No way you’re leaving today, I muttered to myself. Hopping a freight train for the first time would be challenging enough in dry weather. I’d be crazy to try it in a freezing rainstorm. So I trudged back upstairs to my room and resigned myself to hanging out at the Joyce one more day. My room rent was paid up through to the following Wednesday anyway. And after lying awake most of the previous night I needed the extra sleep. A day’s delay just meant I’d be leaving Portland on Easter Sunday, which might be a slow day for freight train traffic. But if I had to hang around Vancouver till Monday I didn’t care. After a month indoors I needed to get used to roughing it again, and the banks of the Columbia River wouldn’t be a bad place to start.
Easter morning dawned chilly but clear, and after a farewell coffee stop at the McDonald’s on Alder, I hiked over to Salmon Street and caught the number 5 bus to Vancouver. At that early hour, the churchgoers weren’t yet up and the bus was nearly empty. I had the back of the bus to myself and as we crossed the Willamette I opened my daypack and dug out the one library book I’d decided to bring along for company on the trip (confident it would find its way back to Portland with a little assistance from the librarians in Seattle). And I could hardly have chosen a better fellow traveller for a freight-hopping trip than Clyde Rice, a native Oregonian who’d ridden the rails all over the West Coast back in the thirties. By serendipitous coincidence, only days before my departure the Portland Library had featured Rice’s recently published memoir, Night Freight, on a shelf reserved for new work by local authors. As soon as I spotted it, I knew I couldn’t leave town without it.
I’d been saving Night Freight for my trip and hadn’t cracked it open until that moment on the bus. But I knew right away that I was travelling with the right man when I read the opening lines: ‘I was jungled up in some bushes alongside the tracks just outside the railroad yards in Eureka. There was a spring in the bushes and at least twenty bums around smoky fires . . .’
Save me a spot, boys, I’m on my way!
CHAPTER 10
I rode the metro bus all the way out to Jantzen Beach on the northwestern fringe of Portland and got off at the last stop on the route, a strip mall on the south bank of the Columbia River. At that hour on a Sunday morning none of the shops were open. The only sign of life was an enterprising silver-haired Mexican who was busy unloading foil-wrapped pots of Easter lilies from his cargo van and arranging them on a folding table he’d set up at the entrance to the mall’s parking lot. I wished him ‘Feliz Pascua’ as I trudged past his display, and he gave me a wave, but I couldn’t wave back. My right hand was lugging my heavy khaki duffel, and my left was clutching a rolled-up, rope-tied sleeping bag. I’d definitely come up in the world since I’d first rolled into Portland two months earlier with nothing but a daypack on my shoulder.
The sleeping bag was a brand new Coleman that I’d scored at another LIEAP office giveaway only days after I’d picked up my blue parka. I hadn’t even had a chance to christen it because I’d moved into the Joyce the same day the bags were handed out. Unfortunately, it was insulated with synthetic Hollofil fibre instead of goose down, so it was bulkier than I’d have liked, but I was still glad to have it. I just hoped the extra gear wouldn’t prove too much of a hindrance when it came time to catch a moving train ‘on the fly’.
Up ahead about a quarter mile I could see the steel framework of not one but two vertical-lift bridges that looked like conjoined twins. I assumed one of the two must have been built after traffic between Portland and Seattle became too heavy for a single bridge to handle, and when I reached the bridges my hunch was confirmed. The one on my side of the road, which carried only northbound traffic, looked a lot older than its downstream twin. Though neither would have won any prizes for elegant design, their span was impressive. Bank to bank, the Columbia must have been twice as wide as any of the Willamette river crossings in downtown Portland, and I was already working up a sweat by the time I reached the far side.
