I ask if rape was involved in her initiation, or in any other FTRA woman’s initiation that she knows of, and she says, “That’s bullshit! When I first got with the FTRA, I was a south rider, riding out of Tucson with Santa Claus and some of those guys, and there wasn’t no initiation. Then I started going with Diamond Dave, and when we went up north, he got initiated, so I did, too. ‘New tits on the tracks,’ we call it. All it was, you had to go one-on-one with another chick. I had to sit there and prove I could ride anywhere. That I knew enough to ride. But rape…I mean, it happens on the rails sometimes. But it’s like everywhere, like in society. It’s usually somebody you know. Date rape.”
“Did you have to fight during the initiation?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Tracy Jean Parker. She was on me pretty good. But that was just her, it wasn’t an FTRA thing. Real fights are few and far between.”
I ask her about drug running, “…drug corridors along the rails from Texas,” and she says, “That’s not the FTRA…or maybe there’s one or two. Some of those new little FTRAs, they all got barbed-wire tattoos on their arms. They got different ethics from us. The Hole in the Wall Gang. Montana Brew Crew. Some of them are maybe into that. But the older crew, we get drunk, we cause a commotion. Sometimes chicks’ll strip naked or go topless just to get a reaction from a yard master or the bulls. But we don’t take it to town.
“You’re gonna have a rotten apple or two in every group,” she goes on. “Like Sidetrack. I traveled with him, I slept beside him many times. He was always laughing and smiling. It’s hard for me to believe he did all that they said.”
“Does the FTRA operate safe houses?” I ask.
“There’s the missions,” she says, sounding a bit puzzled. “God’s Love in Helena, and there’s one in Pasco. Charity House in Spokane. And when I get to a town and I got friends there, I visit them.”
Like others in the FTRA, Cricket has problems with certain of her brothers, Mississippi Bones in particular. “He was a manipulator,” she says. “He was always siccin’ Misty Jane—that was his wife—onto other women, gettin’ her to fight ’em. I seen him get her onto Sweetpea and Snow White and Missy Jones. He cut my rag (took her bandana) one time, but I waited till he passed out and took it back. Everything Bones did was behind drinkin’. He got disgraced soon after that—Chester the Molester took his concho. If F-Trooper cut him, chances are he had a good reason.”
I ask if there’s anything she wants to get out about the FTRA, and after a pause, she says, “You got no idea how many different kinds of people ride. Carneys. Mexicans and Indians. Religious people. Preachers, people from the Rainbow Gathering. Deadheads. More kinds’n I can think of right now. If any of ’em commit a crime, the cops try and pin it on the FTRA.
“Bein’ FTRA don’t get you nothin’—not the way people are sayin’. Your brothers and sisters’ll help you out, now. There’s a lot of helpin’ goin’ on out there. One time I’m gettin’ married on the tracks in Spokane up close to the Welfare Bridge. Gettin’ married to Cherokee. Manny the railroad bull—he’s an ordained preacher, he’s doin’ the ceremony. We didn’t have no money for rings, so these two sisters from Helena bought some rings and hopped a train to come all the way up and give ’em to us.
“That was somethin’ special. But mostly it’s little things. Like when Joshua Longgone lost his dog, and everyone spent hours beatin’ the weeds for him. Or when you haven’t got money for food, and someone’ll hand you over a few dollars. Or when you bring a bottle to someone who’s startin’ to shake all over, goin’ for the DTs, just dyin’ for a drink.”
The day after New Years, 1998, and I’m at a hobo gathering in New Mexico, maybe a hundred people jungled up on a patch of desert figured by saguaro and mesquite and sage and a big, dark lizardback tumble of rock that sticks up beside a section of Southern Pacific track. Atop the rock, several flags are flying—American, Confederate, MIA, Anarchist. The raising of the Anarchist banner caused a minor dust-up earlier in the day, when one of the encamped riders, said to be a KKK member, objected to its presence; but he’s been appeased. He and his family spend a good deal of their time zooming around on motorized all-terrain bikes, making an aggressive show of having fun, and don’t mix with the rest of us.
I’m perched on a ledge close to the flags, gazing down on the place. Below and to my left, some elderly hobos are sitting beneath two small shade trees, occupying chairs arranged in a circle around the remains of the previous night’s campfire; beyond them, a communal kitchen has been erected, and people are busy cooking hash for breakfast. Farther off, there’s a trailer on which helium tanks are mounted; they’re used to fill balloons, which now and again can be seen floating off into a clouded pewter sky. Children scoot about, playing and squabbling in the dirt. Tents scattered here and there; vehicles of every description—pickups, campers, old shitboxes. The whole thing calls to mind a scene from a low-budget film about life after some civilization-destroying disaster, the peaceful settlement of the good guys in the moment before the motorized barbarians come swooping down to rape and steal gas. Trains pass with regularity, and when this happens, rockets are set off and people move close to the tracks and wave. The engineers sound their whistles, wave back, and on occasion toss freight schedules from the engine window.
The King of the Hobos, Frog Fortin, an FTRA member whose coronation took place last summer at the hobo convention in Britt, Iowa, was supposed to put in an appearance here, but to my dismay, he’s a no-show. The majority of the attendees are railfans, people who’ve done some hoboing but now have day jobs and families and can’t be classified as hobos—they simply love trains. There are also, as mentioned, some old-time hobos, men in their sixties and seventies; and there are staff members of the Hobo Times, “America’s Journal of Wanderlust,” a publication given to printing treacly hobo poetry.
Most of these folks don’t feel like talking about the FTRA. Some disparage them, passing them off as drunks who’re more likely to harm themselves than anyone else. Others are hostile when I mention the subject. They feel that the FTRA has brought down the heat on all riders, and don’t want to contribute to more bad publicity. Most of those who are willing to talk don’t have much to add to what I already know, but I meet a photographer who’s ridden with the FTRA, who tells me about black FTRA members—New York Slim, the Bushman, et al.—and attributes FTRA racism to the enforced racism inherent in the prison system. It’s more habitual, he says, than real. Another rider, Lee, agrees with him, and says that although the FTRA use racist iconography in their tattoos and graffiti, they are “oddly egalitarian racists.”
Lee is a 42-year-old wilderness squatter who was involved with the Earth First movement, until he became fed up with the group’s internal politics. He lives in a tiny house he built himself in the midst of a redwood forest in Northern California; it’s so carefully camouflaged, it’s almost impossible to spot from a distance of 15 feet. There he publishes Hobos from Hell/There’s Something About a Train, a ’zine containing stories about the rails written by a variety of hobos. He’s dressed, as is his custom, all in black. Black sweats, black raincoat, black baseball hat. Makes him harder to spot in the yards at night. Though he’s no hermit, his face has the sort of mild openness I associate with someone who’s spent time in the solitudes. His features are weathered, but his energy and humor make him seem younger than his years. He says he looks forward “to the collapse of the Industrial State,” but when that happens, he’ll miss the trains. It strikes me that, for Lee, a perfect world would be one in which man has become extinct, the planet has reverted to a natural state, and the only reminders of the human past are the trains, evolved to an inorganic form of life, traveling endlessly across the wild and making their eerie music.