The rise of the mobile Internet has made a hobo's life easier, Nuke says. "The day I started on the road, I had a flip phone, an iPod, a TomTom GPS, an atlas, a laptop, and free Wi-Fi wasn't very easy to find," says a medic who's been a hobo for four years and asks me to identify him as "Nuke." ("I have a pretty decent amount of training and experience in treating combat trauma.") He now lives out of a '91 Ford pickup and says, "I have a smartphone, a laptop, and free Wi-Fi is everywhere." The ubiquity of cheap phones and even cheaper data has prompted even longtime homeless to join the growing ranks of people with a cell connection but no house. And if you have, there's a good chance you were probably one of the many homeless with a mobile device, a sight that has become increasingly common.
Or maybe you have experienced it, thanks to the recent Great Recession that caused a spike in homelessness-especially for families-with its tidal wave of foreclosures. If you want to say I chose to become homeless and sleep on the streets, really all I have to say is fuck you. Huck says he's been a hobo for upward of 11 years and started hopping trains and hitching rides at 18. "People say, 'Well, you chose to become homeless.' But that's wrong," he says. On "the road and the rails," he's Huck, and even after we speak twice by cellphone, he tells me he'd prefer I don't print his real name. On Reddit, he's /u/huckstah, an administrator on /r/vagabond, a subreddit with nearly 10,000 members-many of them identify as "homeless"-who trade skills and stories.
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