Deciding there was no sense carrying extra weight while I scouted out the route to the railyards, I looked around for a spot to stash my baggage before heading into Vancouver. The tall bushes growing beside the bridge’s concrete anchors looked like good cover, so I climbed down from the walkway with my gear. When I pulled back some of the branches to make room for my stuff, I uncovered a brass plaque which had been mounted to the bridge back in the make-work days of the WPA. The plaque dated the bridge’s construction to 1917, which didn’t surprise me – but the inspiring quote from John Ruskin inscribed on the plaque certainly did. Intrigued by this unexpected find, I immediately dug out my road journal and copied down what Ruskin had to say:
Therefore, when we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone, let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for. And let us think, as we lay stone upon stone, that a time will come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say, ‘See! This our fathers did for us!’
John Ruskin was the last person I’d have expected to find skulking behind bushes beneath a bridge in Vancouver, Washington, but I was certainly glad I had found him. Whether you’re a builder of bridges, laying stone upon stone, or a builder of sentences, laying word upon word, Ruskin’s exhortation was advice worth heeding, and I only wished someone would get around to moving the plaque to a spot where more people could see it.
A few blocks down Vancouver’s main street I came to a little park behind the public library, where a few sleepy-eyed winos were huddled at a picnic table having their first nips of the day. When I asked for directions to the Southern Pacific railyard, they told me, ‘About eight blocks over, just past the Amtrak Station.’
Then the oldest of the bunch asked me, ‘Where you catchin’ out to?’
‘Seattle,’ I replied.
‘Then you’ll be here till tomorrow,’ he informed me. ‘On Sundays, ain’t nothin’ but passenger trains run through them yards.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I kind of figured that might be the case. Will the cops hassle me if I bed down by the river overnight?’
‘Nah, lots of guys sleep there. Long’s you don’t build too big a fire, the cops won’t mess with you. Care for a taste?’ he asked, offering up the communal mickey.
‘No, thanks, I’m good,’ I grinned. ‘My gear’s stashed back by the bridge. I’d better go collect it and start scouting out a campsite.’
Wishing them all a Happy Easter, I doubled back to my stash spot, and twenty minutes later I was eating breakfast on a stretch of shingled beach a half-mile downriver, in the shadow of an old railroad trestle bridge that looked like it had been built by a clever child with a giant Erector Set. While I sat there spreading peach jam on a few slices of Wonder Bread, a big tugboat towing a barge full of sand came down the river and sounded its horn as it got near the bridge; the horn’s blast kept me from hearing the footsteps of whoever was approaching my campsite from behind – until he was practically on top of me.
Startled, I turned quickly, but relaxed when I saw it was a tramp and not a cop.
‘Sorry, didn’t mean to spook you,’ the lanky tramp apologised, grinning through his long red beard. ‘Thought I’d come over and say hi, seein’s how we’re neighbours. I’m campin’ just down the beach. Been here two days, and you’re the first company I’ve had. Name’s Bill, by the way, but most folks just call me Red,’ he said, extending his hand, which I noticed was missing its pinky finger.
‘Good to meet you, Red,’ I said. ‘Can I offer you some breakfast?’
‘Thanks, but I just had a Danish and coffee over at the Plaid Pantry. I wouldn’t turn down a smoke, though, if you’ve got one to spare.’
‘No sweat,’ I said, fishing my pouch of Bugler from my coat pocket. ‘Pull up a rock and make yourself comfortable.’
‘Ever seen one of these old pivot bridges in action?’ he asked, nodding toward the river.
‘Nope,’ I said. ‘Is
that what you call it? A pivot bridge?’
‘Yep,’ he grinned. ‘You’re in for a treat then. Watch this. Here she goes!’
As he spoke, warning lights began to flash at either end of the bridge and, moments later, the air around us was filled with the sound of massive gears turning. Then, ever so slowly, the half of the bridge closest to us began to swing away from the riverbank and, as I watched it pivot ninety degrees toward the middle of the river, the tug’s horn blew one more time. The pilot leaned out of his wheelhouse to wave at the bridge operator, who was waving back from the little control house that sat atop the middle of the span.
‘Pretty slick, right?’ Red said, as the tug and barge eased through the gap the pivoted section of bridge had opened up.
‘Never seen anything like it,’ I admitted, duly impressed.
‘Me neither,’ Red said, firing up a smoke. ‘I’ve hopped trains all over the country and this here’s the only pivot bridge I’ve ever come across.’
