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#12 October 2024
Cover Photo from Penelope Niven's
Wanderlust
By John W. Quinley
Dear Readers,, When I was coming of age in a middle-class family of
the 1960s, I struggled with having too many choices in life. Sandburg as young
man struggled with too few choices. When I was eighteen, I drove from Chicago to
New York with my parent’s credit card to start college, a thousand miles from
home. When Sandburg was eighteen, his dad let him use his railroad pass to
travel from Galesburg to nearby Chicago and back for a three-day stay—his first
time not sleeping at home. The trip sparked a wanderlust
in Sandburg. Somewhere out there, he sensed, he might find himself, learn who he
was and what he was meant to do. So, when he was nineteen, he left home to ride
the rails as a hobo. In Always the Young
Strangers, he writes that he brought “in my
pockets a small bar of soap, a razor, a comb, a pocket mirror, two
handkerchiefs, a piece of string, needles and thread, a Waterbury watch, a
knife, a pipe, a sack of tobacco, and three dollars and twenty-five cents in
cash.” He wrote, “Now I would take to the Road, see rivers and mountains,
everyday meeting strangers to whom I was one more young stranger.” His ramblings brought him to Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado,
Kansas, Missouri, and back—2,000 miles in four months. As he did in Galesburg,
he worked low-paying menial jobs—the only type available. He unloaded and loaded
kegs of nails for transport on steamboats plying the Mississippi; picked pears
and apples, threshed wheat, and harvested hay and corn; washed dishes at
restaurants—often with food offered as pay; labored on a railroad gang; and
chopped wood for meals. He slept in flophouses (once sharing a room with forty
others for fifteen cents a night), as well as barn lofts, closets or hallways at
the back of a shop, and hobo jungles where he was welcomed into their rough
community. In a journal he kept during these travels, he recorded
his impressions of the landscapes, seeing the vast wheat fields west of the
Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains for the first time. He noted interesting
faces he saw, unusual bits of language, examples of folk wisdom, radical
political ideas, and the stories and songs he heard along the way. This
extraordinary journey boosted his confidence and heightened his hope for the
future. He wrote that “Away deep in my heart now I had hope as never before.
Struggles lay ahead, I was sure, but whatever they were I would not be afraid of
them.” From this point forward, he embraced a life of traveling, seeking, and
experimenting. Sandburg returned home with fifteen dollars in his
pockets. He was glad to be home in the “only house in the United States where I
could open a door without knocking and walk in for a kiss from the woman of the
house.” Thanks for reading,
John Quinley is the author of
Discovering Carl Sandburg: The Eclectic Life of an American Icon and is a former docent at
the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site in Flat Rock, North Carolina.
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