by Carrot Quinn
When I wake, the train has stopped. I jump up, stuff my things away, and cram myself into the tiny engine bathroom. My worn photocopied rail maps and the fact that it’s morning tells me that we’re most likely in Hauser, Idaho, so that the train can change crews. Will they check the slave unit now? Is it still safe to be in here? Can I ride this unit all the way to Chicago? What will happen if they find me? After a few minutes the train begins to creep forward and I open the door to the bathroom and peer out.
Through the windows of the unit, I can see that we’re in a huge metal building, probably for refueling. Shit. I shut the bathroom door. Feet thud on the catwalk outside, the door on the nose of the engine swings open. Then the door to my bathroom pops out and I glimpse a white hard hat before it bangs shut again. Shit. A moment later the door opens again, daylight spills into the small, cramped space, and again the door is closed. A third time it opens.
“You have to leave,” says a man in a hard hat. Two other workers stand behind him, looking down at the floor. I mumble something about wanting to stay out of the rain, and they mumble something about how they’re sorry that I can’t.
“How do I get out of this place?” I ask.
“I’ll show you,” says the first worker. I follow him off the train, out of the metal building, and he points me in the direction of the road. “Highway 53. Right over there.” I set out across the yard, lifting myself over strings of cars, feeling disoriented in the bright daylight. When I get to the road, I turn and wave goodbye.
A ways up the road there are enough strings of cars between me and the workers that they can’t see me anymore. There is no traffic. I turn back toward the yard and climb back over the cars; I’m south of the metal building now, abreast of a sandstone bluff that overlooks the main line, the track where the important trains, the trains more likely to go places, will be. The land shines in the sunlight; handsome pine trees move in the breeze. On top of the bluff I find a small spot of shade on its edge. My pack drops onto the soft pine needles. Breakfast is a can of beans and then I lie on my stomach, watching the yard below.
Finally, an eastbound intermodal pulls up and stops. This train, I imagine, is headed all the way to Chicago. I gather my things and sprint down the bluff. There are no rideable cars and the train hisses, releasing its brakes in preparation for departure. Dangit! And then, an unfamiliar car—it has a yellow painted platform, about four feet wide, on the rear, up against the freight containers. This platform seems like it could be rideable.
I climb the metal ladder onto the car and poke around. There is just enough space for my foam sleeping pad, and for me. There is a mess of machinery that I do not understand, but it partially hides me from view. The train begins to move and I lie back on the platform and look at the sky, willing myself to breathe. I am free again. Headed east. I will get someplace. I only wish I had a friend here, with me. Another human soul. These lands are too empty. I feel like I don’t exist. I wish there was someone I could turn to and say, “How cool is it that we got kicked off the train but managed to catch another one?” I miss Finch. I imagine two people trying to hide in the tiny bathroom in that engine and laugh to myself.
Montana. I sleep through Glacier National Park. North Dakota, and the sky is a highway of wind. Clouds race over. The single track cuts through empty, rippling grasslands; shapes on the prairie move like shadow puppets on a wall. Old wooden houses stand empty next to the tracks. I’ll move here, I think. I’ll find a broth-colored creek; pull the stones from the ground and use them to build a hut. I’ll watch the train blow through without stopping, no highways anywhere. It will be beautiful. How long, though, until I am crushed by my solitude? What would it feel like, to die from loneliness? Likely, I wouldn’t die but live forever, haunted by my own demons. Below the known world is a world of loneliness so all-encompassing that not even the escape of death is allowed.
The train sides on the outskirts of Fargo. Only a few swallows of water remain in my jug. I try to read the train’s stillness. There’s a fast-food restaurant in the distance, baking in the hot sun. I hop off the train and jog to the restaurant, fill my water gallon, and run back to the train. It begins to move again, rolls a bit through town, and pulls into the Fargo yard, where it halts.
