Originally screen printed and published by myself as a paper zine and companion CD of field recordings and movies in 2012

The zine in its entirety is now online below

You can listen to the field recordings that go along with the text on Spotify, Apple Music, or most other music streaming services of your choice

Introduction

I was 16 when I first became obsessed with freight hopping​,​ after ​reading about it in zines and hearing about ​i​t from the ​older friends in the local punk and anarchist community I surrounded myself with back then but never quite fit into​. I had already dropped out of high school at that point, was working and living on my own, and was so painfully hungry to experience the world on my own terms. Yet I always felt like an outsider; I always felt too young, too much of a girl, too Asian, and although I was poor, somehow not poor enough. My boyfriend at the time, a 28 year old reformed ex-crust punk from Ohio, would wistfully tell me stories about freight hopping but refuse to do it with me; I broke up with him but not before I stole his crew change guide.​

​Eventually I found someone to show me the basics (another boyfriend, a much more amenable longshoreman) and went on my first ride with some girlfriends. We caught out of Vancouver, British Columbia, and later rode the Highline to Chicago. By the time we got back everyone returned to their lives and jobs, and I did, too, for the most part, but I missed it. I started to go on rides by myself, and working intermittent jobs in the sex industry that allowed me to make as much money in as little time as possible, so I could keep a flexible schedule and travel when and where I wanted. While I still was barely surviving, I was never homeless, like a lot of the riders I would meet; they usually thought I was far too clean and bourgeois to really accept me as one of them. Starting with the very first train I hopped I brought along journals, microphones, super 8, and cheap film cameras to record all my trips; save for a couple people who’d join me sometimes, these were my friends and companions. Although some of the most intense solitude I’ve ever felt has been on trains, prolifically documenting my trips made it so that I never felt lonely. After riding all over the country I learned to thrive and find peace in aloneness, become much more sure of myself, and stop being afraid of the dark.

I wrote most of this between the ages of 19-28 (a long time ago!), very casually, and didn’t originally intend to make anything of it. Once I had more or less settled in NYC – I was living on a small fishing boat docked near Ellis Island that didn’t have great phone reception or wifi, and was awfully productive back then – I collected it all and made it into a zine I screen printed myself and sold to small bookshops and directly to other train hopping friends. It’s not especially edited or polished but it is me. I don’t really ride anymore — it’s a terrible way to travel, honestly — but it was something I used to love very much.

Click here for a GLOSSARY of Common Freight Hopping Words

The first time I ever tried to hop a train by myself was in Eugene, Oregon. My grandpa lived south of there in Roseburg, and after visiting him a few days I had some time to kill before heading back up to Seattle. Although I’d ridden trains before with friends, I had always wanted to do it alone. I got a ride with one of the caretakers from his retirement home and after they dropped me off downtown I walked to the nearest gas station, ripped out a map of the city from the phone book, and started walking toward the train yard. It was cold, I was carrying too much stuff, and I had no idea where I was going. Nearly two hours later I was still walking, with nightfall approaching and the streets becoming emptier and emptier. I wandered through sprawling housing developments and strip malls and up long winding roads, stopping now and then to consult the disintegrating map that was more or less useless at that point. Somewhere up on River Road I passed two men standing next to a car talking, parked outside a restaurant in a strip mall. I gave up and asked them for directions on how to get to an intersection that was listed in the the ten year old crew change guide I had brought with me, and one of them offered to drive me there. It felt like a long drive. He kept asking me why I was going to this seemingly random industrial location in the middle of the night but I just said I was meeting ‘a friend’.

     After a few more minutes of small talk I asked him to drop me off at a little mini-mart near the train yard, so I could pee indoors and buy some water under the comforting shroud of fluorescent lights before going back out into the darkness. I opened up my crew change guide again and tried to follow the directions, but all the information it listed was outdated. A long and narrow dirt road led down to the tracks but the old shack that I was expecting to be there looked as if it had been bulldozed long ago. I turned around and walked back. I was terrified. It was pitch black and there was an enormous fertilizer factory nearby that made the air smell alive and fecal. I started feeling like such an idiot – no one knew where I was, I had no idea what I was doing, it was nearing the middle of the night, and here I was alone in some train yard just because I had this whimsical idea that it might be fun to hop to the next town. If someone had wanted to fuck with me at that point I wouldn’t have blamed them. I walked back to the main road and felt better once I was further away from the dark shadows of the underpass.

     Alongside the highway I found a spot to wait against a concrete column that wasn’t littered with trash. Sitting there I was hidden from the cars that would sporadically drive past and I was right in front of what I eventually figured out was the mainline. I stayed up for hours, listening to engines rumble by and trains switching around, but not departing. After awhile I felt better about being there alone – there was literally nothing to be scared of. Soon I was sleepy so I got out my sleeping bag and snuggled inside, with my backpack tucked under my head for a pillow. When a train finally came through on the mainline and stopped for a crew change I got up and walked alongside it, half asleep, touching its side with my palm and feeling the heat radiate off the wheels. I was so tired that it was hard to think clearly but luckily I was smart enough to not get on it. It was a piggyback train and at that point I had never ridden one before, and I think I was too dazed to know what I was doing. The brakes started airing up to leave and I returned to my sleeping bag and easily fell back to sleep.

     Two more nights passed like this before I gave up. Trains would come through on the mainline but they were either going the wrong way or consisted of types of cars I didn’t want to ride (lumber racks, pigs, sketchy gondolas overflowing with industrial waste). I hadn’t brought a lot of food but as the hours dragged on without any traffic I started getting paranoid that if I left to go to a store then I would miss the day’s one and only ridable train. Instead of walking ten minutes away to the mini-mart I wandered along the tracks and found a bunch of blackberry bushes. I filled a plastic bag up and kept eating until I was sick to my stomach. That night I found a different spot to sleep in, nestled in some tall grass near a pond on the other side of the highway. For the first time in my life I started to feel comfortable camping out alone and feeling invisible. It was easy to stop being afraid of other people once I realized that most other people were probably afraid of me. I was able to relax once I stopped worrying about being found, and even though it rained all night, as long as I folded myself up like a little taco inside of the tarp I had brought, I slept like a baby.

     It was on the third night that I think I started to hallucinate. I’d never waited so long just to catch a train and had spent most of the day shitting out blackberries on the side of the highway. I’d already read two entire issues of the New York Times back-to-back and written pages of stream-of-consciousness bullshit in my journal. Once the sun set the temperature dropped significantly and I had to get in my sleeping bag to stay warm, which made my body think it was time to go to sleep, except I couldn’t sleep, because then I might miss the train. Unless I used my headlamp I couldn’t read or write, so instead I just sat up against the concrete pillar, next to the mainline, listening for the sound of distant train whistles. They were few and far between, so I started spacing out on the music of nature. The wind would rustle through the grass around me and after a good hour of near-silence I started getting really paranoid. By 2am I swore I saw rats swarming around my body and I was convinced I was going to get eaten alive if I didn’t get on a train soon. I was so tired that I was delirious. Like clockwork the regular Z-BRLC train pulled up to crew change, and once again it was nothing but pigs. Ah, fuck it... at 3am I packed my stuff up and started walking back down the highway. I had made it maybe a mile down when I saw a car pass me, and then, brake lights. It pulled over to the shoulder, and when I caught up I just started to walk around it and ignore them. Instead I heard the whirr of a window rolling down, and then a “hey!”. It was a man, driving alone, and he asked me where I was going and if I wanted a ride. I was miles away from any excuse of a destination and under normal circumstances I would absolutely never hitch a ride with a solo dude in the middle of the night. But, what the hell, it was, as my friend Ellie used to say, a ‘whateva kind of night’. I got in the car with him and we started driving toward downtown.

     He asked me what I was doing and I told him, and he told me about how he also used to hop trains a few years back. He lived in Eugene but I didn’t ask him what he was doing out so late, driving down some lonely and deserted highway by himself. Instead I asked him to take me to this one stretch of road near downtown where I knew there were a lot of cheap motels. I had officially given up. We drove down lots of dark side streets and when we passed an especially shadowy road heading up a hill he mentioned that there was an incredible look-out spot at the top, where you could see the whole city, and maybe did I want to see it? No, I said, just keep driving. And I was lucky because he did.

     A few minutes later I got out of the car intact, and after wishing each other good luck we said goodbye. For $45 I bought a room at the 66 Motel and immediately took a bubble bath. Then I stayed up till 8am watching movies on cable. Less than a few months later I would end up becoming friends with the director of photography of one of the movies I watched in bed – why does stuff like that always happen to me? – and by noon the next day I was on a bus going back to Seattle, sad that I didn’t catch a train, but glad to be leaving Eugene... finally.

Several months after that I tried hopping out of Eugene again, only to give up again. And then it was Christmas. Christmas is my favorite holiday and to celebrate I would always take an Amtrak down to southern Oregon with my dad so we could visit my grandpa together. After spending a couple days at the retirement home we would drive up to Eugene and then take the train back home to Seattle. I was determined to finally get it right, so that year, instead of driving to the train station, my dad dropped me off under an overpass on the highway, gave me a hug, and said to call him when I made it home.

     Earlier in the day it had been drizzling but after I settled in at what was becoming my usual spot a rainbow streaked across the sky, which was stark blue and clear. It seemed like an affirmation of the good luck I was hoping for. Around 9am the northbound Amtrak train that was taking my dad back to Seattle flew by and I waved at the blur of windows. A couple hours later a slumbering grain train two tracks over started hissing and I put my book away and hopped on. After a little bit of back and forth the train switched onto the mainline and picked up speed, heading north out of town. I was absolutely ecstatic. I had finally hopped a train by myself and it felt fabulous! I screamed and sang songs at the top of my lungs but all I could hear were the deafening squeals of metal on metal.

     Once the initial excitement wore off I was reminded by the scenery that the distance between Eugene and Portland is one of the ugliest stretches along the west coast. The train tracks are tethered to the I-5 corridor and pass a monotonous pattern of empty fields and strip malls. You are never completely out in the country so you have to stay low and try not to get spotted at crossings. I sat in the little crook of the cubby hole, writing in my journal and taking photos. Driving, it takes about two hours to drive to Portland from Eugene. On a freight train, it took five. When my grainer finally chugged into Portland city limits I woke my ass up and was glad to stretch out my legs.

     I waited until it whined to a stop before I climbed off underneath an overpass in the Brooklyn Yard (almost one year later and I would be passed out in a hammock in the same exact spot, waiting for a southbound train with a friend). I had no idea where I was but I walked through some bushes and found myself in a familiar train yard neighbor: a golf course. Across the parking lot there was a little clubhouse of sorts, where the smiling man behind the counter let me use the bathroom and gave me a cup of free hot chocolate. He asked me where I was going but I had no idea. The weather was starting to turn and I didn’t want to camp out since I hadn’t brought my sleeping bag. But I had forgotten my debit card in Seattle and didn’t have that much cash on me for other options. He pointed me in the direction of a bus stop to go downtown and I figured I would just start there and end up somewhere.

