by Jack Kerouac
THE GROUND I WOULD HAVE EATEN in solitude, cronch—the railroad earth, the flat stretches of long Bayshore that I have to negotiate to get to Sherman’s bloody caboose on track 17 ready to go with pot pointed to Redwood and the morning’s 3-hour work.— I get off the bus at Bayshore Highway and rush down the little street and turn in—boys riding the pot of a switcheroo in the yardgoat day come yelling by at me from the headboards and footboards “Come on down ride with us” otherwise I would have been about 3 minutes even later to my work but now I hop on the littlt engine that momentarily slows up to pick me up and it’s alone not pulling anything but tender, the guys have been up to the other end of the yard to get back on some track of necessity.— That boy will have to learn to flag himself without nobody helping him as many’s the time I’ve seen some of these young goats think they have everything but the plan is late, the word will have to wait, the massive arboreal thief with the crime of the kind, and air and all kinds of ghouls—ZONKed! made tremendous by the flare of the whole crime and encrudalatures of all kinds—San Franciscos and shroudband Bayshores the last and the last furbelow of the eek plot pall prime tit top work oil twicks and wouldn’t you?—the railroad earth I would have eaten alone, cronch, on foot head bent to get to Sherman who ticking watch observes with finicky eyes the time to go to give the hiball sign get on going it’s Sunday no time to waste the only day of his long seven-day-a-week worklife he gets a chance to rest a little bit at home when “Eee Christ” when “Tell that sonofabitch student this is no party picnic damn this shit and throb tit you tell them something and how do you what the hell expect to underdries out tit all you bright tremendous trouble anyway, we’s LATE” and this is the way I come rushing up late. Old Sherman is sitting in the crummy over his switch lists, when he sees me with cold blue eyes he says “You know you’re supposed to be here 7:30 dont you so what the hell you doing gettin’ in here at 7:50 you’re twenty goddam minutes late, what the fuck you think this your birthday?” and he gets up and leans off the rear bleak platform and gives the high sign to the enginemen up front we have a cut of about 12 cars and they say it easy and off we go slowly at first, picking up momentum to the work, “Light that goddam fire” says Sherman he’s wearing brandnew workshoes just about bought yestiddy and I notice his clean coveralls that his wife washed and set on his chair just that morning probably and I rush up and throw coal in the potbelly flop and take a fusee and two fusees and light them crack em. Ah fourth of the July when the angels would smile on the horizon and all the racks where the mad are lost are returned to us forever from Lowell of my soul prime and single meditated longsong hope to heaven of prayers and angels and of course the sleep and interested eye of images and but now we detect the missing buffoon there’s the poor goodman rear man aint even on the train yet and Sherman looks out sulkily the back door and sees his rear man waving from fifteen yards aways to stop and wait for him and being an old railroad man he certainly isnt going to run or even walk fast, it’s well understood, conductor Sherman’s got to get up off his switchlist desk chair and pull the air and stop the goddam train for rear man Arkansaw Charley, who sees this done and just come up lopin’ in his flop overalls without no care, so he was late too, or at least had gone gossiping in the yard office while waiting for the stupid head brakeman, the tagman’s up in front on the presumably pot. “First thing we do is pick up a car in front at Redwood so all’s you do get off at the crossing and stand back to flag, not too far.” “Dont I work the head end?” “You work the hind end we got not much to do and I wanna get it done fast,” snarls the conductor. “Just take it easy and do what we say and watch and flag.” So it’s peaceful Sunday morning in California and off we go, tack-a-tick, lao-tichi-couch, out of the Bayshore yards, pause momentarily at the main line for the green, ole 71 or ole whatever been by and now we get out and go swamming up the tree valleys and town vale hollows and main street crossing parking-lot lastnight attendant plots and Stanford lots of the world—to our destination in the Pooh which I can see, and, so to while the time I’m up in the cupolo and with my newspaper dig the latest news on the front page and also consider and make notations of the money I spent already for this day Sunday absolutely not jot spend a nothing—California rushes by and with sad eyes we watch it reel the whole bay and the discourse falling off to gradual gils that ease and graduate to Santa Clara Valley then and the fig and behind is the fog immemoriate while the mist closes and we come running out to the bright sun of the Sabbath Californiay —
At Redwood I get off and standing on sad oily ties of the brakie railroad earth with red flag and torpedoes attached and fusees in backpocket with timetable crushed against and I leave my hot jacket in crummy standing there then with sleeves rolled up and there’s the porch of a Negro home, the brothers are sitting in shirtsleeves talking with cigarettes and laughing and little daughter standing amongst the weeds of the garden with her playpail and pigtails and we the railroad men with soft signs and no sound pick up our flower, according to same goodman train order that for the last entire lifetime of attentions ole conductor industrial worker harlotized Sherman has been reading carefully son so’s not to make a mistake:
“Sunday morning October 15 pick up flower car at Redwood, Dispatcher M.M.S.”
