My homeward bound life as a hobo

This hobo's primary mode
of transportation.

Since January, I’ve become a bit of a hobo.

I’m slightly better dressed than your average hobo, and I do have steady income, but I’ve been riding the rails - and buses and planes and cars - at least twice a month to travel hither and yon.

The image of hobos -- as the homeless vagabonds of the 1930s who hopped boxcars to get from place to place -- isn’t well regarded. But hobos, as itinerant workers, are different from tramps, who work when they are forced to, and bums, who don’t work at all,and there is a romantic, literary notion to the hobo life, a la Jack Kerouac and his “The Vanishing American Hobo.”

The etymology of hobo is worth exploring because it provides some context for Baby Boomers like myself who get the urge for going.

One etymologist suggests hobo may be derived from hoe-boy, meaning farmhand. Another suggests - and this is the one I like - that hobo is derivative of homeward bound.

Now, my Mom always said that “home is where the heart is”, so the hobo in a sense is just someone following his or her heart home, wherever home may be.

My heart leads me in a variety of directions these days. With my wife having taken a job at the University of Notre Dame and with my continued itinerant work and family in New England, my heart has been dividing its time between here and there.

I don’t hop a freight car and ride for free from rail yard to rail yard. I amass air miles and credit card points to and from  Portsmouth, N.H., Boston, Chicago, and South Bend, Ind.

My heart is with Jane in South Bend. My heart is also with the people I love, admire and respect in New England. I need them all - in the bars where we share our stories, on the golf course where we play against ourselves and each other, and in the offices where I reconnect with my professional life.

The itinerant work I do as a working retired Baby Boomer allows me to pack up my bindle, stow it in the overhead compartment, and move back and forth.

I’m not alone. There are others who do essentially the same thing, who are less rooted to fixed address.

Jane and I a few years ago rented a motor home for a weekend to get a sense of what living life on four wheels would be like.

We stayed at a campground and parked next to owners of a land yacht. Ours was a Class C motor home. Theirs was a Class A motor home that, honestly, was more nicely furnished than our house.

And the couple in their 60s had no fixed address. They moved about as hobos in their condo-on-wheels, visiting friends and family as their hearts moved them, or they visited various parts of the country as their wanderlust moved them. They called it “the life”.

There’s a bit of a hobo in all of us as we get older. Our empty nests make us less rooted. It’s why we Boomers do bucket lists. It’s that need to wander, to discover, to reconnect with someone or some place.

Wrote Kerouac: “The hobo has two watches you can't buy in Tiffany's, on one wrist the sun, on the other wrist the moon, both bands are made of sky.”

The bucket list: A to-do list for the rest of your life

Me on the right with, from left, wife Jane, son David, and
daughter Elizabeth at Breckenridge in Colorado.

I’m goal driven, so the idea of a bucket list as I sojourn through my 60s is a good thing.

It’s like a to-do for the rest of my life, but on a grander, wider scale than the to-do lists that occupy my current working retired years.

I recently checked off a bucket list item that’s been at the top for a while now: A family ski vacation to Breckenridge, Colo.

It was and is one of the best experiences of my life, not only because of the experience of returning to Breckenridge, where I had skied as a kid growing up at the U.S. Air Force Academy outside Colorado Springs, but because I experienced it with several members of my extended family.

I celebrated my 60th birthday milestone in June 2013, and as a birthday present to myself my wife Jane and I offered accommodations at the ski resort for anyone who could make the trip. We scheduled the trip for February school vacation, a time we normally ski together as a family in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

All tallied, there were 16 of us -- me and Jane, two sisters, two brothers in law, two nieces and nephews, my daughter, my son, my stepdaughter, their spouses and significant other, and two grandchildren. One brother and one other sister were going to make the trip, but a work conflict and a canceled flight because of an impending storm got in their way.

The shared experiences are what made the trip for me: the fantastic views that were lost memories because it had been so long but regained as a result of the trip; descending steep bowls that felt less like skiing and more like flying; the massive meal throwdowns each night for dinner; seeing how much everyone enjoyed themselves on the slopes, including my son’s girlfriend who hadn’t skied before and Jane, whose skiing experience was so fantastic that she told me she finally understood what it was about skiing that makes me love it so.

Oh, and Breckenridge Brewing Co.’s Avalanche Ale on tap in The Maggie at the bottom of Peak 9 after skiing.

The Wednesday of that week I couldn’t stop smiling in part because of the ideal weather and ski conditions but mostly from the sheer joy of being where I was and with whom.

With that memory, and so much more, I can now turn to other items on the bucket list: a trip to the Canyonlands and trips to places in the country that I haven’t seen before; trips to Ireland and Europe, to name just a couple. And I plan to carve out the time to write some fiction. And we’ll take another trip to Breckenridge in 2018, if not sooner.

The great thing about the bucket list is it’s ever expanding. I don’t want the list to have an end. There’s so much out there. There’s so much to do. I see an ever growing  list giving me goals through my 60s, through my 70s, through my 80s, through as far and as long as my body and mind can take me.