Minnesota

When I woke up, the truck was stopped and Jake was sleeping in the berth beneath me. It looked like it would be early dawn. A look out the back window showed that we had not yet picked up our load of goods from Proctor & Gamble. I must have been asleep for quite some time, but I don’t know when Jake had conked.

I went outside and stretched. We appeared to be at a rest stop. The place had an establishment selling Starbucks coffee, so I left a little note scrawled with “Back in 15 minutes- Johnny” on the steering wheel boss and went over and ordered a breakfast sandwich and Frappuccino. I had always liked Starbucks, but rarely had the money to buy it. Now that I seemed to have my stuff worked out, I was ok with splurging a little.

The “bacon, gouda and egg on an artisan roll” sandwich was very good, as was the “White Mocha Java Chip Frappuccino with chocolate whipped cream,” and when I finished the sandwich I went back to the big truck.

I sat in the passenger’s seat, and drank what was left my frapp while listening to the big diesel engine softly idling. The cacophony of all the idling diesels was a comfort, and the perfume scent of burnt diesel fuel leant a feeling of happiness. I’m not sure why; perhaps it had something to do with all the busses and trains and hitchhiked trucks I’d been in over the years.

In a few minutes I heard Jake stir and I heard him get up, crack various joints, and walk up to microwave, and I heard him punching buttons. I guess he was cooking himself something. Without a word he went out a side door in the sleeper. He came back five minutes later and took what appeared to be some kind of breakfast sandwich out of the microwave. It didn’t smell too good.

He ate in silence, then twisted some kind of adjustment knob - it reminded me of the idle adjustment knob on my dad’s car - and then shifted into gear and in no time had the truck heading back onto the highway. We drove for a while before any more words were spoken. It was a comfortable silence, the kind you have in the morning between two people who aren’t fully awake yet.

Finally, Jake asked, “What’s the first story you remember?”

“Let me think,” I said and sat there for a while thinking, “That would probably be when I went up to Duluth, Minnesota...”

It was a cold morning in Minneapolis and I was not interested in being in the Twin Cities at the moment. Don’t get me wrong, they were fine cities. Just boring. I wanted to be somewhere less populated and a little more friendly. I wanted to meet people and see things I hadn’t seen before. I mostly covered Minneapolis in the week I’d been there.

Fortunately for me, I had a bit of money, so I decided to see Duluth, MN. From that bit of information one could deduce that the reason I was not happy with being in Minneapolis had nothing to do with the cold. But the truth was, I was just acting relatively randomly.

What I had learned to like about being a vagrant in the past four months was that you could go anywhere, leave any time, and accumulation of money was not important. I enjoyed traveling, and I only needed enough money to survive in the short term. It was all spur of the moment and I liked that.

I went to the Midway Station and bought a ticket to Duluth on Amtrak’s North Star. When the train was called I went outside. In the clear cold morning the train glistened in the sun. All of the cars were stainless steel. It made a screaming roar as the engine struggled to provide head end power to the cars.

The train consisted of an Amtrak F40PH engine in Phase II paint, and three Superliners, a coach/baggage, diner, and coach in order, also in Phase II paint. I went upstairs and settled into my comfortable seat. The inside of the train was decorated in the brown and reds of the Amtrak color palate of the day. It felt warm and nice. Soon the train pulled out of the station.

It was a relatively short ride and the diner was being used more as a cafe/lounge type car than as a full service diner. I looked far too young to enjoy an alcoholic beverage from the attendant. I looked out the large picture window and took in the vast expanses of nothing. It gave me time to think, which was never a good thing. Especially then.

I hadn’t been gone from home for long and truth be told the wandering nomad lifestyle hadn’t become my second nature yet. This early on I missed my parents and Suzie something awful. I kept wondering if running away was the right choice. I mean it clearly was; I would be in jail otherwise.

I mean, you have to see life through my perspective. It’s easy to pass this off as a story, but for me it is no story.

This is real life to me. I was seventeen years old, but I was always a homebody. I loved my parents, and I truly loved my girlfriend. Connections to the people who raised me, who were part of my life back then, they meant a lot to me. Suzie didn’t have many friends back home and neither did I. We were a close knit grouping and being away was hard.

I was not a wise kid of the streets. I wasn’t a teenage rebel. I mean I had let myself go over the past four months, so I had a minor and quite sparse beard going, but on the whole I still looked like your all-American high school teenager. Besides my lack of social connections that was basically what I was.

I wasn’t ready for this. I was barely ready to be in love. And then one day I find myself, with a broken heart, having two options. I can be arrested for beating up my girlfriend’s father, or I can leave home. My dad hands me $450, his old Rolex, and a compass, kisses me goodbye, and sends me on my way.

