How I Accidentally Started the Sixties

by Howard Bloom

  However, due to circumstances utterly beyond my control, in my hitch-hiking and riding the rails days, my relationships with the gendarmerie were outlandishly pleasant. You’ll recall that the police picked me up in San Pedro, California, when they saw me running down the street barefoot at night, questioned me for a while, discovered that I hadn’t seen my mother in a year, became distressed, and, despite my exceedingly peculiar appearance, offered to take me for a cup of coffee. (If they’d still been desperate for information, they’d probably have threatened to dunk me in it.) I didn’t drink coffee, so I politely declined.

  Then there was the policeman who hauled me into his office at the Salt Lake City Airport after I’d grown tired of riding in an open-topped coal car for 700 miles. How in the world did I meet an officer of the law 736 miles east of our San Francisco apartment in the sky?

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  As you know, I hadn’t visited my parents in over a year and they were getting a little edgy. What’s more, the pressure from total strangers for a family reunion was carving a crease the size of a small canyon in my cranium. So I’d promised my folks that I’d return to Buffalo for a brief hello in the fall of 1962, and you’re never supposed to break a promise. I was tired of the unpredictability of Right Thumb Express, so I decided to switch to scheduled vehicles. Which meant sneaking onto freight trains and riding the rails.

  I canvassed the Fillmore District laundromats for another sturdy Clorox jug (the one I’d carried when I’d met the murderers had long since disappeared), went back to the kitchen of our San Francisco apartment that wobbled in the sky, filled the jug with tap water, packets of cherry Kool Aid, and sugar, packed my sleeping bag with staples—a giant pepperoni, a wedge of jack cheese, and a loaf of sourdough bread—left my friends, then headed for the local railroad tracks. If I followed these iron rust-generators far enough, I was sure they’d eventually lead to some sort of freight yard.

  At five-ish in the afternoon, I arrived at a grimy, industrial part of San Francisco whose acres were covered with box cars and shuttling locomotives. So I searched for someone who might guide me and found a man in railroad overalls and cap banging giant pins into the couplings between cars. “Which train,” I asked, “goes to Buffalo, New York?” The fellow looked at me as if I’d asked what galaxy this was. Finally, he decided to be civil, no matter how ignorant my question might be. And he explained America’s freight system.

  “There’s no such thing,” he said, “as a train to Buffalo.” In fact, he explained, there’s no such thing as a train to any city you’ve ever heard of. This great land of ours is dotted with tiny burgs whose names only the experts know. But to railroad boys, they are the hubs of the universe. They’re the places freight trains go, carrying cars headed in the approximate direction of every metropolis on the continent. At one end of the town’s freight yard, diligent laborers in peaked caps take the train apart. In the middle of the freight yard, they shuffle the cars around. And at the far end, these masters of the coupling pin put them back together so all the cars going in the same direction are attached to the same locomotive. Then the whole string of beads heads for another railroad yard 500 miles away and gets reshuffled all over again. “That,” my instructor said proudly, “is how folks like me make our living.”

  This did not make getting to Buffalo sound easy. So how, I asked, could I do it? “Well, first off,” he said, “you’re on the wrong side of the Bay. Nothing going East leaves from here. You’ve got to get yourself to Berkeley.” Berkeley? But that would mean hitch-hiking across the Bay Bridge, and by now my thumb was plumb wore out. “Look,” said my guide and instructor, “you just hop on this train here, and you’ll be in Berkeley in no time.”

  So I found myself a flat car carrying lumber on the train recommended by my railway educator. At its front was just enough room to sit. And when we rumbled away from the big city, I got my first lesson in hoboism. Flat cars are a no-no. Seems the folks who designed these devices never heard of shock absorbers. So after about ten seconds in a sitting posture, it became obvious that my butt was being pounded to a pudding. I did the only logical thing under the circumstances. I stood. Now I don’t know if you’re old enough to remember this, but back when I was a little kid, we had these electric hockey games. The players were jacked up on postage-stamp-sized vertical rectangles of celluloid. And the board vibrated when you turned it on. The result: your “men” went skittling from one end of the surface to the other, allegedly in pursuit of a puck. But actually at random.