I’D PUT A BLOCK OF WOOD under the wheels of the car and watch it writhe and crack as the car eased up on it and stopped and sometimes didnt at all but just rolled on leaving the wood flattened to the level of the rail with upthrusted crackee ends.— Afternoons in Lowell long ago I’d wondered what the grimy men were doing with big boxcars and blocks of wood in their hands and when far above the ramps and rooftops of the great gray warehouse of eternity I’d see the immortal canal clouds of redbrick time, the drowse so heavy in the whole July city it would hang even in the dank gloom of my father’s shop outside where they kept big rolltrucks with little wheels and flat silvery platforms and junk in corners and boards, the ink dyed into the oily wood as deep as a black river folded therein forever, contrasts for the whitepuff creamclouds outdoors that you just can see standing in the dust moted hall door over the old 1830 Lowell Dickens redbrick floating like in an old cartoon with little bird designs floating by too, all of a gray daguerrotype mystery in the whorly spermy waters of the canal.— Thus in the same way the afternoons in the S.P. redbrick alley, remembering my wonder at the slow grinding movement and squee of gigantic boxcars and flats and gons rolling by with that overpowering steel dust crenching closh and clack of steel on steel, the shudder of the whole steely proposition, a car going by with a brake on and so the whole brakebar—monstre em-poudrement de jer en enjer the frightening fog nights in California when you can see thru the mist the monsters slowly passing and hear the whee whee squee, those merciless wheels that one time Conductor Ray Miles on my student trips said, “When those wheels go over your leg they dont care about you” same way with that wood that I sacrifice.— What those grimy men had been doing some of em standing on top of the boxcars and signalling far down the redbrick canal alleys of Lowell and some old men slowly like bums moving around over rails with nothing to do, the big cut of cars squeeing by with that teethgritting cree cree and gigantic hugsteel bending rails into earth and making ties move, now I knew from working as on the Sherman Local on Sundays we dealt with blocks of wood because of an incline in the ground that made kicked cars keep going and you had to ride them brake them and stop them up with blocks. Lessons I learned there, like, “Put, tie a good brake on him, we dont want to start chasin the sonofabitch back to the City when we kick a car again him,” okay, but I’m playing the safety rules of the safety book to the T and so now here I am the rear man on the Sherman Local, we’ve set out our Sunday morning preacher blossom flower car and made curtsies bows to the sabbath God in the dark everything has been arranged in that fashion and according to old traditions reaching back to Sutter’s Mill and the times when the pioneers sick of hanging around the hardware store all week had put on their best vestments and smoked and jaw-bleaked in
front of the wooden church and old railroad men of the 19th century the inconceivably ancient S.P. of another era with stovepipe hats and flowers in their lapels and had made the moves with the few cars into the goldtown milkbottle with the formality and the different chew the thinky thought,—They give the sign and kick a car, with wood in hand I run out, the old conductor yells “You’d better brake him he’s going too fast can you get im?” “Okay” and I run and take it easy on a jog and wait and here’s the big car looming over me has just switched into its track from the locomotive tracks where (the lead) all the angling and arrowing’s been done by the conductor who throws the switch, reads the taglist, throws the switch—so up the rungs I go and according to safety rules with one hand I hang on, with the other I brake, slowly, according to a joint, easing up, till I reach the cut of cars waiting and into it gently my braked boxcar bangs, zommm—vibrations, things inside shake, the cradle rockababy merchandise zomms with it, all the cars at this impact go forward about a foot and crush woodblocks earlier placed, I jump down and place a block of wood and just neatly glue it under the steel lip of that monstrous wheel and everything stops. And so I turn back to take care of the next kicked car which is going down the other track and also quite fast, I jog, finding wood en route, run up the rung, stop it, safety rule hanging on one hand forgetting the conductor’s “Tie a good brake on it,” something I should have learned then as a year later in Guadaloupe hundreds of miles down the line I tied poor brakes on three flats, the flat handbrakes that have old rust and loose chains, poorly with one hand safety wise hanging on in case unexpected joint would jolt me off and under merciless wheels whose action with blocks of wood my bones would belie—bam, at Guadaloupe they kicked a cut of cars against my poorly braked flats and everything began parading down the incline back to San Luis Obispo, if it hadn’t been for the alert old conductor looking out of the crummy switch lists to see this parade and running out to throw switches in front of it and unlocking switch locks as fast as the cars kept coming, a kind of comic circus act with him in floppy clown pants and hysterical horror darting from switch stand to switch stand and the guys in back hollering, the pot taking off after the cut and catching it almost pushing it but the couplers closing just in time and the engine braking everything to a stop, 30 feet almost in front of the final derail which the old winded conductor couldnt have finally made, we’d all have lost our jobs, my safety rule brakes had not taken momentum of steel and slight land inclines into consideration … if it had been Sherman at Guadaloupe I would have been hated Keoroowaaayy.