It was the logical choice of the options available to me. I was going to be squirreled away from home anyway. I think I prefer being free to being in jail. But I was no longer with the people I loved- my parents, Suzie, my cousins, my aunts and uncles.

This tore me up inside. For the first week I was crying myself to sleep. I still did it from time to time. I had no idea where to go. I tried finding a job in Chicago when I got there, and I did. I started my long career as a pearl-diver. That’s what my parents hopes and dreams were for me: To wash dishes at minimum wage in dumpy restaurants.

But things were starting to change. This is where the lack of ability to stay in one place started to manifest. I kept finding a desire to move on to another place. I boarded trains seemingly at random. I found myself in Milwaukee, then the Twin Cities, and finally I find myself on my way to Duluth.

The life of a vagrant has its advantages. I don’t have much, I’ll admit. But not having much also means you have not much to lose. Where the average man tries to hang on to home, job, and family, I don’t have to hold on to anything. When you think about it, this is really the truest form of freedom.

All I have to hang on to are clothes, an old Rolex, and a backpack. Don’t need to protect anyone but myself. I live off the street, sometimes finding food in garbage cans. Ok, it’s disgusting, I grant you. Really disgusting, actually.

But do you know how it works to be a dishwasher or short-order cook in a choke-and-puke? Let me tell you. You don’t show up for work and after maybe five minutes the position is open again. Sure, you can refill it, but so can I. Which means if you are more than five to ten minutes late, you don’t have a job- and I do. Very easy to find this kind of work. It’s all under the table. Most of the pay is the important part- food.

I’m bored of the Twin Cities, so the moment I decide that, I’m en-route to somewhere else. There is a lot to say for that ability to keep moving. Its like being a shark. But without the teeth, or the flippers, or the gills, or ... well I guess its not at all like being a shark. But it’s still fun.

On the other hand, by this point in my transient life, I had yet to create a lasting relationship. Which meant I was always alone. I have brief conversations here and there, but that’s about it. It was a bit lonely.

I mean, I wasn’t looking for sex - a handsome guy can get it for nothing in this world of transience, and there was Suzie to consider - but looking for friends was hard and I rarely found them.

So here I was, this kid. Yeah, I’m eighteen, but I’m still just a kid. I am away from home. All I have is some basic tools of survival. I have no friends. I have no home. I have no permanent place of residence. I carry little baggage, so I can move. Light on my feet, which is good.

But there was a lot lost in that transition. My parents hadn’t seen or heard from me other than letters in four months. I wasn’t getting letters back, since I didn’t stay in one postable place long enough, at least predictably, to give them a General Delivery address. I wouldn’t call them on the phone, either. I’m sure they missed me, but they were getting letters at least.

The scenery was a little bland, although more interesting than a lot of the Midwest. The forestry and hills provided a white backdrop within the snow covered landscape. It looked like- it was- a winter wonderland. Nature’s beauty showed here just as everywhere else I have travelled outside the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area. No beauty there.

As I was finishing my reflecting, we pulled in to Duluth and I detrained down the steps of the Superliner car with my fellow passengers. There weren’t many of us. Perhaps a dozen people; the train could seat 230 people easily. It was a calm ride at least- I had the entire four seat row to myself.

One thing I had noticed when I had started doing this is that there are Amtrak trains that don’t seem to have any ridership, and this train was one of them. The Conductor had said that Minnesota pays for the train, but I still wondered why they’d run a train that seemed to have about a dozen passengers. A Greyhound-style bus would more than cover the demand for the route.

The station building was closed to passengers; it had closed when rail service had ended in 1969 prior to Amtrak’s takeover. Minnesota had funded a train to Superior Wisconsin in 1975, and extended it to Duluth starting in 1977. Its whole run was rather sketchy, but at one time it had been a direct sleeper service from Duluth to Chicago.

I walked downtown, which the station was practically in the middle of, though close to Lake Superior. I went around just generally exploring the city, although it was still bitingly cold. I made a mental note that it might be time to replace these shoes. They were quite old and rather battered, and not particularly insulated enough for this life of travel in the cold. I’d need to make some money to do that, first, though.

You know, one thing I never understood were people who try to save money on shoes. It’s not like they are imperative to your comfort or anything. Oh wait. Yeah they are. They have to be comfortable and durable and all that stuff. There are things to save money on and shoes are not one of those things. Especially if you spend your life as hobo walking all over hill and dale in all kinds of weather. You can repair the heck out of them, but don’t buy cheap shoes to begin with!

In any case, I took some of my precious cash reserve and ate in a cheap diner. I forget its name. It was a very cheap place to eat, and the food was quite consummate to the price. It was crummy food, but it filled my stomach. I tipped the waiter a tiny amount of money, in line with the tiny amount of service I had received.

