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Answering these long-distance calls is a moving experience

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Every once in a while I hear the call of the distance, the way a cow hears the mating roar of a bull, and I get the urge to hit the road. The call I hear isn’t exactly a bellow or even a lonesome whistle, but more a whisper, like the lure of Bali Hai in “South Pacific” that says, “Come to me, come to me.”

My mother was that way. She’d be talking to another old lady on the phone, hang up and suddenly start packing. I’d ask where she was going and she’d say to take a bus. Usually she’d be headed to Reno to play the slots, but the destination wasn’t important. It was the going that stirred her soul, the journey toward a different view.

I began feeling that way after talking to Virginia Lee Hunter the other day. She’s a hobo, or to be gender specific, a hoba. She’s been hopping trains for about a dozen years and has 10,000 miles riding in and on top of boxcars to just about every point of the compass. Why? Well, for a lot of different reasons, but the main one, I think, is because she hears the distance too.

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They call her West Coast Virginia Slim, because every hobo has a moniker, like truckers on their CBs. I heard about her from the folk-singing hobo Fred Starner, a PhD. in economics who gave up the academic life for that of a troubadour. When he talked about a woman hobo, I expected to find a grizzled, stogie-smoking, over-the-hill old mama with the looks of a manatee and the manner of a stevedore.

But what greeted me in a small, tidy apartment tucked behind a weathered, century-old Hollywood house was a pert 42-year-old with a blond-streaked Peter Pan haircut who looked like she’d be more accustomed to riding in a stretch limo toward Beverly Hills than in the boxcar of a train high-balling to Houston.

But Hunter opts for mulligan stew in a hobo jungle instead of foie de veau at L’Hermitage because of the adventure involved. That’s what got her started in the first place. She’d gone back to Iowa for a high school reunion in 1998 and returned to California a hobo.

Hunter is a talented freelance photographer. Her pictures taken while riding the rails make you want to crawl into them and hop the open boxcar racing around a bend through a Canadian forest and into a muted sunlight. The photos are part of a series she hopes to turn into a book called “Views From a Box Car,” scenes of people and places she never gets tired of seeing.

On the way to that high school reunion, she stopped to talk to some people in a park who looked photographable and discovered they were hobos who’d ridden freight trains from California to Iowa to attend a hobo convention. “They were pretty cool people,” she says. “Teachers, students, environmentalists, ‘anarchists’ -- people who read Jack London and Jack Kerouac.”

The next thing she knew, Hunter and a group of friends were hopping a hot shot out of L.A.’s Union Station heading to Bakersfield, and she was hooked. A hot shot, by the way, is an open car. Hobos have their own language. When you’re “on the hog,” you’re broke. When you’re “taking the black train westbound,” you’re dying. A “40-miler” is an amateur. A “rubber tramp” is a guy like me who travels by car.

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Hunter, who looks as though she could be 30, always travels with a group of men and women for safety and company. No one has ever bothered her. Hoboing is like a community, she says. You’re all in that kind of dream world together, looking for that different view my mother was always seeking before she, well, took that black dog westbound. A dog, in hobo parlance, is a Greyhound bus. Mom didn’t hop freights. Riding the dog was her way of seeking an elusive, mind-image destination.

I hear Hunter’s feelings about the rails when she talks about riding a junker -- a train carrying mixed freight -- in an open car for hours and hours. “You can’t talk, it’s too noisy, and you can’t read, it’s too jiggly. So you have long conversations with yourself.”

A sense of self, she says, develops, while listening to the sounds the train makes -- “high-pitched strings squealing on top of the deep beat of a kettle drum.” She calls it an “avant-garde symphony.”

One senses the spirituality in her adventures, trailing the wind to points unknown, pursuing clouds to that far-off place in the soul where destination abides.

Hunter is following carnivals now. Learning about them, taking pictures, planning a book about that world too. And I’m sitting here, chained to my words, looking out a window, wondering where time goes when shadows fall and thinking about the next trip out of L.A.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.

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