If my thought dreams could be seen: May Day 1971 (Part One)

The Sixties were over, but I wanted in. I was lolling around in early 1971 in an ornate sitting room of Purdue University's spacious Memorial Union, a school Time magazine called a "hot bed of student rest." A leaflet stating, "If the government doesn't stop the war, we will stop the government," had fallen into my hands. This was my big chance. I had grown up with the Vietnam War and the many actions taken against it, but I had been too young to take part. I was in college now, I had grown my hair long, I wore an old army coat and bell-bottom jeans, and I even knew people who painted flowers on their faces because they had seen photos like that in Life magazine. But even now I was missing out by attending a conservative school, and this great adventure of travelling to Washington D.C. to shut down the government was my chance to finally make a mark. 


One-third of my life had been spent as a mere spectator, watching the nightly news as our nation thrashed in turmoil day after day, year after year. The killings of students at Kent and Jackson State had happened not much more than six months before. I had witnessed the carnage in Grant Park at the Democratic convention in Chicago from afar, and had watched the Columbia University uprising on TV. I remember seeing James Simon Kunen, a Columbia student who had taken part in the sit-in, on a TV show while I was visiting my sister in upstate New York. He was earnest and impassioned and I knew at that moment that I had more in common with him than I did with the program's churlish host who mocked him. I had also read a book about the socialist icon Eugene V. Debs in my idyllic small-town library around the same time. Debs' life made me feel certain that cooperation was better than conflict in meeting our daily needs, and I experienced a breathtaking and rapturous vision of all humanity uniting in common purpose as I read that book. The world seemed entirely new to me at that moment, and I continued to feel that way from then on. Whenever I think of peace and wisdom I remember the scent of that library reading room and its comfortable sofa chairs.

If you were not alive in the mid-sixties--and even if you were--it can be hard to understand the level of rage engendered by that war. Much depended on the state of your awareness and when you had become aware. If you were old enough and politically astute, and you were already a part of "the movement" or touched by it, you believed in the chosen status of your generation. You had seen President John F. Kennedy assassinated, you had witnessed or endured attacks on civil rights activists that had escalated to murder, and yet you believed in the promise of America. You already knew more about the complicated and contradictory nature of our nation than many had learned in a lifetime. Then the Vietnam War occurred. 


The war was a terrible interruption in what many thought might be a difficult but inevitable march towards a new and more just society. You already had an extremely nuanced feel for your country and its mythologies by 1965, but the next several years would take you places you never imagined possible. The war began small and grew and grew and grew. And as you learned more about it you realized it was not an ordinary war like your father had fought, where one large army squared off against another. This was a war where one large army attacked ordinary people in grass huts, and where small children were burned alive as they raced into their homes to rescue their treasured toys.

The disparity in firepower was unimaginable. You knew that more bombs were being dropped at a far higher rate on this small rural nation than were dropped on areas hundreds of times larger during the Second World War. There were massacres, carpet bombings, and body bags on the tarmac as you landed in Saigon to do your patriotic chore. It was nothing at all like what you had been taught your nation was about. You knew the death tolls were nightmarish and the war served no practical end, but the war went on and on. The fact that they were the communist enemy seemed insignificant when you looked at everything else. They weren't the Russians--with immense resources and a nuclear arsenal--they were poor people living in grass huts. You couldn't cooperate with this kind of evil, with this kind of madness, that linked these two different situations together simply through the use of a word.


Finally, two million Vietnamese would die due to our prosecution of this war, and the Pentagon papers would reveal that 70% of our reason for being there was to save face. Two million people died so our leaders could save face. What nation on earth could do things like this and still wake up in the morning and shave as if nothing were really happening? Ours did.


You felt betrayed because the liberals you might ordinarily trust were prosecuting this war, and the Republicans whom you distrusted supported it even more. You were backed so far into a corner that it radicalized you. And the war went on and on. You couldn't trust your country or your government to do what was right or even practical. And you yourself seemed to have little effect on the war no matter what you believed or did. You became bitter, and were in some ways ruined for life. You could never think of your country or its people in the same way again. Marches, rallies, sit-ins, none of it worked. A large share of the public was deaf and were more likely to rely on a phrase like "My country, right or wrong" instead of any evidence. And when public opinion later turned to a huge majority against the war, it still didn't matter and Nixon was re-elected in a landslide.  It was insane, and it drove many into despair.  

"The movement" had died in some ways due to infighting a year or so before, but I didn't know this. I was signing up for something that was losing many committed supporters to burnout and disillusionment and I possessed neither their experience nor their insight. I was a wannabe. I just knew which side I was on but I wasn't sure exactly why. I was making it up as I went and trying to act as if I knew what I were doing even when I did not.