It seems as though we’re just stopped for a crew change, which usually takes a few minutes, but after two hours we still have not moved. Night comes, and suddenly there are workers in little buggies, speeding to and fro along the train, and bright spotlights shine down into each car. Shit. I lie, frozen, hidden just so, behind the machinery on my grimy metal ledge. My legs are pressed along a metal pipe and my head is hidden behind a steel cylinder. My feet point skyward, against a square shelf. I am invisible. The spotlights sweep into my car and away, into my car and away. The little buggies pause and move on.
As I lie there, stiff, aching, invisible, the dark sky opens up, and rain begins to fall. I know what I need to do. I need to pull out the crackling, shiny blue tarp and spread it over me and my pack. I need to protect us both from the rain. But the buggies are still crunching up and down on the gravel and so I am frozen—if I move even an inch I’ll become visible. So I lie, shivering, as the rain soaks my pants, dampens my flannel, and gathers on my eyelashes. The sound of the buggies recedes in the distance, and the trainyard settles again into its essential stillness. The rain stops; the sky becomes visible, the wind-battered stars. I pull off my stiff, wet jeans and crawl into my sleeping bag in just my long underwear. The hood of my bag, when cinched around my face, leaves just a small circle of stars in my vision. Sleep comes as dawn weakens the sky and my train pulls out of the yard, headed east.
Trainyards in big cities are complex, impenetrable labyrinths of steel, concrete, and concertina wire; their dirt roads lead into each other or dead-end in tangles of blackberry brambles; their bangings and screechings and stadium spotlights will drive you mad; they stretch for miles.
Trainyards in small towns are simpler; they have just a few tracks, no workers, and often a small copse of trees in which to hide. On occasion, you can find interesting things as you walk along the tracks there: Sodden paperbacks, bottles of water, flattened bits of metal. Handfuls of wheat, spilled from grainers, that have sprouted into green grass between the railroad ties.
It is better to get on and off a train in a small-town yard, or, if you are going into a big city, at a random siding at its outskirts—a darkened field somewhere, or an industrial neighborhood. Sometimes, though, you have no choice where you end up—which is what happens to me when I wake in the incomprehensible hours of the night and find myself deep in the heart of the Minneapolis trainyard.
The trees are gone, the rolling pastures are gone, the moon is gone, the night is gone, even the wind is gone—instead, there is the screaming of steel on steel and the ticking of units as strings rumble past, the crunch of gravel beneath the tires of worker trucks, the hiss of CB radios, and the stadium lights, banishing all shadow. And in the distance, the beeping of cranes.
Also, it smells like oatmeal. For reasons I can’t discern, the Minneapolis trainyard smells like oatmeal.
Eastbound intermodals sometimes go to Chicago, but sometimes they mysteriously terminate in Minneapolis. I figure that I’ve ended up on one of these trains, and so I pull myself stiffly from my sleeping bag, take a long drink of water, and pack my things away. I then poke my head around the side of the train—there’s a white pickup driving toward me, the yellow lights on top of the cab flashing. A worker. Shit! I drop back onto the ledge and flatten myself. The pickup pulls up flush with my car, pauses, and then crunches away. The yellow lights wash over the wall of my car and then disappear. On the other side of the car is darkness. And then a bright white spotlight, making its way along the train. Shit! I lie down again and close my eyes. Gravel crunches as this vehicle approaches; I open my eyes into a squint and see that the shadows in my hiding place are gone; the grimy yel
low steel, the twisted machinery, the lower half of my body—all of this is awash in blinding light. And then the light runs from the car like water, climbs the back end of the car behind mine, and is gone.
Out comes the breath I’ve been holding. I heave up my pack and, without looking, hop down onto the ballast. The narrow dirt road is cloaked once again in merciful shadow, and I run along this road, watching for a hole in the high fence that borders the yard. Up ahead I notice a gate, and I sprint for it; the gate is open and I see the truck with the spotlight beyond it, driving around huge puddles of water and mounds of gravel. There is a tower of concrete blocks and I duck behind these, where the trapezoid of dark shadow will protect me from the spotlights. A moment later a pair of headlights cuts across the puddle to my right, makes an arc over the piles of gravel, and disappears.
