Episode: 602 Title: HPR0602: Urban Camping ep 1 Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0602/hpr0602.mp3 Transcribed: 2025-10-07 23:47:24 --- Hi everyone, this is Clat 2 and this is the first episode in my Urban Camping mini-series. This episode we're going to talk about what Urban Camping is, why you might want to do it, why other people do it, and things like that, and then the other episodes will go into more of a how-to sort of thing where someone who's actually been in Urban Camper will give you real life tips on how to make it happen for yourself. So Urban Camping is a new term that I learned fairly recently, and this has actually been an activity that I've been doing for a little while off and on, and I still do this off and on, and so we're calling Urban Camping what other people might call being homeless or being a vagabond or being a hobo. All of these kinds of terms denoting that you don't have a regular place that you pay rent on and stay there and kind of hang out there all day and stuff like that. I don't have any pretense about what makes a real live Urban Camper versus a wannabe or a poser Urban Camper. I don't really feel like I own the concept enough to start deciding who isn't a real Urban Camper. Otherwise, if you're someone who has, like, I don't know, eight roommates in a small little apartment and you just don't relish going there and being cramped and so you prefer to spend all your time out and about in the city and you want to call yourself an Urban Camper, I'm all for that. If on the other hand, you simply have no apartment whatsoever and literally stay out and about in the city because you simply have no place to go and you want to call yourself an Urban Camper. That works for me to another incarnation of this phenomenon might be if you're simply what we sometimes call a couch surfer. I mean, a lot of people know about couch surfer.com, things like that, places that sort of open their doors to, well, Urban Campers, I guess, or couch surfers or vagabonds or homeless people, whatever you want to call these people and they let them crash on their couch for a night. And I'd been thinking of this concept of Urban Camping for a while and I thought that maybe, I mean, when you first think about it, it doesn't seem like a very acceptable concept to sort of your average person on the street, well, I don't mean on the street, but your average person who might just be around you, it seems like a little bit of a revolutionary idea, something that might kind of scare them or freak them out a little bit if you go up to someone and say, hi, I'm a homeless person. They have a lot of preconceptions about that, which of course is why that term Urban Camping is kind of cool. It kind of separates it away from the crazy kind of mentally ill homeless that some people fall into, which is a tragedy in itself and not something to be taken lightly. So I'm not talking about people who lose their job and can no longer sustain a place to live. I'm not talking about people who are mentally imbalanced for some reason, whether it's some kind of trauma in their life or just a chemical imbalance or whatever it might be. And they simply can't operate in the same way that the rest of society does and sometimes can't even take care of themselves. Not talking about those people, not to belittle either of those two groups and say that they're not significant or anything. I'm just saying that's not what we're talking about when we're talking about Urban Camping. So Urban Camping is a more voluntary or at least semi-voluntary kind of thing. So there's a lot of negative association to this concept of not having a home of having an apartment, whatever, kind of makes people stop and look at you funny if you reveal that to them. At least that's what I thought would happen. And it does happen from time to time. However, the people who kind of know you and you tell them that you're in Urban Camping or you have no apartment, something like that. I have found they've been really, really intrigued by this idea of having nothing to tie you down and no imposed responsibility. You've got a lot of freedom, I guess, is what I'm trying to say and I think they kind of admire that. I got to kind of thinking about what they might admire about this and I started wondering if it was a distinctly American kind of dream or a fulfillment of a different kind of American dream. The big American dream being, if you're not from America, you wouldn't probably know this. But here in America, we have a term called the Great American Dream or something like that and it means that you kind of get married and you have kids and you move into a house and that's kind of what everyone's supposed to strive for traditionally speaking. And so thinking about Urban Camping, I was wondering if it was tapping into the antithesis of that where it's kind of that lone hero or that lone wolf or that one person who kind of breaks off from the pack and does their own thing. I wonder if, or I wondered if Urban Camping was kind of tapping into that sense of rugged individualism like you see in all the great John Wayne westerns or the good and the bad and the ugly with with Clint Eastwood's character wandering around kind of on his own, that sort of idea. And then I kind of pondered a little bit longer and thought, well maybe that's not, you know, as much as I love the idea of regional folklore and stuff like that, I also love the idea of the regional folklore kind of tapping into a more of a collective folklore. And maybe it's not distinctly American, maybe it's just actually distinctly human, maybe as social creatures where more, we do have a great amount of comfort in being together and being secure and kind of feeling that we're part of a group and all this other stuff. And in one way, something as simple as owning