Travels with Jim: Wit on Wheels

Travels with Jim: Wit on Wheels
“ and dreamed of romance and big things off somewhere the way the railroad trains all ran” ˜˜Carl Sandburg in “Mamie” from Chicago Poems 1916.

A successful salesman has a soul full of humorous stories to share. He is always ready to transform strangers into friends and, ultimately, into customers. He has the gift of taking a mundane happenstance and turning it into a witty event. He is always at home, never foreign, no matter where in the world he takes himself. Jim Hoffert was no exception. Salesman Jim’s stories established valuable contacts and influenced customers to purchase his wares over those of others with comparable products to sell. His “confinement” to a wheelchair and my penchant for travel and penny-pinching filled the files of his humor catalogue with tale after tale. Not only did the creative nonfiction stories enrich his sales relationships, the experiences on which he based them added delight to our almost-42 years together. Some of his favorite sagas began with a chuckle, a big grin and, “Did I ever tell you about my wife and trains,” drawing his listener in with the absurd notion that I, an aviation employee for 35 years, had a particular fascination with planes on tracks.
In October of 2001, we traveled through Asia for a month, beginning in Beijing and ignoring the concern of those fearful of travel after 9-11. On the third day of the vacation, we were to board a ship in the port of Tanjin. Jim’s Chinese train story—as opposed to his DC train story or his Sacramento train story—began when we asked the hotel concierge about transportation to the port. We preferred not to pay the steep fee charged by the providers of the cruise line bus, knowing that we had hired private guides and drivers for less on previous trips in Asia. The concierge suggested a train and pointed “down there” when asked where to buy tickets. We maneuvered Jim’s wheelchair onto sidewalks under construction (typical in large Chinese cities preparing for the world to come to the 2008 Olympics), looking from one side of the street to the other, searching for something recognizable to us as a ticket seller. After forty-five minutes of futile exploration, once stopping to reattach a tire pulled off by uneven concrete, we went into a bookstore, knowing we would find an English speaker eager to practice his skills by assisting us. A young man walked us to a side street. I left Jim on the side of the road while I climbed steep steps to purchase the train tickets with the help of our new friend. Jim called every stranger in his stories “our friend” and made many while sitting, seemingly abandoned, by the roadside.
The following day, we needed additional friends. We were going on our first cruise and had packed more than the usual carry-on baggage. A size 44 long tuxedo and an accompanying shirt with 35 inch arms take up a lot of room; I wondered how we fit shoes and socks in the carry-on when he used to wear those (surely my gowns had not added to the luggage). Additionally, since our arrival we had purchased a “grow bag,” a wheeled tote that had miraculously grown to three feet in height after an evening of Beijing bargain-shopping (the grow bag would eventually take on a sibling in Thailand after Jim purchased his 23rd shirt of the vacation, but that is another of his comedies, filed under “shirt story”). The next miracle required the concierge to find a taxi large enough for two Americans, two cruise-goers’ suitcases, the grow bag, and a wheelchair. When we arrived at the curb of a traffic-choked street across from the train station, the driver motioned for us to get out of the taxi. We smilingly refused to exit the cab, motioning that we needed a drop-off at the door of the station. There was no way that we could maneuver a wheelchair and three large bags across that street, through the traffic, without some kind of a conveyance. The police arrived, summoned by the honking horns of angry drivers. Jim pointed to his empty trouser legs, to his wife and baggage in the backseat, and to the wheelchair held by our always-with-us-in-other-countries bungee cord on the back of the cab. When the policeman realized that we could not speak Mandarin, Cantonese, or any form of Chinese, and that we were just not going to get out of the cab on that side of the street, he directed the fuming driver to enter the commercial loading area at the station where two kind truck drivers came to our aid. One caring stranger pushed the wheelchair with the laughing Jim while the other pushed a small produce cart loaded with our baggage. I ran trustingly behind.
The next obstacle and need for trust came in the form of a three-story staircase to the platform. After much head scratching, consultation, and pointing, others in the station led us through a back way to the train. Before we could negotiate that, however, we had to find a wheelchair-access bathroom—more head scratching, consultation, and pointing. After the bathroom adventure, we boarded the train. Jim pulled himself up the steps on his fanny, a mode that stood him—one of Jim’s puns—well from Turkey to Thailand. This method always drew a crowd and Jim, the consummate salesman, held his long arms out and announced, “While I have you gathered here, let me show you my wares.” He knew that few would understand a word he was saying, but that his big voice and laughter would put them at ease about a “cripple” in snazzy clothes pulling himself up dirty stair steps. The train ride was to take thirty minutes—or so the hotel concierge told us.
After an hour, we arrived at Tanjin train station where the platform did not meet the train. Jim—always laughing with heart and arms opened wide—encouraged three small railroad employees to lift his large former football-playing frame and to swing him across the divide, his long arms reaching for the chair I steadied on the platform for him. Thus, Jim presented our friendly Chinese hosts with their own story to tell.
We continued to gather material for Jim’s personal Chinese train story, although he teasingly attributed the train adventures to me. We could see the front door of the station only yards away—for those who fly. The other passengers had walked up and down a tall flight of stairs that spanned the tracks. They were probably wondering how these silly Americans would cross with all of their wheels. Two workers loading cabbage seemed to have received a call from their counterparts in Beijing. They understood our situation and came to our rescue. With one pushing the chair, one running with his push cart piled high with our bags, and me running behind, we went this way and that, down a ramp, through the bowels of the station, dodging smelly trucks laden with poultry and produce, and up another ramp, searching for a way to the front door of the station, the four of us laughing uproariously as we ran. I do not know why we ran, but I am glad we did. It turned a frustrating situation into a Buster Keaton silent film romp.
Once we were in the lobby, a British family visiting their exchange-student daughter offered her translation services to locate a wheelchair access bathroom. We then had an entourage of two produce workers, a British family of five, and an assortment of railway workers looking after us. Maybe it was a Buster Keaton silent film romp.
When this large group exited the station, we drew the attention of an English-speaking taxi dispatcher. She put Jim and me in a cab to the port, which turned out to be another thirty minutes from the station. The proud driver pointed out the sights of his historical area. Although we could not understand his travelogue in Chinese, we appreciated his welcome and vowed to return some day to visit the things that this trip we could only see from a speeding taxi.
Our taxi driver/tour guide deposited us at the dock right on schedule (we did not know this from the Red watch Jim wore and had purchased on a trip to Shanghai the previous fall. The miniaturized Mao Zedong on the clock face had stopped waving to the crowd, but that is an episode for an entire book of Salesman Jim stories). As we went up the gangplank, Jim and I smiled to each other in a kind of shorthand that couples develop after decades in concert. We had ridden many boats and ferries in our travels and were both wondering whether our first real cruise could live up to the richness of the beginning of the trip—from finding the train ticket seller in Beijing to our drop off at the ship.
Later, we watched from the deck as the other passengers arrived in their boring, expensive, loaded-with-North Americans, air-conditioned bus. Surely if there were salesmen among them, they had not added another story, a Chinese anecdote, to their all-important repertoire. By relying on the assistance of strangers, we had turned ourselves from foreigners into friends. We had a grand experience to treasure and another story for the skilled salesman’s mental catalogue of humorous narratives. We contributed to our shared history, making sweet memories we hoped to savor in our old age. The bus riders, luggage neatly tagged for stateroom placement, may as well have motored from Vancouver to its suburbs. They would be able to talk about a 21-day cruise from Beijing to Bangkok with 1,590 English-speaking passengers; Jim Hoffert had that and so much more. And so did I.