Two Trains Running

INTRODUCTION: THE STEEL

SEVERAL YEARS AGO I CONTRACTED TO DO AN article for Spin magazine concerning a hobo organization called the FTRA (Freight Train Riders of America), a group that certain elements of law enforcement claimed was a hobo mafia responsible for—among other crimes—hundreds of murders, drug running on a massive scale, and the derailing of trains. As a result, I wound up hopping freights over the span of a couple months. I talked to train tramps in hobo jungles, urban squats, wino bars, at a supermax prison, and in various other venues. For a time I traveled with a hobo whom I called Madcat in the article, holding back his real name for fear he might suffer reprisals from those who did not like what I wrote about them. In Madcat’s company I experienced a fair sampling of hobo life. It’s a life that has little connection with the commonly held, somewhat folkloric view of hobos, one chiefly conveyed by stories and songs and images that reference the Depression era, portraying hobos—or as they prefer to be distinguished these days, train tramps—as colorful kings-of-the-road, lazy, easygoing, good-time-loving, stogie-smoking gents who might be prone to a little drunkenness, a little petty larceny, but nothing worse than that. Though this image may loosely fit the contemporary train tramp, it scarcely describes them. While some of the men and women I met on the rails were seriously dysfunctional, the remainder were more-or-less whole. They were not truly homeless, not impoverished clue to fate—they had simply declined, for one reason or another, society’s invitation to join and claimed to be fulfilled by their vagrant lives. They enjoyed being able to indulge laziness and substance abuse, and enjoyed, too, the brotherhood they found on the rails (“brotherhood” and “sisterhood” were words I often heard used to evoke the chief virtue of the lifestyle). Yet I would characterize few of them as easy-going. Surrounded by violence, generally in poor health, afflicted with psychological difficulties resulting from the stress of their day-to-day existence, they all passed a significant portion of their time in states of aggravation, fear, anxiety, and delirium. When I would press them as to the reason they continued to live as they did, the vast majority responded in kind: the trains.

There’s no doubt that riding on a freight car as it carries you through some moonlit, mysterious corner of the American night is a rush like mystical whiskey for anyone with half an imagination. It’s loud, uncomfortable, and a lot of the time it’s damn cold, but it’s also romantic. You’re riding with ghosts, those of Jack Kerouac and Jack London and Ernest Hemingway, and all the ghosts of famous hobos that only hobos have ever heard of, and the fact that it’s illegal and a little dangerous makes the moonlight extra silvery, and your bottled water tastes extra silvery, too. Working at my desk sometimes, I’ll find myself transported back to a rattling, rushing moment and remember how it felt to be lost and alone in America, to be seeing the country from a perspective not many of us achieve. In my head I’ve got a file of snapshots of things and places few people will ever have a chance to see. A perfect little canyon in New Mexico, a trough of yellow stone brimful with golden late afternoon light, decorated with pines and grazing deer. Being almost stalled on an upgrade in the Rockies, sitting on the back of a grain car and watching a young woman, topless, wearing ragged shorts, her body adorned with tattoos of vines and leaves, emerge from the underbrush like a woodland spirit materializing and stare calmly at me from fifteen feet away (a sight whose magic was somewhat diminished when her boyfriend appeared, dragging their packs, and they hopped aboard the next car down). Standing in the Salt Lake City yard and seeing a pack of crusty punks—pierced, tattooed, grimy boys and girls—burst out from behind a string of rusting boxcars and scatter through the weeds, reminiscent in the suddenness of their passage, their deft speed and efficient flight, of wild animals started up by a threatening scent. It’s one hell of an experience, but would I surrender my life to recapture it? Not hardly.

Most train tramps spend far more time in squats and jungles and missions than they do on the rails, but riding the trains is the core experience of hobo life and they venerate it because it’s the only thing they have to venerate. All men, however debased their state, require a myth to sustain them. It may be a god, a devil, a lover, a dream of success or glory—whatever its nature, whether or not it reflects the least reality, we are moved to mythologize it, because our assumed intimacy with this presence elevates our self-esteem. For the hobo, whose functional relationship with the world is severely circumscribed, the train is the sole object worthy of deification. He conceives of it as embodying a romantic menace deserving of respect, this being the quality of which he feels most bereft. It is the trains, then, two-million-ton beasts with electric hearts and diesel blood, that function as god in the hobo pantheon, a god with whom he likes to believe he maintains a symbiotic relationship, one who transports him to places and experiences inaccessible to ordinary men, and whom he commonly refers to as the Steel.

I’ve talked to elderly train tramps, men in their sixties and seventies, who claim to have known Depression-era hobos, and from what I can gather, the freight trains have always been mythologized by those who rode them; but though it has never been other than difficult, it seems that hobo life was not so miserable or rife with danger in the old days as it can be now; thus I am convinced that the mythologizing of the trains has become more self-consciously devotional, an attitude necessary to sustain some men’s commitment to the life. Certainly this is true with regards to a man named Big Sky Dave whom I encountered one night underneath a system of overpasses on the edge of Portland, Oregon, where the interstate merged a series of exchanges, a contemporary wasteland mapped by mattes of rotted cardboard and defiles filled with broken bottles and crushed cans. Everywhere were the signs of a fugitive existence. Lost shoes, message graffiti, discarded clothing. There were pillars all around, the lights of the city showing blurred through fog, like the lights of a distant coast, and I spotted Dave sitting in a meditative pose beside an abutment in a spot where the fog had thinned. He appeared to be in his forties. Gaunt and rawboned, with large callused hands. Black hair threaded with gray hung to his shoulders. Dwarfed by the sweep of dirty concrete above him, he radiated an air of detachment and had about him a dynamic placidity such as you might associate with a librarian or a funeral director, of someone constantly forced to speak in soft tones. He wore an old army jacket with HENDERSON, R. G. stenciled on the pocket. It may or may not have been his real name.