an apartment and kind of doing that kind of thing or having a home, having a place to call your own, that kind of gives you a communal feel. You're part of a neighborhood, you're part of a city, you're part of whatever group you feel you're a part of. You can invite people over to your apartment or your house, whatever. So that's that sort of social human dream, and I wonder if the urban camper out on their own kind of sending for themselves without these creature comforts sometimes might be tapping into the antithesis of that. As such, be very, very admirable to a lot of people. If they really look deep inside themselves and see what kind of inspires them, and this really been my experience more, more than experiencing horror and disapproval, a lot of the response has been that that's really kind of cool. Wow, I wish I could try that. That sounds really neat. I would love to do that. So I guess my point is that if you're listening to this and you're thinking of trying urban camping, then let this be basically an encouragement to do that. If you're listening to this and thinking that it sounds like a crazy idea, then listen with maybe a little bit of curiosity and just kind of see what might be appealing about it. And if you're listening to this and you think that this isn't something you could ever do, get too many responsibilities, whatever, still listen with open ears, because you never know what's going to happen in your life. I mean, not bad things, just in general, you might find yourself with some time and you might be able to go try this for a little while. So it is really fun and it's really cool and very, very, very liberating. It can't be understated. I don't think how liberating it is. So that's that brief introduction, I guess, to the idea of urban camping. And again, trying to wrap our minds around what I'm talking about when I say urban camping. I really honestly cannot nail it down. I have to say that for me, urban camping is a lot of different things and I think that it's fair to group all of these things together because a lot of them share just a lot of common problems as well as common benefits. So whether you're living in your car, living in your friend's living room, living on the street, which I hope you're not, squatting, sleeping over at your apartment that you do pay rent for, but for whatever reason you don't want to be there a whole lot. So you minimize the time that you spend there. All of these kinds of scenarios, I would classify as urban camping and I think you could benefit from what I'll be talking about in this miniseries. Okay, so let's talk about some of the ideas or some of the reasons, I guess, that one might try a life of urban campingness. First of all, at least for me, I think it's a great way to divorce the cult of stuff. So I mean that there's a big movement, I think in a lot of well-to-do countries that says that we really need to have possessions and things and my feelings on stuff go from very mild to very radical and on the mild spectrum, I just don't like having stuff to weigh me down. I like to be a little bit more mobile than having to worry about how I'm going to move a bed and a chair and a table and whatever else other people have, like bookshelves and books and plates and coffee makers. While coffee makers, I might make an exception for it, but stuff that you just kind of like, you almost start to worry about when you're not there, you know, someone going to break in and someone going to steal my stuff is a fire going to happen and destroy all of my stuff. You're going to get evicted because I can't pay a rent and then I'll have to last minute move all of my stuff, you know, you get like this sort of, you can't help it, you get kind of like obsessed over these things that you paid for and therefore you worked for and now you sort of have to take care of them for the rest of your life. So actually freeing one's self from that relationship, it's one of those relationships that feels fine at the time, it feels totally healthy and normal at the time, completely fine for you to have all these things and so much stuff that you actually have to move half of it out into the garage because it's starting to fill up your house so much, but still you go out and get more stuff and people bring more stuff to you on Christmas and on other holidays they bring stuff to you and you try to find more places for it and it feels fine and it almost feels like you could never ever get rid of that. I mean of course it does, right, that's the problem and you'll find I think that if you get rid of this stuff, you actually feel a hundred pounds lighter, I mean you just feel completely free. I find that urban camping for me enforces and kind of ensures that I look at things that I'm either offered or that I may think in the moment that I must have, I look at them with a real, I look at them twice, you know, you don't just grab it compulsively thinking oh I must have that now, literally when people offer me something, even if it has a perceived high value, quite often I have to reject it because I know that it's not going to fit in the four backpacks of stuff that I am able to transport. So it enforces that for me and I like that, I appreciate that. Now the more radical side of that, the radical end of the spectrum of that would be, I guess you could call it a conspiracy theory, but I actually believe it so it doesn't really seem like a conspiracy theory to me. But if you think about what's a great way to keep people occupied, kind of keep people from living their lives, one of the, I think the great ways of doing that for some organizations, some big scary group, government or a business or the same, since it's basically all the same. But if they were trying to keep a group of individuals consolidated and very busy with internal kind of