     When I got off the bus I started wandering around with my backpack, walking along empty streets lit up with glowing strings of Christmas lights. The shop windows were filled with holiday displays and it was pretty but surreal, sharing the sidewalk with last minute shoppers and happy, beaming children. Without really trying, I walked by the hotel that I had stayed at a few months before, when I was in Portland for a bicycle race. My friends and I had crashed there after a long night of riding all over the city in a scavenger hunt. I remembered that the rates were reasonable so I went in to ask how much a room that night would cost, but the prices were over double what they used to be. So instead I asked for a phone book and I reserved the last bed at a hostel on the other side of the river.

     Another long bus ride and then I was there. Generally I hate hostels, and this one didn’t really do much to dissuade me. A tanned young blonde boy checked me in and started asking me personal questions right away, but traveling alone so much and being so anti-social made me a champ at evasion. After I deflected all of his inquiries he started talking about himself and told me that this hostel gig wasn’t really his thing, and that actually he was a male model. From his wallet he took out a black and white business card – his sculpted torso in soft focus. After I got the key to my room I avoided him for the rest of the night.

     Since I got the last bed that meant I had a shitty top bunk. I have a terrible fear of falling and the idea of sleeping so high up was sort of terrifying, but by the time I finished showering it was too late to trade with anyone. The woman underneath me had the loudest snores I’d ever heard in my life. Usually I pride myself on being able to sleep through anything, but I tossed and turned the whole night. By 7am I was wide awake but groggy and sick. My nose was clogged and I had completely lost my voice. In the bathroom I tried to talk and all that came out of my mouth was scratchy bird sounds. In the communal kitchen I rummaged through the cupboards and found some honey and tea to drink, and by the time I left I still felt awful, but at least I could talk.

     I got on another bus, this time heading toward Powell’s Books. I was going to meet up with my friend Jared, someone I had been exchanging train info with via email over the years. He knew where I could catch a train going north to Seattle and had generously offered to show me his waiting spot. I bought a used book to read (Jack Black’s You Can’t Win) and listened to him give me a comprehensive overview of freight train operations in Portland as we sat on a bus, weaving its way through Portland under increasingly overcast skies. When we got off the bus I thought we were close but as I followed behind Jared, listening to him chatter on about trains, it became apparent that we were still a little ways away from where I was to spend the next few hours in the cold, waiting for a train to take me back to Seattle.

     After what seemed like forever, we were walking alongside another golf course when I suddenly realized we were next to two sets of train tracks, rising up on a hill and over the Columbia River. Although we had spent several hours together at that point it only took Jared and I a minute or two to say goodbye, and then I was all alone again. I walked on the ballast next to the tracks looking for a way to get down to a ravine where I could hide out and wait. Eventually I found a trampled path and stumbled down to a damp patch of grass where I put my stuff down. I was exhausted and felt very sick and very cold. I was in another place I had never been before, where no one (besides Jared) knew where I was. After I had settled down I looked up at the train tracks because I thought I saw something moving, and I had; there was a lone figure dressed in black that was walking toward me and waving.

     This time I knew I wasn’t seeing things, although I was practically in the middle of nowhere and running into someone wasn’t something I had expected. I was scared and didn’t wave back. The figure turned around and walked beyond my field of vision and I continued sitting on my backpack, wondering what was going to happen next. It seemed pointless to move since there was nowhere to go. A few minutes later I looked up again, and the figure was back. As it got closer I saw it was now carrying a large backpack and...a banjo? Then it was at the top of the path, and I saw that it was a girl! Suddenly I felt a lot less miserable and lonely. As she walked down the path I tried to hide how excited I really was. In all my train traveling I had never run into another woman.

     We quickly said hello and introduced ourselves. Anna was trying to hop up to Seattle too, and had followed the information in her crew change guide to find this spot. I watched her go through all her things while she told me about how she had been traveling all winter, hopping trains all over the country by herself. She had just made it back from the Highline, where she had gotten thrown in jail in Havre. There had been six feet of snow on the ground, and desperate to leave her piggyback, she had jumped off and hidden in a unit, where workers found her during the inspection. Finally, someone as crazy as me, if not crazier! The whole time we were talking she took occasional bites of the only food she was carrying – a plastic jar of peanut butter, with the label long worn off. She ate it with a big silver spoon and offered me a bite. Inside the peanut butter she had mixed in two or three different types of cheap gas station candy. It was disgusting, but delicious!

     Wordlessly it had been decided that we would try to hop north together, and I unfolded my tarp so we could both wait underneath it as the sky finally opened up to downpour. Both J and the crew change guide had recommended this spot to wait for Seattle-bound trains, but we had yet to see a single one pass by. As we sat on our backpacks eating and shivering we told stories and listened for the distant rumbling of train engines. Finally, after an hour or two of waiting, there was a succession of doublestacks. Like soldiers, we quickly and methodically packed our things up in seconds and ran up the steep ravine, ducking when the first engine passed us and then quickly getting up and watching for something ridable as the entire train flew by us a few feet away. It was too fast, but just barely. Running on the uneven ballast was hard enough but trying to grip onto the wet metal rungs of the ladders going by was impossible at fifteen or twenty miles an hour. After I tried a few times I fell back and watched sadly as our train left without us. Anna didn’t want to give up, but after a few more failed attempts she did, too.

     Two or three more trains passed by the same exact way, almost slow enough for us to catch, but not quite. It was a tease, a frustrating taunt, another way for Portland (already one of my least favorite cities) to say ‘fuck you’. Anna and I were getting drenched and I was freezing, having once again forgotten to wear enough clothes. Both of us decided that we should abandon our spot in the ravine and walk back further, where we could try to catch the train before it picked up speed and wasn’t going so fast.

     After another long walk we came to a track junction, where it seemed probable that the trains would slow down before switching onto the line that led over the Columbia River and into Washington State. There was a lone tree in the middle of the diamond, and we immediately camped out under it, desperate for any cover from the rain. Back under the tarp we went, drifting in and out sleep – we had stopped talking much at this point, since we were so cold and miserable and tired. I forget how many hours went by but there were no trains. My head ached and my throat felt like it was on fire, so I mumbled a suggestion that we leave and go downtown, where maybe we could find a place to sleep that wasn’t so depressing. Anna was ambivalent, but eventually agreed. She had been traveling all over the country for months without spending much money or having much responsibility. I, on the other hand, had a job and a warm cozy apartment back in Seattle waiting for me, and the idea of taking a hot shower at home was becoming practically orgasmic. Anyway, it seemed pointless to keep waiting in the rain for hours on end, hoping for a train that was never going to be slow enough to take us anywhere.

     We caught a bus downtown and ended up where I always seem to end up in the middle of the night when I’m in Portland: Roxy’s Diner. It was the only thing open at that hour, anyway. Anna and I were both dripping wet and when we maneuvered through the tables with our big backpacks, her banjo, and my badly-folded tarp, we were given looks of sympathy. The waitress gave us a spot to put everything down and we melted into our chairs. I was anxious to order something, anything, as long as it was steaming hot. I greedily looked at the menu and then I noticed that Anna was oblivious, and wasn’t planning on ordering anything besides coffee. I knew she had money (she had just gotten back from a long season fishing in Alaska) but she wasn’t spending it. I ordered cheaply – French fries and hot tea – and she refused my offers to share. But when I was full and couldn’t eat anymore and the waitress tried to take the plate away, she leapt upon them and ate every last one. In my head I wondered how long exactly one could subsist on peanut butter and sugar...

     Roxy’s was busy despite it being 3am, and Anna and I stayed there all night, waiting for the sun to come up and the rain to stop, fighting back the urge to rest our heads on the table and sleep. For a moment there was some commotion – one of the waitresses offered a van nearby that we could sleep in, except then it wasn’t available, and then she offered again, but only if we ‘really needed it’. Both of us were bent on leaving town as soon as possible so we kept drinking our shitty free refills. I felt like I was in a Jim Jarmusch movie, which I guess is to say I felt like shit, but sort of in a glamorous way. I took photos of Anna and we kept talking, until finally: daylight. We gathered up our things again, slightly damp but no worse for wear, and left the diner as a fresh wave of zombies marched in for breakfast.

     Anna knew of a rest stop where she could hitch a ride north, outside of city limits but just a short bus ride away. Back at Roxy’s I had checked the Greyhound schedule and saw that if I caught the next bus I could be home by noon. Noon! The yuppie in me won out again and I decided I was through with roughing it for this trip. I had bronchitis (I discovered later) and Oregon had long since lost its charm. Anna and I exchanged addresses and hugs and then we said goodbye. I walked a few blocks over to the old bus station and bought a ticket with the last of my cash and an apple with the pocket change. Four hours later and I was home in bed, talking to my dad on the phone, telling him that everything was fine.

In the summer of 2008 I was in between jobs and cities, and my best friend Cameron told me about a relatively newish train, called the ‘TACDEN’. Starting in Tacoma and ending in Denver, it passed through Idaho, Montana, Wyoming (a state that has no passenger rail service), Utah, Nevada, and through the Feather River Canyon to California, all places I’d always wanted to ride trains through, but with a few exceptions, never had. I saved my journals.

8/18/2008

I’m sitting in an engine unit now, rolling through quiet farmland before heading up into the mountains to my eventual destination of Denver, Colorado. This trip has hardly started so who knows what will happen. There is always this precise sense of trepidation I get every summer before I leave to travel. Who I will meet, what will I do, will I make any friends or kiss anyone or hurt myself somehow – all of those feelings balled up in my stomach, making me uneasy but excited. Sometimes I think I am addicted to this feeling.

     Yesterday Richard dropped me off at my storage locker around 8am, to meet up with Cameron and his friend Jonah, who was accompanying us to Denver so he could protest at the Democratic National Convention. After the boys took bird baths in the public restroom we gathered up all our things and started walking toward the catch out near Spokane Street. It seemed to take forever with our heavy bags to get to the underpass but that was fine considering we would be sitting on our asses waiting for this train potentially for the next 12 hours. Train riding isn’t especially strenuous or athletic, save for the frenzied few minutes when you are running over uneven ballast trying to hold onto a moving ladder.

     Jonah and I made a bet – he thought the train would come before 5pm, and the cynic in me thought after. Guess who won? He owes me a whiskey. Sometime around 6pm Cameron perked up because they started finally talking about our train on the scanner. A few minutes later the TACDEN pulled onto the mainline, where it was supposed to stop for a few minutes to get clearance. We knew this train would be hit or miss with 48s, and after nearly the whole train went past us we didn’t see a single ridable car. But Jonah swore on a method of riding suicide cars that wasn’t actually suicidal and somehow we managed to dumpster some construction supples and carry two wood pallets (five if you count the rejects we left on the side of the tracks), a stack of flexible wood sheeting, and plenty of cardboard up and over the wall of a 53. By stacking them all together, on top of the narrow steel cross beams, we constructed our own floor, all in under five minutes, while the train was stopped. It still looked sketchy with the wheels completely exposed on one side but after testing it out with a few hops up and down it seemed safe enough, so I amended my resolution to never ride suicide and climbed aboard. Moments later we aired up and slowly crept out of Sodo and through Chinatown. Later on in the trip we would end up resting our feet on the moving wheels just for kicks.

