Sunday morning, a week ago, en route to my bother’s house on South Ninth Street, I met what appeared to be one of those endless freight trains.
I turned off the Tacoma’s engine and marveled at the fantastical stream of graffiti flashing by. Illegible names in fanciful fonts mostly. A decided improvement on the monotonous clatter of gray, rusting boxcars.
On NPR’s Weekend Edition, the host was interviewing Linda Ronstadt, who later in the week would be receiving a Hispanic Heritage Award. Ronstadt has Hispanic roots and in the late 1980s recorded a series of mariachi albums.
The train seemed plenty long, so I cranked up the radio, got out of the car and did some stretches.
Linda was talking about recently getting out her turntable and playing selections from her collection of 10 LPs, one of which is the Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds.”
The host played “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.”
“Brian Wilson is a genius,” Linda was saying. “I love his music; it cheered me up.”
Like Linda, I felt cheerful doing stretches by the train tracks, spider lilies all around and drifting back in time with the Beach Boys.
The Beatles’ “Rubber Soul,” Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue; Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” and Paul Simon’s “Graceland” are among Linda’s 10.
The music segued into Miles Davis’ “So What,” the train still clattering.
American genius on Southside: Brian Wilson, Miles, the passing art show.
A couple weeks earlier, en route to the Humane Society, Beth and I were stopped by a train on College Street. Then, as was the case Sunday, we were similarly impressed by the beauty and sophistication of this ephemeral art show.
Cultural historians connect today’s railroad graffiti with chalk scribblings by railroad workers, noting arrival and departure times, weights, and other information about the car’s contents for colleagues who would be unloading the cars at their destinations.
Then, as the Depression-era rail riding Woody Guthrie sang about became more prevalent, cryptic hobo markings began to appear on the sides of boxcars meant to communicate travel advice to fellow “knights of the road.”
To further explore this widely practiced and highly evolved art form, Google “boxcar graffiti.”
Friday noon I ran into Stewart “Catfish” Clay at Brother’s Keeper Barbecue. As it happens, Catfish worked for the Columbus and Greenville Railway for 25 years. He was a car knocker, which meant he repaired damaged train cars and put derailed trains back on their tracks.
“The work was hard, but the people were good,” Stewart said. “Every day was different.”
I asked him about graffiti and hobo culture.
“Yeah, it’s graffiti art,” he said, clearly appreciative of the genre.
This contrasted with the unsmiling Burlington Northern Santa Fe worker I’d talked to earlier in the day, who dismissed the boxcar graffiti as vandalism.
Clearly there was no beauty in the eye of this beholder.
Stewart waxed nostalgic about a graffiti artist from Florida who decorated boxcars with chalk drawings of a guy in a sombrero sleeping under a palm tree.
“He would put them on the same corner of the car,” Stewart said, “and date them.”
He said the only freight hopping on local lines was someone hitching a ride to or from Artesia or from Birmingham to Columbus.
But there was a time when hoboes were all over the country, Stewart said.
“They were some tough son-of-a-guns,” he said. “Those cars were hot in the summer and cold in the winter.”
Later I asked about the barbecue.
“We’re in a rut, he said, “My wife Malinda likes the ribs; I like the rib tips.”
Not a bad rut to be in. Ah, a plate of rib tips. Wouldn’t it be nice.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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