affairs, such that they couldn't really break out and start looking around. One of the great ways to do that I would think would be to start keeping stuff on them and really encourage that they go out and buy stuff and get more stuff and then take care of that stuff and then when you run out of space for that stuff, fill up more space with it and then make sure that you've got a good place to store all that stuff and keep it safe and look after it and then grow a family around it and get lots of things dependent upon you, such that if you had to walk away at any point, everything in your life would basically crumble and fall apart and you'd feel horrible. So to me, that kind of ties into this whole cult of stuff and the great American dream. That's just a, that's the more extreme side of the theory, either way whether you like my mild or my extreme theory, urban camping does help kind of focus that and make sure that you're not caught up with those kinds of activities and that you're caught up with whatever else you want to be caught up in. I guess the danger there would be that some people don't know what else they would possibly do without those kinds of imposed focal points. So maybe that might not, might not be a good thing for you, but it might, it might be. So continue down this ultra paranoid extremist route for a moment. I think another reason that the urban camping lifestyle, as well as what that means, you know, meaning that you've only got so much stuff on you anyway, you're able to pick up and go at any time. You can pick up your three backpacks and walk for whatever reason and you can, you can fill in whatever reason you might need to get out of an area fairly quickly. You're extremely mobile. Another thing that this will help in my mind is lessening our impact as human beings on the ecosystem or the environment or whatever. I realize that it's a huge buzzword right now to say, oh, let's be green and that kind of bugs me that people use that term now, you know, we're green now. Companies are like labeling everything green and so you think, oh, good, if I get that, I'm lessening my impact on the ecology and this is great. And of course, we have no idea what they're talking about. It's just a word. There's no, they're not contract bound to say that they're doing certain things because they got a green label. It just means that they put a green label on their product. But urban camping, I think, could really be appropriately labeled green because by being an urban camper, you are, well, first of all, you're not having an apartment. And either way, anyway, you look at it, apartments are, I mean, their little self-contained ecosystems of sorts and that takes a lot of energy and resources to keep it going. Think of how much electricity and water and all that other good stuff that you use in your apartment or your house. That's a big impact for one person to have anyway, but imagine how many houses around you there are, how many apartments there are in your apartment building. It's a big deal. There's like a lot of stuff being used up and required, we of course require more energy to run all that and we're not really managing our energy very effectively. I mean, it's not like we're actually really utilizing wind power, solar power yet. It's kind of an issue, I think. And every time I have an apartment, I feel this way. I do feel like I'm using a lot more resources for a single human being than really necessary. And for a very long while, I was looking for like a cube apartment, like a tiny, tiny apartment, you know, maybe eight feet by eight feet. It would be really, really easy to heat that it would be very easy to light it. It just, it wouldn't take up a whole lot of resources. So those don't exactly exist, although my friend Deep Geek actually found an article I think that of course over in Japan, they've got these little sort of cube apartments and people can rent them. And of course, it's, it's accordingly cheaper for, for the small apartment than it would be a larger one, which of course in some places doesn't actually follow at all. Like in New York, you get a small apartment and you're still paying as much as most people pay for a normal size apartment. So it would be great to find that sort of thing. We don't have it at least here in the United States. So just having, having no apartment at all seems not like, like not a bad idea. Part of this too is that if there was a way to maybe, you know, just as a sort of a side thought to have society capitalize on the public spaces. And that's what urban campers do, right, because I mean, think about it. You've got a library, for instance, a public library or even a cafe. Now if there are 50 people in there, then that means that 50 apartment, or maybe 25 apartments out in the real world are all shut down. There's no power running on in them, it probably is, but, you know, it's, it's greatly reduced, right? So if everyone went to public libraries all day one day or if they went there every day for a month, they would find that their electric bills, their gas bills, things like that were reduced dramatically and accordingly, the footprint on the ecosystem would be reduced, right? Because now we're using less resources. I mean, I know that wouldn't be the entire solution. I'm not trying to say that. I'm just giving an example. But those libraries, if there's 50 people in them or there's one person in them, they're still running the same amount of electricity and everything like that. So it seems like we should capitalize on these places because they're there. They're turned on anyway. And if you go there, you can, you can exploit all of their resources that they're running anyway. And that seems very efficient to me. And as someone who's a geek and supposed to be, I'm very into like the Unix philosophy, I don't