The Sunset Route
Page 1
Copyright © 2021 by Carrot Quinn
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by The Dial Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
The Dial Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Quinn, Carrot, author.
Title: The sunset route : a memoir / by Carrot Quinn.
Description: New York : The Dial Press, [2021]
Identifiers: LCCN 2020044466 (print) | LCCN 2020044467 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593133286 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593133293 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Quinn, Carrot. | Street children—Alaska—Biography. | Alternative lifestyles—United States.
Classification: LCC HV883.A4 Q56 2021 (print) | LCC HV883.A4 (ebook) | DDC 305.48/442 [B] —dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020044466
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020044467
Ebook ISBN 9780593133293
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Jo Anne Metsch, adapted for ebook
Cover design by Donna Cheng
Cover image by Getty Images
ep_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Author’s Note
2003
1988
1989
2003
1992
1992
2003
1993
2003
1993
2005
1995
2006
1996
2006
1997
2006
1998
2006
2000
2001
2002
2007
2009
2019
Dedication
Acknowledgments
By Carrot Quinn
About the Author
Here is the world.
Beautiful and terrible things will happen.
Don’t be afraid.
—Frederick Buechner, Beyond Words
Author’s Note
The stories in this book are crafted from my journals, from conversations I’ve had with others, and from my own memory. While all of the events in this memoir are real and true and did happen, some dialogue has been reconstructed, some exact dates and timelines have been estimated, and the names and some identifying characteristics of several people mentioned in the book have been changed.
2003
I crouch in the dark railcar, gripping a plastic tarp around me. The cold wind beats at my face. Beyond the metal lip of the car is the black fir forest of Oregon’s Cascade Mountains, the trees silhouettes against the bright, moonlit snow. These trees bear witness to my train rushing past, train cars rocking and groaning as we hurtle along the track at sixty miles an hour. I press my numb fingers into my palm, counting off the hours until dawn. One, two, three, four. I pull the water bottle from my pack and shake it—empty. When did I drink the last of it? I can’t remember. All night I’ve been drifting in and out of a dim, strange place without time, too cold to really sleep. I remember the moment, earlier today, when I lost my sleeping bag to the train. I’d just woken from a nap. The thundering of the train was ceaseless, the slice of sky visible above the lip of our railcar empty of trees. I looked over at my friend Sami, curled in her sleeping bag on the other side of the car, and I figured I’d cross the railcar to talk to her, since there was too much noise for us to shout. For stability, I gripped the underside of the semi-truck trailer that sat in the railcar as I worked my way along the narrow ledge between the two large holes in the floor of the car, over to Sami’s side. I sat next to her on her sleeping pad and we shouted about our wonder and shared a bag of dried mango. The train slowed and then lurched, picking up speed again. This turned the four-foot-wide hole in the floor into a vacuum of strong, sucking wind, and my zero-degree sleeping bag, which I’d just shoplifted the day before for this trip, rose from the foam pad onto which I’d unstuffed it, tumbled a bit, and was slurped into the hole as if into a hell-mouth, gone forever.
I started laughing, dried mango stuck to my teeth, too shocked to do anything else. Sami stared at the hole, horrified. It was February, and the low farmlands of the Willamette Valley were dark with gray clouds that never left, resulting in a persistent cold drizzle that stung your cheeks. I might be okay without a sleeping bag here. But in a matter of hours our train would climb into the Cascades, and we weren’t entirely sure, but we figured it would be colder up there. Maybe there would even be snow.
“Fuck fuck fuck!” I yelled, into the wind.
“I have a tarp you can use,” Sami shouted at me. She pulled a folded blue bundle from the top of her pack. I took it gratefully. It would be dark soon, and there wouldn’t be anything to do but bed down in the rumble and the wind and wait for dawn. I crossed back to my side of the car and sat on my foam pad, taking stock of my things. I had a wool sweater, a flannel shirt, a hat, a pair of gloves, a rain jacket. I was wearing heavy, double-knee Carhartts and leather hiking boots, both of which I’d shoplifted. I’d be warm enough tonight with these things, wouldn’t I? How cold did it get in the Cascade Mountains in February, anyway? I had a few days’ worth of nuts, dried fruit, and canned beans, and one liter of water. We’d arrived at the trainyard with two liters each, and I’d drunk one of mine while waiting for our train. I was pretty sure my remaining liter wasn’t enough to get me the rest of the way to Los Angeles—why hadn’t I brought more? Well, there was nothing to be done now.
* * *
—
Now, in this late hour, I know the answer to my earlier question: it is very cold in the Cascade Mountains in February, especially when you are hurtling along at breakneck speed and you have no real protection from the wind. I pull the blue tarp tighter around me, strain to see shapes in the glittering dark. How long until we cross from Oregon into California, and then drop down into the warm desert? And how long until we reach L.A., our destination? One more day? Three? The fir forest blurs past, its hollows piled with snow. The trees observe without judgment, as they have for my entire life.
I think back to two days ago when Sami and I were sitting on the lip of this railcar, having just climbed onto the train.
