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News & Blogs Life on the Road as a Millennial - The Vagabus Disaster?

Matt Derrick

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Life on the Road as a Millennial

Ah, life on the open road. So American! Kerouac! Easy Rider! The kid from Into the Wild who ate those seeds and died! Kids are still unplugging and trying out The Hobo Life—but what happens when you add Wi-Fi and Indiegogo campaigns and iPhone apps to the experience? And don't those classic stories of life on the margins seem to end in a sanitarium? Or the grave? Drew Magary joins up with a crew of millennial hobos to find out.

Leaving home was the easy part. I’m at a hobo campground at the dead end of a lonely road at Bastendorff Beach, near the tiny seaside outpost of Charleston in the Great Drifter Heaven that is the state of Oregon. And I couldn’t wait to get here. I left my house on the East Coast, speed-walked impatiently through airports, got a car, and drove four hours, very fast, all to get to this: a parking lot next to a cold-ass beach, where a woman in a shitty sedan with no hubcaps is doing endless doughnuts in the mud and where the surrounding woods host a makeshift tent village for many, many meth addicts.

And yet I was in a hurry, and it wasn’t because I hate my home, or my family. It was just the itch. You know the itch. You wake up every day in a climate-controlled box, then you get into another box to go to work, then you sit in a third box all day just so you can afford bigger boxes and fancy crap to put in those boxes. Somewhere inside all those boxes, you get the itch to blow it all up. Leave everything behind. Live in the motherfuckin’ moment. Like Kerouac did, or Cheryl Strayed, or those people in those Expedia ads.

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That’s why I’m here, about to board something called the Vagabus: a broken-down white school bus that a group of cloud-connected 21st-century hobos bought for $1,200 and then adorned with the cutesy Reddit alien logo. My guide through the farthest fringes of THE GRID is the famed Redditor known to all hobos as Huckstah (his real name: Steven Boutwell), who runs the /r/vagabond subreddit and who doles out advice to anyone online who is eager to get away—the bastard son of Bear Grylls and the Pied Piper. In addition to Huckstah, who is 34, we’ve got Ryan, who’s here illegally from Canada (WE NEED A WALL!) and who ditched his job running an IT start-up to live out here. He still dresses like he’s running an IT start-up: nice pants, clean black sweater. There’s Farkus, 27, a bearded mandolin player with faded tats and toenails that haven’t been clipped in months. And there’s Tilly, Farkus’s brunette traveling companion, a mellow Minnesota native who is new to the road and insists, somewhat unconvincingly, that traveling is in her blood.

“It’s not like I’m running away from any problems or anything,” Tilly tells me. “I’m just running away from the fact that I don’t belong staying in one spot, you know? I just got to go.”

Huckstah has a plan to drive the Vagabus all the way down to Argentina, and he would very much like for you to join him. He’s recruiting passengers through the Vagabus website, and he has the life he believes you may secretly want.

But like I said, leaving is the easy part. I came out here to Oregon knowing how it ended for Kerouac (dead from alcohol) and the real-life Dean Moriarty (dead from drugs) and that college kid from Into the Wild (dead inside an old bus…uh-oh). But maybe these kids have cracked the code. It sure seems like there are more of them than ever before, though maybe that’s just because they’re all on Reddit now. Or maybe it’s because the dream is finally REAL. Huck and the gang believe it is. Maybe. But only if you absorb the lessons I did during my one day—and one long, increasingly batshit night—out in the great wide open.

this-hobo-life-gq-0416-03.jpg

Personal snapshots from Huckstah’s life on the road/rails—that's him below.

You are way more of a pampered baby than you realize. Before I left home, Huck had warned me that nights on the Vagabus can get bitterly cold, and so he recommended a quick pre-stop at Walmart to pick up supplies: a sleeping bag, gloves (fingerless, for the authentic hobo look!), a knit hat, long johns, a big-ass bag of granola, a knife (for picking teeth, whittling, and self-defense), a water bottle, and a pair of wool socks. This, in theory, is all I’d need.

It also dovetailed nicely with my delusional sense of my own spartan lifestyle. I wear the same pair of jeans every day. I drive a Kia.Yessir, I don’t need much to keep me happy!But that’s a hilarious lie. As I was packing, I remembered I needed my phone. Oh, and a charger. And a toothbrush. And what about my ID and credit card? OMG and what about my contact lenses?! Do I sleep with them IN? And do I need some kind of bamboo mat for sleeping on the ground? Pillows! WHAT OF PILLOWS?!

So yeah, pack what you can.

