(Screenshot image taken from the YouTube account of 'hobestobe')
As mentioned in my last review of Stobe the Hobo’s work, the series was often a curious study in competing contradictions. There was always conflict between its underclass milieu and the elegant craft and aristocratic touches in its production values. The view of America that you see from the back of a freight car could be both remarkably fascinating and beautiful, while also being grimly bleak and realistic. The fact that many of the series’ most awe-inspiring imagery would often feature elements of a freight car in the foreground of the shot would easily drive this notion home. Whatever poetry the series managed to capture, it did so in a world firmly attached to reality.
And yet it’s easy to understand the popularity of its 6th episode, a video that perhaps leaned too far into the realm of high-art poetry. Yes the beauty of this episode should be celebrated. But to really understand Stobe the Hobo’s work there should also be some appreciation of videos like the 8th episode which focus more on the unadorned realism of his ventures. This episode offers a thematic and tonal counterbalance to the Casino Tour Part 1 episode. Here Stobe the Hobo travels alone as he makes his way out of Denver heading east. The cheese and wine seen earlier in the series is replaced by more common staples of Stobe the Hobo’s diet, convenience store pizza and beer. There’s also an odd aura of silence to the video especially early in the journey. It’s as if Stobe the Hobo was left completely lacking in anything salient to comment on. While the town of Wiggins, CO gets treated to Stobe the Hobo’s piano rendition of Johnny Cash’s ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ (a piece that appears often during the Casino Tour episodes), the town of Brush, CO was no so lucky. The music stops by this point and the town is instead serenaded by the steel wheels grinding against the rails, in addition to the occasional ‘click clack’ sound effect and the various crossing bell sirens as it blitzes through town.
This segment comes across as an attempt to efface some of the luster and romance of train hopping by approaching an aspect of human existence that art rarely dares to traverse, that of mindless boredom. There is a tedium expressed in this segment that still provides a certain authenticity to the journey which to me felt important even if it wasn’t particularly engaging. There was always a certain educational bent with Stobe the Hobo’s work and this episode offered one of his cruelest lessons; namely that train hopping often isn’t a particularly fun thing to do. If you spend enough of your life doing it, then after awhile the sight of seeing another non-descript rural town from the back of a speeding freight train can leave your soul so unbothered that it elicits no response whatsoever. This is what I felt when watching this video. The silence was very noticeable and deafening.
Recorded a year and half after the Casino Tour episodes, in which episode #7 featured a surprising dearth of train hopping action, this video shows Stobe the Hobo hitting the reset button on his series in order to recommit to the original concept. And he attempts this with an emphasis on showing the underlying drudgery of this lifestyle. A lot of the imagery seen here fits with this motif. Why else would we see the SunCor Commerce City Refinery as the train leaves Denver, or a rather placid view of a residential sidewalk in McCook, NE. The view of the latter shows a certain vacuousness in its structure and conformity that’s reminiscent of Levittown. If that wasn’t enough Stobe the Hobo gives a lecture on all the pitfalls of his adventures while waiting for a ride in the dusk light of McCook.
Despite all of this the episode was not completely devoid of any charm. I was actually quite impressed with a lot of the camerawork in this episode, which I generally didn’t expect for a solo journey. It was interesting to see Stobe the Hobo keep his camera rolling as he both boarded and disembarked from a railcar, something that he had never done before in this series. The perspective that you get from these images was intriguing. There was also some excellent gracefulness with the horizontal pans that went both against and with the direction of the train’s motion while going through Brush, CO. This camera movement created a slight panoramic view to some of the objects that the train whizzed past. And of course there was Stobe the Hobo’s trademark wry humor, which only gets expressed through the video’s on-screen text. The best example of this was a counter that indicated how much time Stobe the Hobo had left before falling victim to a boredom-induced suicide in McCook. While such elements are enough to please dedicated fans of the series, it still doesn’t prevent the entire episode from feeling a bit pedestrian and trite. If the 6th episode made you want to take up train hopping just for the thrill of it, than this episode conversely offers enough to make you reconsider such a notion.