west mainline and headed west into Boone, where I bailed off my junker and waited for a hotshot. In an hour or two I was on an autorack — I wasn't sure where it was headed but, more importantly, it was leaving Iowa...

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