The expanse of concrete directly above Dave’s head had been tagged with the brightly colored and skillfully rendered image of a demonic-looking locomotive, red lightnings spraying from its stack. A couple of cans of spray paint lay on the ground next to him, leading me to assume that he must be the artist. Naturally we mistrusted one another. Trust is a commodity not easy to come by in such circumstances. But after a while we fell to talking and Dave’s conversation, though it skated over a variety of subjects—politics; freight schedules; which local beer had the highest alcohol content; etc.—mainly centered upon trains. As we drank (few discussions one has with hobos are free of significant substance abuse), he pulled out a stack of spiral ring notebooks—they must have constituted nearly half the weight of his pack—and proceeded to read from the literally hundreds of tributes to trains that they contained. The majority of the poems and prose fragments he read were overly sentimental, often mawkishly so, but they all made clear that he viewed the trains in a quasi-religious context. He called them not only “the Steel,” but when speaking of a specific train, he would sometimes refer to it as “the Creature.” Among his writings were a handful of gems, in particular a long, singsongy ode to the old streamliner passenger trains of the ’40s and ’50s (for purposes of meter and rhyme, Dave used the word “streamline” to refer to them), whose chorus evoked a mournful train whistle:

I asked Dave if the spray-painted train was his doing and he told me he always left the same picture when he stayed in a place for a few days. Try as I might, I couldn’t redirect the course of the conversation. He was too drunk, too obsessed with his subject, with his evangelical desire to persuade me of the majesty of trains. His words grew almost unintelligible. Eventually he passed out. When I woke in the morning he was gone. After packing my belongings, I had a last look at the spray-painted locomotive, took a photograph of it, and as I glanced about at the ranks of great pillars, the high concrete arches, the slants of sunlight piercing down from the upper reaches of the interchange, for the first time I recognized how like churches were these all-but-deserted places on the edges of our cities. Like unfinished cathedrals whose congregations have run out of funds and moved on to try their luck elsewhere.

In contemplating this mini-collection, deciding to put together a magazine article with stories derived from the same material, I hoped the process by which the real is transformed into the fictive might be thereby illustrated, at least as regards my own work, and that this relationship might be interesting to certain readers. But in writing this introduction I’ve come to realize that perhaps the most significant function of the book is that it adds a small but hopefully interesting drop to the literature concerning hobos, a sketchy tradition that dates back to the end of the Civil War, when the first hobos, the defeated soldiers of the Confederacy, having no money, no horses, rode the rails en masse in order to return to their homes: You see them in old photographs, like flocks of gray crows inhabiting boxcar after boxcar, all staring listlessly, bleakly out at the world, drunk on blood and dying, an expression whose cousin one can still see today in the faces of train tramps drunk on less potent mixtures. It’s a tradition that’s unlikely to have many more additions. With increasingly effective high-tech security being utilized by the railroad companies, the freight yards are becoming harder and harder to infiltrate, and without access to slow-moving trains, train tramps may become—for all intents and purposes—extinct. According to the viewpoint of law enforcement and of society in general, this will be a good thing. For my part, even though most of the people in America have no awareness of hobos, I think we’ll miss them—I think not having that color running through the veins of the culture will thin our national blood. When I consider my brief time on the rails, I recall initially not scenes of degradation or violence, but the solitudes in which I found myself. Freight routes cover portions of the country never seen by anyone apart from those who ride the trains, and there are places of great beauty that will be forgotten. With no one to look at them, even if only through drunken and corrupted eyes, it will be as if parts of our map have vanished, in a very real sense restoring that map to something resembling the unfinished depiction of the continent that was deemed accurate more than a century ago. I remember, too, the stories I was told. Men grown old before their time, with gray beards, rheumy eyes, and poisoned livers, gazing back along the violent, dissolute corridors of their lives and relating observations and experiences informed by an oddly genteel aesthetic: moments of kindness, of unexpected good fortune, of happy days and boxcar parties that lasted from California to the Dakotas. All that lovely illusion and truth about the freedom of the rails and the inebriated Zen-monk illuminations that attend it…all that will be gone if the freight companies have their way and rid the yards of the derelicts, the dented souls, the human rats who ride the Steel. As will the skinny, million-mile-long city of the rails with its vagrant populace and anarchic laws. It’s a tough place to live, but there are many cities in America that offer fewer cultural rewards.

Perhaps I’m being too pessimistic here. Perhaps sufficient technology will filter down into the hobo jungles and in the near future, cybernetically savvy train tramps will confound heat and motion detectors, slip unseen into the yards and barnacle themselves to robot-driven bullet freights, becoming devotees and celebrants of the New Steel. Probably not. The dissolute nature of hobo life, its fundamental lack of competency, would seem to lobby against this possibility. At the least it’s an idea for another story and maybe in the end that’s what is important. The world is made of stories. A man’s life is a cloud of entangled narratives, and history a wagging tongue. And so as long as there are stories to be told about hobos, they’ll continue in the way we all continue, products of our own myths, heroes in a misperceived and diminutive cause.