‘Glad I got to see it in action,’ I said, rolling up a smoke of my own. ‘What part of the South are you from, Red?’ His Southern drawl was thicker than Dolly Parton’s.
‘Boone, North Car’lina,’ he replied. ‘Ever been?’
‘Nope, can’t say I have. But I spent a pretty strange night in Lumberton a few months back,’ I said, and proceeded to describe my adventures with Sean, the Ninja Warrior for Christ. Red laughed at my story and admitted that Boone had its share of ‘wing-nuts’ too.
‘Wing-nuts?’ I repeated. That was a new one on me.
‘Yeah, you know, guys with nothin’ in their heads but sailboat fuel. Don’t have to be Southern to qualify either. Hell, there was a doozy right here in Vancouver last time I passed through. Some local kid who must have been certifiable. See those two big cables over there?’ he asked, pointing to where a pair of thick, black underwater power lines emerged from the river, then snaked across the shingled shoreline and disappeared into the woods that bordered the riverbank. ‘One of those cables is still live, but the chewed-up one was decommissioned years ago, and this wing-nut spent eight days on the beach hacking away at it with nothing but a buck knife and a railroad spike, trying to strip out the copper for scrap. That’s how it got so chewed up. And you know what he collected at the scrap yard after his hands were too torn up to keep at it any more? Fifteen lousy bucks! How’s that for sailboat fuel?’
‘Unbelievable,’ I said.
‘I know, right? The local cop who told me the story said they nabbed the kid on a tip from the scrap dealer, but when they got a look at the crazy bastard’s bloody hands they decided he was too psycho to even bother charging him.’
Red was two years older than me, and he’d been riding the rails ever since he’d come back to the States from Vietnam, so he had plenty of freight-hopping stories. As long as I kept plying him with tobacco, he seemed happy to share them.
Before I knew it, the sun was sinking and Red was inviting me to move my sleeping bag over by his fire pit so we could keep the gab-fest going. Red got a small fire built, and when I saw that he had a tin cookpot at his camp I broke out a can of pork and beans for our supper. While we waited for the beans to heat, he told me about the time he’d been riding the rails through Texas with a buddy of his named Willy, who was also a Vietnam vet.
They’d had to hop off in the Fort Worth railyards when the train they’d been riding stopped to take on more freight cars, and while they were waiting to re-board, a yard bull snuck up on them and started coming on all hard-ass and demanding they produce ID. But right after he cornered them, their train to El Paso began rolling again, and rather than miss it they both jumped the yard bull and knocked him out cold.
‘No shit?’ I said. ‘You vets don’t mess around.’
‘Yeah, but we couldn’t just leave him in the yard. Sure as shit he’d have radioed down the line as soon as he came to. So we grabbed him and heaved him up into the grain car we were riding and took him with us all the way to El Paso. Before the fat fuck woke up we had his wrists and ankles cuffed with his own zip ties, and his mouth gagged with one of Willy’s old bandanas, and there was nothing he could do when he came to except give us the stink-eye and grunt like a hog in heat. When we got to El Paso, we let one of the brakemen in the caboose know the score. He thought it was so funny, he told us he’d take his time setting the yard bull free so we could di di mau before the shit hit the fan. True story.’
We were both talked out by the time we finished our supper, and when we settled into our sleeping bags on either side of the fire pit we nodded right off. But throughout the night I would wake up whenever an Amtrak train came rattling across the pivot bridge – and I was continually amazed by Red’s ability to snore right through the racket undisturbed.
It must have been after midnight when the third or fourth train roused me from sleep. When I crawled out of my mummy bag to urinate, the three-quarter moon was hanging high in the night sky. I smiled a private smile as I noted its pale yellow colour – a hue distinctly more like margarine than butter. But the river was the real show. Its surface was now striped with ivory bands of reflected light from the street lamps over on the Oregon side, and the black water between each band gave me the weird impression that I was looking at the rippling keyboard of some giant’s grand piano. And as I stood there listening, momentarily transfixed, I could almost hear it playing the music of the spheres.