     We were rolling through the tunnel underneath downtown when we stopped for the first time. I got off to pee by the side of the tracks (I’d always wanted to pee in that tunnel). A few minutes later and we aired up again, only to stop less than a mile away, next to the grain terminal by Myrtle Edwards Park. After the train stopped there it wouldn’t move again for nearly 24 hours. But we didn’t know this, and we just went to bed thinking we’d be moving along soon. The sky got darker and ominously cloudy, and the air smelled damp like it was going to downpour any minute. I fell asleep more or less but Cameron woke me up a few hours later since it had started to rain lightly and none of us had remembered to bring a tarp. He volunteered himself to get up and hunt for some material to shelter us. Maybe twenty minutes later he was back with some huge fold-out pieces of cardboard he found behind a gas station, and we slept under them for the rest of the night.

     Morning light finally came and our car hadn’t moved an inch. Morale was low as we kept watching train after train pass us on the adjacent track. Cameron had the scanner playing back on his headphones the entire time but it was like all the dispatchers were on a permanent lunch break. Radio silence. After three hours of fucking around and eating peanut butter and jelly on the questionable bread Jonah had found in a dumpster downtown, I issued an ultimatum. Cameron and Jonah had brought rain gear but I was freezing my ass off in a hoodie and a thin used sleeping bag. My vision of summer train riding in a bikini hadn’t really included a rainy trip through a mountain pass. We all agreed to get off the train and walk across the street to a conveniently located Taco Time, where we could thaw out and rest.

     Sitting in a booth over an order of tater tots and powdered creamer coffee, we discussed our options. This train was the only train going directly to Denver but we had no idea what was going on and why it had mysteriously stopped for so long. I checked the weather and learned that it was predicted to rain the entire way into the mountains. I was being whiny, but I had almost died on the last cold weather ride I’d done (a few months earlier I’d taken Chuchie, the sexy Spanish filmmaker I’d met while stripping in Hollywood, on a boxcar ride through Klamath Falls and we got stranded in the middle of a blizzard) and was a little touchy about being wet and cold. I just didn’t want a reprise.

     We were wearing out our welcome at Taco Time so we dragged ourselves and our gear across the parking lot to a Starbucks, where they had outlets for us to charge our phones. We played a game of cribbage and Jonah managed to beat me by just two points. After contemplating our situation over the meditative sound of cards shuffling, I decided that I would ride in one of the empty DPUs over the pass, and then run back to Cameron and Jonah’s car before we reached Wenatchee, our first crew change. They didn’t want to ride in the unit with me since they had gotten caught a few months prior but that was ok. I was looking forward to being alone in the engine, having an actual toilet, and passing out in front of the heater.

     Shortly after his narrow cribbage victory, Jonah decided to go wild and splurge on a green tea latte. While he was in line talking to the barista Cameron started freaking out because he heard them call our train on the scanner. The entire staff of Starbucks was already mystified by us and they looked on slightly bemused as we quickly threw our bags on and ran out the door and back across the street. After a brief goodbye Cameron and Jonah started running back towards our original car, the one we’d built a floor in, leaving me alone behind a warehouse. I could hear the train airing up and all of the sudden I felt so lonely.

     I try not to ride in units too often but when I do I always try to observe some basic etiquette. One important point being that you shouldn’t catch one during daylight hours, especially when you have to run in full view of the conductor’s rear view mirror to hop on. Hiding behind the warehouse I was just out of sight, but as I was sweating and waiting for the right moment to leave I started to worry, realizing how all they had to do was look up to see me get on. Just then I noticed two construction workers who had gotten out of their pickup in the parking lot next to the warehouse, arms crossed and intently watching me. Great, I had an audience. Then the train started to move.

     I kept looking at the train and then looking back at the construction workers, thinking maybe they’d get bored watching some weird girl sneak on a train engine, but their feet stayed planted and they seemed to be discussing my next move amongst themselves. The train was beginning to move faster. I said a silent prayer to the train gods and starting sprinting, catching the ladder easily and then running down the walkway and through the unlocked door to the cab. Ten seconds later and I was hiding with my gear in the engine bathroom, unable to look back and see if my performance garnered any applause. I only hope they enjoyed watching. I spent the next half hour locked in the bathroom petrified, wondering if they had called me in.

     And now I am sitting on the floor of this empty unit, warm and dry but all alone. I’d prefer to sit with my feet up in the cushy engineer’s chair but if the train rounded a curve my silhouette would be visible to the crew. Someone left the radio on but it is very crackly and I can’t hear the dispatcher very well. Through the magic of cell phone technology I learned that Cameron and Jonah are exactly thirty cars behind me. I asked them to tie some plastic onto the ladder so when I eventually go back I’ll be able to quickly tell which car they’re hiding in. But I am still worried that if the train sides and I run back, I might not make it in time. I don’t want to be left in the woods in the middle of nowhere, watching my train go by and worrying if I’m going to be eaten by bears.

8/23/2008

Well, all that seems like a long time ago now. Cameron and I are riding one of those endangered 48 wells across Utah now. We caught out pretty easily with another boy and his dog in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

     I never did get caught riding that unit. Before it even got dark I started getting impatient and ran back to the well Cameron and Jonah were in. I was getting too paranoid about passing out and sleeping through the crew change in Wenatchee, where they’d do a crew change and I’d have to hide in the bathroom in case they did an inspection. I kept trying to piece together what the radio was saying and it sounded like we were siding for an Amtrak train, so I got my stuff together and got ready to run. It was still light out and the engineer and conductor could have seen me if they had looked. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t – I don’t know. After huffing and puffing I made it. Luckily it seemed like the rain had passed.

     When I climbed back into the well Cameron and Jonah had a cold six-pack of Pabst between them. Turns out at the last siding their car was parallel to a gas station and Jonah was able to make a beer run. The entire time I was up front in the engine worrying, they were leisurely relaxing as our train ascended into the forest. It made me wish I had just saved myself the stress and gotten onto the same car with them in the first place. We stayed up a little bit longer playing cribbage until it got too dark to see the cards, and then we laid down in our bags and stared at the sky until we fell asleep.

     The next morning we woke up in Hauser, Idaho. We stopped there for a long time, not sure how long exactly, but long enough that we stopped measuring time because it was making us go crazy. The units detached and refueled and the auto racks that had been on the back of the train were moved to the front.

     After playing several more rounds of three-handed cribbage the brakes aired up and we were off again. I was starting to win every game and Cameron and Jonah were starting to hate me. The scenery was beautiful but after the coldness of the mountains the blistering heat was stifling. Of course the boys took off their shirts and rolled up their shorts but I didn’t really feel comfortable breaking out the bikini just yet, so I just wore my vest and jeans and dealt with it. Every time the train stopped in a siding I was relieved to be able to hop off and pee on solid ground; while the train was moving I usually just jumped over the couplers to pee in the privacy of the next car over. Soon the green part of Montana slipped away and everything slowly faded to brown, and then we were in Wyoming.

     I had convinced the boys that we should get off at some point before Denver, so we could be tourists and sightsee, and also so Jonah could buy me the drink he owed me. Cameron wasn’t that crazy about going to Denver anyway, and since Cheyenne was only one stop away we decided to get off there and Jonah would just hitch in. I also became fixated on the idea of getting a cheap motel room, so I could shower and lay around watching TV movies in an actual bed. Of course Cameron and Jonah weren’t interested in such bourgeois ideas like cleanliness but I was buying so they reluctantly agreed to come along. We were pretty filthy. I was getting tired of watching Jonah pick the goo out from in between his toes before he offered to make everyone sandwiches.

     One more day of sweltering hot weather with no shade and then we were rolling into Cheyenne. There was a huge air force base north of town that we had to pass through first, but we made it out ok, despite our car stopping directly under the four surveillance cameras next to the fenced border. It was a long exhausting walk back from the tracks, not sure exactly where we were going but trying to keep the few tall buildings in sight so we would eventually end up downtown.

8/25/2008

I got distracted. New day here in Oakland. Drinking tea under a warm fuzzy blanket at my uncle’s house on Echo Avenue. Cameron and I got here after our defeat in Roseville. A UP cop pulled us off our beloved train, and now we both have tickets and court dates. Fuck fuck fuck…

8/26/2008

     Sitting now in a boxcar, up against the warm metal wall, watching little butterflies float by and sagebrush wiggle in the wind. Not sure why, but we’ve stopped. I thought at first they were throwing a switch but now I’m not so sure. We are in Northern California now – next stop, K Falls. Let’s see what has happened since I last wrote –

     In Cheyenne we walked forever until we got downtown. I had been so excited to visit Wyoming, and even though we were going to be in the dry eastern side of the state, and not my preferred western side, I guess I was expecting more. Half the shops were closed or boarded up, and there wasn’t anyone walking in the streets. The whole town looked economically depressed, empty, and sad. All three of us were indecisive and tired but we eventually agreed on eating breakfast at a greasy spoon. We spotted a distant sign and trekked over past the freeway to order some bad food. The diner didn’t have much atmosphere, and it was part of a chain, with big laminated menus and thirty varieties of pie. I ordered something forgettable and they screwed it up. The boys took turns locking themselves in the bathroom, shaving and sloughing off grime with paper towels. Cameron came back from the bathroom with his whole head wet like he had washed his hair in the sink and the waitress gave me a look. The whole time I sat in the booth I wished I had just ordered the apple pie.

     After settling the bill I sat outside to put on fresh socks, and while I was doing that I stupidly left my favorite bandanna on an ornamental rock. That little square of cloth had been around for two years, stained with the sweat of the cowboy I met the previous summer during my time spent working as a ranch hand in the Sonoran Desert. By the time I remembered and went back to find it, it was long gone. Bellies bulging, we walked over to the train depot, an apparent tourist destination with well-manicured lawns that were enticing us to loiter. Cameron sniffed out some unsupervised power outlets to charge the batteries for the scanner and we stretched out in the sun and discussed our travel plans over clove cigarettes. While we were talking a local character covered in multiple variants of the same blown out Jesus tattoo came over and started talking our ears off. Jonah had left us earlier to go find a sleeping bag at the Salvation Army, since the original had mysteriously fallen off of our train somewhere in between Idaho and Montana. When he came back empty-handed he met our mostly coherent new friend and in the space of a few minutes managed to strike a deal involving a trade of Jack Daniel’s (apparently this guy couldn’t buy his own booze because he’d been banned from all of Cheyenne’s liquor stores) for a freshly washed sleeping bag that was at an undisclosed location a few minutes away.

