Re: halloween 2014

The china international seems to have furled its sails and slows gradually to a creaking immobility somewhere just outside pendleton oregon and we crack the books again, the late morning sun burning down through the panes.

Soon there is a small movement directly ahead on my side and I look up to see a worker advancing gingerly round the bend back to our end. PJ infers that it's probably the engineer and that there must be a problem with the unit we are riding. We stumble out the other side wearily and take cover behind the trees lining an adjacent field. We watch him climb up inside and wait anxiously for the door to signal his departure as we watch and listen to them troubleshoot the line. This is no crew change point and there is nothing routine about watching a train pull up and then back again on a single main like it's trying to hook a deer. We get the impression that it may well be easier if we walked the remaining few miles into town and look for a local to la grande. Hotter than shit in the morning hungry and hung over, but we make it there sooner than later. The best anybody can hope for drilling the final miles, though some of us sometimes wish we'd die first.

Pendleton as many have noticed has the prison, right there by the tracks. And many of them have served in there, I know, the east oregon waypoint for all Wa-county overflow. Surrounded in razorwire and 20 feet of fence for acres. But we didn't ride through pendleton this time we had to walk all the way in from the west side, and so the town we found this time around was much more pleasant than the picture one is presented trackside. It was small and it was clean.

"I'm heading to Grocer Outlet if they have any coffee"

"I'm flying a sign... bring me some if you think they do"

"Yeah"

Before I make it back to the intersection I've got a text from jack in the box about a guy buying us breakfast, and I head over for a burrito and coffee and polite conversation. I always preferred to make conversation with people on my own terms, and whenever it was paired with this tall bastard they always kind of assumed I was the bitch, which is funny, but also not. So I would just silently fume and let my better half go on and do most the talking. That's what he was good at or better than myself anyhow. That and pissing me off -- which he would've been delighted to know if I'd ever let on about it, because for the most part I made sure that it was the other way around. We lounged around the rest of the day perusing for prett'ns where there were none. But we did find a place to crash without any trouble later on thanks to the, uh, better half. My dawg is an aficionado, I discover, when it comes to jiggling doorknobs. Quite skilled, apparently. When night came and he left me and his pack there in the park he was back again not long after with coordinates of a vacant realty only 10 blocks to the west and north. Mighty handsome find, mighty handsome.

It's a realty alright and we three dogs sleep like busted up angels on a white wetvacked shag thick as a bed of grass. Small towns have their perks.

Next day we find a bus that takes us the last 20 miles out to La Grande and from there the first order of business beside food is to hook up with the kindly engineer who'd found the phone I'd left charging on that engine back outside of Pendleton and texted us about it later the previous day thinking, we presumed, I was a company tech. We'd had to slip out in such a hurry I'd forgot to pull the obamr pager from the socket, and not remembered it until it was too late. The guy met us at the hardware store in a big red truck, handed us the phone and without asking us details submitted to a few questions about his job. Just the way anybody'd done it after getting a look at us I guess. Doesn't take an animal to tell who's been rolling around in the dust and rust all night and day.

How many days we stay in la grande it might've been one, it might've been three or four, and since already having spent time there a month prior my memory is foggy on it, but I can guess that the holdup was a banal one. A matter of juggling sleep with odd-duck train arrivals. I was already accustomed by this point to the incredible effort of dragging oneself out of a comatose to pack up and charge out for the ride, but I had not been expecting my dawg as experienced as he was to be so neglectful when the time came to wake the fuck up and head. 