  Turns out the same principle applied when the object on a vibrating platform was about 5’8”. As the car jounced jauntily down the rails, so did I. Or I would have, if I hadn’t held on to the lumber for all I was worth. Fortunately, my arms had more stamina than anyone looking at their pathetic stringiness would have suspected. Because the trip to Berkeley, which would have taken twenty minutes by car, was three-and-a-half hours by rail. Why? The good folks who built this particular transportation enterprise had never bothered to construct a bridge. Instead of crossing the San Francisco Bay, we crawled over every inch of its perimeter—a total distance, it turns out, of about seventy miles. Fortunately, our speed never went above twenty miles an hour, or I’d have been bounced off the car no matter how frantically I clung to the knotty slabs of pine. My first cross-country freight trip would have ended in ground round.

  It was night by the time we got to the Berkeley freight yards. Fortunately, I was still alive. Again, I sought out a friendly railroad employee and asked the way to Buffalo. “Buffalo,” he said, scratching his head, “well, to get to Buffalo you’ve got to go to Rosedale. From there, you head for Stockton. Then you catch a train to Starkey. That’s in Nevada. Next you head for” and he proceeded to rattle off a litany of obscure geographic names longer than the Hail Mary’s you say for penance if you’ve just killed your local priest then raped whatever’s left of him.

  But one thing you’ve got to say for the service on the freight trains of the Union Pacific Railroad: it was A+. “There’s the train for Rosedale,” said my steward. “But it doesn’t leave until morning. Let me find you a comfortable box car where you can bed down for the night. And I’ll have someone wake you up before your train leaves.” If only you got service of this sort from Airbnb! The lodging my newfound guide picked was superb. There was straw on the floor. And sure enough, the next morning another friendly looking fellow in a plaid shirt and a railroad cap gave me my wake-up call, then guided me to the Rosedale train.

  I looked around for some place to put myself. Things didn’t appear too promising. There were no sleeping cars with empty berths anywhere in sight. So, still not having entirely learned my lesson, I climbed to the top of a locked boxcar and settled myself on the ladder-like walkway running like a skunk’s stripe along the contraption’s roof.

  There I stayed for five hours, while the sun did its daily chin-up in the east, slowly hefted itself above the horizon, headed for the top of the sky, then proceeded to transform the tin surface beneath me to a frying pan. I was just turning from sunny side up to solid, when I heard a voice down below. Another workman. “Son, what’s your interest up there, suicide or travel?” And the man explained that once the car began to move, I’d have about ten seconds to live. The old vibrating hockey player principle again.

  So the gentleman in overalls escorted me to an empty car that had somehow eluded my gaze and introduced me to a fellow passenger, a half Native American/half Mexican migrant worker who, despite his alcohol-reddened face and his ninety-proof breath, promised to take good care of me. Take good care of me he did. Like my friends the murderers, he quizzed me about my morals. And when he heard that I hadn’t seen my mother in a year, he groaned. Then he delivered a stirring sermon on the centrality to life of the maternal connection, took a pint of muscatel out of his pocket, drained it in a gulp, and went to sleep. Little did he realize that reconnecting with my mother would be my undoing.

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  At Rosedale, my bleary-eyed companion woke up and walked me to the center of the railroad yard. By now, I was a seasoned traveler. I poked my head into the tiny shack where the scheduling of the trains and their reassembly was supervised and asked, not for the train to Buffalo, but for the train to Stockton. With polite efficiency, another man in overalls gave me the departing choo-choo’s number and pointed out the track it squatted on.

  Who knows how I found a box car and went from Rosedale to Stockton. But I suspect that I traveled alone. What’s the clue? When I got out at my destination, I spotted another traveler at least a half a mile behind me exiting from the same train. And I was so desperate for company that I waited next to the sliding doors of my cargo car until he could walk the 2,640 feet between us. Then we set out on the long walk toward the center of the yard together. We’d been turned into brothers by the fact that we’d shared a train, no matter how great the distance that had separated us.