As I looked over the plans in that sitting room with my friends, my eyes widened and I smiled with anticipation. How would we prepare? How would we get there? What would we do once we did? I could hear Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young singing "four dead in Ohio" in my mind as we studied the leaflet, and wondered what fate we would meet in DC. and how it might change us all.

This train ain't bound for glory, this train (Part Six, The End))

CONTINUED FROM:


This train ain't bound for glory, this train (Part One)

This train ain't bound for glory, this train (Part Two)

This train ain't bound for glory, this train (Part Three)

This train ain't bound for glory, this train (Part Four)

This train ain't bound for glory, this train (Part Five)


The train took a long time getting to Kansas City after leaving Pratt. It stopped numerous times in many small towns, waking us frequently and requiring us to lie on the floor of the engine cab to avoid detection the entire way. When we finally arrived in K.C. it was mid-morning, it was very cold, and there was three to four inches of snow on the ground. Multiple sets of tracks were stacked from one side of the yard to the other and over half of them supported entire trains. I was getting really tired of being on a train and waiting in train yards. But hitchhiking in snowy conditions was an obviously bad move, while riding in an engine cab was comparatively great. 

As we trudged through the snowy rail yard I wondered how things would turn out, and if Jack could restrain his odd behavior. He was recounting still more grisly war stories that I was not yet convinced were true. He would mumble incoherently at times, but only when I was the sole person around. It was as if he felt safe with me but could restrain himself when he was with others. I wasn't sure if he was doing the crazy act for effect or if it were really true. Either option had a down side. If he wanted to mess with me that was bad. If he was really unstable, that was also bad.

We eventually bumped into a young hippy-looking rail yard worker named Kyle. He was lean with shoulder-length dark hair and a sparse, unkept beard. We would have mistaken him for a rail rider like ourselves if he hadn't been wearing a long denim jacket like all the other workers in the yard. I couldn't believe a person like us could get a job at any place that was real. Everyone I knew in Indiana that had gotten a decent job had to shear their freak-flag. And this was a good job with union wages in the early '70s when unions still had clout. You have to understand the degree to which you isolated yourself from the normal world by growing out your hair back then. You were defying multiple codes of social conduct and notions of what was good and taking a stand on a side where you were constantly outnumbered everywhere you went. It was pretty insane when you think about it, but if you were so obviously compelled to voice your displeasure with the world by doing something this in your face, you had to expect adverse reactions and we did. You automatically expected to be excluded and actually felt proud when it happened. But sometimes it got old and you wished people would just take you for who you were and not for the signals of resistance you were sending merely by being alive.

We started talking and Kyle told us the next train we could hop to Indiana was headed to St. Louis first. "It leaves in nine hours," he said. Nine hours! Crap. That was nine additional hours before I could even think of getting home; and what would we do and where would we seek shelter all that time? The wind was whipping up the snow and it couldn't have been more than 2o degrees. Kyle said we could join him in the yardmaster shack for the day. Well, that was mighty kind of him, but they couldn't all be freaks and I was unable to believe we would be welcome by anyone other than Kyle. But I was wrong.

The yardmaster shack was a long, narrow wooden structure holding several tables with newspapers scattered all over them. It was heated, it had a water cooler and a couple old refrigerators, and yard workers of many varieties cycled through it all day. A number of them were older guys my father's age, in their '50s or '60s, a few were black and almost all the youngest guys had long to longish hair. Everyone got along. They were unconcerned that we were there and one of the old guys even went home and got Jack and me some left-over fried chicken from the night before and a pie his wife made specifically for us. He'd called her from the yardmaster's phone and he drove home to pick it up at lunchtime. 

It was amazing how these men were willing to accept two strangers in their midst who were totally in their way and that they decided not only to accept us, but to make our passage through their world as pleasant as they could. After nine hours we packed up and went out into the yard. We asked the engineer of the train to St. Louis if we could ride in a engine cab and he said no, because the surveillance of the trains got thicker the further east you went.  We finally crawled into an empty box car that was cold as hell and completely dark because we had to shut the door to keep from freezing. Jack and I said nothing to each other the whole way.

We got to St Louis the next morning and were promptly tossed from the yard and that was basically that. The train riding had ended. The further east we got things really did get less friendly. Hitchhiking was out of the question and we were too beat to try. Both Jack and I got on a pay phone and made collect calls asking our respective parents to wire us $20 each so we could just take the bus back home. They did. Jack and I said next to nothing on the trip from St. Louis to Indianapolis where Jack said goodbye and walked into the terminal mumbling to himself. He never lost it entirely while I was with him and he may not have been as ill as he seemed, but I'd been grateful not to be alone, nonetheless, during these five days that felt like five weeks. I still feel grateful now. I haven't thought about him at all for nearly 40 years until the last few days. I hope he found some balance and didn't descend any further into the darkness. 