La Grande is an alright place. Small like the rest of them east of the cascades and little on the chubby side. They've got a college, set up against the hills, and a walmart at the opposite end of town by the interstate. We'd run into this reserved and relatively well to do black kid at the mcdonalds there who said he was hitching to the rainbow gathering somewhere east that year. It's not a wholly common occurrence to see a negro goin it alone the way he was, not in my limited experience in any case, so he was a welcome fellow to have along for a couple of days while we lingered. But as soon as he caught on to the lack of brotherhood between PJ and I the guy went from timid to aggro and grating as all fuck, trying to intellectually maneuver my partner into submission in a really obnoxious way that I was disappointed to see PJ fall for. We're fuckin train riders and my so called partner in crime lacks the ability to segregate accordingly. Always trying to make friends with everybody and then issuing death threats when they fuck him over.. Not my style, not my brother.. so I take a walk, half hoping he will see it as a wave. I look around at the south end of town for anything of interest but find nothing. No sided trains, no dumpsters no gas stations no shade and I turn back for the yard as night approaches and my feet begin to ache.. I run into them again after nightfall, the black clown and the white clown, on the tracks marking cars and it's just as though I never left. Thankfully the tables apparently turned in my absence and blackie is no longer trying to assrape PJ. I'm able to allow myself to chum it up a little bit and relax into the crickets and the darkness I so cherish. Then, after cigars and beer, mr. rainbow gathering bids his adieus from somewhere nearby and I can hear his footsteps trail off in the dirt and gravel and all is quiet once more.

There was also Ron, the narcoleptic pigme I'd spent the previous christmas with, and 30 or so other oddities living at a church in west portland. He'd grown up in pendleton and so skipped back and forth seasonally it seemed. We ran into him by chance at the laundromat, and nothing else going for him that day volunteered to join in on the crusade. The crusade for shade. Friendly little guy and certainly not retarded but just a bit thick and exceedingly modest presumably thanks in part to his stature, both physical and social. A fine thing to be. 

So it was like lord of the rings, marching out into the swelter again for lunch and then to the park by the tracks to get faded. We with our knives and crusty faces and jolly halfling ron with his shoulder length hair and little legs jogging after us to keep up. I remarked to pj later that it felt strangely like being chased by a circus freak and he agreed. That guy endured to the bitter end. I don't remember encouraging it, I don't think, but I wasn't going to tell the guy to fuck off either. Ron was alright. But so was Blackie, and so were the highschoolers with the weed or the tweekers with the groceries but none of them were welcome either. I couldn't help but feel that it was my roadies goofy disposition that was to blame. I didn't take to the rails to make friends with incompetents and pedestrians.. people whose proper place in the world is in utter respect and fear and gratitude for the novelty of our even existing the way we choose to in their shitty capitalocracy metropolis.

So it's day 3 of my great volition and I've already had it up to the eyeballs with patches mcfuckinpuffinstuffs prepubescent indignity. 

Pocatello, ID.

Dusk again and we have an IM chicago bound, which take through Napa to Pocatello, the usual 12-16 hours out. I wake to the overcast sunlight and a text from penny jane half an hour ago says we're Tminus thirty minutes to poky and I'd better get ready. So I roll my shit together sleepy eyed and numbnosed. The true hell of winter's cold is still in the works, too early in the season to pay it any mind just yet.. But its cold enough and the ground at this altitude is already white and there's a blinding sheen in the toothy slopes towering out of the horizon ahead, south and eastwards. Luckily our train brakes first outside the yard before proceeding into it and I throw my things overboard and climb down the ladder onto a creaky thin carpet of powder. Nothing out here but what looks like an abandoned grainery and the outskirts of a slum on the other side. Bedlilly the dog is frantic with play, snout white and running off the morning shudders. So much cocaine.

PJ's got acquaintances in town from previous travels and legitimate folks this time, not no rainbow rugrats to play chutes and boots with. No no. A bonafide couple of ex-freight riders. He aims to visit, and there's no riding through pocatello on an IM besides anymore because security's tightened and they've decided those are the money trains and the cops like to look down into the wells from the bridges and throw money riders in jail. 

Before turning in we hit a cafe first, first thing in the morning on south side's main drag. Fifty fucking cents for a cup of joe! Excellent little low down place, too. The name escapes me. No one else in there but us at that hour, must've been a weekday, was very quiet. We wash up in the jon and defrost for a good solid hour before heading over.

