Four days at the National Hobo Convention in Britt, Iowa, with the nicest people in the world. Yes, hoboes still exist. But their numbers are dwindling.
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The Kentucky Kid says he prefers .22s.
We're sitting out back at the J&D Hob Nob, the most popular bar on the short commercial strip of Main Street in Britt, Iowa. He's already shown us one of his knives, asked us to try to hoist his enormous backpack, and entreated us, many times, to touch his chest. "Feel that!" he says. He mostly kind of yells his sentences. "Feel my chest, feel my arms! I'm solid as a rock!!"
The Kentucky Kid, aka Backpack Jack, is impressively strong for a man of his age, in a wiry, lean kind of way; he won't tell us how old he is, but the grey hair and goatee and prescription John Lennon sunglasses and military slang that peppers his speech peg him as a Vietnam vet, somewhere in his mid 60s. Yet when he challenges one of the townies to arm wrestle at some point in the evening, my money's on the Kid.
He comes up to Matt and me while we're sitting at the bar, awkwardly sipping on gin and tonics and taking in the crowd at the Hob Nob (we were the only ones at the bar drinking G&Ts at the bar that night, possibly ever — it took our kindly bartender five minutes just to locate a dusty bottle of gin on the shelf). "You guys must be press," he says, and immediately invites us outside to give him cigarettes, check out his knife and then buy him shots.
Once we're out on the sidewalk, I realize that he's actually the first hobo we saw when we pulled off Highway 18 and into Britt, on our way to the annual National Hobo Convention. And while we've already met a few friendly hoboes at this point, the Kid bowls us over with his eagerness to talk about his life on the road.
He's wearing a olive cap with some kind of insignia on it, a custom T-shirt, jeans and boots, and feels safe leaving his enormous backpack in the bar, unattended. "No one's gonna make off with it — too heavy!" he says/shouts as we finish our cigarettes and head back inside.
We take turns hoisting the Kid's backpack. It's heavy, but then he's got most of his life in it. The gear's top notch: The pack looks like some kind of tactical, military grade issue, and he brags about his Hilleberg tent, a brand whose entry-level model tents start at $465. The Kid alternates between calling himself a hobo and a tramp (more on this below), but whatever you call him, he lives on the road, moving around at will.
Also, like many of the hoboes we meet, Kentucky Kid likes to talk, and he repeats himself a lot. His favorite phrases: "I hate Democrats AND Republicans. I'm an Independent, man!" "All us hoboes, we all go back to Muddy Waters!" "I eat raccoons and snakes; I don't care what anyone thinks about it!" After the first time he uses this last phrase, he asks Matt to smell him, saying "I take good care of myself, I'm clean!" Matt obliges and later reports that the Kentucky Kid, unsurprisingly, smells a lot like a man who sleeps outside and has a healthy dose of raccoon and snake meat in his diet.
Some time later, we're sitting in the back room of the Hob Nob drinking beer, and that's when I ask him if he carries a gun. "Have to," he says. It's for protection, of course. But I get the sense it also rounds out his kit, that he'd feel incomplete without it. He says he prefers the action on the .22, and that he's got one with a filed down trigger, and then makes a gun with his finger and fires imaginary shots into the Iowa night.
I get up and buy us another pitcher.
The National Hobo Convention has been held in Britt, Iowa, since 1900. Britt's a small, stolidly middle-class town of about 2,000, with seven churches, a dirt racetrack and the most impressive town pool/public water park I've ever seen. The houses are modest but well-kept, the streets are wide, and we never saw a stray pedestrian in four days there.
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