God bless the Jesus freaks and the food banks. When I arrive at the Vagabus around midday, it’s stocked with piles of stale croissants, muffins, doughnuts, and danishes, all scored from a local food bank that had no more mouths to feed. “If no one picks this up, it’s going to a Dumpster,” Huck says. “It’s gold!” A local church group also stopped by earlier today and distributed sandwiches, oranges, and religious pamphlets. One of the oranges was left on a bus seat, with GOD scrawled across it in black marker. Occasionally they also hand out toothbrushes and socks, which are even more prized among hobos than God oranges.

ePanhandle! It takes a lot of gas to get from Oregon to Argentina. So the Vagabus is recruiting riders and raising money through its own Indiegogo page. “We have plans to become a 504(1)(c),” says Huck, directly quoting Kerouac. (By the way, I think he means 501(c)(3).) And even though Huck is dressed in a ratty sweater and has dirt and blood permanently stained into his fingertips, the fact that he’s connected makes him seem different from your average drifter. A phone acts as a signal to others that you are reasonably sane. You are someone with business to tend to.

this-hobo-life-gq-0416-02.jpg

You will smell. Everyone you meet will smell. “Have you smelled me?” Huck asks.

“No,” I answer. “Should I?”

“I haven’t taken a shower in 60, 70 days,” he reports. “Deodorant is the biggest hoax, dude.”

If you do feel the need to bathe—and plenty of hobos do—Trevor suggests stopping by a Pilot Flying J and asking a trucker to buy you a shower. The showers cost $12. For that much money, though, the trucker may insist on joining you.

this-hobo-life-gq-0416-05.jpg

Life aboard the Vagabus, back when it was still clutchless and stuck on a tweaker beach in coastal Oregon.

Know the hierarchy of fast-food Wi-Fi hot spots. Out on the road, the “dirty kids” (Huck’s preferred coinage) charge their shit at any one of the many familiar chain joints for quality Wi-Fi squatting. The best of them, shockingly, is Burger King. Compared with McDonald’s, which gives you the evil eye as you milk the clock with free refills and two hours between dollar purchases (“I am ordering food,” says Huck, “just slowly and annoyingly”), BK is a bit more tolerant of vagrants, and it has better Wi-Fi. “I did a speed test with McDonald’s versus Burger King, and Burger King’s was seven times faster!” he says.

You can learn anything using YouTube! Is your car busted? YOUTUBE. Don’t know how to shape an arrowhead? YOUTUBE. Near the Vagabus is another school bus, a black one, belonging to Trevor (not his real name), who tells me he’s an Iraq War vet and who grew so disgusted with suburbia that he packed up his wife and two children and left his Vegas-bodyguard job behind. They’ve been on the road ever since. “I changed my fuel pump after watching a seven-minute video, with $40 worth of returnable tools from Walmart,” Trevor tells me. “You can really just do anything. I also flint-knap.” I don’t even know what flint-knapping is, but now I want to learn. YOUTUBE!

Make bank by foraging for mushrooms. This is Oregon, which would be a lovely state if you could ever see five feet past your face. But thanks to the fog and the Wet-Nap climate, a huge variety of fungi thrive: morels, chanterelles, porcini, and king boletes, which grow right around here. “If you find a really perfect specimen,” says Ryan, “it could be worth $30 for a mushroom.”

Beer, weed, and cigarettes get their own budget. Before anyone makes it to Argentina, there’s the little matter of the bus already being broken down. The clutch is shot; it’ll take hundreds of dollars to fix. But the piggy bank keeps getting raided to buy more beer, weed, and loose tobacco.

Huck keeps talking about “getting the fuck out of this parking lot, and we need a clutch to do that.” But he seems unwilling to confront the zero-sum reality here. Apparently the clutch fund is available to raid on an as-needed basis. Petty cash is to be spent on getting drunk and stoned. Because out here, that’s baseline sobriety. It’s at the top of the Hobo Pyramid of Needs.

The moments of bliss are real. As dusk settles in, we head to the beach to gather driftwood, strolling past thick clumps of bull kelp and a dead seal buried in the sand. We find some dry tinder and some damp logs, troop back to the lot, and PRESTO: a genuine hobo campfire.

Once the fire is roaring, we circle around and drink some beer and pass a bowl of weed and cook hot dogs on sticks (mmm…ashy), and Farkus and Tilly bust out their instruments to play some Pogues and “Smoke Along the Track” by Stonewall Jackson. It’s beautiful. Both these kids can sing their butts off.

And here it is: the hobo dream. Right at this moment, you can lie down on the floor of the forest and breathe it all in. No one really knows, or cares, where we are. We have nothing to do, nowhere to be. We have fire. We have music. We have beer and weed. What more could anyone want?

And now that we’re all drunk and high and friends and shit, I get the next-level tips:

Try not to jump moving boxcars. That’s a good way to wind up with a crushed femur. Instead, the safer method is to case out a train yard, learn the schedule for crew changes, and then sneak onto a stopped train, into one of the often unmanned engines at the back, known as a distributed power unit, or DPU. (“If you’re capable of climbing up a ladder,” Huck says, “you can hop trains.”) DPUs often have leather chairs, a fridge, and a bathroom.

Once you learn crew-change schedules, you can trade them with other hobos for goods and services. But never, ever post the schedules online because…

Violating the hobo code will get your ass kicked. For all their hippie rep, hobos are plenty comfortable with street justice. Huck says when he found out that another hobo was posting crew changes and charging tourists money to go on rail-hopping tours, he put a “green light” on him.