* * *
—
“It’s okay,” she said. “This car is safe.”
The railcar was shaped like a shoebox with no top, and we were looking down inside it. The car didn’t look rideable. It looked dangerous. Instead of a solid metal floor, there were two large holes, each four feet across, through which we could see the train tracks. On either side of each of these holes was just a scrap of floor, about twelve inches wide. This ledge was where we would sleep, eat, and hang out until our train reached L.A. To complicate things further, the back half of a semi-truck was sitting in this railcar. We would have to crawl between the huge truck tires to get to the little ledges where we could rest, each of us on one side of one of the large holes. Our view would be the hoses and grimy pipes of the underside of the truck. The truck’s mud flaps would be our only protection from the wind.
“See,” said Sami as she jumped down into the car. “Perfectly safe.” She pulled o
ff her large canvas military backpack and pushed it in front of her, under the axle of the truck. She reached a ledge and clipped the straps of her pack around a metal pipe that ran the length of the railcar. “You attach your pack to the car so it doesn’t fall in the hole when the train is moving. Then you just make sure that you don’t fall in the hole.”
I followed on my hands and knees, gripping the edge of the railcar. A hiss, like a bike tire deflating, ran the length of the train, from one car to the next—the brakes releasing. I had been told to listen for this sound. The train lurched, there was a scream of twisting metal, and the tracks below us began to move. The train was moving. I had climbed onto a freight train and now it was moving!
“Shit!” said Sami. “Get under here, quick! We don’t want the bull to see us!”
“Bull,” I had recently learned, was what the rail cop was called. We were in Portland, Oregon, on the southern edge of the city, where the tidy grid of houses turned to suburbs and sprawl. We’d caught the train where our friend Andrew, who had ridden so many trains his Carhartt pants shone like waxed canvas on account of all the diesel grease, had told us to catch it—he’d told us which city bus to take south, which stop to get off at, to look for the Burger King and the underpass and the blackberry brambles, to arrive in the morning and wait under a tree out of the rain, that eventually our train would come. He told us what to look for—not grainers with no place to ride, not boxcars like in the movies, not oil tankers. Intermodal trains, that’s what you wanted. Double stacks. Two colorful freight containers in a car like an open shoebox. He’d said that most of the double stacks on the train, which might be up to two miles long, would not be rideable. But one or two of them would be. We’d know by the numbers on the side of the car, and whether or not they were ridged or smooth. The train to L.A., when it arrived (it came every day but Sunday, Andrew had said), would stop for fifteen minutes, max. That’s all the time that we would have.
Our train had come, it had slowed, it had stilled. We’d run along it on the slanted ballast, lungs burning, tripping over the railroad ties. Our packs jostled against our backs and the resting cars ticked, ticked, as though alive. The units—that’s what the engines are called and there were four of them on this train, enough to pull it up and over the Cascades—were far ahead, so far we couldn’t see them, nor could we be seen by the engineers that manned them. We’d found this car that was, according to Sami, perfectly safe, we’d climbed inside it, and now the train had begun to move again, toward a road crossing where the bull, Andrew had said, would be parked in an unmarked white SUV. The bull would watch the train go by and look for signs that there were riders. If he saw us, he would stop the train, pull us off, and we’d get a ticket for criminal trespassing. It would be a fine, maybe some community service. Our trip would be over. If we could just make it past that road crossing, though, we’d be safe, free.
As I scrambled into the car, I could already hear the dinging of the metal arms that blocked traffic at the crossing—the sound was growing louder, closer. Blood rushed to my face. If I could just get to the small metal ledge, I could lie down, and the lip of the railcar would hide me. But as I wiggled under the axle of the semi-truck, I was exposed, alarmingly so. What if I was caught by the bull, and arrested? What if he’d already seen us?
I got myself under the truck and turned around, yanking my pack after me. It wouldn’t budge. Oh shit! Oh shit, oh shit! A stronger pull and the fabric made an awful tearing sound as, at last, I freed it. I scurried onto the ledge, unrolled my foam sleeping pad, and flattened myself onto it, barely breathing, just as we pulled slowly through the road crossing. I clenched my eyes shut, wishing for invisibility. The dinging of the metal arms was all around me now—the sound felt as though it was coming from inside my skull. Why were we moving so slowly through this crossing? Was the train stopping? Were we about to get busted? Finally, the clanging receded and then, after a time, it was gone. I lifted my face and looked at Sami, whose mouth was slack with relief.
“Holy shit,” she said. The sound of her words was lost to the rumble of the train, which had picked up speed, but I could see her lips move. I laughed, and my laughter was carried away on the wind.
We were safe. I lay back on my foam sleeping pad on my small metal ledge and watched in wonder as trees and telephone poles passed through the slice of sky between the lip of the car and the underside of the tractor trailer. Rooflines, brick chimneys, traffic lights. Conifers and the bare winter limbs of deciduous trees. The southern outskirts of the city, in cross section. My heart was still racing from our sprint down the stopped train, our narrow miss with the bull, the fact that I was on a freight train at all. I couldn’t believe it. I was stowed away on a railcar a mile from the front of the train. I was hidden. I had food and water. I could feel the damp winter air on my face, smell wet forests and woodfires and bakeries. Our train was rocking through traffic crossings, heading toward the open land of rural Oregon. The train would soar over the Cascade Mountains! I’d be carried away into the warm, gentle land of California!
