What Is What Was Book

Big Rock Candy Mountain
~~ written by Harry McClintock

Chorus:
Oh the buzzin' of the bees in the cigarette trees
The soda water fountain where the lemonade springs
And the bluebird sings in that Big Rock Candy Mountain

On a summer day
In the month of May
A burly bum came ahiking
Down a shady lane
Through the sugar cane
He was looking for his liking
As he strolled along
He sang a song
Of the land of milk and honey
Where a bum can stay
For many a day
And he won't need any money

Chorus:

In the Big Rock Candy Mountain
The cops have wooden legs
The bulldogs all have rubber teeth
And the hens lay soft-boiled eggs
The farmers' trees are full of fruit
The barns are full of hay
I want to go where there ain't no snow
Where the sleet don't fall and the wind don't blow
In that Big Rock Candy Mountain

~~ Sung by Burl Ives


Back in the 70s my friend Cathy and her boyfriend George took me to Glen Ellen, CA to Jack London's Historial Park. The small wooden house where he lived was still on the land, and the stone Wolf House that he had been having built, had burned down just before they were to move into it. Its ruins remain. His wife Charmian wrote that "the razing of his house killed something in Jack, and he never ceased to feel the tragic inner sense of loss."

I picked up a copy of his credo while at the museum, and I kept it for many years:

"I would rather be ashes than dust!
I would rather that my spark should burn out
in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot.
I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom
of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.
The function of man is to live, not to exist.
I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them.
I shall use my time."

Ah, to live like that, I thought.

Jack and Charmian began preparations to build another stone house on the land, but he died 3 years and 3 months after the fire on November 22, 1918. His health had been failing him for a while. He was just 40 years old. His wife saw to the construction of new house, The House of Happy Walls, and she lived in it until her death in 1955. It is this house that you see first when you come into the park. In it is the museum. Since that one visit, I had gone there often, sometimes alone, just to be there, to see it agaih, and sometimes I sat by their small lake.

While in the museum I read of his travels, I saw this souvenirs from the different islands, and I coveted it all. I had wished then that I had been his wife Charmian because she had traveled with him. Heck, I wished that I had been him. Ah, to sail the seas, to meet the natives of the various islands.

And then I saw his Socialist Party card. He had become one in 1890. This book was about his life as a hobo in 1894. It is political. There is a book out titled, The Radical Jack London.

He had become a hobo because he had the wanderlust, the desire to try it out, to jump the trains, see the U.S. and Canada. It sounded excitsing. So if you read a biography of him that says he did this because he was studying sociology, don't believe it, he says.

His days as a hobo, while they sounded exciting, weren't always so. It was dangerous. The shacks, as he called the men working the trains, the ones that fought to keep the hobos off, were dangerous. You could get beaten up, even killed. He played cat and mouse with them many a time. Perhaps that was exciting to him.

What surprised me and yet didn't surprise me at all, was how they could pick a man up off the streets, or walking in the country, without any provocation. Vagrancy. Then that man would be thrown into jail and then sent to prison for 30 to 90 days. He was made to work hard before he got out.

They fed the prisoners, the new ones, bread and water. The men bartered when they could. An old timer in prison got better food, so if the old timer needed an article of your clothing, like your suspenders, he may trade you a piece of meat for them.

Jack London mentioned how you couldn't see a lawyer during your quick trial, you could't even send a letter out of the prison or receive one. When I think of how he was a socialist, I can see that this book had a message. One of our cruel prison system.

I thought back to`1962 when I first moved to Vacaville, CA to stay with my to be husband's family. He had once lived in my home town of Paso Robles, CA when we met. I wanted to move close to him, and I was fresh out of high school, so I left home. One day he drove me into town, and while he was at the high school, I walked around town looking for work. Not finding any, I went back and sat in the car in the school parking lot to wait until school was out. Instead, the police came and took me down to the station. Vagrancy. I told them where I was staying and said that I had been looking for work. I was not a vagrant. They were bullies. They took me in one of their squad cars and let me out just outside of the city limits on the road going to my boyfriend's mother's home. I sat and waited for him to show up.

I have never since liked Vacaville's police. I don't even like Vacaville. In the next few days, I had a job at the A&W Root Beer Stand as a carhop. The same police men drove by and saw me. I smiled to myself, thinking that they could do nothing more to me. I had a job. Then I rented a house in the country.

London feared the police and ran from them even after he began going to college. Even though he had done nothing wrong. His fear was deep.

There was a chapter in this book where he talked about hopping trains, but I didn't understand the lingo, so I missed out on some of what he was saying. Another chapter was about his knocking on doors looking for handouts. He said that as soon as you saw the person who answered the door, you had to have them sized up that quick, as to the story you would tell. And did he ever have sad stories. For one, his mother died of different ailments, depending on how he sized up the home owner. His father may have as well.

The hobos knew which towns to walk quietly though and which ones to leave alone altogether, because if you were caught in certain towns, it was 30 days or more. They wrote these notes on water towers, even notes saying who had been there and when and even where that person was headed. Jack tried to follow one hobo around whose nick name was similar to his. He just wanted to meet up with him, but he was either just behind him or in front of him. They never got to meet.

I am sure that there are better ways to travel, because this hobo life didn't seem carefree to me. You could go hungry, freeze to death, get beaten, go to prison, and have what little you own stolen from you. Still, it would have been fun to have learned to hop a few trains.