What does “green light” mean?

“That just means you’re going to get your ass beat. He’s just taking yuppies out on tourism, and that’s blowing it up for people like us who hop trains to actually use this shit. So he’s green-lighted, and he will run into a bad time. If he ends up in Roseville Yard or fucking Colton Yard or something like that, he doesn’t want to camp too long.”

And now I’m concerned that disclosing this to you will get me green-lighted. Do they green-light people for talking about green-lighting? Fuck.

The bliss never lasts, and when it ends, it ends ugly. It’s dark now, and suddenly from across the parking lot, we hear screaming. And cursing. Suddenly I remember we are not alone out here.

Trevor’s two daughters come running to our campfire.

“My dad needs help!” one of them cries.

We all scramble up from the fire and hustle across the lot, where Trevor is helping out a man named Harry, who is nursing a giant gash above his eye. Harry explains how he was attacked by another drifter camped out nearby: a man named Richard, whom everyone out here knows and everyone out here tries to avoid.

“He was kicking me while I was on the ground,” Harry says, rambling. “He knows I don’t have a pancreas.” In the firelight, I can see Harry’s gash open and oozing. I ask him if he wants to go to a hospital. “I should,” Harry answers. “But I won’t. I want the cops to come and arrest his ass. Violence.”

If we got a cab to drop you off without any police interference—would you want that?

“No. I just want his ass arrested. I’ve outlived death three times. I’ve actually talked to Christ twice. I’ve been to heaven three times. This son of a bitch over here… He took a rock from his goddamn campfire, came after me like a mad dog and kicked the fucking living shit out of me.”

About 20 yards away, Richard is ranting and raving by his campfire. He’s wearing a straw hat and brandishing a very large walking stick. He also seems to have an inexhaustible capacity for swearing out loud.

“He shoved me,” Richard yells, “and I fucking dropped the fool. You don’t fucking touch me.”

Is everything okay now?

“Who are you? Do you know me?”

No, sir.

Huck tells Richard I’m a reporter (this does not thrill me), and Richard starts shaking his staff and spitting rhymes:

I’m a fucking righteous man, That’s who I am. I served Lord Jesus because I can. But don’t come into my house and push me over my wood, Or else I’ll drop you like I should!

“Got that one, reporter?” he asks.

Yes, sir.

“Fuckin’ A.”

I back away from Richard and retreat to the wounded Harry, still propped up next to the black school bus, still bleeding. I ask Tilly if the Vagabus has a first-aid kit. “We’ve got Band-Aids,” she answers, a bit absently, leading me back to the bus. She’s not doing this with any kind of urgency. She may be new to the road, but she’s already seen plenty of this.

“This shit just seems to happen constantly,” she says. “Seriously, every time I talk to someone, they’ve just recently gone through something, you know?”

Does this kind of violence shake you?

“Not me, no. I keep my head down. I don’t fucking try to talk too much, you know?”

Rejecting society means also forfeiting many of its support systems. I want to help Harry, but the hobos don’t want the cops around here because they don’t want to get in trouble themselves. “I don’t want to have to go back to court, federal court,” Harry’s companion tells me, “and talk about any more stuff that he’s been involved with.” And they avoid hospitals because they don’t want to be hounded with medical bills—Farkus proudly declares at one point that he’s never paid any of his hospital bills—or deemed physically unfit for lucrative fishing and construction gigs.

Back at the campfire, I ask Huck if we should check on Harry later tonight, or maybe tomorrow morning. Huck has played the wise raconteur so far, but now his voice goes cold: “I have no business with him as of now. I know he’s safe and not bleeding, and he’s on his own. He just got his ass kicked.”

Out here, getting your ass kicked happens. It’s happened to Huck, it just happened to Harry, and if I stay out here long enough, it’ll happen to me. And that’s if we’re lucky. Farkus tells me about his friend Nick Henri, who slit his own throat and wrists while living under a bridge in Montana. (I looked it up online. Henri’s body wasn’t found until more than a month later.) Huck says a friend of his, who went by the name Hobo Whiskey, blew himself up cooking beans inside his tent: “We found his blue jeans with his knife in there, and his knife case was completely melted. Hobo Whiskey probably made 3,000 cans of soup in that tent before; 3,001—burned it down.”

this-hobo-life-gq-0416-06.jpg

Other 21st-century hoboing essentials not pictured here: smartphone, fingerless gloves, vape pen.

The nights go on forever. It’s only 10 P.M., but it feels so much later. We need more booze because there’s nothing else to do, so Tilly volunteers to do a run. It’s started raining, hard, but she rides an old bike four miles round-trip in the dark to get a box of Franzia. Farkus shits in the woods and comes back wiping off his hand. “I shit on my thumb. Happens every time.”

