Highballing the Great Plains in a Boxcar

Freight-hopping 1200 miles from western Montana to Minneapolis

When we first met in 1972, my wife Sandi and I both carried within us a vision of “going back to the land” even if we didn’t fully understand yet all that would involve. It was a common aspiration for a certain subset of the counterculture in the aftermath of the collapse of popular movements for political reform. We settled into a sprawling log house on twelve acres of fir, tanoak and madrone woods an hour south of San Francisco near the Pacific coast. With the earnestness of newbies, we began to teach ourselves the basic skills of ”modern homesteading” — gardening, raising goats, preparing meals on a wood cookstove, grinding our own flour from berries, baking bread from scratch and eating copious amounts of soybeans and rice. The simple rituals of our lives resembled a monastic existence — bicycles in place of a car, minimal income, and slogging in winter through boot-sucking mud up the long road to our homestead.

But after three years of self-apprenticeship, we looked up from our garden to realize that there was no way we could afford to buy a place of our own in Northern California to plant our dream in native soil. At the same time, we were starting to feel our inner clocks ticking away, counting the years of our youth left with a certain urgency. How much longer would we have the strength and stamina to start from scratch building our own homestead? We were felt the optimal window of opportunity passing, though I was just thirty and Sandi twenty-six. It was time to spread our wings, widen our horizons and fly on to a true nesting place. We had essentially pocket change in savings, having between us earned just a few thousand dollars a year. We decided to look for unimproved land and develop it all ourselves. Even then we weren’t being all that realistic since between buying land and building a home we’d need tens of thousands of dollars. Nonetheless, we decided to begin by looking north, to Oregon and Montana. Lacking a car, we packed essentials in our backpacks and set out on foot when the weather warmed up in mid-June.

To our benefit, presenting ourselves as a couple made hitchhiking easier than a man hitching alone. We radiated a wholesome image of latter-day pioneers, Sandi with her waist-length braids and I in my denim overalls. It was a safer time in this country, a hiatus from the helter-skelter turbulence of the sixties. Crossing into the arid solitude and alpine peaks of northeastern Oregon, we headed on to Sandpoint, Idaho, then into southwestern Montana. There among ranchlands backed by snow-clad mountains, we hoed weeds from bulb onions for a farmer to earn enough money to pay for the next week’s vittles. It was stunning country but didn’t appear to offer any promising prospects for unimproved land.

Landing in Whitefish, Montana, the entry point for hikes in Glacier National Park, we consulted with rangers and found no slots left for any of the high peak hikes. He offered us a week-long trek on a new trail just opened to handle the overflow. It sounded enticing since he told us we’d likely encounter few if any other hikers. And, as it turned out, for good reason since we disappeared into deep woods without a single break in the forest canopy for the entire week. Wading across the Flathead River on our final day, we stopped at a laundromat to wash our clothes and there met a fellow hiker. When we told him we were looking for land but had found nothing thus far that was appealing or affordable, he suggested that we check out his own neighborhood where Minnesota meets Iowa and Wisconsin. An unglaciated region beside the Mississippi River, it features hills and dales seldom found in the pancake-flat Midwestern heartland. He spoke with great fondness for its quiet beauty and low-key, reliable locals.

“But how would we get there?” I asked him. “We’re half a continent away and we don’t have wheels.”

He smiled and laughed. “Hop a freight!” he quipped.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“I’m not, actually,” he responded. “The Burlington Northern passes right through Whitefish on its way from Seattle to Chicago. It’s the northern route across Montana and North Dakota on its way to Minneapolis. Check it out. It’s called the Empire Builder. The station is just three blocks from here. It’s one of those classic buildings from the turn of the century, all white and in mint condition.”

“Have you ever ridden the rails?” I asked skeptically.

“Not that route,” he said. “I’ve done short hauls. You know, hop on and jump off a half hour later. But I’ve heard great things from people who’ve done the long haul stretches. It’s an altogether different way to see the Plains with none of the clutter you pass through in a car. Instead of a few small windows, you have a ten-by-ten foot opening to peer out into the big wide world.”

His description of hopping freights instantly brought to mind folk legend Woody Guthrie’s fond recollections of his itinerant life as a Dust Bowl refugee riding the rails across the country and bedding down in railside hobo camps. While living in our log house homestead, I’d been enraptured by his classically ribald autobiography, Bound for Glory — descriptions of highballing down the rails in raucous freight cars in the company of fellow hobos. For one who had grown up middle class in Middle America in the somnolent Fifties, the prospect of riding the rails across the plains was almost irresistible. But how many of those Dust Bowl hobos had ridden alongside their sweethearts? Sandi and I exchanged glances and shrugged our shoulders. I had already spent a year in B.C. breaking through one after another personal boundary, but as a woman Sandi was breaking every gender stereotype. I was proud and grateful to be together with someone of such an epically adventurous spirit.

