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.