We pile into the bus and everyone tells dirty jokes into the night, getting drunker on hobo wine and fat cans of Twisted Tea. Huck slips into his sleeping bag and lies there awake. “I like to close my eyes and just listen,” he says dreamily.

The lights go off and I move to the floor, lying between Farkus and Huck, my head resting on a pack. We’re all involuntarily spooning in our wool socks and long johns. Soon Huck is snoring loud, ripping thunderclaps that make it sound like he has glass in his lungs. The wind shakes our rickety bus down to its wheels. Strange noises waft over from the tweaker settlements nearby.

Then, at 2 A.M., Farkus staggers to his feet and pisses on the wall of the bus. Two minutes later, he barfs all over the floor. Huck stirs. “Farkus!” he yells. “I need you to puke off the bus, dude.” But he keeps puking on the floor. I scramble to the front of the bus and try to squeeze into a new spot. Finally Farkus stops, and bafflingly, he and Huck fall back asleep in the mess.

Two hours later, though, I’m jolted awake again by the sound of a woman crying. It’s Tilly. As she slept, the emergency door at the back of the Vagabus swung open and she fell a few feet to the ground. Now she’s lying facedown in the mud, rain pounding down on her.

Tilly?

“I WANT TO GO HOME!”

We help her back into the bus. Somehow she falls back asleep instantly. She probably won’t remember any of this in the morning.

But I will, and that’s when the last ember of romance goes out for good. The itch is gone. This doesn’t feel much like freedom at all. It feels like what it really is: squalor. The kind of squalor that hundreds of thousands of Americans live in every day—the kind of squalor that is not a choice. The kind of desperation that makes all those boxes we live in suddenly seem so roomy and liberating.

You never get where you’re going. In January I get a short e-mail from Huck: “Hey we found out Tilly actually broke her back that night. She has to go in for a CAT scan.”

The Vagabus is still a long way from Argentina. After I left, it took them another full month to replace the clutch. (Though in the meantime they adopted a pack of road dogs, and some local kids came by and painted cute dolphins and pinwheels on one side of the bus.) But let’s say they do make it all the way south of the equator. What happens after they reach paradise? What then?

“Keep on going,” Huck says. “I have no timeline. I’m not stopping.”

https://www.gq.com/story/millennial-hobo-life
 
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Matt Derrick

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so this is going to come off as shit-talking the vagabus and potentially @Hobo Huck but it's really not meant to be that way. I really would like the vagabus project to succeed, but I can't help but have some serious reservations and (what i hope are) constructive criticisms about the vagabus project.

having been involved in this community for 15+ years, I'm definitely starting to see a lot of the flaws in our culture, and one of the biggest of those is our growing dependence/reliance on someone else to finance our own adventures. this includes flying signs, internet spanging / epanhandling, etc.

i hate the fact that i sounds like a fucking republican when i say this, but if you want to have a grand adventure driving a bus down two continents, get a job, and finance that shit yourself. society doesn't owe you shit, and we as a community need stop acting like it does. i'm not saying you can't crowdfund, or collect donations, but you need to have a specific mission/goal in order to be successful. even looking at the vagabus website, it's pretty clear they don't really exactly know what they want to do.

Gofundme, kickstarter, indiegogo, etc were not started so random anonymous people from the internet could throw away their money simply because you asked for it. People give crowdfunding campaigns money because they want to be a part of your project and get something back from it. That 'something' can be as simple as the emotional investment of a donation, but most of the time it needs to be something a little more concrete that makes the user feel like a part of the project. This can be any multitude of things (check out those websites for a billion examples) but the point is that no one is going to give you money for nothing, and frankly you're a fool if you think they will.

The reason 99.9% of these campaigns fail is because the people that put on the campaign think it's the internet equivalent of flying a sign; little to no effort is required. In reality, a successful crowdfunding project is the result of many hours of seriously hard work. i know because i've put in that work before (and our campaign was successful).

Now with that little rant out of the way, another one of the biggest problems i see with the traveler community is that we're pretty fucking lazy. i mean really, how many of us are willing to put in the time to organize... well... just about anything? I mean, it's pretty small fucking percentage. So kudos to the vagabus for even getting off the ground, but organizing a campaign like this takes a lot more than throwing some (random) people into a bus, telling them you're going to argentina and hoping for the best.

now that i've shit on just about everyone in the travel community, i would like to say that there are a lot of good and dedicated people out there, and projects like the vagabus are worth doing. proving things like this can be done outside of societal norms is pretty important in my opinion, and is a big reason why the StP website exists.

my problem as it stands right now, is that you just can't let anyone you want come on your bus (and by anyone i basically mean drunks), let folks drink out of the repair fund, and hang out with sketchy people / at sketchy places and not expect bad things to happen. now you might think that's a little unfair, but this is the real world, with real consequences. it's time to grow up and accept a little bit of responsibility if you truly want your dreams to come true.

i really don't understand why this is such a hard concept for people to understand. even worse, this is why people have such a negative bias towards 'hobos', and we really only have ourselves to blame. why? because we don't plan, we don't take the time to think things through, we treat the whole thing like a party that will be financed on our parent's dime, and then when it all blows up in our faces we blame the world and go our separate ways because we live in this consequence-free bubble where we don't have to take responsibility for anything (including how we'll be perceived by the media/society/world afterwards). this prevailing attitude of most travelers is far more nihilistic than it is anarchist.

i'm getting a little off topic here, but the reason i'm so pissy about this is because i want very badly for this project to work out for these folks (and other ones like it), but i just don't see that happening; at best i can only see it serving as an example of what not to do in these kinds of situations.
 