I sit on the muddy ground with my back against the concrete blocks. My rail maps provide no new information, nor do the handwritten notes I took while questioning train-riding friends about this route. There is some conflicting information, but as far as I can gather, my train is either terminating here or it’s “working,” and if it’s just working then it should, at some point, continue on to Chicago.
The humid, oatmeal smell of the air pulls at my empty stomach. There’s no way to know for sure what’s going to happen with this train; there is only my best guess with the sprinkling of information that I have—like someone took a sheet of text and blacked out all but a handful of words. I can string them together, but they don’t really make sense. Train riding is a thrift store puzzle that’s missing half the pieces. You don’t always know where you’re going or how you’re going to end up there, but you don’t really care, either.
I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to get back on that train. I have a feeling that this train is only working, that it’s continuing on to Chicago. I just have to find my car again, hide myself as best I can, and wait.
Somehow I make it down the shadowy dirt track back to my car without being seen; somehow I fling myself up onto my narrow metal shelf and down behind the twisted machinery before the next beeping worker truck passes by. Train riding is a video game, and I’ve dodged this round of zombies. Stretching out, I will myself deeper into the shadows. Then, carefully, I unroll my pad, scooch into my sleeping bag, and go to sleep.
Two hours later I am startled awake when the train begins to move. It’s heading west. Backward. I don’t know what this means, exactly, but I know that it’s not good. I lie in my sleeping bag, wondering what to do, as my car is pulled beneath the rows of stadium lights. All around me are the beepings and clangings of industry, and it is difficult to ascertain, from my position, just what exactly is happening to my train. I should sit up, I think, but then my car comes to a stop directly beneath one of the giant stadium lights, and all the shadows in my hiding place are gone. There is the crunch of tires, the hiss of CB radios, and I know that I cannot move. It’s not so much that I fear a trespassing ticket, at this point, as that I fear the humiliation of climbing down off my car into the very heart of the yard. I fear appearing, suddenly, before a whole audience of unsuspecting yard workers, who will turn away, who won’t be able to look. Because I am an idiot. Because I am breaking the golden rule of train riding that binds worker to rider in a mutual pact of understanding—be invisible. Because if I am invisible, then the workers don’t have to bust me. They don’t have to turn me in. But if I show myself to a whole group of them at once, they do. And nobody wants that.
So I stay in my sleeping bag, peering at the washed-out night sky, and then, silhouetted against the stadium light above me, there appears the wide, rectangular arm of a crane, and this arm descends onto the next car down from mine and lifts that car’s massive freight container, effortlessly, into the air above my face.
Oh. Fuck.
Moments later I am on the ground. I have never moved so fast, I think, in my entire life. One second I was on the train, in my sleeping bag, staring up at the red-lit fingers of the crane as they swung above my car after dropping the freight container from the one behind it, and the next my shoes were on, my sleeping bag was stuffed away, my foam pad was strapped to my pack, and now I’m here, on the ground, pinned beneath the blinding lights, surrounded by workers.
The spell of invisibility has been broken. The spell that was so strong I slept for hours, unnoticed, in a busy yard. A spell so strong I had almost been crushed, when the freight container I was sleeping against was lifted into the air.
A little white cart is idling next to me. The window comes down.
“Just where do you think you’re headed?” asks the man inside.
“I’m trying to find my way out of here,” I say.
“How’d you get in here in the first place?” asks the worker.
“I came in on the train.”
“You were trespassing on the train?” he says, incredulous. “Where did you get on?”
I lie and name a crew change in Montana.
“You’ve been trespassing since Montana?”
Oh come on, I think. Of course I was trespassing.
“Look, are you going to give me a ticket?” I say. “You don’t have to lecture me. It’s late.” A little rain is falling. I don’t care, though. I’ve just cheated death.
