■   This is the most classic hobo experience I’ve had all trip. The weather is beautiful, making sitting in the doorway of the “personal Pullman” a delight, and most of the trip is being done during the day, actually letting me see the countryside through my moving picture window. The land is beautiful — rolling hills and fields, dotted with tobacco drying sheds blanketing the air with a spicy odor. We swoop through little towns like Wilson, N.C., the type of town time forget, with the old-fashioned downtown not having needed a citizen’s committee to create it, but having just evolved over time. I wave to cars at grade crossings, wondering what goes through their minds when they see a grinning figure standing at the entrance to a boxcar. Hey, Mable, they say, nudging their wives, there’s one of them old-fashioned hobo folks. If nothing else, I figure it’s sort of an adventure by proxy; how many kids that I waved to chattered excitedly about it at the dinner table that night?

When I got tired of standing, I lean back against the door on the other side, nicely warmed by the rising sun. A woodsy odor creeps in, replacing the tobacco fumes, as we pass sites of new construction, seeing the carcasses of recently cleared scrub pines. Later, a fishy odor takes over as we cross trestles with rivers babbling away below.

Once again I realize how relaxed I am. The ride is smooth, letting me return every so often to my tome on military history, but most of the time I just sit and stare, wondering about the lives we’re rolling through. We rumble by trailer parks and office parks, cutting through horse farms, goat farms and cotton plantations, seeing the cycles of city life from urban sprawl to quaint downtowns to suburban homesteads set far back from the tracks. I lean back on a pile of cardboard pallets, put my feet up on a block of vulcanized rubber left in the car and just look.

All of the books I’ve read on hoboing talk about the meditative qualities of train hopping — something I’ve somehow missed in-between dealing with a nut, freezing off my feet and worrying about missing trains. Now, though, the rolling pines and jostling box car lull me into a state of calm, into which I just sit and relax.

As the afternoon wears on and we pick up speed, I get up and stick my head out the door, watching the countryside roll by first hand. As the warming wind blows into my face, I at first reach up and hold my hat on my head, before finally pulling it off and let the air blow through my hair for the first time in days. I continue reading Keegan’s history of warfare, coming across this passage: “The nomads had a weakness: they liked the nomadic way of life and despised the weary cultivator, bound to his furrows and his plough-ox. What the nomads wanted was the best of both worlds: the comfort and luxury that settled ways yielded but also the freedom of the horseman’s life, of the tented camp, of the hunt and of the seasonal shift of quarters.”

I look out at the blurring landscape and think how nomadism will never die.

The trip continues through the day and night as we sweep through North and South Carolina, stopping for about five hours in Charleston, S.C., in mid-afternoon, but finally getting to Waycross, Ga., shortly after noon Wednesday.