GUADALOUPE IS 275.5 miles down the shining rail from San Francisco, down on the subdivision named after it, the Guadaloupe—the whole Coast Division begins at those sad dead end blocks of Third and Townsend where grass grows from soot beds like green hair of old tokay heroes long slanted into the ground like the railroad men of the 19th century whom I saw in the Colorado plains at little train order stations slanted into the ground of the hard dry dustcake, boxed, mawklipped, puking grit, fondled by the cricket, gone aslant so far sunk gravewise boxdeep into the foot of the sole of the earth Oh, you’d think they had never suffered and dropped real sweats to that unhumped earth, had never voiced juicy sorrow words from blackcaked lips now make no more noise than the tire of an old tin lizzy the tin of which is zinging in the sun winds this afternoon, ah spectral Cheyenne Wellses and train order Denver Rio Grandes Northern Pacifies and Atlantic Coast Lines and Wunposts of America, all gone.— The Coast Division of the ole S.P. which was built in umpteen o too too and used to run a little crazy crooked mainline up and down the hills of Bayshore like a crazy cross country track for European runners, this was their gold carrying bandito held up railroad of the old Zorro night of inks and furly caped riders.— But now ‘tis the modern ole Coast Division S.P. and begins at those dead end blocks and at 4:30 the frantic Market Street and Sansome Street commuters as I say come hysterically running for their 112 to get home on time for the 5:30 televisions Howdy Doody of their gun toting Neal Cassady’d Hopalong childrens. 1.9 miles to 23rd Street, another 1.2 Newcomb, another 1.0 to Paul Avenue and etcetera these being the little piss stops on that 5 miles short run thru 4 tunnels to mighty Bayshore, Bayshore at milepost 5.2 shows you as I say that gigantic valley wall sloping in with sometimes in extinct winter dusks the huge fogs milking furling meerolling in without a sound but as if you could hear the radar hum, the oldfashioned dullmasks mouth of Potato Patch Jack London old scrollwaves crawling in across the gray bleak North Pacific with a wild fleck, a fish, the wall of a cabin, the old arranged wallworks of a sunken ship, the fish swimming in the pelvic bones of old lovers lay tangled at the bottom of the sea like slugs no longer discernible bone by bone but melted into one squid of time, that fog, that terrible and bleak Seattleish fog that potatopatch wise comes bringing messages from Alaska and from the Aleutian mongol, and from the seal, and from the wave, and from the smiling porpoise, that fog at Bayshore you can see waving in and filling in rills and rolling down and making milk on hillsides and you think, “It’s hypocrisy of men makes these hills grim.”—To the left at the Bayshore mountain wall there’s all your San Fran Bay pointing across the broadflat blues to the Oakland lostness and the train the mainline train runs and clack and clackity clicks and makes the little Bayshore yard office a passing fancy things so important to the railroad men the little yellowish shack of clerks and paper onion skin train order lips and clearances of conductors and waybills tacked and typed and stamped from Kearney Neb. on in with mooing cows that have moved over 3 different railroads and all ye such facts, that passed in a flash and the train negotiates, on, passing Visitación Tower, that by old Okie railroad men of now-California aint at all mexicanized in pronunciation, Vi Zi Tah Sioh, but is simply called, Visitation, like on Sunday morning, and oft you hear, “Visitation Tower, Visitation Tower,” ah ah ah ah aha.— Mile post 6.9, the following 8.6 Butler Road far from being a mystery to me by the time I became a brakeman was the great sad scene of yard clerking nights when at the far end of a 80 car freight the numbers of which with my little lamp I was taking down as I crunched over the gravel and all backtired, measuring how far I had to go by the sad streetlamp of Butler Road shining up ahead at the wall’s end of long black sadmouth longcars of ye iron reddark railroad night—with stars above, and the smashby Zipper and the fragrance of locomotive coalsmoke as I stand aside and let them pass and far down the line at night around that South San Fran airport you can see that sonofabitch red light waving Mars signal light waving in the dark big red markers blowing up and down and sending fires in the keenpure lostpurity lovelyskies of old California in the late sad night of autumn spring comefall winter’s summertime tall, like trees.— all of it, and Butler Road no mystery to me, no blind spot in this song, but well known, I could also measure how far I had to go by the end of the gigantic rose neon six miles long you’d think saying WEST COAST BETHLEHEM STEEL as I’d be taking down the numbers of boxcars JC 74635 (Jersey Central) D&RG 38376 and NYC and PR and all the others, my work almost done when that huge neon was even with me and at the same time this meant the sad little streetlamp of Butler Road was only 50 feet away and no cars beyond that because that was the crossing where they’d cut them and then fold them over into another track of the South City yards, things of brake significance switch significance I only got to learn later.