"If you ever see a shooting star cross the path of the moon, it becomes a gypsy moon. Every time you see it after that, you want to wander." Those words, spoken to Jacqueline K.Schmidt by an old-time hobo, help to explain why Schmidt, a former executive director of the Indiana Transportation Museum, became a tramp known among her fellow hoboes as "Gyspy Moon."
That's a good enough explanation for me. I know what wanderlust feels like. There are thousands of people like me for whom freight hopping is a classic American adventure. When Schmidt was a child, her father used to tuck her in with bedtime songs and stories from his own rail wanderings so it's not surprising that she became one of us.
It's rare to encounter a female who hops freights. It's even more unusual to find a grown woman doing it for adventure. But what's most remarkable about Gypsy Moon is her prowess as a tramp storyteller.
She reveals glimpses of that prowess early in the book as she describes her first ride, but most of this interesting volume is devoted to straightforward interviews in which veteran 'bos like "Cardboard," "Steamtrain Maury," and "Fry Pan Jack," relate their own rail riding adventures, dating back to the great depression or earlier. In this section, Schmidt gets out of the way and lets her subjects do the talking. The result is a valuable piece of American history -- a glimpse into a way of life that's "done and been."
But it's only toward the end of the book, when Gyspy begins sharing her own adventures and misadventures, that her prose takes off like a fast rattler through the American grain. Her soaring spirit and wry humor carry the reader down the main line, as she and the Collinwood Kid dodge bulls, get sidetracked, and interact with other travelers.
Gypsy Moon, whose fellow knights of the road elected her a National Queen of the Hobos in 1990, has earned a place in my bookshelf next to my other favorite road authors -- William Least Heat Moon and the two Jacks (London and Kerouac).
Keep those eyes on the stars, Gypsy.
-- Reviewed by Robert F. Baldwin