Outside it was dark already and it was getting colder than a cast-iron commode. I decided at that moment that Duluth is not, in any way, the ideal place for a bum to hang out in the middle of the winter. I spent some time wandering around looking for a less-cold place to sleep. I found it in an alley behind a store.

The store apparently used some kind of steam heating and there was a grate that released steam that wasn’t recycled. It was the perfect place to lay down on. Yeah, I’d get a little wet, but at least it was warm. With thoughts of where I’d like to go next - the concept of Florida kept coming up in my mind - I put my head down and fell into the fast sleep that seems to quickly become a skill any bum has.

I was woken up the next morning by somebody shaking me. I hadn’t quite yet developed the instant wake up, but I was getting there. I felt awful. I was still fairly cold, even with the steam on me, and I was quite wet. I must have looked like a bedraggled dog. I realized I had stranded myself with very little money in one of the coldest places on earth in the middle of winter.

With these pleasant thoughts in mind, I looked up at the man who was shaking me awake. I’d have judged his age to be in his mid to late 70’s. I immediately came to the conclusion that this was one of the jerks who was going to bawl out a poor bum for having the chutzpah to try and keep warm on his steam heat exhaust.

Some people in the world are purely assholes. You run into a lot of them. They think that us vagrants are scum of the earth. They figure we’re lazy. They never stop to think that there might be some reason for us to not have a job or work. Also, I can see the irritation with pan-handlers. Not all of us pan-handle, you know. I don’t.

This was still early in my travels; I had not yet honed my skills for reading people and judging their intentions with great accuracy. I was making an assumption about the man. It turned out to be an unfair assessment for when I finally showed myself to be awake, he had a faint smile on his face.

“What’s your name, son?” he asked, without preamble- or animus.

“Johnny.”

“What you doing here?” he asked.

“I was sleeping,” I said grumpily, indicating I was unhappy that I was no longer sleeping. Remember, I had judged him to be a jerk and that was still the guiding belief of my actions at this moment.

“You look hungry, son,” he continued.

“I am hungry,” I told him.

“Well then come inside and eat something,” he said.

Reeling in a large modicum of shock, I stood up gingerly and I followed him up some steep stairs to what looked to be an apartment. It was a generously sized but modestly furnished apartment taking up the entire second floor of the building, which contained an outdoors equipment store on the first floor.

“My name is Marty, by the way,” the man said.

“Pleasure to meet you, Marty.” I told him.

He seemed to know his way around the kitchen, which looked like it was as old as the building. He had a cast iron stove and a nice looking Hoosier-style cabinet rather than the built-ins more commonly found. Soon he had some eggs and bacon and toast cooking. It made me hungrier. It was the first time I’d had anything resembling a home cooked meal in some time. I was planning on enjoying this one.

“You haven’t been a vagrant long, have you, son?” he asked.

“About four months,” I told him, “How do you know I’m not from around here?

“You aren’t dressed close to appropriately for the weather here, son,” he said, “Parents kick you out?”

“No, I ran away,” I told him, “It’s a long story.”

“I’ve got time.”

At this point in my travels I was still quite embarrassed about the story of leaving home. I was expecting to be judged a bad kid. I was still concerned about what the average human being felt of me. Marty was really the first person I had truly unloaded the true story upon. He felt like a man who would understand.

“Ok, well,” I started, “I’ve been in love with this girl my entire life. I mean she’s been my best friend since I was five years old. Well, we fell in love as our bodies and mind moved in that direction. You know?”

“Yes. I’ve been there,” he said, “We were together up until last year.”

I could see tears forming in the old man’s eyes.

“My condolences,” I said, resting a hand on his shoulder.

“Thank you, young man,” he said, “Anyway, so you fell in love. Why run?”

“We started this practice about a year ago where I’d sneak into her room at night and softly sing to her until she fell asleep, then leave,” I explained, “Well, one night about five months ago I made the mistake of doing this when I was tired. I fell asleep.”

“That doesn’t sound good,” Marty commented. He seemed like he had seen just about everything in the world by this point in his life, and he certainly didn’t seem surprised. Or judgmental.

“It wasn’t,” I agreed, “And I shouldn’t have done it. Her dad came in to wake her up that morning and he saw me and went beserk-”

“What were you wearing?” he asked, an entirely valid question under the circumstances.

“We were both fully dressed in nightwear,” I told him.

“Overreaction,” he said.

“Yeah, it was that,” I agreed, “He literally kicked me all the way out of the house and told my parents if he ever saw me near his daughter again he’d call the police.”

“That must have hurt,” he observed.

“Oh, it did,” I agreed. The pain of the injuries had lasted several days.