Hobo Hopping onto a Freight Train

I am currently reading Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters. It is such a pity that people don’t write letters any more. And they don’t read much either. (In fact, is anybody even reading this?) Here, in a 1948 letter to his friend Allen Ginsberg, Jack reminisces about his enjoyment hopping freight trains between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

The Southern Pacific is the most wonderful railroad in the world incidentally . . . on a Sunday morning, riding down through the sunny San Joaquin Valley of grapes and women-with-bodies-like-grapes, I reclined on a flatcar reading the Sunday funnies with the other boys, and the brakemen smiled at us and waved cheerful. It is the hobo’s favorite road. Anybody with any sense in California can ride between Frisco and LA endlessly on that road, once a week if they want to, and nobody will ever bother them. When the train stops at a siding, you can jump off and help yourself to fruit if you’re near a field. So wonderful Neal [Cassady] is working for a wonderful railroad, in the [William] Saroyan country . . . (if there’s any beastly murderousness it’s not my fault or Neal’s or Saroyan’s.) The Santa Fe brakemen will kill you if they catch you and if they have enough clubs. But not the SP.

Neal Cassady is a good buddy of Kerouac’s, and William Saroyan was an Armenian-American author of novels and short stories living in Fresno.