![]() ![]() “If you find a really perfect specimen,” says Ryan, “it could be worth $30 for a mushroom.”īeer, weed, and cigarettes get their own budget. But thanks to the fog and the Wet-Nap climate, a huge variety of fungi thrive: morels, chanterelles, porcini, and king boletes, which grow right around here. This is Oregon, which would be a lovely state if you could ever see five feet past your face. I also flint-knap.” I don’t even know what flint-knapping is, but now I want to learn. “I changed my fuel pump after watching a seven-minute video, with $40 worth of returnable tools from Walmart,” Trevor tells me. Near the Vagabus is another school bus, a black one, belonging to Trevor (not his real name), who tells me he’s an Iraq War vet and who grew so disgusted with suburbia that he packed up his wife and two children and left his Vegas-bodyguard job behind. Don’t know how to shape an arrowhead? YOUTUBE. You can learn anything using YouTube! Is your car busted? YOUTUBE. You are someone with business to tend to. A phone acts as a signal to others that you are reasonably sane. (By the way, I think he means 501(c)(3).) And even though Huck is dressed in a ratty sweater and has dirt and blood permanently stained into his fingertips, the fact that he’s connected makes him seem different from your average drifter. “We have plans to become a 504(1)(c),” says Huck, directly quoting Kerouac. ![]() So the Vagabus is recruiting riders and raising money through its own Indiegogo page. Occasionally they also hand out toothbrushes and socks, which are even more prized among hobos than God oranges.ĮPanhandle! It takes a lot of gas to get from Oregon to Argentina. One of the oranges was left on a bus seat, with GOD scrawled across it in black marker. “It’s gold!” A local church group also stopped by earlier today and distributed sandwiches, oranges, and religious pamphlets. “If no one picks this up, it’s going to a Dumpster,” Huck says. When I arrive at the Vagabus around midday, it’s stocked with piles of stale croissants, muffins, doughnuts, and danishes, all scored from a local food bank that had no more mouths to feed. God bless the Jesus freaks and the food banks. ![]() And there’s Tilly, Farkus’s brunette traveling companion, a mellow Minnesota native who is new to the road and insists, somewhat unconvincingly, that traveling is in her blood. There’s Farkus, 27, a bearded mandolin player with faded tats and toenails that haven’t been clipped in months. He still dresses like he’s running an IT start-up: nice pants, clean black sweater. In addition to Huckstah, who is 34, we’ve got Ryan, who’s here illegally from Canada (WE NEED A WALL!) and who ditched his job running an IT start-up to live out here. My guide through the farthest fringes of THE GRID is the famed Redditor known to all hobos as Huckstah (his real name: Steven Boutwell), who runs the /r/vagabond subreddit and who doles out advice to anyone online who is eager to get away-the bastard son of Bear Grylls and the Pied Piper. That’s why I’m here, about to board something called the Vagabus: a broken-down white school bus that a group of cloud-connected 21st-century hobos bought for $1,200 and then adorned with the cutesy Reddit alien logo. Like Kerouac did, or Cheryl Strayed, or those people in those Expedia ads. Somewhere inside all those boxes, you get the itch to blow it all up. You wake up every day in a climate-controlled box, then you get into another box to go to work, then you sit in a third box all day just so you can afford bigger boxes and fancy crap to put in those boxes. I left my house on the East Coast, speed-walked impatiently through airports, got a car, and drove four hours, very fast, all to get to this: a parking lot next to a cold-ass beach, where a woman in a shitty sedan with no hubcaps is doing endless doughnuts in the mud and where the surrounding woods host a makeshift tent village for many, many meth addicts.Īnd yet I was in a hurry, and it wasn’t because I hate my home, or my family. ![]() I’m at a hobo campground at the dead end of a lonely road at Bastendorff Beach, near the tiny seaside outpost of Charleston in the Great Drifter Heaven that is the state of Oregon. ![]()
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