I continued on the bus to Lafayette, Indiana and walked into the former house of ill-repute my friends and I rented on 5th Street some time before 9 in the evening. It was a plain two-story house with battered white siding, a long front porch, and train tracks running down the middle of the street in front. What a hoot if I'd been able to hop off right in front of the house. Oh well. I was able to reclaim my old room with the six-foot high, red and black Che Guevara silo I'd painted on the wall the year before. Che and I have since parted ways but that was a symbol I appropriated to feel more powerful about myself back then. The house had ten very small rooms and we each paid $11 a month to stay there. I was so happy to be home. I felt warm all over and I'd survived. I was with people I loved, and who loved me as well. And I'd met many more on the road. The world seemed like a friendlier place than I had thought before this journey.

During this entire trip, where I had felt devoid of all protection and vulnerable to fate and to the whims of others most of the time, ordinary people acting out of simple kindness repeatedly came to my aid. I also found events themselves seeming to conspire to produce surprisingly positive outcomes every time things started heading south. 

Many years later I read that Albert Einstein considered an answer to this question the most important thing in life: "Is the universe a friendly place or not?" He said that everyone's life heads down one of two major paths depending on how they answer this question. I am absolutely sure that this is true. If you trust life and others you go one direction, and if you distrust life and others you go another. If you distrust life you think people are bad and you need to change them and dominate them. If you trust life you know people are good--or at least that enough of them are good to tip the scales--and that you can trust them and that someone or something always has your back. You may feel like a tightrope walker, but in some way you know you're operating with a net.

How does this relate to Charlie, Nick and Jack and the kid jerked from the train by the Border Patrol? Their stories don't seem as happy as mine. I'm not sure how to answer this question, but I do have some thoughts. C.S. Lewis tried to answer the question as to why people can think the world is good and meaningful when so many bad things happen to others. Lewis said, in effect, "That is their story, and you can only make sense of life through your own experience and not through the experience of others." I don't have the right to decide for someone else if their suffering warrants their feeling defeated and alone. And I don't have an obligation to feel hopelessness and defeat when I witness their suffering. My obligation is to help. Anyway, in the midst of the greatest abandonment imaginable, many people feel nourished by forces beyond their comprehension. These forces are beyond my comprehension as well. I didn't think that way at the time. I didn't have words for it then, but my sense of things were headed in that direction all along.

So in my experience, which is all I have to go on, the universe is a friendly place and the people in it are generally good. Somehow, some way, things are better than they are worse. This is the precious miracle of ordinary life that is always staring us in the face whether we notice it or not. There are plenty of reasons not to believe this, but my experience exceeds the limits of these restraints. Call it optimism, call it resilience, call it God, leave it unnamed if you wish. It's one of those things I can't figure out with my mind alone. There are places my mind can't go but where my heart has no problem treading. I'm fine with standing on the edge of the chasm of existence and calling its bluff. And I know I'm not alone.

Joe, Shelly, Bert, Nikki, and Patty in 1971

This train ain't bound for glory, this train (Part Five)

CONTINUED FROM:
This train ain't bound for glory, this train (Part one)
This train ain't bound for glory, this train (Part two)
This train ain't bound for glory, this train (Part Three)
This train ain't bound for glory, this train (Part Four)


After I got back from the diner, our box car was picked up in less than an hour. We travelled without incident to San Antonio, Texas where we spent the night at the Gospel Mission, an unpleasant place where we were treated judgmentally and without respect. The Gospel Mission had little to do with the Christianity I had learned as a kid at the Presbyterian Church or at St. Martin de Porres Catholic Worker house in San Francisco only days before. It wasn't like the Gospel Mission thought we were good people who had lost our way. They thought we were bad people who needed to change or be punished. There's a difference. 


The truth is that they seemed to be serving people for God's sake and not for ours, so they never really saw us or connected with us and that gap between us was a painful thing to feel. They didn't really care about us and we knew it. They cared about The Word. We were merely bit players in a script, a necessary evil for them to live out a gospel that had been reduced to a joyless death march. They had no Good News for us. I feel bad saying this about them, but I have met others who filtered through that place and they had the same experience.


