while living along the tracks in troutdale i work first at a lube shop over in fairview, then quit that a minute to go work as a welder a little further up lombard at a truck body manufacturer. dodging theft and bangers alike most weeks, hiding my things all over the place and sleeping in a different spot every few days. im doing alright, funds slowly but surely building in the bank account, and when taxes hit i finally have enough to go for an appartment — cheapest in pdx was 1k/mo with an extra k for initial downpayment.. but i scratch that and just walk away one day, 5 minutes to clockout.. and make a Bline straight for the siding where i left my things.
new boots, new pack.. guitar, check, 3000 dollars.. and a fresh case of cold ones.. check. by 7 a doublestack pulls into the hole from the west for clearance, and im floating back up the columbia again watching the sun set over washington on the far side. this never gets old.
i step off out in hinkle first, later that night, hoping to find the swimming hole out there near the yard a friend had told me about. next day find a vine that looks an awful lot like poison ivy creeping in mounds all up and down that stretch of the banks and wind up restocking on beer instead over in stanwood and catching another im back out of there, rolling out of the east throat of the yard, next day. as soon as my phone caught signal again though i discovered that that vine id mistaken for ivy was in fact something else altogether, after some googling, and that i couldve waded through it all to the water no problem.
next, i stop over in la grande to spend a day by the river there up by the bridge. its like a nice cross between dunsmuir and klamath falls here, and the river so deep and green its perfect for a quiet little dip before carrying on up the overland. i practice clumsily a few songs there and once in town and then im on my merry way again to pocatello. had only just bought this guitar the previous summer out in missoula and never much had time to dig it out of its hiding place in the woods to play it while i was working up dinero.. so this was my first clumsy steps along the fretboard, finding my way along, the first of many on that trip. couldnt even remember how to sing along yet just then and it was a frustrating endeavor relearning how. it was looking more like a drinking tour to me at that juncture, rather than a busking one, just then. easy does it.
pocatello im only there to switch over to a manifest and avoid the rail police. hanging out with this couple by the burger king on the way, hiding in the shade.
so its a drinking tour alright, but i do meet a guy. this dude i already know, technically.
my gm takes me past green river to rock springs, ten miles over. only some of the gms do this, or possibly all of them do bc it happens every time im not on the other thing. they stop on this siding thats like, in the middle of town.. only theres this marshland between you and it — just a matter of 100 feet to the left, shopping centers, motels, restaurants, all of it — and the only way across is at the overpass a whole mile further east. so you find yourself right next to the main drag but still a good 2 miles away from it too, cursing god and sundry as the horseflies come munching on your cooked ass marching over the suncooked sand and ballast thirstier than hell.
my phone croaks that night and i spend the night at the super eight next to the walmart where i drop another three bucks on a new one, spending half the following day getting my number transferred from at&t to verizon bc they never heard of no damn at&t in wyoming. then, this put right finally, i thumb it back up the highway to green river.
seeing as how my funds are already beginning to drwindle, between all the regearing i did before leaving off in pdx a week prior, all the drinking, and then some.. my intentions set originally for wind river are already beginning to waver. id read about wind river canyon in one of aaron dactyls railroad semantics issues some years prior and although it sounded like a plan, id no way of knowing just how many weeks more itd take me to figure out the details, north of cheyenne. so, back in green river, im naturally equally as contented with hanging around the west side of the yard as the east.. and vice versa. maybe west again and north to seattle, who knows but the wind, now.
i go for beverages then find myself wandering down to the wbd place, the blue skies of it already darkening behind me, and in the distance through the cooling steely grey i make out a figure. what appears to be a naked man standing around by the cp box / “tower”. ‘well, it really was just about that hot out here a minute ago, ig..’ i think to myself. i set down my shit in the brush nearby and can see immediately its not in fact just some crackhead local this time. guys coming from denver he says and seems to have ridden a decent bit of the map. after a while even begins to sound vaguely familiar — where do i know this dude from? and it isnt until well into the night i figure it out. hes that one kid from that travel forum. the greenhorn. or was.
