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