by Carrot Quinn
Our train is slower than cold peanut butter, and in the desert, every day, it rains. In El Paso, the highest-security trainyard in the country, we hide beneath our bright blue tarp, and that, along with the spell of our white privilege—we are not the ones the rail cops are looking for here, so close to the Mexican border, so when they do get a good look at us we are presumed innocent, even though we are far from it—keeps us from being pulled off the train. We bail before it pulls into the yard in Yuma, Arizona, and put out our thumbs to hitchhike, but no one will stop but the police. The cops run our IDs while we stand squinting on the pavement in the sun.
“You have a warrant,” says one of the cops, to me.
“What?” I say. I close my eyes and think back, finally remembering being pulled off the train here with Sami, when we were headed from Portland to Texas. The kindly rail cop who gave us citations and then told us his shift was almost over, so that we knew what time we could go back to the yard and catch another train. Did I ever pay that ticket?
Oh, fuck.
The back of the cop car is airless and warm. It reminds me of every other time I’ve been in the back of a cop car. The time I got caught shoplifting in Omaha, Nebraska, when I got off the train to get more water and then decided to hide my pack in the bushes and walk into town and steal a new book to read, because I’d finished East of Eden the night before. I smelled bad and I hadn’t quite managed to clean all the diesel grime from my hands and face, even though I’d used all the wet wipes I’d had left. The loss prevention agent held me in the back room of the store for hours. He grilled me: How much meth was I on? Where did I get my meth? Was there any meth in my pockets? He rifled through the fanny pack I was carrying and instead of drugs he found my small journal, homemade from scrap paper and fabric-covered cardboard and bound with dental floss. I’d had a hard few months, and I’d been writing the most personal things in there—about how much I hated my body. How bad my anxiety and insomnia were. How I cried every day. The pages were literally stained with my tears. The loss prevention agent opened that little book and my stoic, interacting-with-the-cops façade crumbled. I started crying and begged him not to read it. He was angry that I was not, in fact, on meth, and he needed to cover his embarrassment, so he curled his lip and began to read aloud. After a few pages he snorted in disgust, closed the journal, and dropped it onto my lap. The cops came and drove me away and booked me into a holding cell in the Omaha courthouse, a small steel room where I waited twelve hours to see a judge. I curled up on the cold metal bench and closed my eyes, listening to the other minor offenders come and go, the booming of the heavy, solid door. The judge gave me time served, and I was released. It took a long time to figure out what public transportation would take me from downtown Omaha back to that industrial neighborhood on the outskirts of everything, next to the tracks. My pack, miraculously, was still in the weeds where I’d left it.
There was the time I was arrested in Portland during Critical Mass, the monthly event where thousands of people ride their bikes together through the streets, blocking traffic. That month the ride had been to protest the start of the Iraq War. The Portland Police Bureau had announced on the nightly news that they’d be arresting people indiscriminately. There were more beds available in the women’s jail, and so they’d mostly arrested women. I was one of them. The cops pulled me off my bike and dragged me across the concrete, zip-tied my wrists, and shoved me into the back of the police cruiser.
I wasn’t carrying ID, and I refused to give them my name while I was being booked. I knew I could do this, since my fingerprints weren’t yet in the system. It was a way to fuck with them—I wasn’t committing a crime and you arrested me anyway, which is an abuse of power, so I’m going to make things harder for you. It slowed the machinations of the criminal justice system. Caused problems. Pissed them off. The hope was that it would make the city think twice in the future about arresting people arbitrarily, purely as an intimidation tactic. Legally, I knew, they were allowed to hold me until they found out who I was, but I knew that they wouldn’t, because I hadn’t actually committed a crime. I was calling their bluff.
My paper bracelet said “Jane Doe” and they held me for four days in the downtown jail. Each cell had two bunks, and each bunk had a window that ran the length of the wall, from which you could look down on the fountains on Third Avenue. The women in the jail were kind to me. They were thrilled by the fact that my bracelet said “Jane Doe” and that I had refused to give my name. My cellmate was in for identity theft. The food was inedible—cold, congealed oatmeal, stale bread. While I was in there, I read A Separate Peace and Slaughterhouse-Five.
At the police station in Yuma, Arizona, I am given a court date three days from today for the “Failure to Appear” I accrued after neglecting to pay my train ticket. Florence pays my bail—two thousand dollars—with the money she made doing medical studies in North Carolina. It’s all the money she has. When the cop picked me up, Florence was left with both our packs, and she had to push them in a shopping cart for four miles in the hot sun to reach the courthouse. She is dehydrated and exhausted, and I am so grateful to her it’s physically painful. We fill up our water gallons and stumble through the afternoon to a deep blue canal on the edge of town where we swim until our worries rinse away, then we wash the filth from our clothes and lie down to sleep in the dirt. We’re head to head on our blue tarp with the sky turning magenta, then turquoise, then black, and then we’re asleep before all the stars are even out.