we talk trains for hours. hes waiting for a wbd to pull through but none do, and eventually sacks out for the night. me im on a real bender, at least a week drunk, approaching a pleasant sort of manic state and not tired in the least just sit up well into the following morning before making another pit stop up at the mavericks for another couple 40s and a full case on top of that.
some time after sun up we string my tarp up against the highest stakes of sage available and sit behind that for the remainder. this guy aint bad. evens got a mandolin.. i finally pose the question. why not chill a few days more and maybe put something together to busk with. why not, i think im headed back now anyway bc the heats starting to make me nervous — which was true too, id legit never been further east than poky, on the overland, but for in the fall and winter and the heat was getting to be unexpectedly miserable. cheyenne, likely equally parched and all its asphalt, did not sound like a fun time on my last 1000 bucks. not like he had much choice in the matter though, he was going that way already.
that evening a young couple of riders filter over and settle in next to us in the shadows. they start talking about intermodals through pocatello and i waste a few incredulous breaths muttering about the bull there and jailtime before laughing back to my 40 oz.. fine then. we will all go to jail together then, i dont have my glock on me so what do i care another misdemeanor.. have it your way.
an intermodal arrives soon after and we all climb aboard. i scream some alcohol fueled soliloquies into the wind, feeling at long last, a decent nap coming on. the insomnic euphoria of a massive serotonin dump over 48 hours catching up to me finally, enroute.
i wake to the absence of sound as soon as we slow, noiselessly as a schooner out of the bay, to a halt. a bird. the rumor of a breeze slips by out of the soft rolling hills nearby, the dawn just breaching over the rise. ill be damned, they were right. but if they werent, i wasnt awake to see them get pulled — we never saw them again.
walking up to the sinclair mano mandolin tosses a little ziplock bag into the brush at the shoulder. i remember idaho isnt legal yet.
beer refilled, we retire to the park just a way further on, where a cop wanders through to run our IDs. vigilant pricks. ya cant blame them, but ya cant not hate their ass for it either. Still just hapf through my first beer of the day, and languishing somewhere in my wild, half cooked, lingering hangover i get all broken up suddenly.. thinking about all the times id been accused of shit i didnt do else looked at suspiciously, but mostly just having a minor panick attack about the glock id left by accident in a college parking lot back in portland which i was still waiting to hear back about from officer whoever. there was always the possibility theyd make me a felon, once they got around to it. so i sit there all teary eyed venting to this fellow about it, way out of my head on a hangover as usual. one more beer and ill be back in business again, my brains just fried like an egg first.. always, in that liminal river lethe from sunnyside up wrecked, to buzzed, to drunk again.
anyways we move over to the other side where theres a sort of culvert — i would not dignify this thing as so much as a creek its so slow and muddy. a mere channel, squire.. we folks from the pnw know only those waters which gush strate from the heavens, but it does not stop this man who hails from utah from having his way with it before dipping out to the latrine a minute. what with locals frolicking about all over the place and nowhere to pee conscientiously. back from which though bros pride has already suffered a crack, remarking something about these yuppies (my french) jeering him. i laugh.. the fishing hat and shades probably not helping the scruffy beard. the old bags had spied a homeless man, of which species theres not a great many around pocatello. women and children at the little park out back on a sunday bane. always a good laugh when someone else is suffering a thing youve yourself had the great pleasure by on many occasions. and all the more so when dude, like myself, may be so profiled somewhere in that subspecies between houseless — but not uncivilized — and employed (yet not, at this moment). in other words im learning that being mistaken for so much strikes a nerve in this fellow and its not entirely without a comical aspect.
we soon vacate, back the way we came, first breaking out our instruments for a bit of show and tell on the way to see what weve got. nothing doing we find the wbd hopout by the same slough, a ways back, instead. a spot id never known about actually, after all these years, nearly 7 of them by then.. heading west in a downpour id only ever known to just sit it out with my tarp draped over me like an absolute savage. so this wasnt half bad, not for shade either.