So, we took showers, ate a meager meal, got preached at and condescended to, then they tried to seize my last six dollars and fifty cents as payment for their heart-felt service to God, but not to me. I refused. This remaining pittance was my only cushion against total dependence and I promised to cause a ruckus if they persisted in robbing me so they relented and left me alone. The people staffing the Gospel Mission were nothing like the Christ who had shined through the waitress at the Texas diner a few hours before. She just went with her instincts and her instincts were sound. These official Christians had an agenda that blunted those instincts and that made all the difference. 


The Mission itself was crammed high and wide with beds and odors and gloom, and the people staying there were diverse. There was the usual group of social dysfunctionals you'd associate with a shelter, as well as many people whom you would never expect to need its services. It was intimidating in its utter sadness, and I couldn't wait to leave. We woke up early the next morning and left without eating breakfast, something we really needed, but not under the circumstances in which it would be offered.

We hopped a train a couple hours later after some very kind assistance from a rail worker in the San Antonio yard. "It's getting cold where you're going," he said, "and you didn't hear this from me, but it's OK if you get in an engine cab. There's a water cooler and heat but don't touch anything and lay on the floor when you go through a town. Someone in a little shit town might call the cops if they see you." He was an ordinary man probably 30 years my senior and I was astonished at his kindness. Hadn't he gotten the memo that people like me were what was wrong with this country? The folks working at the Gospel Mission had. Once again, there it was in this railroad man, this simple instinctive kindness I'd come to expect from people who relied on their hearts instead of a rule book that did their thinking and feeling for them. Breaking the rules out of simple love for others is what got Jesus murdered, you know. If you've never heard this before then at least you've heard it now. 


In the end the four of us took refuge in of one of the six engines pulling this very long train; but Charlie, the Chippewa Indian from Minnesota, was not too good about hitting the floor when we went through small towns. He would sit in the engineer's seat and wave at people and smile while the other three of us lay on the floor. He laughed at us and called us, "pussies."

Many hours later past midnight we were over 600 miles north of San Antonio in Pratt, Kansas and snow was falling hard. We were sleeping, the engine cab was well-heated, and we had fresh, filtered water in Dixie Cups if we wished. Life was treating us well. Suddenly the door was pushed open, cold and snow blew in upon us, and a nine-foot tall policeman weighing 500 pounds drawled, "Well, do you boys got yourselves a ticket?" Gee  thanks, Charlie. Thanks for being a dumb ass and waving at people the whole damn time. The cop had a southern accent too. Why the hell did a cop in Kansas have a goddamned southern accent anyway? It was like something out of a movie, and just when things were going pretty well by our diminished expectations. We had already been punished by the Jesus Police at the Gospel Mission and now we were going to get another dose of it at the hands of the Real Police. I was furious at Charlie and scared as hell. 

The cop squeezed us into his cruiser, and hauled us to the police station through a sad neighborhood of dilapidated homes. The streets were dark and empty, and layered in nearly a foot of drifting snow. Street lights back lit the snow, making it look like it was falling even harder than it was. I was so damn miserable. How the hell could I get out of this? He plopped us down in a small, blank room with a plain, metal desk and a door with a frosted glass window. The desk was freezing to the touch. The officer questioned us like we were some kind of big catch and it took more than two hours. It was so lame. He dumped out our knapsacks, rifled through our sleeping bags, and ran a check for priors on us. It was sheer malice. The railroad didn't give a damn if we were there, or at least its employees didn't. We'd had no intention of doing anything other than pass through Pratt, Kansas in a state of sublime unconsciousness, and we were no threat to anyone or anything. You can pratter on as much as you like about law and order and duty, but in reality this was senseless. It was spite masquerading as justice and nothing more. I hated the bastard. 


In an act of perverse irony he arrested Charlie the waving miscreant for failure to appear and jumping bail, as well as his partner Nick the boot sniffer who had a roach clip on him. The cop was looking for anything to bring more misery into our lives and Jack and I were next. What a way to spend your life, I thought, shaking down people who were already down on their luck just because you could. 

But he had to let us go. We hadn't really done anything wrong aside from exist, and believe it or not, that was not a crime. He didn't have anything to charge us with because the railroad was none of his damn business and they didn't care. God bless capitalism, finally. I was so happy I couldn't believe it, then just as quickly I was miserable once again. He said he was taking us back to the tracks where he'd picked us off the train, and if we weren't gone in 30 minutes he'd jail us for vagrancy. He was savoring the chance to get one last crack at us. We knew that after two or three hours of being shaken down, the train was certainly gone and that hitching would kill us in this weather--literally--so we'd just have to go to jail. To his jail. 


