The Legend of Hobo Shoestring
By Travis Kincaid
April 1, 2024.
The front door is deadbolted. The police officers enter the apartment anyway, and a breeze from the open balcony door hits them. A shower curtain printed with trains hangs where a closet door should be. The walls are decorated with locomotive posters, a train clock, and maps of the continental United States.
As they continue, they see a key ring on the kitchen counter. Two officers walk out the balcony door and stare down while the other turns into the bedroom. It’s about a 15-foot drop to the ground, with Boone Lake 40 yards from that. They’re staring, contemplating. And then there’s a knock on the open front door. A short, middle-aged man stands in the doorway.
“Hi, excuse me?”
The cops turn.“Yes, how can we help you?”
“I have Mark’s gun at my apartment. I’m his neighbor.”
The officers stay relaxed. “Ok, and why do you have his gun at your apartment?”
The man grows tense, knowing the weight of his words. “Well, when I got news that he was missing, I came to check on him, but the door was locked, and I saw the balcony door was open, and I knew he had a gun in here. I didn’t want to leave it here, you know?”
A voice calls out from the bedroom. “The safe is open! It’s been rifled through.”
March 31, 2024
Cue the bright lights and the teleprompter. A man in a suit walks into a small studio and takes a seat in his chair. He adjusts his posture until it feels perfect. Action! A recorded voice booms.
Breaking news for WATE 6 News On Your Side, Nashville.
The man in the suit stares into the camera and begins to read.
“The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation has issued a Silver Alert for 53-year-old Mark ‘Shoestring’ Nichols on behalf of the Johnson City Police Department. A post from the TBI says Nichols is just over 6 feet and 165 lbs. He has blue eyes, brown hair, a long gray beard and is missing two fingers on his left hand. The TBI says Nichols was last seen at his residence in Johnson City on March 27 and last spoke with his family early that morning.”
It’s a silver alert for Nashville police, but it’s a code red, all-systems-go alert for the railroad community.
To them, Mark Nichols is not just a middle-aged man who vanished from his home. He is “Shoestring,” a legend of the rails. He is part hobo philosopher, part living archive of a fading American subculture. For decades, his lanky frame and weathered guitar showed up in freight yards from Appalachia to the Pacific, carrying with him stories, songs, and the kind of hard-earned wisdom you can’t Google.
To the railroaders, drifters, and wanderers who know his name, Nichols going missing isn’t just cause for concern. It’s unthinkable. It’s like a lighthouse going dark.
YouTube and Reddit posts trigger his peering-eyed followers. They comfort each other with statistics like, “86% of missing adults are found within two days, and only 3% are missing for over a week.”
But do the odds shift for a professional mobile stowaway? The calendar flips through the inaugural days of April, and the sanctioned and unsanctioned searches continued while hope dwindled.
“Lots and lots of railroad workers are fans of his …and still no one has spotted him,” lamented a Reddit user with the profile name TraditionalLecture10. “People are checking his camping areas, no luck, it's not looking good.”
“My father-in-law was such a big fan,” said Ignited Coyote on YouTube. “He’d go to sleep with him and talk about riding with him. He talked about, ‘we rode there last night,’ like he was on the train with him. This has hurt him very much, it’s almost too hurtful for him to watch the videos right now.”
Dozens of others longed to go beyond the keyboard to search.
“I wish I lived closer so I could try to help,” wrote PRB74TX on Reddit. “I love that guy.”
November 10, 2021
The Utah landscape is hell. Cities line its borders, not daring to test the belly of the beast. Within is an endless expanse of huddled sand, frowning trees, giants of stone with varying stability in their old age, and few people.
Rock formations trap the gravel surrounding the rail yard, and the sun amid its daily shift is rusting the tops of train cars. This is probably why cars exuberate pleasant roars when departing the nearly forgotten pocket of land. Others screech their displeasure upon arrival. Around them huddle groups of train workers, most wearing their own rusted faces, matching the personality of the locomotives they operate. A hard-nosed middle-aged group of men standing in a circle, all more thankful than their trains to be taking a break in this hellhole. It’s either this yard or the one in El Paso. About 100 yards from them sits another middle-aged man no more content to be in this train yard than a prisoner is to be in the U.S. Penitentiary. He’s been actively plotting to get out of yards like this for 33 years. He’s hoping to get himself to the one in El Paso.
Nichols explaining crew changes to his online audience. Credit: YouTube/Hobo Shoestring.