I make it to my court date this time. The judge serves me with a modest fine. Florence is refunded her bail money and we set out for the more challenging leg of our journey—hitchhiking the length of California, which will bring us the rest of the way to Oregon. We eat and fight and then laugh, we dislike every person who picks us up, the cops are terrible, and we’ve never felt freer, even though we’re trapped in L.A. in the middle of the night with no energy left in our bodies. Florence sits on her pack to roll a cigarette and I say:
“What are we doing now? What are we going to do now?”
We try to take buses out of L.A. but the buses go nowhere. Each neighborhood seems to lead only into itself, and the highway is nowhere to be found. On the northern outskirts of the city, the sun is so hot it burns our faces, our forearms, and the backs of our necks. We walk through labyrinths of concrete courtyards to a rolling, scorched-brown field surrounded by a high chain-link fence. We climb the fence, Florence catching her skirt on the top, and tumble down into the grass on the other side. There’s a great oak tree in the center of this field and we run to this tree and allow its shade to swallow us. Florence pulls out her sleeping pad and loses herself in a fitful sleep. We didn’t sleep last night, we passed the night wakeful in Union Station after a young man who picked us up at a rest area dropped us in L.A. after all the buses stopped running. Now, in this dry field, Florence is twitching in the dappled light but I’ve had too much coffee to sleep, so I read a National Geographic we got from the free box at the Yuma Public Library, fighting with the wind for control of its pages. I read about Dubai and palm fruit, about orangutans being burned alive in Indonesia.
“Don’t you think we should go?” I ask Florence.
“Another hour,” she says, red-faced from her bedroll.
I knife open a can of tuna and produce several mayo packets. I dig the corn tortillas from my pack and we laugh at our disgusting lunch and then eat it, wearily lash all our things back together so that we can hoist them into the air, and head toward the freeway, the wall of sound on the other side of all this grass.
It takes about thirty seconds for a cop to kick us off of I-5.
“Fuck,” says Florence. We stumble back through a different part of the field and find ourselves cut off from the neighborhood by another tall fence, this one with barbed wire. Using our hitchhiking sign to cover the wire, we struggle over it, much to the amusement of some guys working on a ho
use across the street. Once we’re on the ground, we see a straight, person-sized hole neatly snipped in the fence at ground level. “Fuck,” says Florence, again.
Finally, the sunny part of the country is behind us. A snowboarder is taking us all the way up to Portland.
Florence asks him to drop her off in Salem.
“I’m going there for a few days,” she says to me, holding my hand between hers. “I’m visiting friends there. You knew that was my plan. I’ll meet you in a few days.”
I feel a flutter in my chest. The planet we’d created spins wildly out of orbit. The stars fall from the sky.
We leave Florence leaning against the cinderblock wall of a gas station, surrounded by her dirty things. Back in the car, the conversation shrivels up and dies. Buckets of rain pelt the windshield as we near Portland.
That night, safe and sound in the basement guest room at my friend’s house, I can almost feel the indentation in the bed next to me where Florence would be. It’s an ache so deep that I cry and think, I didn’t know it would be this bad. I wake at dawn like we had when we were sleeping in the weeds and pull all the things from my pack. Everything smells like corn tortillas and the insides of empty bean cans. I think of walking behind Florence and watching the way her legs bow out as she walks, three pairs of long underwear under a maroon skirt with a crooked hem that swings across her ass with the rhythm of her steps. She’d pull a stick of gum from her pocket for me and tell me not to spit it onto the ground, because a bird will eat it and die. I’d spit out the gum anyway when she wasn’t looking and then put my nose against her neck, wrap my arms around her, and inhale the scent of her filthy cashmere sweater, one hundred twenty dollars stolen from the mall and good thing I got her the gray one, because you couldn’t even see the dirt.
I fish around for my last clean T-shirt and then put everything back in my pack, pick up the landline, and call her.
“I miss you so bad,” says Florence. “I almost cried last night.”
But you’re still not here, I think. What I don’t say is that maybe I am the reason she is not here. That aloneness is the final chapter of every story line of my life. That I’m closed up inside myself like a Russian nesting doll. That she can feel it. I put my heart away for safekeeping so long ago that I don’t even remember where it is. Either she’ll leave or I’ll leave her, there’s no other way for this to end.
Florence shows up in Portland the next day, freshly laundered and covered in raindrops. She’s brought me dumpstered mango juice and a loaf of olive bread.
“I can’t stay for long,” she says.
We fall into bed that night and bury ourselves under pounds of blankets in the cold basement room. I wrap my arms around Florence’s waist and we both sigh, fitting together like tarnished silver spoons, and I feel the tension drain out of me as I squeeze my eyes shut to keep from crying, to keep from telling her everything I’m thinking, that I want to alter the present and the future and place us side by side in this dark galaxy like twin planets instead of appearing together by chance, each on our way to somewhere else.
Life, I think, is more precious than I can ever remember it being.
And then I am asleep.
2009
The telephone poles are giant candy canes. The streetlights are candy canes. The McDonald’s is red and white striped, like a candy cane. I’m in North Pole, Alaska, in the passenger seat of a semi-truck, bouncing as the vehicle jostles along the icy road, my face pressed to the cold window. March, and there’s still several feet of snow on the ground. Smoke curls from the stovepipes of the small houses. I’m here to meet Tara, a woman I’ve only ever talked to on the internet. She lives in a cabin in the snow in the Alaskan interior, without electricity or running water.