     After an hour of nervous waiting Jonah came back a new man, gently used sleeping bag in tow. It was then mutually agreed upon that it was high time for a cocktail. There was a bar across the way that seemed suitable, and I enjoyed my whiskey and coke over yet another game of cribbage, which I let Jonah win since I felt bad for him. Victorious, he stood up on his chair and did an a cappella rendition of “We are the Champions” while everyone else in the bar hooted and hollered. I broke my vows of vegetarianism and ordered a buffalo burger in honor of the majestic animals that once roamed freely over the West, until the great railroad barons drove them to near extinction. It tasted bland and wasn’t as exciting as I thought it would be, but it did make my cramps go away. Listlessness had taken over and by that point all three of us were sick of Cheyenne. I had high hopes for Wyoming, but there were no rodeo days, no tight-muscled cowboys. We retreated back to the side streets of downtown, walking parallel to the UP yard. Cameron and Jonah wandered off to buy Kit-Kat bars while I posed as a sweet and innocent young thing and got a cheap single room at the Ranger Motel. Key fob in hand, I unlocked the door and collapsed onto one of the sagging beds, before taking advantage of the luxury of a proper bathroom and calling my mother. A few minutes later Cameron and Jonah appeared at the door and I let them in.

     I was pretty disgusting, so I took a shower, washed my hair, and shaved. Thankfully Cameron and Jonah took showers too, and after we were all scrubbed pink we laid around in bed and indulged in one of my favorite motel past times – watching bad cable. Unfortunately the only thing on TV was the Olympics, and not even good Olympics like gymnastics but boring shit like volleyball. Soon the TV was shut off and we fell into a deep sleep. I don’t remember what I dreamt about, but the bed was warm and soft and felt absolutely delicious. The next morning Jonah said goodbye and left to go to take his place on the side of the highway with his thumb in the breeze. I duct-taped my tripod and super 8 camera to the pink tiled wall of the bathroom and filmed myself putting on liquid eyeliner in anticipation of another long glamorous day of train hopping. Afterwards I went to go check-out and Cameron left the room without thinking, walking right past the office and earning me a ten-minute lecture from the Pakistani motel proprietor. Shamed and $10 poorer, I walked out of that motel office and didn’t look back. Cameron was waiting down the street but I caught up to him and then we wandered.

     The previous day we had met a fellow train rider and his cute little dog when we were walking around downtown. They had hopped all the way from New Mexico and had just gotten back from the Rainbow Gathering. Cameron and I were having coffee on the sidewalk outside some awful cafe that sold Beanie Babies and pre-packaged baked goods when we ran into this young man again. He was also heading west, but just one crew change stop away to Green River. The three of us (four, including doggie) fell into sort of a motley crew, not saying all that much to each other, but content with our new company and sharing a common interest of getting out of Cheyenne as quickly as possible. For the rest of the day we walked around town with our gear, stopping by the Safeway and the library to print maps, and then to the catch out spot just down the road. We settled down on some forlorn looking pallets and began a long wait that would take us into the late evening.

     Up until this summer I had never traveled with a scanner, even though my dad bought me one for Christmas two years before. It had always seemed too complicated to program, and besides that it just felt like cheating. I already knew how to track trains with my cell phone and that seemed bad enough. I had given my scanner to Cameron a few months before since he had lost his, and after doing this trip with him and using the scanner to track trains I had to admit that cheating felt good. Before every train rolled by we would already know where it had come from and where it was going.

     I finished reading my book (Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, which I was reading because a regular of mine at the peepshow I worked at always told me I reminded him of Oryx) and we must have played another ten rounds of cribbage before finally an eastbound IM train heading for Oakland was announced to be approaching by the yard dispatcher. Drowsily we began the usual scramble to pack everything away in our bags, ducking into the bushes for any last minute pees. Staying close to the shadows of buildings, the three of us began running alongside the train, half-squatting in the dark, and scanning each car to see if it was ridable or not. When the train finally slowed to a stop we got lucky – there were three 48s right in front of us. Sometimes it’s almost too easy. I threw over our bundles of cardboard and climbed in while Cameron helped our friend hoist his puppy into his own car, and then he ran back to me and we were off.

     The next thing I remember is waking up and looking straight up at a blindingly bright blue morning sky. We were in Green River, our first crew change. Our friend hopped off his car with his dog and came over to bid us farewell, before I pulled my sleeping bag back up over my eyes and tried to will myself out of Wyoming. When I regained consciousness our long intermodal train was snaking through a dry desolate landscape of red rock and dust. Welcome to Utah. It was hot and Cameron and I sat up on the ledge, taking turns smoking cigarettes and laying down, sucking up all the sun and feeling the wind whip away our sweat. Quietly we watched the world pass us, two invisible dark blips in a barren, empty place. I think this feeling of invisibility is why I love riding trains so much. I love to sit back and observe without participating. Being a part of something without committing. Maybe it’s a cop-out.

I was excited to finally cross the Great Salt Lake but the wall of black flies that greeted our arrival was apparently just as excited. They swarmed around our heads until our train picked up speed and started its long straight shot over the salt plains. For the first twenty minutes it was novel, but after an hour of staring at nothing but gray I was really starting to miss trees. All that stale salt water smelled bad, too. After Utah, riding through Nevada was more or less forgettable. Nighttime on the train means no reading without using a headlamp and no passing out in a bikini, working on a tan on top of your cardboard. Try as I might to destroy my lungs and liver by smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey (classic night time train activities), I never last longer than a few minutes before I get bored or I start feeling sick. And so most of Nevada for me was experienced on my back, staring at the sky through the small sliver opening of my sleeping bag.

     Cameron and I woke up early with the sun rising, near the California-Nevada border and on our way to the scenic Feather River Canyon. I grew up traveling up and down the west coast and in California, and leaving Nevada and all points east meant saying goodbye to cowboys, wild west frontiers, prairies, white people, and organized religion. California to me meant hippies, easy hitching, the ocean, safety, and decent coffee. Despite everything, it felt good to be back.

     Our train was destined for Oakland, where the UP yard is only a few miles away from my uncle’s house and where we could stay for a night before heading back north. Everything seemed ideal. The ride through the Feather River Canyon was gorgeous, and after we passed Keddie we began the last haul through the fertile central valley, on our way to the coast. Strip mall, farm, strip mall, farm. Our next crew change was Sacramento, but before then we had to pass through Roseville, the largest freight yard on the west coast. It was also known as being rather hot, and I’d always managed to avoid it. I have ridden through dozens of so-called hot yards before and if you’re smart then getting caught really wasn’t an issue, but it was just one more thing to think about.

     We were still fifteen or twenty minutes outside of Roseville when I got impatient and peeked over the edge of our car to see how close to civilization we were. Stupid. Directly parallel to our train was a cop car trailing us on the highway, and not just any cop but a UP cop. I was down in a split second but he would have had to have been blind not to see me. Cameron turned on the scanner to see if he’d started talking about us, but everything seemed normal. When the train reached Roseville and started slowing down we thought about bailing but Cameron still hadn’t heard anything on the scanner, so we thought we were probably fine.

     Our train stopped and within a few minutes we heard the familiar sound of car tires on ballast, and then a door slam and the crunch-crunch of someone walking towards us. He knew exactly where we were and went directly to our car. “Hi there!” He peered over the lip of the well and told us to get our stuff together and get off the train.

     It was boiling out and we sat in the shade of his mammoth SUV while he wrote out citations. We said everything we could say but it was no use - after getting caught so many times and riding trains all over the country I guess I was due for my very first ticket. He took our pictures and said they were going into the nationwide UP database, but that meant nothing because everyone I knew was in that database and they never checked it. Cameron had already been ticketed and arrested several times. I took my hat off for the first time in three days to take my glamour shot and my glasses broke. Then I watched as our train aired up behind the SUV and left without us. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

     Officer Conley drove us to the train station and wished us good luck. When I asked him how many kids he caught in Roseville he said usually one a day. “If they’re smart,” he smirked, “they keep their heads down.” Oh, eat shit, asshole.

     Cameron and I found a taco place, drank horchata, and discussed our next move. We carefully folded our tickets up and put them in our packs; we were due back in Sacramento in two months for a court date, and if we didn’t show we’d both have national warrants out for our arrest. How exciting! If we wanted to catch out from Roseville it would be a good idea to wait until our friend’s shift was over and it was dark, but we were already so close to Oakland that we just said fuck it and got on a bus. By evening we were walking up to my uncle’s porch, where he had hidden a key for us under a flowerpot. Him and his boyfriend were on vacation and we had the place to ourselves for the night.

     It wasn’t until 10 or 11 the next morning when we woke up, and after a leisurely day spent showering and eating hot, home cooked food (such a nice change!) we packed up and took a bus out of Oakland. We could have caught out of the UP yard by my uncle’s house in West Oakland but if we got caught again on their property we thought we might get arrested. So instead we went to the BNSF yard in Stockton.

      We used the directions in our crew change guide to find a little dead end street in a residential neighborhood, where there was a hole in a fence, and on the other side, the BNSF mainline. We camped out for a few hours, reading and cracking open almonds that fell off the tree we were sitting under. Cameron went on a run to find cardboard and burritos, and I got my kicks seeing how long I could videotape him without him noticing. He was listening to the scanner and the very first train the dispatcher called was headed for Pasco. Perfect. We waited for it to pull in front of us and then we went through the fence and climbed onto a grainer.

     I have taken the train through Oregon many times but always on UP track, passing through Eugene after descending from Klamath Falls. BNSF trackage also passes through Klamath, but soon after the tracks split off and head through the mountains to Bend, and then back down along the Columbia River before reaching Pasco. I was excited to see new territory but it was going to be cold as fuck going through the mountains on a grainer at night.

     Our grainer ended up being the grainer from hell, because once the train got going it rattled so hard that we had to hold on with both hands to keep from getting thrown off. My knees were getting cut up from slamming into the floor again and again, so when the train sided for the first time we packed up all our things to try and switch cars. We were adjacent to a large farm and before we hopped off two Mexican workers in an old pick-up truck saw us. Cameron ran over to say hello and after rattling away in Spanish for a few minutes he returned with his arms full of presents. The workers were total sweethearts and we were now in possession of a watermelon, cantaloupe, two Red Bulls, three sodas, ice cold water, juice, over three pounds of almonds, an entire bag of cucumbers, and a glass salt shaker (absolutely essential for the cukes, they insisted). After successfully decamping to an open boxcar we aired up again and went on our way. We ended up carrying that watermelon across two states!

9/1/2008

I spent last night sleeping on a sheet of damp plywood in an alley behind a restaurant in Georgetown. But I feel fine.

     What else, what else… oh yes. Klamath. Uneventful. Many moons ago I got stranded in Klamath Falls with a girlfriend, abandoned by a train. We ate pancakes at a diner and hitchhiked with a lonely trucker who practiced his amateur chiropractic skills on me at rest stops. This time I stayed on the train. After a few hours of waiting around it finished working in the yard and then we started north for the mountains and the cold.