When we got to the rail yard the train was still there. Oh God! Jack and I couldn't believe it! It was a vision of all that was good in the world. We leaped from his cruiser and sprinted for the train, fighting through snow that was drifting nearly to our knees, and trying to surpress our jubilation for fear that he'd just find some other way to harm us in the end. We got right back in the same engine cab we'd been on before and the train jerked and started pulling out within seconds of our bodies hitting the floor. In breathless amazement we laid on that floor for the next several hours all the way to Kansas City. 


The cab was so deliciously warm that I started thawing out from the cold brought on by the weather and the cold that was due to that policeman and to the official Christians from the Gospel Mission in San Antonio. I opened some Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup and ate it straight from the can. It was thick and salty and I chased it with a Dixie Cup of cool, fresh water from the water cooler. It was like Thanksgiving in a can. I was so grateful for our escape from Babylon and how it had been seemingly engineered. I was stunned into wonder. I didn't know about Jack, because we were hardly speaking to each other by then, and Jack was slipping deeper and deeper into the reveries of his mental illness all the time, but I was praising our good fortune and feeling as if we were being watched over at every critical juncture. 


I took off my boots without hesitation and crawled into my sleeping bag. I didn't have a word for it at the time, but everything was Grace at that moment. The soup, the warm cab, the snow, the cop, the ministry of meanness in San Antonio, it was all Grace, and no one part of it could be taken away without diminishing any other part in return. I slept the deep sleep of one that knows he is beloved, as the train cut through the snow, the cold, and the night, shielding us from every possible danger until a new round of challenges resumed in the morning.

LAST INSTALLMENT NEXT

This train ain't bound for glory, this train (Part Four)

CONTINUED FROM:


This train ain't bound for glory, this train (Part One)
This train ain't bound for glory, this train (Part Two)
This train ain't bound for glory, this train (Part Three)


Although the box car was as dark as it could be, small slits of light shone through around the edges of the door. I stumbled to my feet and slid the door open to a blinding mid-day sun. It was dead silent. As my eyes adjusted I knew it had to be South Texas, a meager landscape of sagebrush, dust and bare, dead trees. I jumped down from the car and marched around and was shocked beyond belief. We were on a side rail off the main tracks in the middle of nowhere and the rest of the train was gone. Only one box car stood on this side rail, our car, and we were completely and utterly alone. That goddamned engineer had lied. He'd abandoned us in the desert after all. 


Charlie, Nick and Jack stuck their heads out and uttered a collective, "Oh fuck!" They jumped down and dashed around the box car, frantic for any sign of life. In the distance we saw a small concrete structure with a few pickup trucks scattered around it. The tension lessened a bit. A least we weren't a hundred miles from a road or food or water. I volunteered to check it out immediately, hoping to get there before the bail jumper, the boot sniffer, or the crazy man got there first and spoiled our chances of making good first impression. I had only seven dollars left, I was over 1,300 miles from home, and I was too focused on surviving to be scared. 


I plowed through the weeds and the brush and made it to the building which turned out to be a small Texas diner with a eight to ten dust-caked trucks parked in a gravel lot out front. It wasn't much to get excited over, cinder blocks with a red neon open sign in the window, but I had never been more pleased to happen upon a crappy little dive in my life. I could see from outside through the window that it was a cramped little place with a counter and stools and fewer than a dozen tables. It was packed, and I finally started feeling scared. This wasn't the kind of place where I expected a warm welcome.

I walked into a room filled with smoke and a rumble of voices arising from men in Wranglers, cowboy hats and boots. Every head turned at once and the place fell quiet in an instant. I had been a spectacle at the Safeway in Indio, but I had gone downhill further since. Covered in dirt and with wild, tangled hair, I have never wanted to just turn tail and run any more at any time in my life than then. But I had no choice, and threaded my way through the tables and the cowboys to the counter. What could these people possibly be thinking? None of it could be good.


I sat down on a stool at the counter, and when I sheepishly raised my eyes in utter shame to look at the waitress she said, "How can I help you son?" There was an immense tenderness and earnestness in her voice and her eyes. She was old and wrinkled and had that bluish gray hair that many older women seemed to covet back then. At that moment, the gratitude I felt, the pure grace I felt through her acceptance, pierced me. I barely noticed when the rumble of voices resumed, for she and I had become the only people in a world that now paid us no mind. 