He sits alone, hidden from the others for fear of receiving his hundredth-something trespassing ticket. However, a small part of him would appreciate the run-in since he has not had a face-to-face conversation in days. He wears a thick coat of facial rust, his eyes sit deep in their sockets, making it hard to notice when one wanders, and he dons a camouflage cap with a short brim, which fits with his long, grey, and scraggly Civil War beard. In the times between each of those trespassing violations, he’s learned some things about avoiding run-ins with rail police, or as he calls them, “bull.”
His mind rattles and burdens when he’s in a yard too long, so he’ll scout a car, either right before operation or at the inception of its movement, and stow himself away. After the railmen have made their checks and boarded their vehicles, dreading their road to El Paso, he finds his bliss, stashed away in a railcar.
When he’s caught, you’ll see on the trespassing ticket that his name is Mark Nichols. But here, in the unforgiving confines of a freight car, he’s best known as Hobo Shoestring. He’s ridden the steel road through eight Canadian provinces, 14 Mexican states, and 49 U.S. ones. There’s no greater celebrity sighting in a North American railyard than Shoestring.
While he sits alone in Utah, he tells stories, looking through the lens of his camera and explaining to his 150,000 YouTube subscribers how this yard hasn’t changed in the decades he’s known it. He turns the camera to capture footage of a car rolling along. Then he packs away the camera and waits for the perfect moment to board the train. He lies in the cut while the workers do their thing, and turns his storytelling device back on as a car rolls past him, going just too fast to make a safe entry. "AWH, Crap! Shit! I know I can’t catch it now. Shoestring relents. The initial disappointment wears rather quickly.“You know that old saying… it wasn’t meant to be and there’s always another train… Well, it’s 84 degrees right now. I’d kind of rather go north anyway. That’s the excuse that’s gonna make me feel better.”
High Above the Railroad Yard (Helper, Utah), Video ~300, Views: 95,000, Comments:
“I’m a railroad engineer, and Hobo Shoestring knows far more about the railroad than I” (90scarguy).
“Shoestring, My cousin lives in Helper. I just sent him this link. I told him if he ever sees you offer you a meal or your favorite, Coffee! He's a Great Man just like yourself” (TheGumbyBlues).
November 1989.
Hobo Shoestring does not exist, and Mark Nichols is a fresh-faced 19-year-old, a newborn veteran of the United States Army, and a drifter with no home.
He eyes a musty, stained bridge in Laramie, Wyoming, thinking it could do fine as shelter for a night. The only problem is a man already there; his smell radiates out both ends of the arched cement pillars. He is staring at Nichols, quite aware of his thinking. He is a small man, sporting multiple layers featuring a surprisingly cool coat and a snug beanie. A troll figure – one who doesn’t seem to present much threat in a turf war, except Nichols is rail thin.
The troll waves towards Mark. “Hey! Come over here.” Mark walks cautiously over, stopping a few feet from him. “What’re you doing out here?”
“Traveling. Looking for a place to lay my head tonight.”
“You a hippie kid? Where you headin'?”
“Oh, Seattle, Portland, I don’t know.”
The troll walks closer and puts his arm around Nichol’s bone-thick frame. “You see those trains over there,” he says, pointing at a yard some 300 feet from where they’re standing. Nichols’ eyes light up. He knows how the rest of this conversation will go and wonders why he didn’t think of it himself.
“If you go get on that train, it’ll take you to Portland.”
Mark is skeptical about the destination, but he doesn’t care much. He shakes hands with the man and a Laramie, Wyoming, compromise is made. He walks toward the trains, sensing inside of him that adventure is afoot, one which will keep him moving. As he gets closer, he inspects the connected cars, each holding a different character. Some present a thousand shiny and well-crafted ridges, some show gray, round brute force, and some give a homely feel with about a quarter rust and a large open door inviting all comers. Mark settles into the latter, knowing not when departure would take place. While it would be many years before he is knighted with this name, Mark Nichols is now Hobo Shoestring.
The multi-day journey of steel smacking steel, metal cars clanging, train horns, and loneliness is enough to drive a man hungry, sleep-deprived, and cursing a bridge troll in Laramie. But for Shoestring, the combination of those noises – along with solitude and the feeling of covering a great distance – is bliss. As days pass and his food dwindles, he remains determined to prove himself to the lumbering locomotive.
“I didn't get off in the right place, he told me to. I loved it so much I just wanted to stay on, and it took me all the way to Stockton, California.”