     It was gorgeous out but freezing. After laying down in front of the open boxcar door all day, watching the skyline pass by us like a film reel, Cameron and I moved to the far reaches of the front corner. We slept, more or less, tossing and turning naked under a mountain of cardboard, sleeping bags, blankets, and the fabric of my hammock. When we woke up we were on the edge of Oregon, crossing one of my favorite rivers – star of the Northwest, origin of favorite stripper nom de plume – the Columbia!

     Boxcars are beautiful and for traveling through scenic country, by far the best kind of car to ride. You can sit in front of the door and zone out for hours. But I don’t like getting on or off of them when they’re moving, which drastically reduces their desirability. I like fast exits, and accidents are too easy when there’s such a wide space beneath your car, sucking air and limbs under. Cameron had spent a lot of time in Pasco and he figured that we’d have to bail off when the train was slowing down before it entered the yard, which was busy and not so easy to get out of. So in anticipation of this we moved yet again, this time to another grainer.

     After finally eating our watermelon we entered city limits. As the train took a wide turn into the yard and passed the Amtrak station we got ready to jump. But it was still going too fast for me. I started arguing with Cameron – he didn’t want to get caught in the yard but I would rather risk getting caught then jump off a train that was moving too fast. He kept trying to make me feel stupid, even though I have jumped off plenty of fast trains. I wanted to hit him for being such a dick but before I could he jumped off without me (of course he was fine). I stayed on the train and watched him get smaller and smaller and then I really did feel stupid for not jumping. I started dreading walking back with all my heavy gear just to catch up with him, so I climbed around the ladder. I had gotten off trains going the same speed but for some reason I just didn’t feel good about getting off of this one. I put my foot down on the ballast and it immediately kicked up. Oh well, here goes – I threw my water and backpack off the side and held onto the rungs and ran with the train for a few seconds before letting go. But something went wrong – it was all a blur, but somehow I lost my footing and then I was holding onto the ladder with one hand as the train dragged me through the rocks. Without using my legs it was hard to push away from the train but I let go anyway. I landed on my bad shoulder (old rotator cuff injury from a bike accident) but on the upside at least I still had my legs! I wanted to get out of the yard as quickly as possible, so I got up and hobbled back to where my stuff fell, grabbed it, and ran to the highway.

     By the time I reached Cameron I was not very happy. “Did you see that?” I asked, fuming. He shrugged, “See what?” I spent the rest of the day hating him and rubbing my arm. We began the unpleasant long walk down the highway back into town, eventually reaching the train station, where we used the bathrooms. Just down the road from the train station there was a building Cameron knew we could wait behind to catch the once-daily Stampede Pass train to Seattle. It was Cameron’s favorite ride and one that had just recently restarted after being out of service for a long time. This made it rather elusive and not everyone knew how to catch it, but it wasn’t much of a challenge if you just knew what to look for. We had gotten bored with waiting and had gone on a pastry run so Cameron could feed his sugar addiction and flirt with the Mexican mamacitas in the aprons. I was holding his extra large coffee when suddenly he froze – he was wearing headphones and listening to the scanner as we walked around and he had heard them call our train. Out the door, he started running to the train yard without me. Like an idiot I started running after him, with his coffee spilling everywhere. By the time we reached the tracks I wanted to kill him. My shoulder hurt, I was out of breath, and the train was going too fast anyway. He yelled at me to get on it but my left arm wasn’t fully functional and I couldn’t get a grip on the ladder rungs. I told him to catch it by himself but he stayed put, pouting. The FRED on the last car passed us and then it was his turn to stop talking to me. The Stampede Pass train originates in Pasco and does a long crew-change in Ellensburg, the next town over, before chugging over the mountains and into Seattle. If we missed it we still had a chance of beating it to Ellensburg and catching it there. So we walked to the bus station and bought a ticket.

     Walking into a Greyhound station and paying for a ticket after missing a train has to be one of the most depressing things about traveling. We grudgingly got in line and noticed a tall, slim Vietnamese kid waiting to get on the bus with us. He had a death stare that shot daggers and when people walked by him, saying ‘excuse me’, he just stood there, mute. When it was his turn to hand his ticket over and board, he just looked at the driver, silent. He was already weirding out everyone and we weren’t even on the bus yet. People started whispering and giving each other looks – this was just a few weeks after the news story broke about the guy on the Greyhound bus in Canada who decapitated the kid sitting next to him, before taking the whole bus hostage. Cameron and I were sitting across the aisle and a couple rows back from him. Every so often he would slowly turn his head and stare at me blankly, before I forced myself to look away. A few minutes after we got on the highway he stood up without a word, moved to the aisle, and laid down on his back. Everyone was silent. A beefy, bloated pink man sitting across from him finally told him to get up, and when he didn’t get a response, he lifted him up by his arms and threw him violently back into his seat.

     This went on two more times before the idiot put the kid in a choke hold and everyone on the bus was horrified. The bus driver, of course, was completely oblivious. By the time we got to our first stop, a gas station in some otherwise forgettable nowhere town, everyone leapt out of their seats to get out. I bought a newspaper and sat on the curb while everyone paced back and forth with their Slurpees and someone called the cops. When the bus finally pulled away from the gas station the pudgy group of white boys sitting in the front gave each other high fives. Out the window, the boy that got kicked off looked completely devastated, finally showing emotion, while the cops looked at him, mystified. Despite an hour delay by the time we got to Ellensburg our train was still waiting for us on the mainline. Up the highway we found the Red Horse Diner, where I promised Cameron I’d buy him a slice of pie (our past grievances had been forgotten in the bus drama). But the diner didn’t have pie (what kind of a diner is that?), so instead we shared a root beer float on the back deck, just thirty feet away from the train tracks. The scanner was on and when the crew got called we could just settle our bill and walk on over. A couple hours later and it was time. We got our coffee in ‘to go’ cups and walked down to the tracks to find a comfortable car to ride. The train was made up of mostly tankers, but toward the end there were some grainers with floors. We found one that seemed suitable, climbed on, and began our final descent home to Western Washington.

     Like our first ride out of the city, the sky turned dark and it started to rain. We retreated to the twin cubbies of the grainer, scrunching up but staying dry. I’ve always liked sleeping on grainers (especially Canadian ones, which are rather spacious), but Cameron hated it and kept complaining, which I had to admit was a little satisfying to hear. After over a week of traveling with each other, usually in extremely small spaces, I think we were finally starting to get on each other’s nerves. Riding this train through the mist of the mountains and over Stampede Pass was beautiful but somewhat anti-climatic. It was around 2am when we reached Georgetown, south of downtown Seattle. We stood up and stretched, and just as I thought all the slack in the train had been let out there was a tremendous jolt and I went flying toward the coupler. Luckily the crossbar stopped me from falling off our car, but I got a big cut on my arm, despite all the layers of clothing I was wearing. A parting kiss, I suppose. It was too late to show up on my ex-boyfriend’s doorstep so we hiked up Airport Way South, trying to find a safe place to sleep. Behind the Rainier Cold Storage building there was a good spot Cameron knew of, but before we could put down our cardboard we noticed a security guard making his rounds. We went back to walking on the main street and eventually found a fenced backyard to slip into. Behind a storage shed there was a sheet of plywood that we laid down on the damp grass before getting out our sleeping bags and passing out. By 8am the next morning we were back at the storage locker we shared, dropping off our bags, before splitting up for the last time and going home, wherever that was.

It was winter in New York City and I had lost my job and most of my belongings when the sketchy but highly profitable job I had been moonlighting at got shut down by a undercover vice squad and all my things were confiscated. I didn’t have anywhere to live and I was almost out of money. I had moved to the east coast from Seattle about a year before and had absolutely no desire to go back, but I didn’t really have a choice – NYC depressed me too much and I couldn’t find legitimate work. So I bought a one-way ticket back to Seattle.

     During the winter of the previous year I had danced for a week at this strip club in Fargo, an old school little dive bar where bouncers in tuxedos escorted you to the elevated stage and you made money giving lap dances to fat farmers and top secret government operatives. I swore I’d never go back, but the idea of making a $2000 a week (an astronomically large amount of money to me at that time) clouded my judgment and I made another booking, this time doubling my commitment to two weeks. Fargo was across the river from the city of Moorhead, a crew change stop on the Highline and a relatively easy ride. I was still sort of in a relationship with my best friend Cameron and he offered to hop with me part of the way there. Suffering through two weeks of lap dancing for a thick wad of cash didn’t sound so bad; I knew it would be exhausting but I thought a change of perspective might be good for me. Nevermind that it was the middle of winter, Fargo is a shithole, and I hated stripping. More than anything, I just really needed the money.

     A few mornings later and Cameron and I were enjoying a breakfast of day-old pastries in the basement cafe of Elliott Bay Books in downtown Seattle. Our backpacks were at our feet and propped up on the table was our scanner, blaring out little snippets of conversation people were having in the BNSF yard that was just a few blocks away. Around 11am we started getting antsy, so we folded up our newspapers and started walking south to the catch out. On the way there we stopped at a few dumpsters and collected enough cardboard to keep us warm through the mountains. Northwest winters are generally mild but we were heading into a rainstorm and needed all the help we could get. Just as we reached Spokane Street there was a train pulling onto the mainline. Crouching down in between parked cars, we watched anxiously, and in a sea of 53’s we got lucky and spotted a lone rideable 48. We kept waiting for the magic moment to run up, throw our bags and water into the well, and hop onto the ladder before tumbling quickly over up and then down. A few seconds elapsed and we accomplished our mission. Although we had mostly been hidden to the line of cars at the next railroad crossing I heard a supportive honk right as I lowered my head.

     We rode through Seattle without stopping, quickly reaching Balmer Yard and then going onward to Everett. It was a pretty ride but nothing too exciting as Cameron and I had just ridden it a couple months before on our previous trip to Wyoming. After we started gaining elevation it started sprinkling slightly, and then it was outright pouring, until we were enveloped in the Cascade Tunnel, the longest and steepest rail tunnel in the US. It fills up with so much diesel smoke that each end is sealed with a giant exhaust fan while the train chugs uphill inside it. Previously we had timed the tunnel trip at a new record low of 22 minutes, but this time around it was at least 30. Dank and smoky, it was terrible – even with a wet bandanna over my face I would still be blowing black snot out of my nose a day later. But at least after we rode out of the tunnel we dropped elevation and the rain died down a bit.