"I'm stuck in a box car a half mile from here and I was wondering if you knew anything about the trains," I confessed. "Oh hon', don't trouble yourself. A train comes around every few hours to pick up those cars they've left behind. Can I get you something, dear?" How could she even think of treating me like this? How could she act like I wasn't everything no one wanted their child to become? "I don't have much money, I guess I ought to go," I said. "You don't have to leave hon'. Order anything you want and leave a little change on the counter, just enough to make it look good," she whispered. "You got an hour or two anyway," she said. Then she smiled. Never in my life had I expected something like this. I felt ashamed for judging her and everyone else in this diner so quickly. When you don't know what people are like and you're afraid, you fill in the blanks with your anguish and end up assuming the worst. Maybe the world wasn't as bad as I thought it was. Maybe I was just stewing in the contents of my own sour feelings and thoughts. I had a burger, a fry, and a Coke and left her fifty cents. She winked as I got up to leave. If the whole world were made of simple little waitresses in crappy Texas diners, this world would be pure magic.


On the way back to the box car, as I trudged through the brush and the dust and the weeds, I saw something glitter on the ground. I bent down to find a small brass bell, no larger than my thumb, and on it was inscribed the word, "Hello." I shook my head in wonder. I had just been saved by a person, and now thin air was pitching in too? For a moment I entertained the notion that maybe there was a god, or that somehow the universe acted as if there were. I pocketed that bell, and carried it with me for three or four years, until I took out my key chain one day and it was gone. I guess it was someone else's turn to feel blessed and amazed. 


TO BE CONTINUED

This train ain't bound for glory, this train (Part Three)

CONTINUED FROM:
This train ain't bound for glory, this train (Part One)
This train ain't bound for glory, this train (Part Two)


Silhouetted in the moonlight against the open door, and amidst the rattle and banging of the swaying train, I saw the slender kid with the wispy mustache and he seemed to be sniffing my boots. It was almost comical in its horror. I'd wondered how things could get worse, and they had. I also knew, however, that as strange as these people seemed, they certainly were not evil. So, I wasn't really afraid. I just felt so very, very alone. Every reference point to something normal or familiar was gone. But at least I wasn't in a coal car. Life was looking up! And even if these people were losers and crazy they had been kind to me, and had accepted me as if they felt I belonged. And when that thought sunk in, I cried a little harder, and was grateful to the wind and the clattering of the train that muffled my cries from discovery.


That good hard cry exhausted me, and I slept deep and dreamlessly all night. It was far into the morning when I woke. "You've been asleep for the last four hours since we got here, man," Jack sputtered. His mouth was filled with cold Cream of Mushroom soup directly from the can. "Are we in Tucson?" I asked. He nodded yes and swallowed. "We don't even have to switch trains," he said. "We'll be leaving in about an hour." That seemed like good news. I climbed down from the box car, took a leak and stretched and climbed back in. There was nothing much to see. We were surrounded by box cars and the landscape was hidden from view. "Where's the other two guys?" I asked. "Charlie and Nick? Not, sure but they said they'd be back. They left their knapsacks here." Oh, goody. We were on a first name basis now.

I felt unusually well after sleeping. Only hours before, my life felt like it was over. On waking nothing had really changed. I'd lost everything, I had no future, but nothing was really wrong anymore. It had all been in my mind. It's interesting how things can seem so bad when you dwell on them, but when they happen it's no big deal. About the worst stuff I could imagine had happened, but I was still alive. The sun was shining, and with or without me, life was forging ahead. I felt an amazing sense of release. I wasn't in charge anymore. There wasn't a me that was living, and instead I was being lived. There was more freedom in this recognition than I can ever put into words. 

Charlie and Nick returned with some red vines which they shared, and a few minutes later a frightened and hesitant young man from Mexico jumped into our box car. After some faltering attempts to speak to him it was obvious he knew no English and our Spanish was just as bad. He was a nice kid. He took an envelope out of his pocket and pointed to the return address which said "Chicago, Illinois." He smiled broadly, we smiled back, and we all sat down and that was simply that. We ignored the old hobo's warnings about Mexicans. It was obvious we were all exiles anyway, and that was all that mattered. As the train pulled away we slid the door wide open because it was actually getting warm. It was also the beginning of March in southern Arizona and we wanted to enjoy the sights.


As we thundered along, the views were spectacular. Depending on our elevation, sweeping vistas of cactus and desert arose then departed as thicker and grassier vegetation arrived. Only a couple hours out of Tucson the train slowly came to a halt in the desert. Light green border patrol vehicles rumbled up in the dust and finally stopped by our car. They picked out the Mexican kid right away, and led him from the train to a vehicle. "You're an Indian, right?" a man in a border patrol uniform asked Charlie. "Oh, yeah," he said. The agent nodded, then left to check the cars in front of us. He and a couple other agents checked every box car on that train and the time dragged on and on. They acted as if they had all the time in the world, and that's because they did. A train with empty box cars has no pressing destination when it isn't hauling freight. This was the flaw in our plan about getting back to Indiana so damn quickly by train. A train you can hop is a train that is slow. 