“It is like a medication…I finally found that motion and that sound that kind of put me in a trance. It made my head straight… still does.”
March 1991.
Now three years into his travels, his addictive nature finds its symbiotic counter to that of his train-hopping: alcohol. It is a tale as old as time for the inhabitants of this lifestyle. Watching the sunset in a boxcar means a lot of downtime. When not working the fields or in a factory for a day job, a hobo drinks. He drinks waiting for a train and he drinks on the train. Traversing America’s landscape can be a lonely love, connection and food being the simplicities left behind. Alcohol can serve as a substitute for both. In Shoestring’s case, it crutches him for 26 years.
He huddles under a building’s canopy near that infamous yard in El Paso, the one he’d be thinking of 30 years later. He sips on some wild-eyed liquor to drown the effects of the boiling West Texas sun. At least that’s what he tells himself. He has dumped some water to make room for the Mad Dog Orange Wine stowed in his bag. He sits under the canopy for some minutes debating whether he would rather undergo his ride with less water or less liquor. The liquor loses. He doesn’t mind his choice, taking down half the bottle, ready to board the train. He remains a diligent snoop even when intoxicated, checking cars, opening doors, and staying in the shadows.
He slides open a creaking boxcar door to find stacks of the nation’s finest two-ply toilet paper stacked high and wide. A cardinal sin of hopping freight trains is riding in a car with cargo. The dangers of it shifting and injuring you during transport are too existent. Shoestring climbs atop the paper rolls and settles into his comfiest position in weeks. He decides the risk is worth it, hypothesizing no man has died via toilet paper.
Hobo Shoestring tells his online audience how he escaped the locked boxcar. Credit: Youtube/Hobo Shoestring.
Before climbing in, he spikes the door — a term used for picking up a railroad spike and jamming it into the bottom of the boxcar door — to prevent it from slamming on him, locking him inside. That is the only work needed before he busts out his Mad Dog Orange Wine, determined to no end to save his water. A drunken stupor closely follows with a coma-like snore as the finale. He awakens five hours later with an instant rush of fear and anxiety on steel. His spike job proved poor, and he was lying in complete darkness, the door having shut on him, locking him in a uniform boxcar somewhere in the southern United States with no form of emergency contact. He spends many minutes motionless, sick from his Wild Eye.
“Oh lord, please, please don’t do this to me. I swear if you get me out of this, I won’t drink or curse or nothin’. Please just get me out of this. Amen,” he wept.
Now, some lies were written in this story's last few sentences. The first being that he had no form of emergency contact. Shortly after his first prayer and in between the countless more that would follow, Shoestring initiates the “bang and call.” He bangs on the door of the boxcar and yells out for any yard workers. Daylight peaks through a hole in the car, providing him the same bearing as a man in solitary confinement. Still, it is enough to keep him hooting and hollering for hours. Night falls with no solution, and Shoestring is feeling more and more alone. The pleas to god become less frequent and his mind slows in defeat. Fortunately, his commitment to wine and liquor means that he has enough water to survive a while. He spends patches of time banging and calling through the night, but it isn’t until early the following morning that a yardman hears his pleas and frees him from the shackles of the toilet paper car. Well, maybe not free. He’s sent toward a man with the authority to issue a trespassing ticket.
That was year three of 26.
October 2012.
He sits in a boxcar on a local train leaving Sioux Falls, South Dakota for Sioux City, Iowa. He polishes off what is likely his 20th or 25th beer of the day. These days, he’s putting down more than 30 of them between dawns. His withdrawals are debilitating, his travels are slow, and his body is breaking down—his eyesight, especially. He can feel himself sinking into the sediment, not wanting to ride trains for fear he will stray too far from the liquor store. Plus, the habit costs so much that he has to work day jobs to support it. Still, he is pulled to keep moving, so Shoestring drinks and burps and stirs himself to sleep in southern South Dakota, waking up in northern Iowa around four a.m.
“A lot of people just quit riding. Because if they rode, they would leave their source, their supplier. So they'd just stick in one area where they had their drugs. They'd rather not go through withdrawal than ride and have a good time. And I don't look down on those guys because I was that way with alcohol.”
While his sleep is short and dreamless, it is enough time away from the bottle(s) to kick in extreme withdrawal sickness. He is a paralyzed man, too sick to get himself off the floor, so he stays there. He lay thinking of his piercing headache and the beer in his stomach, disgusted that he would have to add more to get himself level. He also thinks of the difference between Sioux City and Sioux Falls.