A few weeks ago I was in Portland, staying in a small carpeted room in a friend’s house. I had a mattress on the floor and my things were in boxes stacked in the corner. The room was lit by a single bare bulb and I hadn’t put up any decorations. There was one narrow window that rattled in the constant rain.
I’d just quit my job as a pedicab driver, which I’d only had for two weeks. My shifts started at nine p.m. in downtown Portland, and lasted until four a.m., when the last of the drunks trickled from the bars and found their way home. I paid twenty dollars rent, each night, for my pedicab, which was a bicycle with a narrow bench on the back where two passengers could sit. I parked outside the bars in the cold drizzle, offering people rides. The rides were free—that was the hustle. I pedaled drunks across town, laboriously up hills, at about the same speed they could walk. The people took pity on me, they stared at my ass, and then they tipped.
When the streets were silent and empty, I passed the hours with the other pedicab drivers outside the twenty-four-hour donut shop, spooning cold quinoa from a mason jar, wishing I was at home in bed.
And then I had quit. So then I had no job, and I wasn’t sure how I would pay rent the next month. Or how I would buy cabbage and peanut butter and brown rice. On my mattress the night I quit, I was exhausted, but I couldn’t sleep. My brain kept going going going, trying to solve this basic puzzle of survival. I need money to live. The bare bulb buzzed softly in its fixture. I looked at the stack of cardboard boxes, some of them collapsing, that held everything I owned. How depressing. Running my hands over the bed, I thought, At least I have nice sheets.
I opened Craigslist and started scrolling. A listing caught my eye.
Driving to Alaska. Looking for riders.
Now, that’s something, I thought. For the past couple of years, I’d gone to Alaska in the summers to work. I’d hitchhiked around the state, brought a tent with me so I could sleep in the trees on the edge of town. Dumpstered corn tortillas and bruised apples. But I’d never thought to go in the winter—I hadn’t been in Alaska in the winter since I’d left when I was fourteen years old. How would I get around? Where would I sleep? In the summer there were boatloads of seasonal jobs. What could I do in the winter? I needed money. And I needed to get out of Portland. Out of this sad room where I couldn’t sleep or imagine a future for myself.
A year ago I’d found a blog online called hobostripper.com, written by a woman named Tara Burns. Tara lived in a van and traveled around North America, stripping, sleeping on forest service roads, gathering plants for medicine, and snaring rabbits. Tara was queer, the same age as me, and she was also from Alaska—she’d grown up in a remote part of the state, in a cabin with a dirt floor and walls made of spruce poles. When she was a kid, her family ate moose, caribou, fish, and beaver, burned wood for their heat, and made their own parkas out of caribou skins. What little cash they needed came from selling the furs of the animals her father trapped. They had a dog team to run their traplines, and the nearest village was several days’ boat ride away. Even that tiny village wasn’t on any road system—you had to fly out of there to get to a town that could be considered civilization.
I’d emailed Tara and we’d become friends, writing long letters back and forth about our families, our longings, our hopes and dreams and fears.
Becoming friends with Tara online was a balm for my tired heart. I felt a great kinship to her, and the more we emailed, the more I wanted to meet her.
Recently Tara had bought a piece of land on a large river just south of the Arctic Circle. The land was five acres of flat forest with a one-room cabin. No electricity, no plumbing, no running water. You walked across the wide frozen river to get to the property, or you took a boat there in the summer. Tara had just moved onto the land and was writing and making poplar salve and selling kinky hypnosis videos on the internet. In my bedroom at one in the morning, under the bare bulb on my nice sheets, I penned another email to Tara. If I found a ride to Alaska, could she help me get a job?
You should come stay on my land with me, she wrote back within minutes. And we can totally find you a job.
The next morning, I
called the number listed in the Craigslist ad for the man driving north. His name was Asaf and his speech was loud and gruff, but not unkind. He was Israeli American, he said. What kind of vehicle was he driving? I asked. It was over three thousand miles from Portland to Alaska, so if his car was a gas guzzler and we were splitting gas, then it might be cheaper for me to fly.
“I don’t want any money for gas,” he said. “I just want the company.”
I listened for hints of an ulterior motive, but there were none. There would be two other riders, he said, also from Craigslist. This put me at ease. A person looking to victimize three people would be a pretty ambitious serial killer, I told myself.
Asaf said that he was moving to Anchorage and leaving March 1. It would take us four days to reach Alaska.
On a Sunday, in the gray hour before dawn, a sleek SUV pulled up and idled on the curb in front of my house. I pushed my way through the wet roses, dragging a brown leather suitcase from the Goodwill, a tall pack on my back. Everything else I owned I’d wrapped in garbage bags, as protection against the damp, and stored in a friend’s basement. Now the birds were up, but I felt like I was still asleep—it had been too warm in the house last night and I’d lain awake for many hours. I’d eaten only a banana for breakfast.
There was a storage trailer hitched to the rear of the SUV.