As the tedious search continued, we jumped down from our box car for some fresh air and Charlie shot forward past the next couple cars and gave out a startling whoop. "Oh man oh man check this out! I've done this before and it's great!" he shouted, leaping onto an empty rail car for automobiles that was just ahead. We followed his lead and began to explore the empty, open rail cars. It was great not being boxed in by the walls of a regular box car. When the train finally jerked forward we stayed on these cars. It was crazy, dangerous fun. We took running leaps from rail car to rail car as the train increased in speed. It was like riding the biggest motorcycle in the universe and the landscape completely surrounded us. There were no roads anywhere and you felt like you owned the world. The sky, the desert, and the cactus seemed to shoot right through us, and the sun beat down and the wind was in our face. Slowly the train ground to a halt. In a few minutes a very angry engineer confronted us.

"Do you have any idea how fucking stupid this is?" he shouted. We were mute. It was true. "I can't just leave you here in the middle of fucking nowhere because it's wrong." Yes it was. "So get your fucking asses back in a box car or I will leave you," he said, seething. And we did.


The train was hours from San Antonio. Once it got dark there was nothing to do and it was too loud to talk, so one-by-one we all dropped off to sleep. I didn't remove my boots. Jack figured out how to slide the door shut without locking us in forever, so we closed it to keep out the wind and the cold. I curled up in my sleeping bag but my rest was more fitful than the night before. Every time I awoke I could feel the train vibrating beneath me. After a while, the movement ceased, and when I was finally awake I realized we hadn't been moving for hours. 

Although the box car was as dark as it could be, small slits of light shone through the edges around the door. I stumbled to my feet and slid the door open to a blinding mid-day sun. It was dead silent. As my eyes adjusted I knew it had to be South Texas, with a meager landscape of sagebrush, dust and bare, dead trees. I jumped down from the car and marched around and was shocked beyond belief. We were on a side rail off the main tracks in the middle of nowhere and the rest of the train was gone. Only one box car stood on this side rail, our car, and we were completely and utterly alone. That goddamned engineer had lied. He'd abandoned us in the desert after all.


TO BE CONTINUED

This train ain't bound for glory, this train (Part two)

CONTINUED FROM: This train ain't bound for glory, this train (Part One)

"A tramp is like Charlie Chaplin," said the 'bo. "A tramp will work a bit here and there then move on, 'cause he's restless. And then there's bums, who just refuse to work. I'm a bum," he laughed, through many missing teeth. "I refuse to work." 

The two men regaled us with how they spent their lives. At the beginning of each month they would cash their assistance checks from Washington, and ride the rails south to California then east to Texas and do the same thing there. They laughed about getting one over on the system and shared other valuable tips.

"If you strain paint through a white sock and put peppermint candy in it, it'll taste just like peppermint schnapps," said one. They also explained that Sterno was good for getting a buzz in pretty much the same way. "Only you got to use the red can," they told me. "The green can is army issue and they put shit in it that makes you sick." All in all, they didn't seem to be bringing down the empire with their extravagant lives.

Jack and I headed off to a grocery store to buy a few supplies before we hopped the train. Other men in the yard had told us to get condensed soup because it stored well and could be eaten without cooking simply out of the can. Yum. 


When we straggled into that bright, clean store we were really out of place. We looked like the Geico cavemen on a bad day. Mothers stared at us and herded their children away from us, and I couldn't blame them. We were disheveled and wind beaten from our trip over the mountains. My shoulder-length hair was matted and tangled beyond repair. We were smudged and powdered with coal dust, and Jack kept staring back at people like the goddamn loon he was. I was glad to get the hell out of there, and it felt strange to be seen as "one of those people." I'd had long hair for a few years by then and was used to not fitting in, but this was a whole new order of things. I was no longer just on the fringe. I had fallen off the edge of the earth.

When we got back to the yard we crawled into an open box car and a couple other guys jumped in too. Gulp. Actually, they were OK, I guess, at least until we went to sleep. Both in their early 2os, one was a rotund and jovial Chippewa Indian from Minnesota who told us up front he'd jumped bail. I didn't bother to ask why. His partner was a slender, mousy-looking white boy with a cocky look, blond hair, and a pathetic, wispy moustache that wasn't worth the trouble. Then one of the two old 'bos stuck his head in and waved goodbye saying, "See 'ya boys around, and don't forget to be real careful around blacks and Mexicans but help an old 'bo every chance 'ya get, OK?" And here I'd thought they hadn't cared. 