— So SF milepost 9.3 and what a bleak little main street, o my goodness, the fog’d roll in fine from there and the little neon cocktails with a little cherry on a toothpick and the bleak foglike green Chronicles in 10^ sidewalk tin clonks, and yr bars with fat slick haired ex troopers inside drinking and October in the poolhall and all, where I’d go for a few bars of candy or desultory soups between chores as yardclerk when I was a yard-clerk digging the lostness on that side, the human, and then having to go to the other end, a mile towards the Bay, to the great Armour & Swift slaughterplants where I’d take down the numbers of meat reefers and sometimes have to step aside and wait while the local came in and did some swi
tching and the tagman or conductor would always tell me which ones were staying, which ones going.— Always at night, and always soft ground of like manure but really rat ground underneath, the countless rats I saw and threw rocks at till I felt like being sick, I’d hurry fleeing as from nightmare from that hole and sometimes fabricated phoney numbers instead of going too near a gigantic woodpile which was so full of rats it was like their tenement.— And the sad cows mooing inside where little ratty Mexicans and Californians with bleak unpleasant unfriendly faces and going-to-work jalopies were milling around in their bloody work—till finally I worked it on a Sunday, the Armour & Swift yards, and saw that the Bay was 60 feet away and I’d never known it, but a dump yard a recka of crap and rat havens worse than ever tho beyond it the waters did ripple bluely and did in the sad morning clarity show clear flat mirrors clear to Oakland and the Alameda places across the way.— And in the hard wind of the Sunday morning I heard the mutter of the tinware walls of brokendown abandoned slaughter house warehouses, the crap inside and dead rats killed by that local on off nights and some even I might have hit with my jacketful of protective rocks, but mostly systematically killed rats laying around in the keen heartbreaking cloud haunted wildwind day with big silver airplanes of civilized hope taking off across the stinking swamp and filthy tin flats for places in the air.— Gah, bah, ieoeoeoeoe—it has a horrible filthy moaning sound you’d hear eiderdowning in that flydung those hideaway silos and murdered tinpaint aisles, scum, of salt, and bah oh bah and harbors of the rat, the axe, the sledgehammer, the moo cows and all that, one big South San Francisco horror there’s your milepost 9.3.—- After that the rushing train takes you to San Bruno clear and far around a long bend circling the marsh of the SSF airport and then on in to Lomita Park milepost 12.1 where the sweet commuter trees are and the redwoods crash and talk about you when you pass in the engine the boilers of which redly cast your omnipotent shadow out on the night.— You see all the lil ranchstyle California homes and in the evening people sipping in livingrooms open to the sweetness, the stars, the hope that lil children must see when they lay in little beds and bedtime and look up and a star throbs for them above the railroad earth, and the train calls, and they think tonite the stars will be out, they come, they leave, they lave, they angelicize, ah me, I must come from a land where they let the children cry, ah me I wish I was a child in California when the sun’s gone down and the Zipper crashes by and I could see thru the redwood or the fig tree my throbbing hope-light shining just for me and making milk on Permanente hillsides horrible Kafka cement factories or no, rats of South City slaughterhouses or no, no, or no, I wish I was a little child in a crib in a little ranchstyle sweet house with my parents sipping in the livingroom with their picture window pointing out on the little backyard of lawning chairs and the fence, the ranchstyle brown pointed full fence, the stars above, the pure dry golden smelling night, and just beyond a few weeds, and blocks of wood, and rubber tires, bam the main line of the Ole SP and the train flashing by, toom, tboom, the great crash of the black engine, the grimy red men inside, the tender, then the long snake freighttrain and all the numbers and all the whole thing flashing by, gcrachs, thunder, the world is going by all of it finally terminated by the sweet little caboose with its brown smoky light inside where old conductor bends over waybills and up in the cupolo the rear man sits looking out once in a while and saying to himself all black, and the rear markers, red, the lamps in the caboose rear porch, and the thing all gone howling around the bend to Burlingame to Mountain View to the sweet San Joses of the night the further down Gilroys Carnaderos Corporals and that bird of Chittenden of the dawn, your Logans of the strange night all be-lit and insected and mad, your Watsonvilles sea marshes your long long line and mainline track sticky to the touch in the midnight star.