     We were wearing every piece of clothing we had packed, and still it was too cold. Huddled together underneath my tarp, we were sitting on cardboard that was quickly getting submerged by the growing puddle of brown rain water in our car. Cameron wasn’t going to bail off until we were in Spokane, but I wasn’t really looking forward to a cold and damp nighttime trip through Eastern Washington. I had packed my travel hammock in my backpack in anticipation of the floor flooding; I had figured I could tie it up and stay elevated until I reached somewhere sunny and everything dried out. But it was a lightweight, one-person affair, and after debating the merits of getting a cozy hotel room in Wenatchee, our first crew change, we got off there and figured we’d catch out easily the next morning. Two blocks away from the tracks we found a motel and I bargained them down $20 before we bedded down for the night. In the morning I checked out and we found a small coffee shop in view of the yard and watched as figurative tumbleweeds blew down literal tracks. Lots of westbound trains came through, but after four or five hours of staring out the window and drinking tepid coffee there was just one lone eastbound full of piggybacks. Call me a baby but I wasn’t going to ride under a pig in 30 degree weather. My shift started at 5pm the next day, and I didn’t want to risk being late, or my entire booking might get canceled. Reluctantly Cameron and I both walked to the train station and got on the evening Amtrak.

     We parted in Spokane and I continued on to Fargo, sitting alone and with my face pressed to the glass. The train ride between Spokane and Eastern Montana is one of the prettiest stretches in the US, and even though I’d been through it a million times it was impossible not to be entranced. It felt weird to be in the middle of all this serene wilderness, on my way to dance at a shitty dive bar in the middle of a quiet upper Midwest town. Would people remember me from the last winter I was there? Did I want them to remember me? Sitting behind me were two evangelical Christians, a husband and wife, on their way to some sort of Bible conference. Interspersed with my thoughts about lap dancing and flashing dollar signs were pieces from their loud conversation about the meaning of repentance against sin. I felt tired.

     Amtrak was late, as usual. You’d think that buying a ticket on passenger rail would be faster than hopping a freight train, but sometimes it really doesn’t seem that way. Due to the delay I arrived in Fargo at the unfortunate time of 4am. The last time I was in Fargo I stayed at an apartment the club rented for out-of-town dancers that was a few blocks away, and I planned on walking there and simply punching in the old key code on the master lock to get it. But when I called the club to tell them I might be running late the night manager told me that the apartment no longer existed. Instead there was a dorm on the other side of town, too far to walk to, and by now it was probably too late to find anyone to let me in. I hadn’t planned on spending a single dollar in Fargo, and the thought of wasting my money on cab rides and sleeping in a stuffy room full of strippers was unappetizing at best. But it was 4am and I was exhausted. At the train station I got in a cab and told the driver I was going to the stripper dorm. He didn’t need directions. At the last minute he convinced the Christian couple (turned out their conference was in Fargo, how funny) to share a cab with me. This trip was starting out great!

     Our ride lasted an awkward few minutes, with the couple asking me questions about what brought me to Fargo (“Are you studying?”) and the smiling and nodding cab driver earning his tip by corroborating my lies (“Yes, uh, modern dance with a minor in social services?”). When we pulled up to the dorm he explained to the couple that it was for students, and he offered to wait in the parking lot while I pounded at the door, and surprise, no one answered. $8 in cab fare wasted, he dropped the perplexed Christians off, and then took me back downtown with directions to the nearest all-night diner. The idea of eating pie and drinking shitty coffee until 5pm the next day made me want to kill myself, so I dragged my dirty backpack down the block, where I had seen a cheap hotel earlier. The clerk was nice and decided to not count that night toward the next day’s reservation, making my $45 room rate stretch a little further. After requesting a trackside view, I staggered to my room, ripped off my dirty Carhartts, and indulged in my pre-dancing ritual of a long, hot bath. After shaving off most of my body hair I melted into the bed and watched a gem of a movie called Roller Boogie, before passing out into a deep and much needed sleep. The hotel ended up being one of the better ones in town, offering a free hot breakfast every morning. The dining room opened at 6:30 and I set my alarm so I’d wake up in time to pillage it. Using the provided paper plates and napkins I managed to take enough floppy whole wheat bread and little plastic containers of corn syrup jam to ration out for the next two days. Whenever I work a job that requires me to dance naked on a lit up stage in front of a room full of people I generally don’t eat much, so this was probably as gluttonous as it was going to get. Up against the back wall they had a shiny silver machine that popped out piping hot pancakes at the press of a button, and I restrained myself to a couple small ones before I went back to my room. I set my alarm for 9am, fell asleep, and then did it all over again.

     Around 2pm I finally roused myself out of bed and walked a few blocks over to the post office, where I’d sent a box of platform shoes and costumes to myself, post restante. I had a little bit of time before I had to get ready for my first ten hour shift, so I walked toward downtown and found a little cafe to sit in and write while I drank my first real coffee of the day. A mousy boy came up to me and managed to hit on me even though my head was buried deep in my journal and I was radiating bad juju. He asked me what I was doing in Fargo and I was tired to lie, so I just told him the truth – I was severely depressed, broke, hopping trains aimlessly, and stripping in this shit little town of his until I could extract as much money as possible from its resident hicks. He looked frightened and left but then he came back and asked me out again. It was time to go, so I picked up my box again and left.

     Two nights later and I was vowing that not only would I never step foot in Fargo again, I was completely, absolutely done with stripping. Nothing especially bad happened or took me by surprise; it was more like nothing had changed. One year later and the club was filled with the same bad music, mean women, and self-righteous, entitled men. I was used to it at that point, but I didn’t want to be. If this was my definition of normal then what did that mean for my psyche? I was getting too cynical, and my knees hurt. The men had gotten cheaper, too, and after working a busy Friday and Saturday shift I left with half as much money as I expected. After mentally calculating how much the dollar value of the brain cells I was killing were worth, I decided to walk out. I had hidden my pack in one of the corners of the dressing room (one of the girls asked me, “Are you homeless?”) and as soon as the clock struck 2am I grabbed it and quietly walked straight to the train station.

     I bought a ticket as far as Whitefish, since there was another storm coming and western Montana was where the rain finally ended. I liked Whitefish anyway, knew my way around, and trains were so easy to catch I figured I could relax and make an easy hop back to Seattle from there. When the westbound Amtrak finally pulled into the station I noticed that the same evangelical Christians were in the waiting room with me. We nodded ‘hello’ but at that point I don’t think any of us really wanted to talk to each other. All the money I’d made dancing was folded up in a bar napkin in my front pocket, and I was carrying a duffel bag full of high heels and mesh dresses. I wasn’t really in the mood to answer anybody’s questions. I stole a bag of M&Ms from the cafe car and kept to myself.

     The train ride was long and tedious but it conveniently dropped me off in Whitefish right after nightfall, and I quickly did a loop of downtown, scoring bagels and cardboard at a dumpster and buying water and apples at the grocery store. Two cop cars cruised past me after I walked out of a dark alley but they waved hello after I smiled sweetly. I tried not to take it as a bad omen. I made sure no one was around when I started walking north into the darkness along the tracks, past some work sheds where there were tags from previous westbound tramps (my tags had been long since painted over). I found a dusty old pick-up truck facing the train yard and put my stuff down before scooting underneath it and leaning up against the wheels. I was in the middle of a large, empty field and on the very edge of town. Whenever I hop trains alone I don’t like to run into people, and this seemed as far away from anyone as you could get. Underneath the truck I was completely hidden. I ate my M&Ms as I waited, drifting in and out of sleep.

     Three hours had passed and I was zipping up my pants after a pee when I saw a dark figure walking toward me across the tracks. I wasn’t sure if they saw me so I quickly crouched down and crawled back under the truck. I had noticed before that the truck was unlocked and I planned on sleeping inside it if a train didn’t come soon, but if anyone knew I was there then that plan wasn’t really going to work. I started thinking about how stupid I was to have been seen by someone else, and how at that moment not a single one of my friends or family knew where I was or what I was doing. After twenty minutes of anxiety I heard something walking through the brush, and then someone was shining a big flashlight underneath the truck, blinding me. “Hello! You a rider?” It was a man – thin, wiry, and wrinkled. He introduced himself as Dennis and after he confirmed that I was waiting for a train he told me that he was a veteran train rider of 22 years. At first I was terrified; running into a homeless man at 2am in the middle of nowhere was not in my travel itinerary. In the front pocket of my jacket I had a small canister of pepper spray clutched in my fist, ready to defend myself if I had to. But the more we talked the more it seemed like Dennis was a good guy, and just really lonely. He kept asking me if I was warm enough but I insisted I was fine, and even though it was about 20 degrees, I actually was warm for once. From underneath his shirt he produced a heat pack, the kind you shake up and put near your skin, and he gave it to me. With the my free hand I pressed it against my stomach. After telling me about how nice his camp was he pointed east along the tracks and said that I should camp out there, instead of in the truck, where he guessed I was going to sleep. I didn’t get a dangerous vibe from him but there was no way I was sleeping near anyone who I didn’t trust completely. I started thinking about all the other possible places I could stay, but he kept talking about how he knew all the good spots and that the police presence in Whitefish had increased a lot in recent years. He was making me paranoid, and he wouldn’t stop talking. I couldn’t stop thinking about how I really wished it wasn’t Sunday and I didn’t have $700 in small bills stuffed in my pants.

     I was still crouching on the ground when I came up with some excuse for having to leave. It was the only way to get him to stop talking. I didn’t know where I was going but it didn’t matter - I couldn’t fall asleep with him there. I made up something stupid and said I had to walk back to town to make a phone call, and that maybe I’d run into him later. He was trying to hop to Seattle too, and he suggested we ride together. Oh, brother. Finally I stood up, shouldered my bags, and walked away. I was trying not to be in a bad mood about having my hiding spot blown up since there wasn’t really anything I could have done about it. Dennis was nice but I wondered if he would have stayed talking to me for as long as he did if I weren’t a woman. Along the road back into town I tried to find another place to sleep that was sheltered and hidden but I couldn’t. Every time I saw something that had potential I thought about how Dennis said he worried about me and wanted to check and make sure I was sleeping ok. I just wanted to be left alone. I wandered toward a bar and asked a man outside if he knew of any cheap motels nearby, but the only place he suggested was one that I had stayed at before, a few blocks away, and it was definitely not cheap. After walking around for a few minutes more I gave up and checked in. I took a bubble bath and went to bed.

     In the morning I woke up feeling better and more hopeful about catching out. Usually there is a lot of traffic through Whitefish and I had only expected to be there a few hours at most. I knew there had to be a train coming soon. After hiding my money in a better place and leaving my bags at the front desk of the motel I walked over to a cafe to have a cup of coffee and a slice of pie before I went back to the train yard. Just as I had settled in with a newspaper I ran into Dennis, filling his thermos up. He sat with me at my table for over an hour, telling me stories about his life, riding trains all over the country. There were jungle brawls and tales of old love affairs, and he was a good storyteller, so it was entertaining. But it still bugged me, knowing that if I were a man he probably wouldn’t have hung around me so much, and I didn’t like hearing him talk about how after I left the night before he had walked around Whitefish trying to find my camping spot to reassure himself that I was alright. After he complimented me (“You’re the prettiest train rider I’ve ever met!”) he started telling me about his knife collection, and then I told him I really had to go. He walked outside with me and sat on a bench in front of the library so I could take his picture. As I turned to leave he shoved a folded up piece of paper in my hand, and I waited until I was alone and walking away from him to read the note, which said in scrawled, earnest writing that he was sorry for scaring me off and that he regretted asking if we could ride together. He just wanted to have a friend. I felt so shitty.