know, somehow I like efficiency. I really do. I admire efficiency. And so it seems very inefficient to have lots of people staying home in their apartments, running their TVs, running their air conditioning, running their heater, whatever, when they could all be out at the same place, doing the same thing, but sharing the same amount of resources. So, I mean, if you're concerned about that sort of thing, that might be another reason to try urban camping. Another thing about apartments, of course, is that you're paying rent on them. This has a whole host of interesting ramifications, right? So the first one for me, again, starting sort of with the extreme, and we'll filter down to another brand of extreme, for me, I really dislike the landlord rent model of building a society. I don't believe that most landlords, quote, unquote, deserve to be landlords. I mean, most landlords that I've ever had their mean and their slimy, and they always want to get as much money for the least amount of quality that they can possibly get. And you can tell me that that's the American way and say that that's the greatest business model ever, and that's why this country is so rich. All you want, the fact is that that's wrong because human beings need a place to stay. And so if you're going to require people to actually have to pay for a place, for shelter, which is a basic human need, I just have a problem with that. Sorry, I just do. And I apologize to all the land owners out there, and all the people with apartment buildings making a lot of money off of them, or getting a big headache from all the complaints, from their tints about them, whatever your experience might be, I don't agree with it. I think that shelter and food and things like that are basic human needs, and should therefore be provided for everyone. And I think that we are resourceful enough race that we could actually figure that out. Yeah, someone would be making not as much money somewhere along the line. I don't think that's really what we need to be concerned about personally. I like to urban camp often because I really like not being subject to a landlord. I enjoy that feeling very much. Of course, a more pragmatic thing coming from rejecting this landlord rent model is that you are saving a lot of money. You'll find that when you are urban camping, your paycheck, if you have a job, it all goes into your bank. It doesn't go to your landlord. It goes straight to your account, it goes into your pocket, whatever. That's a big deal. It's a huge deal in some cases, it depends on where you're living. But you'll find that, along with apartments, tend to be associated with a lot of other costs. So rarely do you rent an apartment, at least in my experience, and get all of your utilities included. There's usually extra bills, whether it's just a phone bill or just a TV bill if you watch television, or something more essential, like a heating bill or a water bill or something like that. There's always those bills, and then you'll find that there's always stuff that you need for your apartment. It goes back to stuff. I mean, if you've got an apartment, you're probably going to need basic things like, I don't know, dishes and dish soap and towels and curtains and trash cans and whatever else people get and put into their apartments. So all of these things really start to add up after a while, and you look at the amount of money that you've spent, and suddenly you're basically, if you're employed, you're simply employed to live in an apartment, and it's kind of weird. That's a great thing about urban camping. The related opposite end of that is that you may have no money at all, and you might need to urban camp for that reason. If you ever find yourself in that situation, I know this past seems like this past summer. A lot of people are actually looking for work and stuff, you know, because I guess the big thing was the economy, the economy was so bad. I guess it supposedly still is, I don't really know, but a lot of people seemed to be having some hard time. So if you're ever actually finding yourself in that situation and you are up to trying something drastic like urban camping, that's a great way to go, because in any amount of money that you do make, whether it's off of a freelance kind of position, or simply answering ads for work on Craigslist, like, you know, hooking up someone's home network or fixing their printer or fixing their computer, you know, those things, make money, and every since, or even playing a musical instrument on the street, you know, whatever your skill is, you do that, and every since you make, goes straight into your pocket, and it's not like you're working for anything, you're just working for yourself. And that's, that's a great way to save up a fair amount of money pretty quickly. And we'll talk, I mean, I'm not saying that there are no expenses when you're urban camping. There can be expenses to that, and your style of urban camping might change as to, you know, if you're employed or if you're not employed. But we'll go into that in later episodes. The final reason that I think for urban camping would be hacking society. And I know that film kind of weird, and almost obligatory, like, that's a hacker book for you episode, I should mention the word hack, but in fact, this is correct. You're hacking society, and you can take that almost any way you want to, but the ways that I think of it, is that I've hacked around the necessity that society keeps telling me I have to have, whether it's something as basic as a landlord who owns an apartment building, and will let me stay there for rent, or whether it's something a little bit more frivolous, like a telephone line and a television, you know, I mean, people here that you don't have, well, I don't know, any of those creature comforts, really, they