Cameron Bren
From left to right, Toedoe, Bumblebee, Josie and Bumblebee’s dog, “Black Dog,” hangout on State Street during a brief stay in Madison. The city is a popular destination for “traveling dirty kids” or “gutter punks” in the summer.
Bumblebee has been traveling the country hitching rides from city to city since 2001. But he’s never seen a city quite like Madison. “Dude, this place rocks,” he says while sitting on a State Street curb. “A cop told us we can panhandle. Normally it’s like, ‘you can’t sit here and you can’t talk to anybody.’”
He rolled into town on an 18-wheeler Sept. 7 along with two other self-proclaimed “traveling dirty kids,” who identified by their street names of Toedoe and Josie. They say they don’t need money to travel, eat, or buy cigarettes and beer.
“Most of the time we don’t really even have to ask for it. People just see us and like what we are doing and think it is cool and just help us out,” Josie says. “In a lot of places people will actually be really rude and be like, ‘dirty hippie, get a job’ and stuff like that. We haven’t really had that here.”
Some places, Toedoe adds, “have no-sit-down laws, like you can play guitar on the street but you’ve got to stand up. You get tickets for sitting down.”
“And you definitely can’t sleep just anywhere like people sleep on the benches. That is really different,” Josie adds. “We slept in [James Madison] Park and nobody bothered us.”
The three represent another aspect of homelessness — those who lead nomadic lifestyles. “There are definitely different breeds of us,” says Toedoe. “There’s Deadheads, train kids, festy kids, trustafarians, gutter punks, street punks. Just traveling dirty kids I guess.”
Their presence in Madison is a ritual.
“I’ve been working the downtown beat area for six years now, and I’ve come across the ‘travelers’ aka ‘train hoppers’ aka ‘children of the dirt’ each summer without fail,” reports Madison police officer Shawn Kelly. “It almost seems like their yearly summertime visits are a common rite of passage for downtown Madison, similar to how it wouldn’t be a proper summer in downtown Madison without Concerts on the Square, the farmers’ market and other festivals. I believe that the allure of the State Street atmosphere is known among their community, so word gets out about making a stop.”
Josie says she thinks of herself as home-free rather than homeless. She, Bumblebee and Toedoe all say they are part of the Dead family — the groupies who followed the Grateful Dead on tour, and endure as a community since the band’s demise. The three also consider themselves part of the Rainbow family, a nomadic group that has been traveling since the 1970s, congregating at annual gatherings.
They get around in various ways, by ride-sharing, hitchhiking and jumping freight trains.
Toedoe and Bumblebee are originally from New York, Josie is from Wisconsin. “I love traveling; it is humbling,” Josie says. “I used to get caught up in materialistic things. That is what I like about [traveling], not having to worry about that anymore. You appreciate every cup of coffee and every cigarette and every bite of food that much more.”
Bumblebee says he has cut all ties from before he started traveling. “I got my guitar, my dog and my backpack.”
It is common for traveling people to be estranged from their families, Josie says. “Most people on the road have really bad relationships with their family, and that is why they travel.”
Josie started her life on the road after dropping out of UW-La Crosse at 19.
“I was really depressed and didn’t know what I was doing with my life. I was walking around downtown after bar time, and I came up on a street kid,” she says. “I’m 19 and I’ve never seen street kids or knew about the lifestyle. I didn’t even realize people hitchhiked still. He told me about it, and I was like, ‘fuck yeah, I’m doing that.’
“I put all my shit on the curb and left and hitchhiked to California,” says Josie, who is now 25. “I’ve been hooked on it ever since, just meeting the new people and seeing the new sunrise in a different place.”
Toedoe has been on the road for three years. He says traveling helped him overcome drug addiction. “You’re on the streets, so there are drugs everywhere, but you just keep moving,” he says. “I’m addicted to traveling now.”
Bumblebee is from Ithaca, New York. He says met some people who came to Ithaca for a Rainbow gathering. After the gathering, Bumblebee tagged along with one of his new friends to Michigan and has been traveling ever since.
Tami Fleming is chair and director of operations of Friends of State Street People, which distributes food, clothing and supplies to homeless people around downtown. Although the travelers may portray their lifestyle as a choice, Fleming says there’s usually more to the story.
“I think if you talk to people about their childhood, you’ll find a lot of them were runaway or throwaway youths or struggle with childhood trauma,” Fleming says. Most of the travelers she has met haven’t been able to keep a regular job, but they often do seasonal work, which fits their lifestyle.
“Sometimes there is maybe a cognitive disability, learning disability, addiction or subtle mental illness that kind of keeps a lot of people that travel from fitting in,” Fleming says. “I’m not saying everyone is like that, but when I’ve sat down and really gotten to know people, that is a very common thread.”
Life on the road is not without challenges. “You’ve got to be careful traveling by yourself,” Bumblebee says.
Fleming agrees. “It is really a dangerous lifestyle,” she says. “I know lots of young women and young men who have been sexually assaulted and beaten, gotten all their things stolen again and again. People are cruel in a lot of places to these folks.
“It is not a glamorous life, it is not fun,” Fleming adds. “Kids go hungry, kids go without consistent medical care, and then their health problems get really bad by the time they finally get treatment.”
Madison police report that while the travelers are generally all nice folks, they do sometimes cause problems or become victims.
“Throughout my 19 years of working on the street, I’ve had to toss aside first-impression theories,” writes officer Rhonda Hennessey in an email. “Most often when I encounter these ‘home-free’ individuals, their appearance is one of ‘unclean; gruff; angry at the world.’ What I have discovered, however, is despite an extra layer of dirt; most of these folks are kind individuals. They are simply choosing [to live] a worry-free day-to-day existence.”
Kelly agrees that most are nice, but says “I have had some of my more dangerous contacts with a few of them over the years. Many are often highly intoxicated; some drug addicted. Members are known to carry knives, and some have unpredictable dogs as traveling companions.” Bumblebee did in fact carry a large knife and appeared intoxicated.
“The group this summer seemed to have arrived late, but they have been mostly polite and cordial,” Kelly adds. “However, most are constantly drinking alcohol, panhandling, swearing and sleeping in front of State Street business and residential doorways. Complaints are starting to come in at a steady pace.”
Bumblebee will soon hit the road again. He is crashing with a friend until Oct. 12 and then hitching a ride back to California, where he plans to spend the winter in Slab City. Toedoe and Josie have already taken flight. On Sept. 25, the two caught a ride on a “hippie bus” to North Dakota to join the pipeline protests.
Josie occasionally takes breaks from the road. She says she recently worked a few months at a Montana ski resort and spent a summer as a zip line guide in Tennessee. She also lived in Hawaii for 10 months working on an organic farm through WWOOF, which connects volunteers to small organic farms in exchange for room and board.
“I like to think that I am going to settle down someday, and ideally that would be on an organic farm, but every time I’ve worked on them and it’s like paradise, I still get antsy,” Josie says. “I don’t know if I will ever be able to stop.”