     After I picked my backpack and my duffel bag up I quickly hiked over to the eastern end of the yard, careful not to run into anyone, including Dennis. I was walking through a field of tall grass when I found a little miniature travel trailer, unlocked and facing the tracks. Inside it was pitch black but I didn’t mind. It was clean and completely private - in other words, perfect. I put all my things inside, laid down on my cardboard, and resigned myself to a long wait in the dark, resolving not to open the door until I heard train whistles. Two hours later and there was a westbound train slowing to crew change in the yard - a grain train to Pasco, with mostly tankers and those awful BNSF grainers that don’t have floors. I got out of the trailer and ran across the field to the tracks. It was just past nightfall and I could hardly see anything. I jogged alongside the train as it pulled into the yard, and after nearly getting attacked by a stray dog I lost my cardboard but still managed to catch one of the few ridable grainers on the fly. As much as I loved Whitefish, I was ecstatically happy to leave. The entire time I was there my favorite diner was closed and I didn’t even get to eat the pancakes I had been fantasizing about for the past three days. As the train sped up I saw Dennis walking along the tracks, his silhouette lit up by the lights of the crew office. I don’t think he saw me, and guiltily I felt relieved knowing for certain that he wasn’t riding the same train as me. Leaving him behind in Whitefish made me sad but I didn’t know what I was supposed to do about it. I will never see him again.

     For a junk train we made good time and rarely stopped at sidings. A little past Sandpoint, Idaho the storm caught up with us and it started raining. Unfortunately I had been passed out on the porch and only realized this when I woke up in a sloshing puddle. My sleeping bag wasn’t too wet though, so I put on the rest of my clothing and scrunched up in the cubby hole so I could try to sleep in there and stay dry until the sun came out. I woke up around 5am, stopped in Hauser. All I could see were empty adjoining tracks, and a small highway a couple hundred feet away. Despite the cramped conditions I somehow fell back asleep and woke up again around 11, not having moved an inch. My legs were sore and I really, really had to get off the car to pee. The coast seemed clear but right as I poked my head out a UP work truck sped down the access road and screeched to a stop beside my train. Two workers yelled, “Hey!” and came over to talk to me. It had been very cold the night before, and I was wearing every article of clothing I had taken with me (not including the stripper gear), topped off with my favorite vintage air force flight suit and a colorful knit hat I found in my old apartment building’s free pile. I think I still had eyeliner on. Basically I looked kind of ridiculous.

     The workers assured me that if the yard’s ‘special agent’ caught me I would be arrested and that I best be walking over to the highway and hitching to Spokane. They were polite, though, and patiently waited for me to gather up my things and climb off before they sped away. I crossed over the tracks, wiggled out of my long johns, and ate my last stale bagel while I watched three or four different work trucks drive along my train, each of them slowing slightly when they were adjacent to the grainer I had been on. Checking out the rest of the train I saw that there was an open boxcar five cars up from my car, and I decided that I would run over and get on it after the last workers drove off. I got my stuff together and started walking parallel to the tracks when I heard the brakes airing up and then the train started rolling. I don’t like getting on moving boxcars so instead I ran back over to my original grainer, threw my stuff in the hole, and very quickly hid. As the train pulled out of Hauser I was feeling pretty gangsta.

     By dinner time I was in Pasco. My train terminated at the eastern tip of the yard, and I easily climbed off and hiked through the tall grass surrounding a gigantic ConAgra factory before hitching into town with a nice Mexican couple in a stuffed two-door sedan (it’s always the poor people that pick you up). After wasting $5 on a disappointing burrito from a taco truck I hiked back to the east end of the train yard, where I knew there was a cheap motel with a fantastic view of the tracks. On the way there I ran into a group of crust punks, looking like they had obviously just gotten off a train. They saw me and quickly glanced away, but I stopped anyway to ask where they had come from and where they were going. They answered with grunts and evasive eyes, so I wished them luck (all five of them were trying to hitchhike together) and kept walking, buying a piece of chocolate at a Mexican bakery on the way.

     When I finally made it to the motel the Indian man behind the check-in desk knew I was a train rider. “I don’t rent to train kids. They get a room, say there’s only one person, and then they bring all their friends and trash the place!” But he broke his rule and rented to me anyway, because he thought I was sweet and polite and because I was traveling alone. I promised to take care of the room but it didn’t matter anyway because it was already totally disgusting. There were stains on the bedspread and pubes in the sink, but the mattress was firm and at least there was free cable! Everything in my pack was damp from being in the rain the night before, so I spread out all my stockings and garters on all the lampshades to dry. I called Cameron and left a message, and after showering and shaving, I went to bed. Out the window above my pillow you could see the busy train yard forty feet away, just beyond the buzzing neon motel sign. At 1am there was a knock on the door, and I unchained the lock to find Cameron, fresh off an eastbound train from Seattle. We went back to bed together and in the morning walked back downtown, spending the day eating burritos, smoking cigarettes, and drinking horchata, lounging at plastic picnic tables in front of taco trucks. The Stampede Pass train came right on schedule, and just like before, it nearly took my arm off trying to catch it. Cameron was staying put in Pasco so I said goodbye at the bus station and took a Greyhound by myself to Ellensburg, the next crew change point. The bus dropped me off near the highway and I walked over to the Red Horse Diner, ate an order of French fries on the deck, and then climbed onto the mid-train DPU that was conveniently less than thirty feet from my table. I called Cameron to tell him I was ok and leaned back in the conductor’s chair with both windows open and the smell of pine trees in the air.

     Six short, relaxed hours later and my train pulled into Seattle, alongside Boeing Field. I hopped off and started walking toward Georgetown as I watched a cute young worker in overalls drive up, climb into the engine I had left just ten minutes later, and then cut the air. I turned my cell phone back on and called my friend Richard, who offered to pick me up and make me dinner. Twenty minutes later and we were on our way back to the old apartment we used to share. The next day I deposited all the money I had made from working in Fargo. I haven’t stripped since.

4/10/2010

I am currently on an airplane, flying above some brown midwestern state, on my way to the desert oasis of Phoenix, Arizona. Tonight I am meeting Cameron on a certain street corner near a freeway viaduct, and from there we are going to try and catch a train to Belen, New Mexico. I am pretty tired but I can’t really sleep. Too bright on this plane, and I think I am too anxious. Listening to a radio podcast about hitchhiking, which is making me think about how much I loathe hitchhiking. This morning was frantic – I hardly slept after working a closing shift the night before so I only managed to do a few of the things on my long laundry list of errands. Mark came over to see me off, which turned into an hour of sweaty farewell fucking. When he left I started to run hot water for a shower – the last shower I get to take all week – and the water heater broke. Fuck me.

4/11/10

Funny how much can change in 24 hours. Cold ass on steel floor, on a boxcar riding through Arizona creosote country. A little nippy for my tastes. Since last night my muscles have all turned achy, my hair is already matted and coated in grime, and my skin has a slight tinge of gray. If only we had gotten on the boxcar with the luxury bathroom compartment...

     My flight from New York last night was uneventful. Upon arrival I changed into my train clothes in the ladies bathroom at the airport. Goodbye miniskirt and platform sandals – hello patched Carhartts and hoodie I should have washed last week but didn’t! I found the bus stop that Cameron told me to look for and waited for a ride that would take me to the nondescript intersection that was close to where we could get on our first train. The bus driver that picked me up was the most ornery woman I have encountered in a long time. I asked her how much the fare was and she answered with a curt question. “Where are you going?” Every polite question I asked was answered with another question or a criticism of the original question. She didn’t approve of the neighborhood I was going to, I mistakenly said ‘street’ when I meant to say ‘avenue’, etc etc. By the end of our whole interaction she was muttering under her breath that I was an idiot. I thought she was going to kick me off but eventually she let me out across town at the right stop. The neighborhood didn’t seem so sketchy but what did I know... apparently nothing. It didn’t matter much anyway because the next bus came quickly and this new bus driver was jovial and friendly. It was dark by then, and on the half-full bus I was a hit. I don’t think there are too many tall female Asian backpackers in Phoenix. Before the bus was about to go under a freeway overpass I got off, and sitting on an ornamental rock waiting for me was my best friend Cameron, who I hadn’t seen in months. He was playing a Madonna song on a Casio keyboard that he later told me he had bought for $2 at the local Goodwill. He had been visiting his family in Palm Springs but his sole purpose in Phoenix was to meet me so we could ride out of town.

     Over a pre-recorded beatbox track he gave me the lowdown on the night’s activities. Across the street was the main BNSF yard, where almost every night there is a mixed manifest train that goes to Belen, New Mexico, which was our first destination and transfer point. Past a dirt lot off the sidewalk there was a graffitied brick wall that we could jump over to reach the mainline, where our train was already made up and waiting. Cameron had been listening to the railroad scanner and knew that our train’s crew was about ready to go. I peed behind a bush next to a dark office building and then we were off. The wall was too high for me to climb over so Cameron gave me a boost and I helped pass up all our gear. After we jumped down we walked quickly but as nonchalantly as possible to an open boxcar that Cameron had spotted earlier. He gave me another boost and then we were both in. The adrenalin of sneaking into the yard was short lived. I was exhausted and laying down on the flat metal floor reminded me how tired I was, so I got out my sleeping bag and layered together some cardboard to sleep on. Cameron was sleepy too, and back to being his usual gross self. I love him, but dear God, I wish he would shower or at least change his socks more often.

     I fell asleep quickly but it was a lot colder than I thought it would be and halfway through the night I had to dig through my backpack to find my sleeping bag liner and put on all the rest of my clothes. Around 3am the train abruptly came to a stop and I woke up. I hate that feeling – riding a train, waking up when you realize you’ve stopped for who knows what reason, you’re in the middle of nowhere, and you have no idea when or if you’ll start moving again. The engines never disconnected from our train but our crew was nowhere to be found. We figured that they had exceeded or were about to exceed their maximum shift hours (there is a railroad handbook you can read to find out about these sorts of fascinating things) and were sleeping in a nearby motel before they continued the rest of the way to Winslow. After looking up our milepost number we discovered that we were in scenic Ashfork, Arizona, which judging by our panorama boxcar view was comprised of two mini-marts and a small maze of dead-end streets. There was nothing we could do, so we went back to sleep, or at least tried to.