do kind of, they get a little bit thrown off by that. But you're also, I think you'll also find that you're hacking around a lot of the rules and regulations that society sets in place even unofficially, because they're, and we'll get into this later as well, there are some rules on the, on the law books supposedly about being an urban camper or homeless or whatever, and it's, it reads very accepting and very tolerant, but I think you'll find that that's not the case, and in practice. So if you're, if you're doing this, you're kind of, you're getting around a lot of the things that people just don't expect, they don't, they don't want to accept that people can live and be happy this way. So I like hacking with people's minds and expectations in that way. Of course being, being homeless requires a little bit of social engineering in lots of different situations, whether you're getting a new job and you have to fill out an IW 4 form or whatever, and suddenly they're asking you for an address, and you don't have one. So what do you do? You know, little things like that. It definitely helps you brush up on your social skills, your social engineering skills. So that's a great reason to get into it, really. You'll find, you'll find the opportunity to be a social engineer, presents itself a lot more if you're urban camping, because generally speaking, you're having to deal with people in, in ways that you've never had to deal with them before, and what we will go into that, oh, as, throughout the whole series, you know, I think we'll encounter some of those, some of those examples. So that's great stuff too. I think I said that was the last one, there's actually one more, and I, I associate it with hacking society as well, but it is a little bit specific, and that is, if should you have or feel the need to disappear off the grid for a little while, again, for whatever reason, whether it's because you want to get out of town, for a vacation, or whether it's simply because you need to not be in an address that you were formally associated with, or whether it's that you don't even want, that you need to probably just not have an address at all. So, however the reason going, being, being an urban camper is basically disappearing from everything, there's, there's really no precise record of you anymore, obviously it depends on how you work it. You might get a PO box, you might get a cell phone, you might get all these things in your real name, which actually getting a PO box, not in your real name is not easy, but getting another mailbox and a cell phone, all these things, I mean, if you don't want to be off the grid, if you don't want to disappear, you don't have to, I'm saying it certainly helps if you have no address. It's a lot harder to find people when you can't go knocking on a door and expect to see them on the other side of it, so that's something to keep in mind as well, might be a benefit. So, those are some reasons that you might want to look into urban camping, and some of the things that I really like about urban camping, I'm a really bad salesperson, so I'm not trying to convince you to do anything, but like I say, those are the reasons I like it. In closing, I want to give you just the pros and the cons of urban camping as I see it. I obviously don't want to make it sound all great and all easy so that everyone just gives up everything they've ever had and walks out and thinks they're going to urban camp for the rest of their lives, but I do want to give you, I guess, both sides of this. So, the benefits of urban camping gets you out of a house, well, quite literally, right? But if you're, you know, a lot of geeks are a little bit, I'd say, anti-social. If that's you, you will find opportunities to interact with people a lot more if you're out among people. So, you'll meet more people, that's a big plus, or not, depending on who you are. No more bills, really, that's a fact, extreme mobility, that's a big plus for me. Disassociation from the requirement of stuff, very important. You're lightweight, you're just literally lightweight, you feel completely light, you have nothing but, like, whatever you're carrying around with you, and even that stuff, I usually stashed somewhere. So, you're just walking around with nothing, it's incredibly liberating. Low maintenance. You'll find that maintaining just yourself goes down so much when you're urban camping. It's so simple all of a sudden. I guess it's because you don't have, like, a bathroom to stand in front of a mirror for three hours, you know, fixing your hair, or whatever people do. That's kind of, it's an interesting thing that I didn't really expect, I wasn't sure how that was going to go. We'll go into the specifics of that, too, by the way, later in the episode, in the series, but I did find that to be a really interesting one, that just kind of, the amount of time you have to spend on, I don't know, just being, it really goes down. Simplification, it really, really simplifies things, I found, drastically. I don't know what it is, if you're just too busy figuring out how you're going to get by that day, so you're very focused on what you're going to do, or whether it's literally just when you don't have an apartment to kind of fill with drama, as it were, then you don't. You don't get the drama, and I definitely appreciated that, and I've kind of been able to maintain the simplicity that I discovered through urban camping, even when I cease urban camping. By the way, the reason I cease to urban camping is simply a function of weather. It gets cold during the winter, and I don't want to freeze. So anyway, more benefits here. Stress relief in a big way, yeah, it's just, again, you don't have stuff to worry about, you don't have a place to worry about, you don't have money that you're always owing at the end