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Violating the hobo code will get your ass kicked. For all their hippie rep, hobos are plenty comfortable with street justice. Huck says when he found out that another hobo was posting crew changes and charging tourists money to go on rail-hopping tours, he put a “green light” on him.

What does “green light” mean?

“That just means you’re going to get your ass beat. He’s just taking yuppies out on tourism, and that’s blowing it up for people like us who hop trains to actually use this shit. So he’s green-lighted, and he will run into a bad time. If he ends up in Roseville Yard or fucking Colton Yard or something like that, he doesn’t want to camp too long.”

i would also like to say that this is such bullshit. first, i hate how the train hopping community has degraded into this kind of gang mentality bullshit, and second, it's such an empty threat:

oogs: "hey, are you that guy hobo huck put a green light on?"

'greenlit' oog: "why, yes, yes i am. please commence the beating."

yeah fucking right. the odds of that person being recognized (in most situations) are pretty fucking low. the odds of someone else being mistakenly identified might be higher. also you know how many people have claimed i'd be killed if i went to such and such yard, or if they caught me on the rails? i know plenty of people that would probably like to kick my ass just to say they did, but it never stopped me from riding a train. why? because the odds of me running into those people are so astronomically low, it's not worth worrying about.

so get off that high hat i'm-a-better-hobo-than-you bullshit.
 

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kokomojoe

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@Hobo Huck made a comment on reddit refuting some of the stuff in the article above:

https://www.reddit.com/r/vagabond/comments/4cbkkt/life_on_the_road_as_a_millennial_hobo/

so it could very well be that i'm talking from a misinformed perspective. if so i apologize, it's easy to forget sometimes that not all articles on the internet should be taken at face value. especially something from GQ magazine. overall though, i stand by my opinions stated earlier.
Glad you posted this to clear some things up but I do agree with a lot of what you said about the traveling community overall. The whole greenlighting thing is overdone and rarely do you ever hear about the person greenlit receiving that beating. If someone does something really fucked up I guess I can understand it but, a lot of the time it's just some personal confrontation that could've been taken care of. Self-reliance also is something that'd be nice to see more of, don't get me wrong I've flown signs before too, but finding some type of work for the day and having some money in my pocket is cool too.
 

Hobo Huck

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Ok this is a bit absurd, if not slanderous. Hope this post doesn't get deleted, but if someone is going to slander our name on a public forum, we have the right to respond.

Let's start with the fact that you are basing a majority of your assumptions and accusations from an article written by GQ, which is certainly not a journalistic source known for supporting homeless lifestyles or counter-culture. They angle stories to appeal to upper-class white suburban males, and the story is construed exactly in a way to comfort their target audience: "Don't worry, cubicle life is about as good as it gets, dont be jealous by free-spirited travelers actually enjoying the spontaneity and adventures of life on the road. Just stay home and be a drone, hobo lifestyle isnt worth it"

On top of that, this article was written in the VERY premature days of our Vagabus project. We had JUST bought the bus, and we hadn't even formed an official group yet. Everything was still just a dream at that point. We were broke down and working on a major bus repair issue, and it happened to be a semi-neutral spot to wait for 5 other members to arrive and help us renovate the bus. In short, we weren't an actual Vagabus at the time that the GQ journalist interviewed us, we were just dirty kids stuck in a broken down bus. Sure, we drank beer and smoked joints, wtf do you expect from train kids and hitchhikers stuck in a gloomy broke down situation. I don't consider that a fair evaluation of what our project has become today, and I think you are simply and conveniently choosing to ignore that.

Speaking of convenience, its also very convenient of you to label our entire project as a "grand adventure", and that our GoFundMe is simply "e-spanging". I guess it would be most inconvenient for you to acknowledge that EVERY member of our group spends over 40 hours a week volunteering for homeless outreach, animal sanctuaries, environmental care projects, local non-profits, and progressive community events. Sure Matt, organizing 12 people together, many whom are STP members, and volunteering more hours each week than most yuppies work, is referred to as a "grand adventure"...

Do you realize we are actually now an official non-profit? So I guess if a homeless person starts a GoFundMe for a dream that they have, thats called "e-spanging"...yet if someone like you that lives in an apartment does it, thats called "fundraising" or "crowdsourcing" or whatever the politically correct term is. We are a non-profit group of homeless volunteers, and to say that our crowd-sourcing project is simply "e-spanging" sure does sound, and may I steal this from you, quite "republican" indeed.

