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.
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.
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.
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”
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”