of the month. It's just, yeah, there's enormous amount of stress just kind of flying away. Again, it uses resources that your local community is already using up, so it's a green lifestyle, you can put a little green sticker on you. You save up money, that's a good one. You disappear from people who might be looking for you, whoever those people might be, could be anybody, and it chooses not to heartake in a system that's set up that you might not agree with, and that's, of course, a big one for me as well. The disadvantage is the things to watch out for. It's probably not that compatible with a traditional family life. Obviously, if you have kids in a spouse right now, being an urban camper probably isn't going to really work all that well for you. And even if you think that, if you're close to your extended family, or your parents and stuff, and you think that urban camping might completely offend and horrify them, again, it just might not be something that you're able to do without really kind of causing a lot more drama in your life than maybe you want to. So that admittedly is difficult. There's no place to hang out with friends. This one is something recent, something I completely didn't expect. But when I was urban camping, just this most recent time for actually most of this past year, about what, eight months or something like that, I kept meeting people, and it would always come up like, oh, we should hang out, and it would always be like, oh, well, my place, yeah, we can't hang out at my place. Well, because I didn't have a place, you know, and so you don't want to, like, say that right away, depending on who it is, obviously. I mean, you don't really just want to say, oh, I actually am homeless, you know, you don't want to say that. So you kind of have to, like, sort of beat around the bush and kind of like, I don't really, my place isn't really good, or I have a roommate, and they're really stubborn, and they don't like visitors, you know, just come up with weird stories. So that really doesn't work very well. So be aware of that. Of course, other people, you just tell, hey, look, I'm an urban camper. I don't do the whole apartment thing, and they'll be fine with that, but it's still an issue, right? Because you still don't have a place to go hang out if they have, like, the grumpy roommate or, or they live with their parents still, or something, you know, I mean, it's kind of like, what do you do? Where do you go? There's no feeling of permanence, which for some people is a terrifying idea. For me, it's really quite comforting not to have a feeling of permanence, but some people don't like that from what I've heard. Some people like to feel like they've established a home base for themselves. They've got a place to go to. They've got a place to rely on. That kind of thing. A lot of people find comfort in that from what I'm gathering. So, urban camping makes that a little bit more difficult. There's a certain ever-changing setting for yourself when you're urban camping, or it might be something that you can rotate, like, every Tuesday, you're hanging out here, everyone's there, you're hanging out there. But there is that feeling of change, of frequent change, and a lot of people get freaked out about that by that as well. And then, finally, there's health and concerns. This is a big drawback. When you're urban camping, you tend to eat out, or you're not cooking for yourself, so you can't really monitor what exactly you're getting, or whether it's the healthiest thing around, for whatever reason, whether it's because you can't afford good food, or whether it's just because there's actually not that much really healthy food out there being made in restaurants and stuff. So, it gets difficult, I find, to eat healthy when you're urban camping. It gets difficult, certainly, to maintain temperature and stuff like that. I mean, you may or may not have a place that is really, I mean, if you have your own apartment, you can completely do climate control there. You can set the temperature to whatever you want it to be. Not a problem. Urban camping, you may not have that luxury. Things like that, things that kind of dictate whether you're healthy or not, basically. That becomes a concern when you're urban camping. You really do have to give some thought to that. That's probably one of the primary things that you have to think about, actually. So, that would be a big drawback of it. In that sense, having an apartment is simpler. Is it worth that trade-off, and definitely not for me, well, except when it reaches zero degrees outside, in which case, yeah, actually, admittedly, the apartment thing is actually worth it for me. So, it really just depends. That's about all of the good and bad things I can say about urban camping. I hope that I've at least explained why on earth someone would be interested in urban camping in this episode. Hopefully, I've given you an idea of some of the neat things about it, some of the bad things about it, and I'll come back next episode and talk about some specifics, and specifically on finding shelter while urban camping. Riding on an eastbound freight train, speeding through the night, hobo bill, a railroad bump was fighting for his life, the sadness of his eyes revealed, the torture of his soul, he raised a weakened weary hand to brush away the cold, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, he smiled there where he lay oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, what It sped through the darkness, and the raging storm outside. No one knew that Hobo Bill was taking his last ride. It was early in the morning when they raised the Hobo's head. The smile still lingered on his face, but Hobo Bill was dead. There was no mother's longing to suit his weary soul, or he was just a railroad bum who died out in the cold.