But really that's just as well. As it happens nobody else soldiered up to man the table (maybe thinking I would, since I'd suggested it) so FOP didn't even participate in the event. And anyway you know me, I got to thinking about NO TRESPASSING signs and Woody Guthrie and pretty soon my piece was about hobos and my Uncle Bus and the American character so I don't know how much of a case I made for public lands anyway.
The title of the piece is from the often-left-out verse of the Guthrie song about the NO TRESPASSING sign.
And On The Other Side, I Didn’t See Nothin’: That Side was Made For You and Me
By Robin Ford Wallace
My Uncle Bus was an actual hobo.
His real name was George Washington Ford. That was a mouthful so they called him Buster, which in turn got foreshortened to Bus. That’s the story of the name but when I was a child I imagined it was because he was always traveling around the country on Greyhounds.
I remember Bus with dark curly hair around a bald spot, wearing green wino pants and a flannel shirt, in need of a shave. He was thin and walked with a limp, having been shot during World War II. He got a pension for that and with it he financed his travels and his whiskey.
He’d come stay with us sometimes and he was like a cartoon, always putting on airs that contrasted weirdly with his hobohood. We lived in a town called Smyrna but Bus called it Sumatra, I think because it had more syllables. He affected to adore opera and once when they were young Bus told my father as he set out on his wanderings, “I’m off to study with Einstein.”
He was a character all right and I wish I could say I appreciated him. I didn’t though, I had a prissy girl-dread of him. When I came last to supper I had to sit next to him and he made horrible eating noises, little subvocal cries of joy mixed in with smacks and heavy breathing and clicks from his dentures: “Mmm. Yeah. Oh boy. Click.” I would cringe myself inside out.
Probably Bus was rusty at eating because he devoted most of his practice time to drinking instead. Once when Bus popped a beer in the morning my father fussed at him: “I’m not asking you to stop drinking. I’m only asking you to wait until lunch.”
Bus famously replied, “Lawrence, why torture ourselves?”
Bus wasn’t much of a role model and I didn’t grow up to be much of a hobo. One of my favorite comic strips features a cat and a dog who have dug out under the fence. Emerging into the great world beyond, the dog shouts, “We’re free! We’re free!” The cat says, “We’re homeless.”
I am the cat. I recall thinking during a once-in-a-lifetime dream vacation through Europe: “Only nine more days.” Constant travel makes me feel lost, and constipated. Anyway gardeners are never really happy without their little acre of dirt to roll in.
Still, there’s enough hobo in me that I walk and walk and walk. And lately I’ve noticed that a lot of places around here I used to do that are gone. Private dirt roads have been gated, and I had to give up my favorite walk on a quite public paved road after a couple with vicious dogs moved in. Their dogs would attack my dogs, then the couple themselves would come out and attack me: “Stay home where you belong!” they said.
I’m hobo enough to resent that. And I’m not the only one. One of our elected officials told me how a representative of one of the new luxury developments here complained to him about trespassers. “Your Dade County locals need a little reeducation on where they can and can’t go,” he said.
The elected official found that just as charming as I did. Reckon he’s part hobo too?
I think most of us are. Uncle Bus and my father came from West Virginia, a state where big conglomerates called land companies used confusing legal instruments called “broad sheet deeds” to swindle mountaineers out of acreage they’d farmed for generations. This they sold to lumber companies and mining companies, and both began raping the land. As for the poor hillbillies, they were either displaced or enslaved.
I’m not saying it was corporate greed that made Uncle Bus into a hobo. My father said it wasn’t even the war wound, that Bus was always peculiar. But corporate gobbling of the resources caused a vast statewide hobohood as West Virginians took off for pastures new. My old man ended up teaching school in Georgia and the other brother selling insurance in Ohio.
Much the same thing happened all across America in the Great Depression. Banks foreclosed on farms and homeless families went a-hoboing. And long before that, the notorious land enclosures in the British isles made the rich richer by robbing ordinary people of their livelihood, sending many hoboing across the ocean to colonize the New World.
So really, from the beginning America has been a nation of hobos, tossed out of one place and roaming around looking for a better one, only to bump into signs that say Stay Out! Private Property!
Where am I going with this? Where else? Please join me in supporting our public lands.
Private property is sacred in America, but from the very beginning our nation was smart enough to set aside tracts that no one can chase us off of because we all own them in common. Personally, I walk off my hobo restlessness at Cloudland Canyon State Park. My friend Greg has a slightly worse case and he walked up one side of America and down the other on the Appalachian and Pacific Crest Trails.
It’s wonderful we can do that in America and it’s probably also an essential outlet for the hobo side of our national character. Greg said on the AT the only way to tell recreational hikers from the homeless was Gore-Tex.
So in a way my Uncle Bus is a symbol of America just as much as that other famous uncle, the one in the star-spangled top hat. When I close my eyes I see them together, Bus with his wino pants and his proffered whiskey bottle, saying:
“Sam, why torture ourselves?”
Robin Ford Wallace generally plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one. Things change.