  My newfound train mate was black. And he was cursing African Americans. That seemed strange. Why would he complain about his own kind? Because, he explained, they were not his kind at all. He was from the Caribbean. And island blacks despised American blacks. Apparently the contempt was mutual. He was traveling, my newfound railroad relative explained, to escape Los Angeles. Why escape the City of Angels? In theory, the place should have been heaven. If you didn’t count the fact that you could have cut the smog in LA in 1962 with a butter knife and parcel-posted it to China, where they were seriously lacking in modern industrial air pollution under Chairman Mao.

  Well, it wasn’t the angels he was hoping to escape. It was those pesky American blacks. “If they’re not robbing from you, stealing from you, or killing you,” he said, “they’re lying to you.” A harsh verdict. Why he felt another destination would be any better escaped me. After all, no matter what black community you head for in America, it is likely to be inhabited by American blacks. But this was my second introduction to the fact that there are subcultural divisions even in minority cultures. Big ones. One small clue to, guess what? The forces of history. The kissing cousins of the gods inside.

  We parted company at the center of the yard. He went off to find a berth on the train that would take him to God knows where and I tried to find the train that would take me to Starkey, a town whose location even God has forgotten. Yes, a town so small you can’t even find it on Google Maps.

  This time I knew that I was going to need to ensconce myself in some sort of container out of whose sides I couldn’t spill. So I reconnoitered the half-mile chain of cargo from one end to the other. But I was out of luck. Not an open box-car in sight. Finally, I heard a voice. “Over here,” it said. The syllables emanated from a man a hundred feet away next to the train. “You looking for a place to ride?” this tall, rather pale, but pleasant type asked. I admitted that I was. So, praising its virtues, he invited me over to his find…an empty coal car.

  Turns out my host had grown up on a small farm somewhere in Nebraska. His parents had sent him to Bible College. It was there, while studying The Epistles of Paul, that he had become aware of an abnormal amount of attention focused in his direction. He was being followed day and night. Someone had apparently installed microphones in his teeth and radio transmitters in his eardrums. It took several months of sleuthing to determine who was on his tail. But he’d finally nailed it down. A squadron of Martians determined to do him in had hooked up with the FBI. And you know those FBI types, they’re relentless. So he’d taken to travel by freight in an effort to elude his pursuers. Frankly, I found the man fascinating. William James would have been fascinated, too.

  The coal car, unfortunately, was not the perfect form of transportation. It was built not just to transport coal, but to do something very clever but rather necessary when it reached its destination: to dump it. But how do you dump four tons of black chunks into a waiting receptacle when you arrive? Step one: you build your tracks over the receptacle that’s your target. Yes, that’s a start. But how do you transfer the coal from the car to the waiting bin below? Step two: you give your car a floor that can be opened. An opening floor? Whoever heard of such a thing? And how, pray tell, do you make your floor gape like a mouth stretched open in the office of a demon dentist? You build the floor out of flaps. Six massive flaps hinged to a strip of steel that runs from the front to the back of the car like a backbone. Open the flaps, and the coal comes pouring down. Like an ebony hailstorm. Yes, but then how do you make sure the coal will not come out until you want it to? You put handles on the outer edges of the panels, handles that you can grasp to lift the flaps, handles that, when slid, lock the flaps in place.

  So my fugitive friend, the one dodging aliens and at least one law enforcement agency, guided me to the coal car, showed me how to climb in through the car’s one open flap, then lifted the flap and locked it in place, giving me my own private compartment. When he was sure I was safely ensconced, he wandered off to find a coal car of his own.

  There is one small inconvenience to a coal car, no matter how snugly you lock the floor in place. When they empty one of these things, they remove the lumps of potential fuel from its innards. They do it thoroughly and completely. Waste not, want not. But they don’t bother to Hoover up the sand-like black dust the bitumen leaves behind.

