Person Essay: Uncle Bob Roberts

Uncle Bob Roberts
Whenever my car thumps over railroad tracks my mind jolts to a night fourteen years ago. The few memories that I have from elementary school are cloudy, but the night Uncle Bob Roberts told me about his migration from Washington State to California by railroad is still fresh in my mind. In his old-timers language Uncle Bob Roberts told me this story:

“I was 16 when The Great Depression kicked me out of my parents’ house. There was no food in the kitchen, no work, no school, so I got the hell out of town. Jesus, there was no other place to go, so I headed to California. I walked the rail for three days, slept under Douglas trees and ate boiled nettles when I could find them. Trains only ran this far north weekly and fare was expensive -- money wasn’t given away like it is nowadays. I walked because that’s all a man could do. I walked.”

“The fourth day I could hear the steady beast chugging up the steel. Hot damn, it was music to my ears. I knew that taking the train down to California was the only way I’d eat again and I wasn’t going to miss it. When an opportunity presents itself you gotta grab onto the horns and see what happens. I didn’t want the engineers to see me so I waited in the woods till the locomotive passed. Moments later I jumped for my life right into the open door of a freight car. BAM! I was home free.”

“I spent a week in that damned freight car. It was full of others who were also catching a ride down to California. We became a real family, sharing bits of food and stories as we sat and waited. We rode in that car until the air smelled sweet of peaches and decided it was time to jump back into the real world. I picked and ate peaches everyday for the next four months until even my sweat was peach juice.”

Uncle Bob Roberts died when I was 13 and I cried at his funeral. Between salty tears I read his obituary fully expecting to see some mention of his life during the depression. I was surprised when there were no references of California or the trains. In fact, according the piece of paper in front of me, Uncle Bob Roberts was born in 1925, which made him too young to remember anything about The Depression. The obituary called him “a great story teller” and “a real character”. However, there was no mention of him being a great liar.

I knew children lied to adults all the time, yet, I didn’t think adults were allowed to lie to children. It didn’t seem possible, the man who I had spent my entire childhood looking up to didn’t even exist. He was purely an imagination that lived only in my head. The Uncle Bob Roberts that I knew was a man created by Bob Roberts himself.

After his death I wondered what the real Bob Roberts was like. My parents said he lived in Bellingham for most of his life and drank too much in the evenings until he passed out. This description didn’t match the man that I knew and I had a hard time believing truth. The stories that I had grown up listening to gave me hope and inspired me to push through even the hardest times. The truth wasn’t as fun as the stories Uncle Bob Roberts had told me and it didn’t give me the same feelings of adventure.

My mind eventually created two men named Uncle Bob Roberts. One man, the one that I rarely think about, lived in Bellingham and drank himself into a coma every night. My real uncle is a man who jumped trains and picked peaches until his fingers bled.

**This is an essay I wrote for one of my classes. The assignment was to write a two page coming of age story. It's a little bit choppy in the middle section (not to mention cheesy), but I still sort of like it.**