Although I had been told that the train would be loud, it was so much louder than I expected. The sound was like plates of steel being wrenched in half—a sort of screaming that lasted for minutes, tapered away, then began again. And underneath this metallic screaming was the rhythmic rocking of our heavy car on the tracks. And the vibration—every part of the car vibrated, including, and especially, the floor. It was a vibration I could feel in my entire body, even in my teeth. It felt as though I was in the throat of a great, ponderous beast, and I suppose, in a way, I was. How fast were we going? We’d trundled slowly through the intersections in Portland, but now we were positively thundering along. Sixty miles per hour? I closed my eyes, letting the sounds and vibrations of the train hypnotize me.
Once in L.A., the plan was to catch another train to Texas. Instructions from Andrew on where and how to catch this train were written in pencil on a piece of scrap paper that was folded carefully into my journal. Sami had ridden a freight train twice before, and I, before this trip, had never ridden one at all; between her limited knowledge and Andrew’s mostly legible instructions, we were hoping that it would all, in the end, work out.
* * *
—
This cold. I don’t know what to do about this cold. I lie down on my sleeping pad and wrap myself in the tarp, but I cannot rest. If only I hadn’t lost my sleeping bag! Each time I succeed in gathering the tarp around me, the wind tears it away again, pulling it open with a thousand icy fingers and beating it against the frozen steel of the car. The gaping hole taunts me from beyond my ledge, sucking at the corners of my sleeping pad. I start to panic but remind myself that this sort of thing must happen to my friends who ride trains all the time. And they’re okay, aren’t they? I want to be tough like them, don’t I? If Andrew were here, I think—remembering the way he nonchalantly described this route to us, as though riding the train from Portland to L.A. in February was the easiest thing in the world—he’d squat over the hole in the floor and sharpen his knife on the tracks.
When I open my eyes again, it’s still nighttime. The trees beyond the train have begun to slow—I can see them more distinctly now. Their boughs, tufted in white, sparkle in the cold, clear air. Is the train stopping? Somewhere up ahead are the units, although I cannot see or hear them—ticking, rumbling engines, four of them, yellow light spilling from their windows. There are engineers in the first unit, but the three rear units will be unmanned. Each unit, I have been told, has a small, heated cockpit, with captain’s chairs, a cramped bathroom, and, incredibly, a mini fridge full of bottled water. If the train stops, I can climb out of this car, run down the tracks in the dark, and try to reach those units. Maybe I can ride in one through the night, and be warm. At the very least, I could get some water. How far from my car are the units, though? A mile? More? I feel mumbly with cold, and my thoughts are tangled. Across the car from me,
Sami is burrowed in her sleeping bag, the hood cinched around her face so only her nose is visible. As the train pulls to a stop, she does not stir. Now’s my chance! I wriggle out from under the truck, lower myself down the three-rung ladder on the outside of the car, and land, with a crunch, in the snow.
When, where, and for how long a train will stop is a riddle that each aspiring train rider must learn to solve, and on which the success of their trip depends. This is what I have learned so far, from my friends: A freight train stops at least every eight hours, to change crews. These crew-change stops are made at specific railyards around the country. Since the train always stops for at least fifteen minutes when it changes crews, this makes a convenient window in which to get on or off a train. We got on in Portland at the specific yard where our train was changing crews, and as our train rumbles south it will stop in a handful of towns, every eight hours or so. Aside from crew-change points, a train might stop on a length of double track to “side” while it allows another train to pass—a train carrying higher-priority freight, maybe, like mail or automobiles—or it might stop in a railyard to refuel or “work,” a mysterious affair during which beeping trucks drive up and down the train as it sits motionless under massive floodlights. Or sometimes, like now, on this dark, snowy mountain, the train might stop for no discernible reason at all.
I stumble forward in the snow, willing my numb legs to waken. The train, so full of shrieks and groans just a moment before, is now so silent it’s as if it never moved at all, as if it will never move again. The moon casts everything in silver, and the air is fresh and sharp. This is a quiet, wintry land, dazzling and enchanted. I pause for a moment, full of wonder, and then I run, the sound of my boots cracking the stillness like glass shattering on cement. I’ve gone ten cars toward the front of the train when there’s the telltale hissss of the brakes releasing. Fuck! Fuck fuck! I spin around and jog as fast as I can back toward my car, slipping a bit on the steep embankment next to the tracks. The train begins to creep forward, so slow at first, not making any noise at all. Then a shudder moves down the string as the slack is pulled out of the couplers between each set of cars. I have to make it back to the car we were riding in—it was yellow, wasn’t it? Or was it red?—before the train picks up speed, or I’m fucked. If the train leaves me behind, I’ll be stranded here, in the cold forest, in the middle of the mountains. How far to a road? A town? I have no idea.