     Unfortunately our short hold-up ended up being over ten hours. The morning stretched on and on and we were bored out of our minds. At one point Cameron left our boxcar in search of hot coffee, junk food for him, and an apple for me. The outing was a success but it made me wish I could take a shower in the dingy motel that looked like it was only a few blocks away from the tracks. The sign was so close I could almost read it (free HBO? Continental breakfast?), but with my luck I’d be halfway down the block when the train decided to finally leave without me. Knowing Cameron he’d probably be leaning out the boxcar, waving and laughing at me...

4/12/10

What to say? Nothing to say. Nothing’s happening, nothing’s changed. I am sitting up against some dumpster, waiting for yet another train, on the side of a warehouse in Amarillo, Texas. Most of the houses here have chainlink fences and yappy little dogs, unfriendly to strange people with backpacks walking aimlessly down its residential streets, but the people are nice and overall so far I like it here. We were in Belen yesterday morning, where we had gotten off our Phoenix boxcar to find ourselves in this dusty little shit of a town. Belén, town of Bethlehem and churches and a public library with pathetic hours, due to budget cuts. Maybe if their government spent more money on literacy and less on aimless law enforcement...Within the space of an hour we managed to watch four separate cop cars cruising the empty, wide streets. We ducked into a Mexican restaurant to escape, where we filled up on coffee and cheap tacos before following our crew change directions to the next catch out spot, a wooded field across town and at the end of a meandering dead-end road. As the sun set the large yard was lit up with powerful spotlights, and when a IM train finally pulled in to crew change on the mainline we looked both ways and ran like hell. A few seconds after we frantically climbed onto our car there were workers everywhere, driving around our train and checking the air hoses. We had made it, but just barely, onto a 48’ long car with a 42’ container centered in it. There was only a three feet wide sliver of space for us to stretch out and share, but luckily we were only going one stop and my nose was starting to adjust to how Cameron smelled.

     Eight hours later we chugged to a stop in Amarillo, Texas, right as the sky had finally made up its mind up about raining. A longish walk through early morning humdrum residential streets brought us to my ideal destination after a train ride: a diner. This one was almost perfect, really the best I could have hoped for. Bottomless coffee, cheap breakfast standards, friendly waitress. I ordered coffee, two poached eggs, and a side of hash browns. Later I got half a pancake (split it with Cameron) and a biscuit, to satisfy the carbohydrate craving I’d been harboring since New York. I think the biscuits were from a can but they still hit the spot. We quickly made friends with the waitress, which wasn’t hard to do once Cameron started batting his eyes at her and speaking in Spanish. The table next to us was friendly too, two sweet older men, one short and skinny and the other morbidly obese, and fluent in Spanish also. “They bought your breakfast,” said the waitress, leaning down and whispering in my ear. We stayed a long time at that diner, where for the first time in a long time I could enjoy a smoke at the table with my coffee (ahh!). Little dimpled plastic ashtrays, excessive Coca-Cola paraphernalia on the walls, 25¢ vending machine selling stale candy by the register. The diner was only a few blocks away from where we knew we could catch out, but there was a fierce wind storm and no activity in the yard, so we were happy to stay put indoors. Cameron was listening to the scanner again, all stealth with only one earphone in, while at the same time rambling away in Spanish (waitress, big dude, small dude) and English (me). It’s amazing. I don’t know how he does it.

4/13/2010

Shoulders and back are sore from yet another night spent on the hard floor of an engine, sleeping on five layers of corrugated cardboard. But I’m on a train heading north, slowly approaching Denver city limits, so I am pleased.

     Re-cap. Amarillo was not easy. One of Cameron’s friends had caught out there a few weeks before, and he had told us about a daily coal train that did a crew change around noon. So around 11 we packed up and started walking toward the yard. As predicted, a coal train soon came around the curve, but when the DPU (the only car we could actually ride, really) swung around it was still going about 20 or 25 miles an hour. We ran toward it anyway, but then saw that the ballast was banked so steeply up to the tracks that it was impossible to run next to the train and catch on the fly. When the DPU disappeared into the yard we retreated back to our little hideout behind a dumpster and just hoped that were would be another train coming soon.

     We continued waiting, taking turns pacing up and down empty industrial streets to get a break from the stale air that had started to circulate around each other. I volunteered to walk down along the tracks to see if there was a better place to wait, where we’d be more hidden and also where the tracks leveled off and there was space to run next to them. A few blocks away I ended up finding the perfect spot. The mainline tracks joined up with another track coming from the yard and for about fifteen feet the ballast was flat enough for us to run on without falling. I reported back to our dumpster and Cameron and I packed up again to move north. The crew change guide mentioned several daily coal trains running out of Amarillo but as the day dragged into evening we realized we had probably missed our only possible ride earlier that day. The wind wasn’t letting up and as the temperature dropped the rain started drowning us again. Seventy years ago this awful wind covered the eroded plains with black dust and dirt, and it was easy to see why. It was relentless. I had found a little place for us to sit and watch the yard, up against a crumbling wall and in between pockets of mud and beer cans, but it wasn’t covered. Behind the wall Cameron found another place we could sit, under the awning of a small building whose workers had gone home for the day. For awhile it was ok, but soon the wind got violent enough that we were getting pelted sideways with rain. Both of us were in a bad mood and hating each other, not talking, just shivering. Cameron left to go on another one of his silent mood swing walks, but a few minutes later he returned with a grin. After I gathered up my things he led me around the building and through a parking lot full of refrigeration trucks. Finally he stopped in front of one of the largest trucks and unlatched the lock on the trailer’s roll-up door. It was filled with dismantled coolers, like the kind you’d find in gas stations, waiting to be filled with soda and beer. Toward the front there was room for us to sleep on the floor, and when you stood up inside the cab you could see over the fence and into the yard clearly. It was perfect. We listened to the rain slap against the sides of the truck as we unpacked again and drifted off to sleep.

     By 6am the next morning we were scrambling to get our things together so there wouldn’t be any trace of us when the workers clocked in. I felt like a zombie, walking down the street in my dirty wrinkled clothes and matted hair, half-asleep but slowly coming to life. The only destination I was interested in going to was our diner, where I could indulge in another cup of crappy coffee to sustain the artificial consciousness I seemed to have been maintaining since the beginning of this trip. Cameron walked alongside me, silent. We were the first customers and our old familiar waitress was surprised to see us back. She knew we were trying to hop a train out of town and figured we had made it out the day before. Unlimited free refills tripped me up and before I knew it I had drunk around five or six cups of coffee. I tried to balance it out with hash browns but I still felt like shit. The diner was starting to feel like a black hole in Amarillo, sucking out our motivation to leave and replacing it with empty carbohydrates and burnt coffee grounds. Cameron and I crawled out the door and trudged over to the library, so he could charge the batteries for our scanner and I could negate my diner illness with Richard Avedon books. Both of us kept an eye on the clock and soon it was time – another coal train would be rolling into the yard around noon, and we had to walk back to our spot if we ever wanted another chance to escape Texas.

     Within an hour we were on a train leaving Amarillo. Just as predicted, the daily coal train came back around the curve at noon, and our little patch of semi-flat ballast was just barely enough for us to run and jump on the rear DPU. It was by far the fastest train I had ever caught, and the second after I got a grip on the ladder and felt my feet lift up I was ecstatic. Against the wind I ran down the walkway and opened the door to the cab, while behind me Cameron barely made it on himself. Inside the DPU we slumped on the floor, out of breath. “I didn’t think you could catch it,” Cameron sneered at me, smiling. I gave him a look. “I didn’t think you could catch it...”

     What commenced was one of the prettiest train rides I have even taken. Barren dry desert vistas were interspersed with travel trailers and abandoned wood plank houses, tilted sideways, half-buried in earth. Who lived there, why, how? We were in the midst of Dust Bowl country and I envisioned ghost clouds of dirt drifting across the plains. We seemed to be the only humans around for miles, not including our engineer and conductor, whose silhouettes we hid from when our train made wide turns. It continued raining as our train crossed the Panhandle and headed north into Colorado. We were in the last car on the whole train, and I opened the rear door and sat on the porch taking photos, filming super 8, staring off into space and watching the distant horizon bob up and down, up and down...

4/15/10

In bed at my usual Seattle hotel room. One of my favorites, not in terms of interior decorating (the floral bedspread is dreadful) but the view out the window – BNSF mainline! It’s the little things that mean a lot...

     Cameron and I split up. The last time I saw him was outside around 7am on an anonymous Denver street. I was so tired. Our little coal train had sputtered into town after a night of fitful sleep, our bodies forming a misshapen jigsaw puzzle on the limited floorspace underneath the engineer’s command chair. I turned on my phone and had been getting increasingly frantic messages from my mom, who was waiting for me to show up in Seattle. The original plan was that after flying into Phoenix I would hop trains with Cameron to Texas and then back to the Pacific Northwest, so I could visit my parents for a couple days and fulfill some obligations, and then I would fly back home to New York from Seattle. If the train ended up taking too long, which it had, I was planning on flying or taking a bus to Seattle from whatever town I ended up in, instead of riding. Which meant that, unfortunately, Denver was the end of the line for me, so to speak. Cameron was continuing northbound without me, hopping another train departing in the afternoon from a nearby yard, and I planned on meeting up with a friend before figuring out how to get to the airport. We got off the DPU amicably and started walking into town together, but as the blocks got longer, Cameron’s strides increased and I was having a hard time keeping up. Soon I started walking slower deliberately, seeing if he would even notice if I was no longer by his side. He didn’t. On a street corner we finally met up again and I suggested something civilized, like stopping by the local 7-11, the only thing open at the time, for a cup of coffee and a donut (my treat!). But he was impatient and surly and I was sick of it. We both turned around and walked in opposite directions without saying a single word. Alone, my coffee tasted delicious and I drank it without guilt.

     A few cigarettes later and I had managed to walk into downtown proper. I found the main branch of the library, but it was way too early and it was closed. I sat on a concrete bench outside and read the paper, and once the doors finally opened I signed up to use the internet and bought a surprisingly cheap (why do I like hopping trains again?) one-way plane ticket to Seattle, departing later that same day. Back outside, I called my friend Shawn, someone I’d been collaborating with on a photography show but had never met in person. His house was a short bus ride away and after another hour spent navigating the city I was in his kitchen, drinking some hot coffee with soy milk. After awhile spent sitting in his backyard, talking and smoking more cigarettes on tree stump stools, I got the courage to ask a favor: letting me use his shower. It seemed very bougie but I don’t think I ever wanted anything so bad before in my life. It was delicious. It had only been a few days but I was grimy, physically and mentally. The hot water washed it all away. In my backpack I had folded up the dress I had flown to Phoenix in, and after scrubbing away at my skin I could put it back on without feeling like a drag queen. I re-emerged from the steamy bathroom victorious, and Shawn walked me to the bus stop before wishing me safe travels. And now I am here. Not home, but close enough. I bought this room for cheap, and I am shacked up here until I leave again in a couple days. My backpack is full of film rolls and my stomach is full of dim sum. More importantly, my parents are happy. Tomorrow I fly back home to New York!

Thanks for reading ❤️