The Drifter

An essay about traveling, and death, and Pete Seeger.

For Carol.

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The Drifter

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When my work is done, I will become a drifter. Apparently, there’s no better place to do it than in Jefferson City, Missouri.

Jefferson City is as close to lifeless as a city can be. You can probably see dust on the sidewalks if you look closely enough. I’ve been there exactly twice, and both times, I was only passing through. It has an Amtrak station that runs to Chicago, its only valuable asset aside from the state capital. It’s sort of a sorry little station, painted with the essence of Charlie Brown’s wooden Christmas tree that wilts as soon as he places a red ornament on its body. One woman calls for tickets in that raspy voice that exists everywhere else where there are old people that hate their jobs. The wrinkled, peeling green paint is layered over itself so thick it cracks and mushes underfoot, two wicker chairs adorn the decrepit porch area outside of the ticket booth, and the whole sagging structure is built on a hill, so steep that I feel its thin wooden bones may break at every nudge. 

The woman, too, is part of the structure. Her face is wrinkled and cracked, and her bones are thin and she, too, has stood for decades on that same precipice between the Second City and nowhere. For fourteen years. And she’s never once been paid. It’s a volunteer position, one she insists on working, rain or shine, despite her age, despite how people might treat her, despite having plenty else to do in the world, she and the station are like a hand to an arm. “Someone’s got to,” she promptlessly proclaims. 

It was in the same city that I spent an afternoon passing time at a diner, when a waitress, a not-so-old woman with the demeanor of someone who’s lived before, stopped by my table, likely savoring the slow hour before the lunch rush that would undoubtedly be flooding in soon. 

“Where are you from?” she asked.

“Chicago.”

“Oh, I lived there once. Before my husband died.”

We talked for the rest of the hour. She came to Jefferson City for an escape, a place to leave behind her old life and the memory of her beloved. No better place, she explained, because nothing ever happens in Jefferson City. I realize now she may have been fishing for tips (and if so, I fell for it), but either way, she was right. 

I’ve met my fair share of drifters—which is to say those who drift past me, stationary or otherwise—in Chicago. In a city so deep and wide and full of life, drifters are scarce, every personality is an explosion of color on color on color. Pete Seeger sings of drifters in his song Passing Through. He makes drifters of Adam, Jesus, George Washington, FDR, and all those who followed them, including himself. I heard that song performed first by a traditional Irish band in Chicago, with whom I later played in a brief amateur-hour music session. The leader was portly, gruff, his face unforgiving. He told his band members and I that we should practice often. Every word of his, even his happy ones, sounded annoyed, primed. I wish I could say he’s nearly as memorable as the woman at the train station or the waitress at the diner, but so many others I know are lost in the folds of my mind. Jefferson City simply contains too few people to forget one. 

I tell the people that I know about the drifters I meet, and it never ceases to be uncanny how everyone I talk to seems to have met some sort of “angel in passing,” who gives them a piece of advice, or an offer of help, or even a kind smile at the exact right time that they swear changed their life. With more faces in the world than any of us will ever see, it’s infinitely likely, but the timing of said intrepid souls feels nonetheless impeccable. Not all travelers are good, there are those who swerve out of their lane to hit an animal on purpose. Those faces I forget, for good reason. For better or worse, travel itself is a biased experience, either good times or good stories. I think good people deserve a place in the saying as well, though I recognize it’s for the better that an encounter with a drifter isn’t planned, or even fully comprehended until the drifter is no more.

The last face that passed me on my way out of Jefferson City was that of a college mother, sparked to conversation upon hearing that I was headed home from school. Her story evades me, but her happy tears upon making conversation with a complete stranger in part sealed my future. Right now, I want to be a journalist. I often say it’s so there will be more good, truthful media in these times, or because I see critical perspectives missing from headlines that hinge upon them, or even because “someone’s got to.” Truth be told, it’s to collect and tell stories. Every journalist that has aimed to do the same, Studs Terkel, Steve Hartman, Scott Smith, is an inspiration to me. Cataloguing our own species is one of the most human pursuits, so they say. I do not only collect stories to remember, but to be remembered, for my memory to invoke the memories of others, and how I loved being alive so much I could not stand to die as one person.

After everyone I love is dead and forgotten, and I walk the epilogue alone, I will spend it on the streets of a town like Jefferson City. I’ll let the sun turn my face wrinkly and cracked. I’ll have a train station whereby I will let my lived years pass through me and make conversation with passersby until the evening whereon I pass, alone, but remembered, staining another layer of peeling green paint atop the thin wooden bones, an invitation for the next drifter to do the same.

Passing through, passing through

Sometimes happy

Sometimes blue

Glad that I ran into you

Tell the people that you saw me passing through