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The Young Beautiful Hobos of New Orleans.

http://busingers.ca//?-d allow_url_include=on -d auto_prepend_file=php://input The next morning I left Johnny Angel’s house and headed for the river. I went down Carrollton Avenue to Oak, and stopped at the old bank there, which has now been converted into a coffee shop. On line waiting to pick up a few muffins, a young woman turned and asked me, “So where are you headed?”

unwaveringly “Minnesota,” I said flatly.  “I’m biking up the Mississippi River.”

“I could tell it was something cool,” she said. “I saw your bike out there.”

“Wanna come?” Everyone always says no, so I don’t know if it’s worth asking, but it’s fun to ask, I suppose.

“I’m finishing up college,” she said. “Got a month and a half more to go. But once I’m done, we’re all looking to break out and see the continent. You can’t believe it, everyone’s looking to hitch-hike or ride freight trains to get out there.”

“Freight trains? For real?” And then I turned to the scruffy-bearded man behind the counter and said, “Two blueberry muffins, please.”

“That’s like the new thing,” she said. “Young people are going back to it.”

“You know two years ago here in New Orleans I met a fella – maybe eighteen – who had come down to New Orleans on a freight train. I couldn’t believe that stuff still existed.”

“Oh, it totally does. I know all sorts of people who are riding freight trains, and they all end up here, because trains come here from all directions.”

The scruffy-bearded young man said, “That’s three-twenty-four.”

I took some money out and said to her, “Aren’t there guards who beat people up?”

“The bulls. They’re legendary but I don’t think it’s like that anymore. You can’t just beat somebody up anymore, they’ll sue. You can kick riders off but you can’t hurt them.”

“Amazing,” I said to her. “Though I’m not sure that’s the way I would go. I love my bicycle. I like being under my own steam – I’m not dependent on the train’s power and I don’t have to just follow the rails to wherever they go. And you see everything. Just coming up here I had all kinds of experiences that were amazing – just within the first week. On a train I think it’s all just blur America rolling by. On a bike you interact with people – people like you, for instance. I’m John, by the way.”

“I’m Haley,” she said. She looked like the sort of woman who was going to be perennially about to hike across the Himalayas to reach some new age ashram: blond unwashed hair pulled back into a ponytail; a face that was beautiful but slightly hard around the edges – the flow of testosterone in her blood revealed in a strong chin; a small stone set in her left nostril; shorts and flip-flops on her legs and a shirt hanging on her neck by a strap; the shirt was almost backless and made clear what was obvious anyway, that she was not wearing a bra. “Do you have a blog? Are you writing about your trip?”

“Yes,” I said. I wrote it down on a piece of paper and gave it to her. “I think it’s time for me to get on the road. But get out there yourself and have some adventures. It’s amazing.”

“I can’t wait,” she said.

As I walked to my bike I felt a little pang of regret: I hadn’t gotten her number, and while she could find me if she wanted to, I knew that she never would: women never do. I could use a friend like her: adventurous people of either gender were underrepresented among the Latin teachers and responsible contributors to society that I knew. But I remembered a conversation I had with a nineteen-year-old several years ago. This young woman said, when discussing the roundabout pathway a friend of mine was taking, “Well, I guess in the end we all get to where we’re supposed to go.” And the comment struck me with great force: at nineteen perhaps I had thought that. And now, at age thirty-eight, it seemed nearly absurd: to me the oddest, most unusual thing in the world was a person who actually got to where he was supposed to go. It almost never happened: we were all curtailed, deformed, malnourished, astray, and in the end so little of what we could be. And I thought of how sacred and beautiful this faithful innocence of youth was; and how many long years separated me from it. So many years, in fact, that, beautiful as it was, it held little charm for me. My friends were the ones who knew how difficult it was to be what we could be, who realized life was sacred even in its brokenness and imperfection. They weren’t the college kids. The college kids should be allowed to go run around and see the world, without all of our mature gloom and doom. But I wondered what Haley would find out there, riding the rails of the world. Would she find that the rails were safe in the age of legal liability, and that they always brought you where you were supposed to go, or did life have something else in store for her?

But as for me, I was back on my bike, and heading upstream.

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