Cassidy and Casper.. Cassidy is kind of a lookin' bitch, big and broad but by no means unbangable and Casper the hubby, also chunky, is a kind of storyteller. Together they make.. alcoholics. They must've had gallons of grape steel reserve and everclear stockpiled somewhere in back if the size of the jugs and quantities of mix she'd brought out first thing was anything to tell by. A little bit sweet for my tastes but I drank heartily for the cold ride we'd just left.  

First shit to shoot then showers, and next to go make a little pocket cash in town.

We try different corners each to ourselves once and then together the next at his more lucrative spot at the other end which made a lot more sense than the place I'd initially attempted at a traffic light. People really don't like me when I beg, for whatever reason. After sponging a few bucks from the locals and handin out some toothy smiles to all the ladies we get a 24 pack of domestic beer and start back to the jones's. Casper is offended at our choice when we present him with our winnings. "How do you expect to get drunk off THAT shit, you stooges. I'll pass".  

There were a couple other randos hangin around in their little place that day too. One dude who looked to me like jeff bridges in the big lebowski if jeff bridges ever never got laid, and the other a gay in punk rock garb and leather boots for whom you might conjure the image of marilyn manson without the makeup, also younger, who irritated the shit out of me. But Jeff bridges did not because he never said a word. He just stared into space. I too, like to stare into space, dude. I too.

Come midnight we give up the fist pounds and pack on down to the yard. We spend 3 or 4 hours laying between an old cement wall and some broken down old trucks next to the mains before a westbound rolls in. It's a gon we get this time, stopping right there in front of us.. and a solid trip through the rest of idaho and some of wyoming all the following day. Less the snow. For the first time the distance we've covered since Portland is beginning to feel like something. Something accomplished, palpable. 

A terrific windy ride over the plains. It was then that I learned the different ways one fixes to relieve himself, to piss to spite the wind. Kind of like people-politics.. sometimes you gotta get up real close so that your pecker is almost touching in order that no one gets hit with the fallout. Other times the airflow is such that it is only possible to go sideways, into the thin air and on occasion if there is a backdraft you stop off the flow and wait or else face the consequences. Taking a leak while trained is a vastly different undertaking to that of taking one while detrained. It is a skill, nay an art, a thing that requires some order of craftiness. Because necessity as the saying goes, is a motherfucker. 

Re: halloween 2014

The conversation so transcribed is not exactly verbatim now is it. Dramatization, for entertainment, of all the things we really wanted to say but could not without risking a flare of temper or a bruised ego since ours were then both quite fragile wherever the hammer fell.
The echoes of the complications of the west's dying masculinity are everywhere. And as for the truth if that is what you think I am covering for, I don't remember details like these so well whether it was last week or last year. The exchanges were sparse, and kind of just faggy at worst. In that impotent and inconsistent sort of way. Wholly unremarkable. Until the last days that is, then there were some hard words involved and then all a guy really wanted to do was talk with his knuckles. But we were headed for the east and so we relied mostly on civility, hoping it alone could keep us tied. Because there was a cold season ahead of us both in the backs of our minds.

Hinkle

I want to talk about fung shay for a moment.. feng shui. No one of us ever thinks twice about sound and magnetics and chemistry and what until something unexplained happens. They say that sound is but a partition of color, and color of light.

And light of space and space of time, and I don't suppose time is but the half shell on the back on the turtle of the turtle on the next and so on. So many turds in the swan pond to me, brothers and sisters honestly but there are places that all of these things seem to come together to create something strange. Not that nonsense about amphibians, I mean there is a continuity…

There is one night in the week, for instance, one night, the same night every week, a thursday that I'd found that if I'd turned my head at the right angle sometime after midnight on the pillow in my bed I could make out a harmony. Harmony as in the dual sounding of two notes at certain places down the neck of a stringed instrument, okay. Every thursday night, say, somewhere after midnight and provided I angled my one ear down, the right temple, there would be perceived a sound characteristic of a low hum. One is the vibration created between the lower one half-pane of the bedroom window that slides to open into the upper portion... the other source more mysterious but after some deliberation I decide is a low hum coming from the nearby hills out toward the training base beyond east selah. Every one or two nights in the week, the resulting harmonic as I said, created through resonance.

