Hobo Punks Remembered - On the Road #22
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Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay
In my last On the Road blog here, I mentioned at the end that I had interviewed a few hobo punks who I had met while traveling in Alaska with the potential to freelance an article to the Anchorage Press.
It is one of my most painful regrets of that road trip that I didn’t follow through on that. Because I did interview these people. Their stories were incredible, and they deserved to be known for that.
I probably had a gnarly case of road fatigue.
For all the excitement and adventure of the unknown and this odyssey, it was exhausting to pack up the Beast and move from town to town, where I didn’t have any roots or emotional investment.
I had it in me to interview them. Then that was it.
The main people I interviewed, Derrick and Kylie Greene (names changed for privacy) had settled down in Anchorage. At the time that I had met them, they had a young son, and Kiley was pregnant with their second child.
This was in the autumn of 2005. In the 90’s, there was an exodus of teenagers out of the homes into the streets. The core of the homeless teens were – and still are - those who left dangerous family environments and those who had gotten kicked out of their homes, usually for coming out as gay.
But then there were those who came from safe homes and were simply restless and probably didn’t fit in with the mainsteam conventional culture from which they came.
If I remember correctly, Kylie had been a hobo punk longer than Derrick. I think he had hit the road around 16 or 17, whereas she had been on the road from the time she was 13 or 14.
Originally from Louisiana, she said her mother and sister worried sick about her, and often begged her to come home, which she would never do no matter how dangerous life on the streets was.
“I remember one time me and a couple friends found a squat (an abandoned, empty building) as a place to crash. One night, these older homeless bums came in and saw us. We overheard them talking about how they were going to kill us to claim the space.”
Kylie shuddered as she remembered, and shook her head.
“We were so scared.”
Kylie and Derrick met through the network of hobo punks that hit the road. Both had a lot to say about the network of homeless youth on the road, how they managed with no money and very few resources beyond each other.
Safety happens in numbers. Hobo punks know this.
They talked about connecting with the Rainbow family, the nomadic tribe that travels from National Park to National Forest year round, when they needed more resources or the security that comes with a group.
They talked about hitchhiking and hopping trains, as the hobos of the Great Depression did to get around. They talked about living in squats, sleeping in encampments, panhandling, and receiving money and food from kind-hearted strangers.
“It gets harder as you get older,” Derrick said.
They also talked about the excessive alcohol and drug use that goes hand-in-glove with that lifestyle.
They talked about Punksgiving, celebrated at the same time as conventional Thanksgiving, and that people traveled from all over to come to it. In fact, I’m pretty sure, it was at a Punksgiving that Kylie and Derrick met.
Image by Ryan McGuire From Pixabay
They showed me a group photo of an early Punksgiving before they married. Everybody in the picture hammed it up. Kylie had her ginger hair in a Mohawk and wore brown overalls, Derrick had his hair slicked back, and I recognized the guy I found in Seward who told me where to find them.
Once they settled down in Anchorage, they’ve been the hosts for Punksgiving. And it was no easy feat for those hobo punks to get to Anchorage from the lower 48 (the rest of the United States, except Hawaii).
That was becoming problematic for them.
Although it was part of their tribal values to open their homes to their hobo punk family, then they’d have far too many people in their house expecting to be able to stay. They’d drink all day, not help with the bills, housework, look for a job, or anything.
And they were in Anchorage in late November, where winter was always well under way.
This honest, humble working class family were especially conscious of the difficulty of this. They were torn between the past and the present and the needs for their future, especially because they had a four-year-old son and Kylie was pregnant again.
“It’s gotten harder as we’ve gotten older,” Derrick said. “It just doesn’t work to keep partying like that and not doing anything.”
“Derrick became a journeyman at his job this year,” Kylie continued. “And things have just changed for us. We don’t know how much longer we can continue to host Punksgiving because it causes a lot of problems.”
I asked them if they missed their former way of life. They both nodded.
“Yeah,” Kylie said. “But it was just getting too hard. People don’t want to help you out so much when you’re not so young and cute anymore. It’s harder to get rides and money and food and stuff that you just need.”
Both of them were only 24-25 years of age at the time of my interview.
In the long run, Derrick and Kylie were the fortunate ones.
Life on the road is hard, especially the way they lived it. It’s a way of life that the young and restless still engage in. Several years ago, I met a young woman who had lost her leg in an injury where she was hopping a train.
Image by lannyboy89 From Pixabay