Trainhopping

I saw these rough, dirty looking kids in packs. Soot on their hands, dirt under their fingernails, matted hair, smelly with ratty looking dogs by their sides. I first spotten them in alphabet city in NYC. I saw them again in Savannah this past weekend. They looked like what I imagined from Cormac McCarthy's The Road or from a Mad Max episode.

I did some reading and tried to figure out what they were. It appears they are freight hopping vagabonds. Living on what they find, going where the tracks take them. I came across this quote and wanted to share in, particularly in my quest to sort out all of my views.

"The average man grows up to live a regular life and to work as a part of it. We are taught to believe that there is a necessary relation between doing our daily tasks, eating our regular meals, going to bed in a fixed place, rising at a pre-arranged hour, wearing a certain kind of clothes, that there is between all this and being 'good' an unalterable relationship: as also between being good and being happy. Religion gives its awful sanction to this theory, habit fortifies it; successive generations of what we call civilization even create an instinct which even makes us think, or at least say, we like it: When suddenly to one of us comes the discovery that we can stop all this and yet live - nay, grow fat, perhaps, and vigorous and strong; drop worry and responsibility... everywhere, see everything... and when that discovery comes, it is apt to be fatal."

-John J. McCook