Hobo Shoestring tells his audience about an incident in a boxcar. Credit: Youtube/Hobo Shoestring
*BANG* The door of the boxcar slams shut, the car is motionless, and Shoestring awakens from a second sleep. He hears the workers talking and working outside and knows the door will open again. He’s aware of every step taken upon arrival and departure of a train, and each car is repeatedly opened and shut. *BANG*
It’s an hour later. Shoestring’s awake—motionless and sick—and the shotgun-like noise sounds again. But he can’t get up. He doesn’t have the will or the health. He accepts his spot: stuck to the floor in a motionless, dark, open boxcar. *BANG* Ten more hours pass, the workers are gone, the door is shut, and Shoestring has found motivation to drink his remaining beers. It takes seven or eight to relieve the shaking. He grabs a piece of wood in the car and bangs the door with it, but it’s a ghost yard outside.
“911, what is your emergency?”
“Uh, hello. I’m locked in a train boxcar at the Sioux City CSX railyard. I can’t get out.”
“You’re locked inside a train?”
“Yes, in a boxcar.”
He gives the operator the serial number and waits, expecting rescue and a jail visit all in one. Anxiety fills him. While he would usually welcome a weekend in jail on account of a meal and a bed, time away from alcohol heeds a heavy risk. Shakes, sickness, and risk of a seizure for 48 hours, cold turkey. After another beer, he starts fidgeting around with the wood and the door, finding the drunken strength to pry it open while Sioux City’s finest are still racking their brains on how to find this caller. He figures himself free and starts walking away from the yard, thinking it’d be smart to distance himself. A patrol car picks him up not a block away. He’s cuffed for trespassing and put in the back of the car.
“Sir, I should tell you, if I’m away from booze for too many hours, I get real sick withdrawals and could seize up. So that you know.”
The officer could already hear his shakes rattle the handcuffs, which matched the tone in Shoestring’s voice. He dropped him off at the emergency room with a ticket, knowing well that money would never reach the government of Sioux City. As it turned out, it was exactly what he needed. Four days later, Shoestring left the hospital. Three years later, he was sober.
May 5, 2020, Slammed Shut in Another Boxcar, Video: ~250, Views: 257,000, Comments:
“You have no idea how glad I am that you kicked alcohol and opiates, man. They are both truly demons” (WillaHerrera).
“Oh, the hell of alcohol withdrawal, gone are the days of me sitting in bars in Ireland trying to stop the shaky hands until I could get the whisky to my mouth. Thank god, you're looking well, Shoestring” (Muskrat477).
“I quit drinking about 8 and a half years ago. It was so bad that my stomach started bloating, and I had to have a blood transfusion and a platelet transfusion. They put me in a nursing home for four months. They thought I was gonna die. That's where I made the decision, 'Hey, if it's this bad where I'm in a nursing home, I'm quitting.' I didn't go to any AA meetings, nothin’. I said, 'That's it.'” — Hobo Shoestring
Winter, 2018.
Shoestring sits on the narrow porch of a grainer — a car used for transporting loose material like gravel — in Kansas City. Grainers are exponentially more dangerous than boxcars as you ride on the vehicle's porch, not surrounded by the comfort of walls. You’re more exposed to the elements, and falling to the wheels below becomes a factor. Still, most hobo rides are done on grainers since empty boxcars are a finite commodity. Shoestring shares pleasantries with the locomotive’s workers, who point him towards a good car to ride. The lot of them are aware of his legend and have seen his YouTube videos, not an uncommon occurrence for him now. He stares out at the grey Kansas sky and the portable building in front of him, unable to tell how ugly both are.
Hobo Shoestring explaining how he hurt his hand. Credit: Youtube/Hobo Shoestring.
In a life hinged on depth perception and judging speeds, a hobo losing their eyesight is a death sentence. If he were a major league pitcher, he would have been put out to pasture. Two years in the minors, a stint in Liga Mexicana De Béisbol, then a Scottsdale retirement community. It’s unfeasible to operate in high-pressure visual scenarios with such an impediment. But Shoestring is one of the greats of his field, and he possesses those attributes: commitment, love, skill, and stubbornness. Across sports, legends stay past their expiration date. In the case of an athlete like Michael Jordan, his 2002 stint with the Washington Wizards only took away from the mystique he built. In the case of Hobo Shoestring, his stint as a nearly legally blind train hopper added more battle scars and accompanied him during his formative legacy years.