its not even 12 yet and mandolin mf goes directly to sleep, saying he didnt sleep on the ride over. also hilarious, but i didnt push it — id been screaming pretty loud and long before passing out on the way, not thinking anybody even just a single car back would hear much of anything over the howling steel but if he did i could imagine it reasonable cause for never fully being able to drift off. id not really thought about it at the time as i always do that.. and now that i was just then, i had to stifle a laugh. ive been there before, too.
so i move off out of earshot with the guitar to do my thing. and there under a little elm tree by track one i find for a moment that rare combination of air, light, time and space, with not a little blood-alcohol to smite the ground beneath my feet.. inducing The Zone. like a bird taking flight for the first time i began to improvise.. and it felt wonderful. yes, i thought. wondering back over to the shade and the bridge.. yes, this is what i want to do.
i find a fortune cookie fortune slipped beneath a can of green beans on the ledge beneath that read ‘have you ever waited too long and missed out on something beautiful?’ in read text. the fuck does that mean.
mandolin o mang raises from the dead, simultaneously with a quart of vodka, in one motion like the whole.. sleeping part was just a momentary feature of the movement between the last pull and this one. dunking it as much onto his mouth than into it, as though to rinse off also. my stomache turns seeing this. ‘that.. jesus’ is all i admit. late noon. cheap vodka.. damn. man turns to me and in an almost urgent tone, serious as a heartbreak says ‘rob, do you believe in christ?’
alcohol does things to a mans mind after some days. your brain, i suppose, is being quite literally pickled. and you start having these sudden crises, of every genus denomination and description. sometimes a crises of conscience and other times its a more worldly affair that triggers it like waking up to find no more dinero in your britches. and no matter how sane and sound of mind you actually are in otherless intoxicated circumstances.. to any onlooker youre just plain crazy. sitting all alone in the corner drunk out of your everloving mind crying with your shirt smudged and ragged and one shoe missing.. crying tears of joy bc you think you just found god but really you just havent slept in days bc youve been having the best damn time of your life and forgot to eat something. and it was just this sort of thing that had just come over both of us, each of his own accord, wild eyed, studying the other uncomprehendingly.. me on the verge of realizing ive not cried enough over my sisters dying some ten years ago and he god knows what. just two madmen under a bridge entering some god-mode level of alcoholism maybe only the irish have ever reached, one cant be sure. but in different circumstances idve died laughing..
‘rob do you believe i christ’
‘..what? oh, no not really. i mean i guess. but have you ever waited so long you missed something beautiful?’
idve given us both medals of honor. or purple hearts one or the two.
anyways after some more similar nonsense conversation we migrate again closer to the sinclair. bc directly across the street from beer sounded better than a mile up the road from it after some careful deliberation. i eventually cant hold it back any longer about my sister and start bawling out of nowhere. alcohol folks.. messes you up sometimes. and when a unit grain pulls in i tell this bloke im getting on and ill see him in la grande. which puts me in some non-location called bliss, idaho, at one lone grainery next to the interstate which i try for a while to hitch but eventually wind up on another unit grain straight back to pocatello. whatever. at least it only put me out a day.
not long in poky for i get a cadillac that takes me to lagrande. but on the way my train gets robbed on some siding outside nampa, and while going through the beginnings of serious alcohol withdrawals, paranoia and whathave you, i legit thought i was going to die. but i make it to la grande in one piece anyhow. i jump in the water, the very same.
i mosie back through town snagging a case of beer and find my friend by the tracks waiting for a westie.. as soon as i get there hes yelling ‘FUUUUUUUU’ at this gm blowing straight through to cc a few miles up. happens all the time, happens to the best of us. but thats exactly why its hilarious — long as it aint you this time. and thats also why when you find your train airing up just as soon as youre walking up straight off work its nothing short of a miracle.
—
west through the blue mountains a few days later i wake up stopped on a siding in the thick of them somewhere, withdrawals again. but theres one house. just one, just across the way and theres a dude coming out of it to the driveway. i throw my shit off and running, just manage to get him as hes popping the clutch to reverse.. ‘ten dollars, i need alcohol, anything youve got’
guy sent me back with a whole case of coors and rolling off in a matter of minutes
it was afterall a drinking tour. and i got to the busking when i got there, eventually