So that is what I came to look forward to as I would drift off provided I had not already, there at the old farm in washington state.

There are also these things they call geoclysmic symmetrations which when one is in place to see it, the entire western face of a mountainside for instance may approximate some semblance of a bear, or of a man laying on his back, looking up at the sky. Think of the face they've claimed to find on mars. Fung shu folks, fung shu guys. That is, providing that it is the right time of day and the sun to the south is south enough that the shadows are long and the furrows all furrowed such that you can make out the earnest grimace on the man's face … obviously the martians didn't get enough lay. But maybe they were too busy. Busy building faces in the dirt, fellas. Faces for posterity or something, I won't be the judge.

So too; there is this section of track on the columbia line, some miles after Boardman riding the final hour into Hinkle, that I remember especially for the same reasons. There, shortly after the columbia curves off from us into the trinities and looking off to the south there are again those same thousand red eyes blinking in unison for miles and miles and you are hypnotized. Without phone or radio or watch to force out the dark, laying back to close your eyes there is this distinctly cacophonous low pitched groan created by some defect peculiar to that section of track. It is this wall of noise at first, but then, after a moment of adjustment all harmony. It's like a symphony in the clouds that seems to bend and bow and billow out of every 3 winged wind powered angel out there and it sings to you. If you'll let it.

We must've hit in sometime after midnight. I already know the place well from aforementioned previous excursion 10 months prior. I knew already the immaculate desolation one jumps into if one should hit in at night into all that emptiness. The first time Hinkle is like stepping ones first accidental step on the moon or any moon in a dream, it's spooky and downright alien. It even smells strange out there. The second time Hinkle is nowhere near as aweful because the memory of it hits you again all at once and you know enough not to head for the light in the farthest distance, in the case that you are hungry or thirsty. Unless of course you're prepared for an hour hike, or a swim. A total wasteland.

Odd thing when we'd stopped. They'd detached just at the throat of the yard and without breaking the air. So we had lain there, in our respective cars, wide awake for half an hour or more before roadie jumped out to survey the head and realized that they must've sealed us off. All the way out there at the asshole of the headless worm the fred still whirred.

We take cover in the old dormant units a couple miles up at the Y at the west end and sleep off all our whiskey through the remaining dusk, and in the liminal thirsts of first light I am already sitting up again, cracking sunflower seeds, tiredly nursing my sleepless head. I hear engines and stand up to watch china bring us some stacks down the main. It grinds to a halt and I wake the dogs. As some would guess we don't find anything good the whole thing over so we start for the pushers on the double to the rear when a hiss of air warns an imminent departure.

"See those?...

Roadie points to a string of triton outfits, giant neptunal prongs embracing each end of the containing barges. They provide terrific coverage from the sides, but zero to fore and aft between them and are in such wise not ideal rides.

"...only in a pinch."

I have to reflect on his words for a minute before I remember the Veteran-Student arrangement again, the terms we'd started with. He's still showing me the ropes I guess. I'd not seen those peculiar well cars just yet sure, but its not like I'd never consider climbing up into one myself if I was ever desperate, whether I knew what the hell they were called or not. And I supposed then that appearances are an important part of coping under pressure for some people. The smoothing your hair back stratagem.

"Ahh-huh.. interesting!", Says I.

We waited a long time before china pulled, and then it was a drawn out sidling along over pasture and sages and some river for a couple of hours, PJ fiddling with the nobs on the radio in the conductors chair and me in the brakeman's seat with my feet up on the speedometer, contemplating existence all and sundry.. Meditating on every plant and bee I can conjure in my field of vision, waiting immortally patient, as I suppose myself to be, for the autumn quilt that blew right off the perfect bed she made.

halloween 2014

the trains



It’s halloween, or the day after halloween. I remember that it is the day after because november first marked the 2nd anniversary to the night I caught my first train, out of seattle, straight into jail. I forget most everything besides but that I am grabbing onto an eastbound manifest airing up for clearance on champ siding in northeast, with my road dawg and his doggy dog hopping up into the grainer ahead of mine.