“When I was young, I could catch maybe 15 miles an hour. Nowadays, if it’s going faster than walking speed, I don’t even try…I got fifteen percent eyesight in my left eye and thirty in my right eye. People say, ‘How in the hell do you ride trains?’ I'm like, silhouettes. I can tell exactly what car is what. I've been doing it for 32 years with good eyes, so I know what to expect. ” — Hobo Shoestring
He lies in the cubby (picture a dustier version of those Japanese sleep pods) of his grainer and thinks of where he’ll get off, the video he has to edit, the one he’s currently filming, and decides he needs a new pair of pants—these have a hole around one of the ankles. He finds an underpass in Pittsburg, Kansas, in the annals of his brain. Though this train will only slow down at the underpass, he knows.
Around 3 a.m., Shoestring is awake after only a few hours of sleep, and it’s time for the dismount. It’s not a full moon night, and given his rhino vision, he feels nervous for the escape. But it’s also a maneuver he’s mastered through thousands of jumps. He throws off his backpack to relieve the weight.
Now, when exiting a moving train, the subject must clear the “decoupler bar”—a railing that connects the two cars. At best, not clearing the bar would mean a tumbling landing beside the track with bruises and aches. At worst, and maybe more likely, it would mean a trip face-first onto the rail and an evisceration of one's organs. Every second more he waits, his luggage moves further.
It’s time: he stands at the back of the train, his mound. A place he’s stood many, too many times. While his pitch hits the air slower than before, there’s enough movement to get him out of the inning. As his feet leave the metal, he gets as little air as he does distance. A sad sight of aging that could be shown at a doctor's office. Shoestring’s left foot catches the decoupler bar, initiating 15 life-changing, subconscious seconds of chaos. He lets out a hard grunt as he lands ass up on the railroad ties beside the track. Had someone been looking on, he’d think, “holy shit, how is he not dead?” But there wasn’t anyone watching. It was Shoestring and the train.
In a moment of vulnerability and panic, he places his left hand on the track to push himself away, and with no change of pace, a gondola runs through it. The train horn blares as it passes under the bridge, drowning Shoestring’s screams.
“I remember it felt like lightning had shot up my arm.”
He grabs his gloved hand with the other, not knowing if it’ll be there, if the whole hand will be hanging off, or if miraculously that pain was fugazi and it only caught the tips of every finger. He held it to his face like Joe Pesci in “Home Alone.” What he sees is indiscernible from anything other than a bloody mess. His screams turn to solemn cries now as he gets to a knee and then to his feet, holding the wrist of the bloody mess. The last car passes, and he is officially alone. The Battle of Pittsburg, Kansas, was over, and Shoestring would humbly write the book of his casualty.
Disoriented and dripping blood from his limp hand, Shoestring walks to get his backpack. It’s still a hundred or so feet in the opposite direction. Adrenaline gives him the boost he needs to make it up to civilization. He manages to let go of his wrist to bang on the first door he comes across, screaming for help through the closed windows. A man in underwear opens the door. Shoestring’s voice turns to a defeated panic. “I got my hand rand over by the train… Can you call an ambulance for me? I — I lost my phone.”
The man runs upstairs to grab a belt, fastening it above the bloody mess. Cops arrive before the ambulance with a trespassing ticket in hand. They stuff it in his pocket before he’s loaded and taken to the emergency room, and later transferred by helicopter to a trauma center. Nine surgeries later, the news is official: his pinky and ring finger are pronounced dead. Hobo Shoestring is officially an eight-fingered man.
When he was lifted out of the ambulance and rolled into the depths of Mercy Hospital Pittsburg, the paramedics moved Shoestring past a nurse who immediately recognized The Man writhing in pain on their stretcher, fastened by seatbelts. He—we’ll call him “Michael”—was a fan of that man and had watched his YouTube videos. Michael could figure for himself what the bloody mess was about and assumed it would be a while until the next upload.
When Michael learned that Shoestring’s belongings were left behind in Pittsburg as he was airlifted to Kansas City, he knew how to repay his favorite storyteller. The 120-mile journey was very different for the nurse than for Shoestring. For the former, it was a four-hour round-trip drive on his day off, used to do a good deed for a man he knew only through pixels on a screen. So he drives through the fluctuating Kansas plains, with a hefty but neat backpack in his passenger seat.