These kinds of people are routinely cast as villains in people's minds. They strike a pretty frightening visage, and you see them with signs asking for money everywhere you go. They live on the streets and in parks and by rivers--and even in shelters if you're not hassling them about god and their sins. But really, when you get to know them, for the most part they're sensitive, vulnerable men who just can't make it in this world. They've never fit in and they never will. They have feelings and they're fuck ups and that's the way it is. But was I really one of them now?

When the train pulled out that night, we knew it was headed east and that Tucson would be our first stop. The box car rocked back and forth, shaking violently at times, and the wind whistled in through the door that we were afraid to close for fear of being locked in. The noise was deafening. I don't think I have ever felt more abandoned at any time in my life. How had I gotten here? I'd been normal once. I had once meant something to people. But I'd stopped being real, and now was a thing people pointed at. I had once had a mom, just like those kids at the Safeway. I curled up in my sleeping bag, and wept huge, hard tears for my mother. I was only twenty years old. 

Silhouetted in the moonlight against the open door, and amidst the rattle and banging of the swaying train, I saw the slender kid with the wispy mustache and he seemed to be sniffing my boots. It was almost comical in its horror. I'd wondered how things could get worse, and they had. I also knew, however, that as strange as these people seemed, they certainly were not evil. So, I wasn't really afraid. I just felt so very, very alone. Every reference point to something normal or familiar was gone. But at least I wasn't in a coal car. Life was looking up! And even if these people were losers and crazy they had been kind to me, and had accepted me as if they felt I belonged. And when that thought sunk in, I cried a little harder, and was grateful to the wind and the clattering of the train that muffled my cries from discovery.

TO BE CONTINUED

This train ain't bound for glory, this train (Part one)

I was standing on an entrance ramp to I-5 somewhere in the scrub lands west of Bakersfield when a guy with longish brown hair in an army coat walked up. "See that train down there," he said, pointing to a line of idling coal cars where the land sloped down steeply from the highway. "It can take a week or so to get cross country hitching, but hopping a freight train can get you there in days."

I liked this idea because you never knew how your rides would pan out. I'd thumbed 2500 miles from Florida to California in 48 hours six weeks before, thanks to a lucky ride from a whacked out junkie named Ed. He'd picked me up at the Mississippi and had driven non-stop until his hand-painted Studebaker Lark crapped out and died in the desert near Barstow. He'd spray-painted it with four or five cans of powder blue paint and why the police never stopped us I have no clue. But it had taken me 24 hours to get less than 300 miles from San Francisco to Bakersfield on my way back to Indiana. I'd been stuck in the dark and the cold for 12 hours in one spot alone and had finally been picked up by two men I was sure would rape and kill me. They seemed dangerous and weird and the back of their Pinto was piled high with hundreds of cellophane-wrapped sandwiches. When they invited me to visit their Children of God "colony," I flinched and pined for the good old days with jittery, carrot-top Ed. I'd heard of the Children of God. People went there and got mind-raped instead, and I had places to go. 

The guy in the army coat was named Jack. After a while I realized he was crazy, but by then we were hundreds of miles from any highway, and hurtling over the mountains in a dirty, empty coal car that was vibrating madly and freezing us nearly to death. He was shouting very strange shit the whole time, trying to drown out the howling wind and the rattle of the train. When we came down from the mountains to a halt in Indio and climbed out covered in coal dust, he was babbling about being a Vietnam vet and, sure, it could have been true. But lots of crazy people used that to explain their weirdness back then, whether they were vets or not. We'd discovered we were both going to Indiana and having a partner, even if he was insane, seemed better than being alone. 

The train yard in Indio was beautifully warm after that numbing rumble through the mountains. I was astonished to find that the culture of hobos was actually real. There were young guys like me who were just passing through, but there were legions of men who had embraced this life on the road--or been trapped in it--for many, many years. Two old guys I met in the yard were classic, cantankerous coots. One was missing the lower half of his right leg and said he'd lost it hopping trains. They were lean and haggard men, worn down by the ways of the road, yet choosing it over a world that everyone else yearns to conquer.

"There's tramps and then there's bums, my friend," said one, as we lolled around the yard, waiting for a train to hop that a railroad worker told us was heading back east. Yard workers were free with information helping us, either to ease us out of their way or because they'd grown to accept our presence. In many places there was a simple culture of tolerance and mutual support between yard workers and the 'bo's who had no real business being there. It was a culture that would nourish me on my way back home, and whose absence would sear me, just as yard workers warned. Not everywhere I'd go would be friendly.


"A tramp is like Charlie Chaplin," said the 'bo. "A tramp will work a bit here and there then move on, 'cause he's restless. And then there's bums who just refuse to work. I'm a bum," he laughed, through many missing teeth. "I refuse to work."


TO BE CONTINUED