The previous 3 months things have gone about opposite from how they were charted to. I'd come back down from herring and salmon in alaska with a few thousand and a game plan. Instead of taking a ticket to spain or czechia or a car or all on hookers, I’d resolved to turn myself back into a housie there in pdx and save for college. Serious business. I set about finding any job I could get straightaway, but these things go their own way… Your boots don’t fit right, that extra elevated section in the side walk.. keeps tripping you up.. someone doesn’t like your shirt, or maybe it was the day you were completely fucked because all the drinking you did the night previous. In my case it was the pos of dangerous weapon on my backcheck. I nail a few jobs almost right away, and there is a week there that I am not even sure which one I want. Hertz parking tenant, Fisherman’s finest deck hand, or warehouse associate down in wilsonville? Decisions. But they all call me back, one after the other, about the same thing. I’m harmless and drug free as a bee but no one wants to hire me and weeks wear by. Taking it like a true athlete, naturally I make no effort to reduce spending and carry on lounging around bars and restaurants like a king. I’ll find something.

A month later I’m sleeping in the fields next to the airport and five days in seven there is no money enough for a bus into town, so I’m walking. Walking 2 hours into the labor ready at 5 in the morning. Walking 3 hours to yellow brick road on thursdays, walking an hour to my weekend drinking spot on the siding or else up to the friendo's place on Sandy. Walking and walking.

Meanwhile I am leaving my shit in the field where there is nobody. But as it happens there doesn’t always have to be anyone there at all for your shit to disappear regardless. One night I get off the lightrail back from a long day of job searching and hitting up food banks, and stepping into my home field I discover its been cut. Some bootlip cocksucker had come with the big guns and ploughed, pulverized everything. Steel toe work boots, coat, pack, bivy, everything. Fine. There's a few things that only got chewed and I manage with what I’ve got all right. Summer is still alive and well for another month and all I really need to do for the interval then is find a tarp for the inevitable rain.
Trivial, bare necessities. Just the kind of shit I was getting tired of and I was already in need of a good long break from the city.

The day we make it out then, I get off work with a rough 120 in my pocket, just enough to go buy a proper coat down at the carhartt store at cascade station. I’ve got an old pair of boots I'd picked up already, in Bend the month before as well as a fresh bivy for my bedding. I’ve covered all the essentials in the nick of time, by the seat of my pants. So I drag myself back to camp with food and loot. A spankin new pair of black coveralls I'd found for Jon at the house they had me pillaging, a carhartt jacket for myself, and a six of beer.. Satisfied.

The train's been parked since before I return, and remains for another hour and more. Friendo yells over to me he was considering leaving without me had I not got back already and I ask him where he's plannin to go without daddy bear. He grins a sadistic fuck you. We lay on our backs against our packs on the ballast beneath watching the late noon light turn orange then autumn and crimson, nothing left to do but wait. And when the fred of lady luck finally airs up evening is already well underway. We toss our packs aboard each, and I pull myself together and huddle against the porch, watching the city sink away. Black and blue now, with only the glimmer of the day gone down behind the far hills and bends and bridges, those lonesome silver-blooming studs peaking down into it all like loose sparks from out the infinite dark and dust. The night drinks the cradle, swallows the saloons, swallows all. I will not see this sky for eight months.

The ride is familiar after the last trip I'd made this direction 10 months before. That time trying to get north. My first freight train, the first journey into nothing.. and firsts can never be overshadowed, those first brave leaps into the void. I'd caught that one running at 10 miles blind down graham siding. Not an ounce of liquor on me either, just another homeless bastard penniless, grabbing on at the front and landing a knee sorely into the bottom rung just before it kicked forward into a 15 mile gallop.

