Artifacts and Illuminations: Critical Essays on Loren Eiseley

2. “ Never Going to Cease My Wandering”

2 “Never Going to Cease My Wandering” Loren Eiseley and the American Hobo m. catherine downs 37 In the summer of 1926 or thereabouts, young Loren Eiseley and his friends from high school hopped a freight in California (Christianson, Fox50–54).1 One of their number was, in the slang of Eiseley-the-boy’s favorite author Jack London, a profesh, a boy who had jumped trains in previous acts of derring-do. Perhaps in earlier years he had enticed Eiseley on short runs from the freight yards of Lincoln, Nebraska, where they were living, to the next town, but this California trip was a real adventure. Their trip had the hallmarks of boys’ rough play and concomitant bad planning. The Model T (“Old Purgatory”) into which they had been pouring oil had finally broken down. One of the boys had wired home for money, since their funds were running short. It became obvious that a boy with a physical disability, as one of their number had, would not square with their train-jumping ambitions. Eventually, however, most of the group rode California freights as nonpaying passengers before finding their way home by more conventional means. The young Loren Eiseley who hopped the California freights lived in relative poverty in Lincoln, Nebraska, it is true, but it would be close to three years before he would lose his father to cancer; it was before his own brush with tuberculosis as well. He was no down-and-out man, beating his way across America in a kind of desperation because there was nothing else for him to do. Although in 1926 Eiseley and his friends would return safe and sound to their homes in Lincoln, they were of the hobo-kind. Vagrants in America have long borne either social scorn or adulation, and sometimes both at once. In Eiseley’s time, the railroad was simply the only means of timely long-distance travel, and migrant workers, almost exclusively men, followed the road seeking work. For some individual wanderers, a temperament that grew restive when too closely restrained “Never Going to Cease My Wandering” 38 by whatever went by the name of civilization at the moment sought freedom from social encumbrances; a number of men newly mustered out of the armed services, unable to call anywhere “home,” found companions on the road who could not be found in more stable populations. Some vagrants honorably supported families by working the harvests; some were thieves who used the rails to make an escape. Those who scorned hobos and those who admired their seeming freedom could each find in vagrant men objects for their feelings. As a boy, Eiseley encountered vagrancy both as fact and myth. In his later years, as he ceased riding trains illicitly, and the experiences receded from his immediate life, they were turned to myth in the lines of essays and autobiographical writings. The present essay begins with the facts of train travel in the early years of the twentieth century, examining, at the last, the mythic journey that Eiseley saw repeated in every wanderer. Loren was born to wander; his family fortunes were tied to the railroad . His father’s father, Charles Frederick Eisele, fled Stuttgart to avoid conscription in 1838, crossed the ocean to the United States, and took the Oregon Trail to build a farm north of Omaha, Nebraska, on loess soil (Christianson, Fox 3). The name of the soil and the pioneer bent of the grandfather were recapitulated in Charles’s grandson, Loren. “Loess” is the geologic term for soil that is deposited by wind during the era of glaciation; the term, from Norwegian, means “loose” or “free.” Charles Frederick, like his grandson, moved like windblown soil across the western landscape, seeking freedom from the social and cultural constraints that had burdened him. The grandson would come to study the Ice Age and Ice Age hunters. Charles Frederick, despite his canny and energetic nature, became impoverished when the railroad bypassed the town where he kept a hardware store. The grandson was enriched by spending much of his childhood and young manhood in Lincoln, a rail division with an extensive train yard. The grandfather and grandson participated in the movement westward of great numbers of Americans across the face of the continent, and their gains and losses were connected with the rails. Charles Frederick’s grandson came of age during a golden age of drifting , bumming...