And please, dont pretend you actually wish for this project to succeed. If you gave two shits about our project, you would have actually researched us and realized that we are NOT as evil as you are making us out to be. Have you seen the pictures of us working our asses off in community gardens or animal snactuaries, or have you read the DOZENS of other stories covered by journalists from more credible sources?

So Matt, if you wish to use your site or blog to slander a homeless group of volunteer travelers based on an out of date article written by a shitty upper-class magazine, why dont you respond to REAL local journalism that has covered us. Allow your community to read/hear what more recent journalists have said about us, and lets compare that to GQ:

Lost Coast Outpost (Eureka, California)
https://lostcoastoutpost.com/2016/feb/25/vagabus-voluntourism-reddit-hippie-bus/

The Lumberjack Press (Humboldt State University, California)
http://thelumberjack.org/2016/02/24/vagabus-makes-its-way-through-arcata/

KHUM Radio (Garberville, California)
http://khum.com/media/uploads/post/15203/03-14-1612pm.mp3

KRCR ABC News (Crescent City, California )
http://www.krcrtv.com/north-coast-n...ty-service-from-america-to-argentina/37382540

North Coast Journal (Eureka, California)
http://www.northcoastjournal.com/humboldt/road-barriers/Content?oid=3593619

KMUD Radio (Arcata, California)


Del Norte Triplicate (Crescent City, California)http://www.triplicate.com/News/Local-News/The-merry-boosters

Lost Coast Outpost (Humboldt County, California)http://lostcoastoutpost.com/2016/jan/20/internet-fueled-busload-vagabonds-rolls-town-tonig/

KIEM ABC News (Eureka, California) –
http://kiem-tv.com/video/vagabus-volunteers-lend-helping-hand-eureka
 

Matt Derrick

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that's a totally fair response, and no, i don't go around deleting content just because i disagree with it. i've already apologized for misconstruing the content of the GQ article, myself (and i think many others) were mislead by that.

also, there was no timeline for the article, so all that could have happened yesterday for all i or anyone else knew. the article certainly painted a poor picture of your situation. so perhaps you should post something refuting the 'facts' of that article on your website.

as for the volunteering, that's great, really. but you really can't argue that you've done a good job of showing off that side of your travels or, well, any other aspect of this project. it's easy for folks like myself to be mislead if you put no effort into letting us know otherwise, which is not our fault.

i know you're angry, but you really need to learn to develop a thicker skin about this stuff. you tend to have the same problem on reddit as well, if people disagree with you then you blow up on them and immediately assume they are internet trolls, and remove their posts.

i wish you wouldn't assume that everyone that disagrees with you is trying to be your enemy, or slandering you. frankly you've done a pretty poor job of documenting this whole thing and reporting back to folks that are interested in supporting you, so we have to assume the worst, and again, that's not our fault, that's yours.

i'm really not trying to shit talk you, and i honestly would like to be friends, since i've respected everything else you've done for the vagabond community in the past. i just think you need to stop assuming every criticism is a personal attack. a lot of that criticism might be valid and should possibly be addressed. taking responsibility for the fact that you haven't quite delivered on some of the things you were promising out of this project would go a long way towards rectifiying things with the people that want to support you.

despite your personal feelings i do in fact wish you all the luck in the world, but i'm also not going to ignore the things i disagree with. i would honestly want anyone to do the same for me.
 
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Hobo Huck

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It's up to ME to prove to YOU that we are volunteering? That's hilarious Matt, and utterly wrong. If you are going to make a huge blog post that makes wild assumptions about our group in the form of criticism, it is YOUR JOB to research us before you start saying things that are false and potentially slanderous. That is YOUR job, not mine.

And what is this crap about anyone not delivering? I began this project with one bus, and now we have 3 buses, 2 cars, a motorcycle, and a winnebago. I promised 10 members and now we have 12. I promised to pay back the person that purchased our first bus, and I paid them. I promised to do 3 volunteer jobs each week, and now we average 5. I promised that our group would have full transparent accounting, including spending and donations, for every vagabus member to see on a shared google spreadsheet, and we have that. What exactly are you wanting me to deliver? We are a very young project, we have made some amazing gains, and no of course we are not perfect or whatever dreamy vision you have concocted for us based on a GQ magazine article. I think we are delivering just fine, and we will continue to deliver more and more as we mature and become better organized.

But, hey, let me make it easy for you. You want to see proof of our hard work and volunteeringz/ Have you ever seen our website with pictures and stories of our work? Have you ever been to our instagram that has DOZENS of pictures of us working in gardens and feeding homeless people. You are a member of our subreddit, yet you claim to have not seen the DOZENS of pictures I've also submitted there?

Haha, fine. If youre going to be too lazy to actually click a few links and see proof that we arent simply some "grand adventure" trying to "e-spange" for selfish desires, ill provide links here for you to see so you dont actually have to move a mouse and do research.