I'd spent that winter in Portland too. No phone and no idea what I was doing, just bullshitting and surviving. Waiting for the sun to come out again and not a whole lot else. Not a thought other in my mind. The graham line is the east-west overflow track that bellies down from troutdale and the 205, below Lloyd center and up into Albina yd next to the Willamatte. It was an empty bnsf unit-grain out of Lake yd that time, headed for Pasco and probably the border. That fucker had come pulling through just as I was leaving my post for a food run. I was walking over Grant bridge and heard it rolling out just underneath. I looked down over the side, hesitating, terrified in that moment because I knew it was only a matter of seconds.. and then took off, running full speed with my bags, some 6 blocks back down to the tracks. Just me and a couple sacks of food all the way up the columbia. Catching that first train was like... I don't know what. Like love. Like a childhood dream. I don't know what.

The river has always been one of the closest approximations to home for me, next to the cascades, and I have fond memories of this corridor that I won’t soon forget. Hiking Dog mountain, Bridal Veil, the Lookout. There was the countless family trips too which we'd made throughout my childhood through the 84 to visit family in California every june.

The train passes Multnomah falls and in a brief instant I glimpse the snow of it through the dark for the first time in more than a year like a colossal apparition, like remorse. So moved by my recollection of the bridge beneath it and the embankment above and of you and I and the fallen pine and the absolute soundlessness of that fall before the falls that I break into song. First mouthing then outright yelling, trying to feel out the correct notes to silkworm’s lepidoptera beneath deafening torrents and tidal waves of wind and steel.

I go on like that for a good hour. The feeling in my chest swelling higher wider deeper, belting it all out of every cubic millimeter of my lungs as if to pinch out the lights on the far bank with the foghorn in my heart. I go until I run out of stuff, I run out of all the songs I know words to and out of courage too in the improvising of my own. Then the hand brake chimes in and we roll to a gradual halt on a single main with no signal in view.

As you soon discover, this is how it is: the trains stop constantly. We sit a good long while in the quiet but before I fade out I hear steps in the ballast. Road dawg and doggy too come back and pay me a visit, offering gifts of whiskey and tobacco which I accept gratefully like a pilgrim at the first thanksgiving, newly baptized now in the light of a strange moon, changed for the time being into someone other than the person that'd left the mother land.

Dawg screams at his mut wildly spiriting about in the dark, “Bedlilly ye bitch whore slut look, we’re free! .. No more yuccas coming to play dice on your floor my boy!!
..Not even the floor anymore. No, fuck carpets, seriously. Know what I mean, robby?”

Poor Jon has been living in the hood of east Sandy for longer than he'd bargained for and recently slipped off into the deep end of every-mans-dip after splitting with a girl he'd rode with prior to his move-in a few years before. Depressed, aged thirty some years and experiencing some very personal misgivings about where he is in his life.. It was clear to me shortly after meeting this fellow that he was living in his own world, with his own demons, and there was never hardly any point in trying to put any sense into that lonely limburger jesus I'd shared that first thousand miles of november.

My voice I discover has sunk a decibel after all my screaming into kingdom come, and I hope my companion is not unnerved at all as he seems not to notice. The next day my voice was all but gone, and wouldn't come back for another week.



“Fuck carpets and fuck you" I spray, "Gimme some more of that bourbon before I throw yer dog into the river, pussy and all!”

“I won’t allow it. You can lick dog balls first, howabouda?”

“He probably don’t have anymore balls, riding you”

“Yer not gonna have anymore either!”

“Maybe cause yer gon be chewin em like rabbits after beddieby.. ”

“Aw, how sweet.. don't be shy.”

The flask is surrendered.
.
“I say, uh, moons like a jewel uh this night uh a right here huh..”

“Wonder what in the f of a they're doin up there anyway. We’re not even sided. Waiting for the other guys down the line to find one I guess”

“Don't care, don’t even. But fuck portland and hello coool cool breeze”

“Yeah, stump town can kiss it. But we’re in for it now bud, you and me, got it?”

“You really mean it, honey?”

“Speaking of shit...

We’ll be in Hinkle before morning. Don’t sleep heavy on it or I’ll come back and stomp you out.”



“Perfect”