When we broke camp in the morning, Red stashed his gear in the riverside woods and then walked with me to the nearby Plaid Pantry, where we hung out in the parking lot drinking our morning coffee. Red rolled a few extra smokes from my pouch of Bugler, and in return for the tobacco he did me a solid by using his knot-tying skills to re-rig the rope I had tied around my sleeping bag, allowing me to attach the rolled bag to my daypack shoulder straps.
‘There you go, that should do you,’ he said. ‘You’ll need two hands free if you’re catching a train on the fly,’ he advised. ‘Nothing I can do about your duffel bag, though. You’ll just have to toss it aboard the car before you jump on.’
I took my time hiking to the railyards after Red and I parted company. He’d told me the regular Southern Pacific freight train to Seattle usually didn’t come through until noon time. And I wasn’t quite so worried about yard bulls because he’d told me exactly where to hide while I was waiting for the train. I stopped off at the Amtrak Station when I got to the railyard and took advantage of their restroom to wash up and refill my half-gallon water jug for the trip. Then I kept a sharp eye out for the bulls as I hiked the rest of the way to the trackside woodlot Red had described.
Ducking into the bushes, I was surprised to find a fancy cast-off Posturepedic mattress spread out beneath a big cottonwood tree, most likely dragged there by some scavenging tramp with a taste for creature comforts. I gave it a quick check for bugs, but found none, so I made myself right at home and settled down with Night Freight while I waited for my train. It was a mild, sunny day and the morning passed quickly. Before I knew it, the sun was straight overhead, and I figured I’d better gather my gear and get ready to run for the train.
As I watched the yard from the cover of the bushes, I spotted two tramps heading up the tracks in my direction and wondered if they’d come to catch the Seattle train, too. They looked to be about my age, and neither was carrying a pack. The skinny one was about a head shorter than me and was sporting a wispy goatee that made him look like a Chinese herbalist. His partner was even shorter, but powerfully built, and his full black beard was wiry and thick. When they came up even with my hidey hole, I stepped out to say hello, and sure enough they were heading to Seattle after having spent the weekend in Portland celebrating a buddy’s fortieth birthday. The one with the wispy goatee was named Keith; his buddy’s name was Paul, but Keith just called him ‘Bulldog’ and it wasn’t hard to see why.
Keith and Bulldog had just hiked over the bridge into Vancouver after catching the bus to Jantzen Beach, same as I’d done the day before.
They were both hungover and thirsty from their hike, and when I offered them a drink from my water jug they couldn’t thank me enough. They’d left all their gear back at their home base in Seattle and hadn’t thought to bring a canteen along with them when they’d caught the train down to Portland. I told them I was a rookie at hopping freights and would welcome any coaching they could give me, and Keith said not to worry, they’d hop aboard first to give me a hand up when the train came through.
Thirsty as the two of them were, my water jug was emptied quickly, and Bulldog volunteered to make a run across the yard to an outdoor spigot to reload it. When he got back five minutes later, he said he’d seen a mama opossum dead on the tracks at the grade crossing, with her head crushed to a pulp by the wheels of a train, and her five orphaned babies nosing around her corpse.
‘Pretty sad,’ I said.
‘Yeah, I felt bad for the little guys. They’ll be the next ones pulped. That’s the thing about trains, though. Those steel wheels’ll fuck up your whole day if you let ’em.’
Not the most encouraging words I could imagine on my first day hopping trains, but I kept my worries to myself.
‘Train should have been here by now,’ Keith said, when twelve-thirty had come and gone. ‘Must be having mechanical problems. Sure as shit hope it gets here soon or we’ll never make supper at the Bride of Death.’
‘The Bride of Death?’ I repeated. I thought Baloney Joe’s Junction was a weird name! ‘Who the hell would name a mission that?’ I asked.
‘Nobody,’ Bulldog laughed. ‘That’s just what Keith calls the Bread of Life Mission. Not too cynical, is he?’
‘How long’s it take to get up to Seattle anyway?’ I asked.
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