Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America's Hoboes

While it does indeed describe some of America, the author quickly loses focus on the aspect of seeing American through the eyes of the hobo to looking at hobo society itself. For the most part, he does this latter quite well, except where he finally intrudes and makes a bald statement of his opinion, and what he deems to be the reader's opinion, in the last page.

Conover is refreshingly naive, in some ways, and not afraid to place his naiveté in what could be considered a work of autobiography. While I doubt someone could use this book as a manual for catching a ride on a rail, it does allow for enough detail to catch some understanding of the complexity and difficulties accompanied thereto. As a travel book, it's interesting and worth the time.


Riding the rails   July 31, 2002
 18 out of 18 found this review helpful

As a young man, in his early 20s, Ted Conover traveled on foot and by rail over most of the Western states, first with hoboes and then with undocumented farm workers from Mexico. In his travels, he discovered two itinerant worlds, sometimes overlapping, that are often misunderstood, and invisible to most Americans. In many ways naïve and sometimes too trusting, Conover also discovered the limits of his middle class upbringing. His first two books, "Rolling Nowhere" and "Coyotes" were based on his experiences. Together they represent a kind of coming of age in America.

With little knowledge of real hobo life, Conover left college in the East, jumped a train in St. Louis and headed west. In the months that followed, he crossed and recrossed 14 states, meeting and traveling with a dozen or more modern-day hoboes. He learned from them how to survive, living off of handouts, sleeping rough, avoiding the railroad police. And he learned about loneliness and loss of identity.

There are moments of pure pleasure, a tin cup of steaming coffee on a cold high plains morning, the unbroken landscape gliding by open boxcar doors. And there are times when the romance of adventure disappears completely -- in bad weather and bad company. I greatly enjoyed this book and was often touched by Conover's youthful pursuit of independence and experience, often taking risks and crashing head-on into realities he does not anticipate. At the end, the romance of the rails has been pretty much stripped away; he's not sorry, but he's had enough.

His book "Coyotes" is a great companion to this one, as it shows him a little older and somewhat wiser, on yet another risk-taking adventure that throws him into yet another marginal world.