There are plenty of guidebooks for how to “adventure” into national parks or how to backpack around Europe while spending only a minor fortune, but few books provide tips for surviving in the American jungle. Josh Mack's The Hobo Handbook teaches you how to thrive with a pack, your wits, and an eccentric sense of absolute freedom in the concrete wilderness and along the railways crossing the industrial landscape like America's iron arteries. In many ways this book strips away all the glamour that Jack Kerouac, Jack London, and Walt Whitman ascribed to the open road. Living free is an art that demands a Buddhist monk's patience and a soldier's ability to endure extreme conditions. In addition to the basics, like investing in synthetic clothes that will dry faster, the book covers some of the finer points of hoboing, like how to give yourself stitches and how to waterproof a match with candle wax. Below are the top ten tips from The Hobo Handbook on how to survive as a modern vagabond searching for a double-edged kind of freedom.
This article appears in Sep 8-14, 2011.