“Wait here,” says the worker. “I’ve got to call the rail cop. He can decide what he wants to do with you.”
It takes a while for the rail cop to arrive, and meanwhile I stand, waiting, in the busy lot with my hands in my pockets, feeling like a fool. At last an unmarked SUV crunches over to me, and the rail cop steps out into the bright light, and I notice that he looks just like the man on the Pringles can.
I give him my ID and he turns it over in his hands thoughtfully. I study his tufts of silver hair and his carefully combed mustache, his tidy wool sweater. He looks up and meets my eyes.
“I’ll take your information,” he says, “and then you can go. This time. Next time I’ll give you a citation. For theft of services.”
“Theft of services? Really?”
He nods.
“Just like if you stole a ride on Amtrak.” As if I have shipped myself across the country in a freight container without paying the postage. Which, well, I guess I pretty much have.
“And one more thing,” he adds, peering down at me with his bleary, grandfatherly eyes. “Did you know that people have been riding freight trains since before you and I were born?” He nods again, looks out across the shadowed strings of trains, and rocks on his heels. “And they’ll still be riding trains long after you and I are gone.”
This is not the sort of rail cop with paramilitary aspirations, the kind who cuts his hair close to the scalp and treats you like a terrorist. This is the kind of rail cop who has a wood-paneled office in a trailer somewhere, where he sits drinking tumblers of whiskey and reading railfan magazines and out-of-print books on the history of freight trains, in between rounds of half-heartedly combing the yard with his spotlight.
He hands me back my ID and points me toward the dirt road out of the lot. “Thank you,” I say. Workers turn the other way as I pass. I am a hobo, disgraced. Be invisible. Beyond the gates of the yard are gray, sleeping industrial buildings and a narrow bit of forest. I make my way into these woods, pushing aside the tangled branches, until I find a clearing, padded in fallen leaves. I spread out my bedroll, prop my pack beside it, and pull my tarp over everything. And then for a while I lie still, heart racing, listening to the gentle tap of rain on tarpaulin, and when I close my eyes I see the crane again, swinging over me with its red-lit fingers. Except this time I’m not fast enough: the crane grips my freight container and the freight container shifts, crushing me. I’ll never sleep again, I think, and then, of course, I do.
In Minneapolis the next day, it mists, rains in fits, and then rains solidly, a heavy sheet that darkens the sky and sends torre
nts of water down the streets. The sky is no longer a warm roof but a crashing wave that sweeps over the city, into every small place that has once been bright and dry.
I may as well have jumped in the river with my pack on my back.
I trudge, senselessly, water dripping from my eyelashes, looking for a laundromat, some dignity, a meaningful life. But the outskirts of Minneapolis will not give me what I need. In the evening the rain stops, and a long bus ride delivers me, at last, to a laundromat, where I watch cable television and dry everything that I own. Then I walk back through the night to the trainyard, under a sky that has turned to clear stars. On a bluff above the yard there is a trampled-down place among the thistles, and I spread out my bedroll here, on a bed of flattened beer cartons, and lie on my stomach to watch the tracks. There is a train sitting there, but it’s sitting where my train sat, the train that was unloaded of its freight containers, and I know that this string, too, is destined for the hungry maw of the great train-eating crane. Other trains come and go, and I consider them, but my Minneapolis trainyard spirit has been broken. Loneliness has crumpled me, my morale has bottomed out. I want to gaze upon a kindly face. I want to share this night, this bed of flattened cardboard, with someone. I can’t muster the energy to try to catch another train. Not all alone like this. I’ll just sleep here, I think, looking up at the glittering stars. And in the morning I will hitchhike.
On my second day in Minneapolis, it doesn’t rain. I find a food co-op and eat dolmas and then spend the day on the bus, going this way and that, in the direction of what may or may not be the highway. The bus fills with people and then empties, fills and then empties. Nothing is where the map at the gas station said that it would be. The day begins to wane and I know that I have missed my opportunity, because no one picks up hitchhikers after sunset.