  Now a funny thing happens when one of these cars hits its top speed—somewhere in the neighborhood of sixty-five miles an hour. The dust demonstrates the finer points of aerodynamic lift. It is sucked toward the car’s front. There, inspired by the Bernoulli Principle (in which an Italian named Daniel Bernoulli was sucked off the ground in 1738 every time the top of his head was hit by a strong breeze), the black grit is lifted into the air, snatched by the slipstream traveling across the car’s open top, and whipped at over sixty mph toward the rear. At the car’s hind end, the dark dust is suddenly stopped in its tracks by suction, settles to the floor, and begins its nomadic movement toward the vehicle’s front again. What a wonderful demonstration of convection! And of thrift. The same coal dust is recycled over and over again.

  Why is this restless, high speed motion of grit a problem for the casual traveler? It’s called sand blasting. But what, pray tell, is there to sandblast? How about you. Or, more specifically, me. Recall a lesson from the lumber car. There are no shock absorbers on rolling stock designed to carry cargo. So if you try to sit while your lovely coal car is traveling at top speed, a strange thing happens every 1.5 seconds. A bounce. A jolt. A big one. The jouncing of the car tosses you roughly three feet into the air. Then you fall to the steel floor, hitting it at what Galileo determined was a speed of over 32.2 feet per second. If your pelvic bones survive the crash—and even if they do not—the next jounce will catapult you back into the air, perfectly positioned for another smashing descent. And here, the word smash is uniquely appropriate. You can hear the bones of your buttocks being hammered every time they hit the floor. Like the sound of the kickball victim hitting the pavement on Manhattan’s Third Street. Despite the noise of the car.

  So sitting can be hazardous to your osteal integrity. It can shatter your pelvic girdle like William’s sister’s teacup. The one that infuriated God and her parents.

  What to do? Stand. For 700 miles. However this poses another problem. It puts your face in the slipstream. In the laminar flow of the sixty-five-mile-per-hour coal dust. But do not despair, there is a hidden reward. You get to experience firsthand—or should that be first-faced—the phenomena known as ablation, abrasion, and erosion. You have a one-of-a-kind, full-immersion opportunity to experience the physics of grinding, rasping, and scouring. Lucky you.

  My friend left the train at a water stop somewhere in cattle country. The Martians, it seems, had figured out where he was. But I soldiered on, altering my color scheme dramatically as I went. Thanks to the fine spray of high-speed coal dust bulleting above the front bulwark, my face took on a solid ebony hue. A color driven an inch deep into every p
ore. This Nubian darkness was colorfully highlighted by a decorative red strip across each eye where the coal dust had crashed at the pace of a speeding auto into the white sclera around each iris.

  Just to soothe any distress I may have felt over my dramatic change of skin color and the requirement that I remain upright for eleven hours straight, the car was designed to provide additional entertainment. As you recall, a coal-carrier’s floor consists of six large, hinged panels, made to drop down and let several tons of black nuggets slide out. About 300 miles into my ride I got unexplainably restless and moved my sleeping bag, my Clorox jug, and myself from the front left panel to the front right. Ten seconds later, there was an enormous clang. The panel I’d been standing on for six hours slammed open. If I hadn’t moved, I’d have slid out the side of the speeding box of tin and been chopped to Bloom Tartare. Could it be that precognition—the supernatural ability to sense the future—is sometimes for real?

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  When we reached the large switching yard with four buildings on a stretch of two-lane highway nearby called Starkey, Nevada, 124 miles outside of Salt Lake City, the transport company’s police finally noted my presence and threw me off the train. It seems that out in California, railroad folk are friendly. They provide a major form of transportation for the migrant workers who pick the state’s bountiful harvests of fruit. And the lucre from carting this trove of pre-packaged fructose provides the company’s cash flow. But as you head east, the sense of economic symbiosis disappears. And once you cross the Mississippi, something I had yet to do, it turns into a surly sadism.