You are simply jumping on a bandwagon of criticism that occurred on the internet today, and you wrongfully jumped to the conclusion of further trying to discredit us. Poor research and false reporting is your fault, and not very distant from the likes of GQ journalists.

Here some pics for you:















http://imgur.com/ILgRpJe.jpg



 
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Matt Derrick

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It's up to ME to prove to YOU that we are volunteering? That's hilarious Matt, and utterly wrong. If you are going to make a huge blog post that makes wild assumptions about our group in the form of criticism, it is YOUR JOB to research us before you start saying things that are false and potentially slanderous. That is YOUR job, not mine.

that is false.

when you are presenting a project to the world in the way you have, it's your job to present some kind of proof that you're doing what you say you are. if you don't, then you're just doing a bad job at PR. it's not my job to seek it out via some obscure instagram pictures.
 

Hobo Huck

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that is false. when you are presenting a project to the world, it's your job to present some kind of proof that you're doing what you say you are. if you don't, then you're just doing a bad job at PR. it's not my job to seek it out via some obscure instagram pictures.


What the hell? Most of those pictures are on our subreddit, our facebook, our instagram, and our subreddit. Our website and instagram address is freeaking PAINTED on the side of our bus. If you havent seen pictures of us working, and cant bother to research us by googling our name or our website, its not my job to deliever pictures to you personally on a silver platter. That is absurd.

We do show the world our pictures. We upload them to 4 different social media platforms every single day, including today. How are we doing "bad PR" when we have been in a dozen newspapers, radio stations, television, and magazines. I think we are doing pretty damn good for a group of homeless backpackers and trainhoppers that are truly trying to help the towns they visit.

If you're going to criticize us, it isnt my job to do a few mouse-clicks of very easy and obvious googling. Stop calling a group of homeless volunteers "e-spangers" or "liars" or "not delivering promises" simply because you think we should be living up to youir fancy notions and hand-delivering pictures to you that are widely available on the web. You can simply google us and see tons of these pictures and stories, and Ill do that for you now:

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=vagabus

https://www.google.com/search?q=vag...517&bih=741&dpr=0.9#tbm=isch&q=vagabus&nfpr=1

I'm sorry Matt, but if you cant even google us before you shit talk us, I'm going to discontinue this silly back-and-forth pointless debate you started here. You obviously don't give a shit about our project, you don't like us, and you failed to do VERY easy research about us, yet amazingly youre twisting this as if all of this is my fault somehow. Wow. Have fun with with that, and I hope you get the karma you deserve for criticizing an optimistic group of homeless volunteers. So big of you.
 

Matt Derrick

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If you havent seen pictures of us working, and cant bother to research us by googling our name or our website,

your website doesn't really have anything on it, which supports my arguments.

We do show the world our pictures. We upload them to 4 different social media platforms every single day, including today. How are we doing "bad PR" when we have been in a dozen newspapers, radio stations, television, and magazines. I think we are doing pretty damn good for a group of homeless backpackers and trainhoppers that are truly trying to help the towns they visit.

i guess the wall we're hitting here is that you think posting pictures on social media and not on your website is perfectly valid; in my point of view (and i think most people would agree with me) your website should be the one place we can go and find out what the heck is going on with your project.

so at that point i guess it's down to semantics.

Stop calling a group of homeless volunteers "e-spangers" or "liars" or "not delivering promises"

you're starting to misconstrue what i was saying. look at my original post, i never said any of those things.

I'm sorry Matt, but if you cant even google us before you shit talk us, I'm going to discontinue this silly back-and-forth pointless debate you started here.

again, you're offended/hurt/angry, whatever... i get it. no body likes being criticized. again, you gotta thicken that skin, buddy. i really don't think i'm twisting anything around though, because, whether you want to admit it or not, the only reason you're facing so much criticism right now is because people are confused about your project, where it's going, it's purpose, etc. so if that's the case then it's definitely some kind of failure to communicate on your end.

You obviously don't give a shit about our project, you don't like us, and you failed to do VERY easy research about us

none of that is true. quite to the contrary, i'd love it if you proved me wrong and sent me a picture via whatever social media format you choose, with a big picture of yourselves and the bus in argentina, holding a huge sign that says "go fuck yourself matt derrick". that would be hilarious. i don't harbor any bad feelings towards you or anyone else on the bus (how could i? i don't know who they are), but i don't think you're really emotionally equipped to handle disagreements in a reasonable manner, which in the end is going to hurt you more than it does me.

look, i again apologize for taking the GQ article and running a little wild with it. i was misled and i'm big enough to admit that i was somewhat wrong there, but that my base arguments with the problems in the travel community are still valid.

your insistence that it's our responsibility to verify what you say is still, well, kind of crazy. but the fact that we won't be able to come to some compromise on this topic is more your own shortcoming than it is mine.
 
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Hobo Huck

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Ok Matt arguing you is obviously pointless.

First its our fault for not publicizing our volunteer work, and I show you over a dozen media links from newspapers and radio stations that talk specifically about all of our volunteer projects.