“Oh man, I can’t thank you enough. I can’t believe you did this for me, I thought I was gonna have to ride that damn train again,” Shoestring says as Michael returns with his belongings. The two remain friends afterward.
“It's better than an arm or a leg. I'd rather sacrifice two fingers and part of my hand than an arm or a leg. And it's the pinky and ring finger on my left hand, which I don't use.”
March 27, 2024.
Mark Nichols stumbles out of the Johnson City Medical Center with a Visatril subscription. He walks in sleep-deprived with auditory and visual hallucinations and leaves hours later, his mental state unchanged. No official admission or patient status, just a man sent on his own. His final visit to such facilities. His last known contact would be ten hours later.
The search for Mark focused on an obvious culprit, Boone Lake. The 4,400-acre body of water rested behind his apartment, which he rented with his newfound YouTube money. Nichols’ body was found there, beneath a bridge, on April 5th, nine days after his disappearance. “If that body is indeed Mr. Nichols, this investigation is not over,” says Mike Adams, captain of the criminal investigation unit, at the scene of the discovery. True, mainly because the town coroner hadn’t gotten his eyes on the body. But one found in a lake behind the subject’s house, no outward bodily injuries, discharged for hallucinations 10 hours before his last contact, would typically yield an open and closed case.
November 2024.
It’s the annual 2024 Tennessee Coroner’s Conference, an extravagant gala. The Johnson City representative, the ninth biggest in the state, stands before his contemporaries and presents the case of Mark Nichols. He’s Damned, bewildered, and stumped.
“Nope.” “Couldn’t say.” “That’s an odd one,” muttered the various examiners, their focused eyes on the medical documents. No one could find answers in the mysterious man’s remnants — no drugs or alcohol in his system and no internal or external injuries.
Seven months later, after being examined by many Tennessee coroners, with their next conference four months away, the investigation remains open, the case is cold, and there are no answers on the horizon. There’s an obvious suspicion of drowning, but an inability to prove it. What about the open safe and the neighbor with the gun? They were seemingly chalked up to concerned friends reacting to Mark’s disappearance. One took his firearm before someone else could, and another entered the safe to confirm his passport wasn’t missing. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation won’t disclose any details.
The rails remain alive. Operators, crews, and hoppers still crisscross the country. In 1967, a documentary declared The Last American Hobo. In 2012, Vice followed with Death of the American Hobo. Yet as the cost of living climbs and wages stall, the tradition has revived. Today’s generation of hoppers can connect and inspire each other in every direction — north, south, east, west — always in motion.
For years, whispers have circled of a man somewhere among them. Rarely seen, but often recognized by the mark he left on boxcar doors. His signature, etched in passing, still stretches across the country.
Hobo Shoestring: 211,000 Subscribers, 515 Videos, 47,000,000 Views, Over 2,700,000 miles of steel rail ridden.
“Three Years ago, I was just a fan of Mark. I wasn’t even out here traveling or anything, I’ve only been at it for two and a half years…and then we became friends, we got to meet, I got to travel with my idol, got to take him on his last ride. So I’m out here in Johnson City, where he lived. I’m gonna go to the spot where we first hopped trains and see if I can’t get a ride out of here” (Anywhere Man Hobo on Youtube).
“I'll do it till the day I die. I've thought about it a million times, am I gonna retire? It's kind of like those ball players that say they're gonna retire and a year later they're back at it. Cause they love it, they love the game so much. It's like that with me” (Mark Nichols aka Hobo Shoestring).
The broadcast light goes off. The chyron retires Shoestring’s name like a jersey and moves on. We are very good at naming people: Silver Alert. Legend. Trespasser. We are less good at saving them. The news cycle ends neatly. The police file does not.
The night he vanished, a balcony door wouldn’t stay shut, a neighbor pocketed the gun “for safekeeping,” and a ransacked safe gaped open. These are facts that read like clues but never added up to an answer.
Earlier that day Hobo Shoestring walked out of the hospital with the same hallucinations he walked in with, a script in his hand and no admission band on his wrist. Nine days later they found him in the lake behind his apartment. Months pass and they still can’t say how a body with no drugs, no alcohol, no internal or external injuries came to rest there.
Out past the lake, a horn holds one long, low note and the blocks flip from red to green. In the yards he loved, brakemen still count cars. The train still takes the curve and doesn’t look back.
Maybe that’s the closest thing to an answer to Hobo Shoestring’s story: keep moving.
Travis Kincaid is a journalism student at Mesa College. He hopes to get paid to write something again sometime.
