Page 2

By Jack Joseph Smith

To Be An Engineer Arthur was eleven in Western Oregon When from a home he left for the trains After Arthur went away from his foster doorstep He got to like the hobo's in the Willimatte and Columbia River camps Arthur did not bring a can of soup But the men of the rails understood Letting Arthur render his reasons with the seasons The hobo's boiled the boy kettle beans picked free-hand, down along the loam And the railroad riders never douped Arthur to roam In the hobo's conceptual theme of glory as a misfit: Yet Arthur once rode with luck A past passinger car retaining a wooden tolit Though those long railroad-crossing drifts filled with freight Were what were taken Arthur out of city bulliyard rods And the odds on whiskey and whisker From the settled farms and barns and junkyards Had Arthur somewhat safe through the Cascades To the stretch of fur into pine Where the steel and the blue only wine winds in the Rocky Mountain Theatre And as though it couldn't get better Into thirteen after a bit more kindness than fear Arthur turned himself into the authorities Arthur had been refered to by parents unaware of adventure And stated at the child care center door That although the hobolife was fine education for sure Arthur himself had decided he had to study just a bit more to become a railroad engineer

Original Scan

Page 2

AI Interpretation

GPT

Arthur's childhood flight from a foster doorstep begins a hard narrative of trains, labor, and damaged ambition.

The writing frames engineering not as a clean profession but as a dream seen from instability. The page follows a boy moving through Western Oregon and the rail world, giving work and motion the feeling of both escape and exile.

Claude

Arthur's journey from foster care through Western Oregon hobo camps to his voluntary surrender at the child care center is told as an American ambition fable.

The poem holds two things in tension: the hobo world as a legitimate education, and the decision to return to institutional life for further training. Arthur isn't defeated by the camps - he chooses to leave them. The dialect spellings and the rail vocabulary build a credible vernacular frame around a genuinely ambivalent picture of freedom and aspiration.