I googled our name The Vagabus (basic beginners internet task) for you so that you could see our volunteer work on google images, facebook, our website, our instagram, and our Facebook, yet somehow its still our fault for not proving to YOU that we are actually volunteering.

I'm going to seriously hope you are drunk, or else this is just plain stupid and you are either:

A) Can't do any research, including basic google skills

B) Choosing to blatantly ignore our volunteerships for the sake of upholding your criticisms.

C) Drunk

You'll be eating your words in a few months from now, but hey, just google our name and follow us if you want further proof of that. When we near Austin, or wherever you are, Ill personally steer the bus your way so that you can stand with us and apologize for the things you say today. Deal?
 
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etpyh

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as for the volunteering, that's great, really. but you really can't argue that you've done a good job of showing off that side of your travels or, well, any other aspect of this project. it's easy for folks like myself to be mislead if you put no effort into letting us know otherwise, which is not our fault.
when you are presenting a project to the world in the way you have, it's your job to present some kind of proof that you're doing what you say you are. if you don't, then you're just doing a bad job at PR. it's not my job to seek it out via some obscure instagram pictures.
your website doesn't really have anything on it, which supports my arguments.

There is more than enough information on their website and a simple google search will bring up even more infos. The fault is clearly on your side and not on poor PR.
I tend to agree on most of your general critic on the traveler community though.

But at least you brought hobo huck back after he forgot his password being to busy on the bus and banning people on r/vagabond
https://squattheplanet.com/threads/r-vagabond-admins-censoring-at-their-own-will.26621/
 

Matt Derrick

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The fault is clearly on your side and not on poor PR.

can you please explain this in more detail? because i'm not seeing hardly anything about their volunteer work on their website.
 

Hobo Huck

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can you please explain this in more detail? because i'm not seeing hardly anything about their volunteer work on their website.

You have got to be either blind or joking. Are you serious? Dude, google our name. Go to our instagram, go to our subreddit, go to our facebook. I'm not trying to sound condescending, but I'm seriously starting to question your ability to use the internet and google our name. We have tons of social media, along with tons of media links that have TONS of pictures of us volunteeing, both past and present.

You have got to either be blatantly ignoring several of our social media platforms, or youre just joking or trolling this comment thread.

Here, I'll google it for you again, Matt.

https://www.google.com/search?q=vag...j69i61j69i60.769j0j9&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

Here are our social media sites to prove our work:

https://www.facebook.com/thevagabus/

https://www.instagram.com/the_vagabus/

https://www.reddit.com/r/vagabus

https://www.thevagabus.com

Here are the media links (including pictures and testimonies proving our volunteer work)

https://lostcoastoutpost.com/2016/feb/25/vagabus-voluntourism-reddit-hippie-bus/

http://www.krcrtv.com/north-coast-n...ty-service-from-america-to-argentina/37382540

http://kiem-tv.com/video/vagabus-volunteers-lend-helping-hand-eureka


I don't know how else to hand this info to you other than some sort of silver platter. If you cant google this, I can't help you.
 

iamwhatiam

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I think if maybe you updated thevagabus.com website a little more frequently it would help some. I mean, that being the main website and its been almost 2 months now showing nothing about recent volunteer gigs.

And I think when people mention about being compensated for their donations.....I seem to remember somewhere a list of things you would get if u donated money towards the project. I.e. $10 bucks gets u a postcard sent from you guys, $50 bucks a souvenir, etc? are you waiting until mexico/central america before you do that?
 

iamwhatiam

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Ah well now I see on the media tab where there are some more recent articles..
 

Hobo Huck

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Ah well now I see on the media tab where there are some more recent articles..

The website is a work in progress. We switched domains and hosts this month from one host to another, and it was a difficult process for me to figure out since I'm not a web designer or very knowedgable about the whole domain transfer.

Our main web designer left the bus because his visa ran out of time and now he has to sit in Canada. I've done a little bit of updating it here or there, but I've mostly been busy coordinating the bus and our volunteer schedules, and so I havent really had much to work on it. I can do most of the facebook/instagram/subreddit stuff pretty easily through my phone, which I just update daily on the fly inbetween jobs or during the late evening. However, the website is a bit over my head and actually needs someone to sit down with a laptop for a couple of solid hours, which is a freedom I rarely get to.

Funny sidenote to this is that I was going to update the website last week with a huge update to our progress in Fortuna, California, and after writing an hour long post, including pictures, the laptop ran out of battery and I didnt have time to plug it into the inverter. Pissed me off sooooo much and I just said "screw it" and walked away to read a book. Ill definitely update it soon, as its on the top of my to-do list, but I really cant wait to hand it over to someone with better web design experience than me!

I also should point out that our project is really young at this point. Our main focuses right now are renovating the buses, volunteering our butts off, and getting everything more organized according to our rapid growth. For me, the social media stuff is all secondary to that, but its absurd to say that we have failed to show the public proof of our efforts.
 

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