We thanked our informant, gathered our freshly laundered clothes into our backpacks and strolled the three blocks to the station. And what a station it was. It was a grand edifice for such a small town, with regal lines and a scale like that found in just a small number of railway stations in the North American west from Fairmont Banff Springs in the Canadian Rockies to the Ahwanee Hotel in Yosemite Valley. The building’s first floor is now clad in horizontal wood siding while the upper floors exhibit half-timbering and heavy carved brackets support the roof’s wide overhang. Trackside, the cedar-shingled roof featured three prominent dormers, the two on the far ends decorated with clipped gable roofs.

Not knowing quite how to ask railway staff how to avoid paying for a proper ticket and ride free on their rails, we settled in the lush lawn in front of the building and took naps, our heads propped on our packs. We awoke a while later to the sounds of a nearby conversation. Two young men had sat down several yards away. Both were a bit shaggy in the style of the time but not unkempt, and the way they handled their gear indicated that they were veteran vagabonds. We strolled over, sat down next to them and began asking questions.

“Where you from?” I began.

“Santa Cruz,” answered the one who called himself Ace.

“And where you headed?”

“Chicago.” Ace was a sandy-haired man sporting wisps of an adolescent beard.

We nodded.

“And where are you headed?” asked Ace.

“Minneapolis,” I replied.

“You planning to pay to ride coach or hop on a boxcar?”

“Ride free, like we always do,” said Bud. His shoulder-length hair and casual manner camouflaged his youth. Turns out, as we later learned, they were both just sixteen, but they had already dropped out of school when they found they could learn more on the road than behind a desk. They’d already seen more from the floor of a barreling boxcar than most of us see in a lifetime sitting in the padded interiors of a coach, car or bus.

They quickly briefed us on essentials to stock up on for a 1200-mile, thirty-six-hour journey with just three stops along the way. And those stops were not in the few towns along the way like Havre and Minot but smack in the middle of eye-high cornfields and wind-whipped wild grasses when the engineer pulled our eastbound train onto a siding waiting for a westbound train to barrel by. They advised bringing enough food, water and beverages to last the trip along with a few inches of collapsed cardboard to cushion our butts for the thrashing they’d receive from the lurching, suspension-free wood-and-steel-bottomed boxcar.

“Be sure to get your juices in №10 cans,” Ace advised. “They’re real handy to pee into after you finish drinking from them. Just cut out the top and you’ve got an instant porta-potty.”

“Oh, and be sure to bring TP, paper towels and liquid soap to clean your hands and wipe your ass,” added Bud, chuckling. With all the soot and dirt being kicked up by the engine and boxcars in front of you, you’ll be pretty filthy by the time you jump off in…where did you say you were going?”

“Minneapolis,” said Sandi.

“Better Minneapolis than Chicago,” said Ace. “You’ll have a better chance of surviving.”

The train departed Whitefish around 8:30 p.m. for points east that evening with all four of us aboard in the same boxcar. Before it pulled out of the rail yard, Sandi and I laid out our thin cardboard padding, sleeping bags, and the contents of our backpacks with a meticulous sense of proper order, as if setting up camp for the night. After carefully examining the underside for its suspension, Bud and Ace had selected a red-tinted boxcar with“Southern” printed in fading bold letters across its side. Unlike passenger coaches, freight cars had essentially no suspension at all and the effects of winter frost heaving the rails on the Burlington Northern route made for a teeth-gnashing ride. In addition, while passenger trains are outfitted with cushioned couplings between coaches, boxcars were linked to one another by loose-fitting steel-on-steel that squeals like a dying donkey.

As the train pulled out of the station we felt like we’d just won the lottery, riding free while all those tenderfoot suckers paid bigtime to ride inside. Our triumphal mood dampened slightly as we picked up speed to thirty miles an hour. But hey, what do you expect for a free ride? The boxcar’s ten-by-ten foot steel door opened onto incomparably sweeping views of the snow-clad Flathead Mountains bathed in the roseate light of a northern summer sunset. But as the train accelerated to forty, then fifty miles per hour and the last light faded into inky blackness, the boxcar began to lurch from side to side. We scrambled away from the door and scuttled across the floor like spiders, taking up our positions on our nested sleeping bags. The sounds of gnashing steel grew unbearably shrill and nerve-shattering. Though the tracks were too uneven and the locomotive too ancient to bear speeds higher than fifty-five miles an hour, even that velocity felt half again too fast for safety.

Careening through the darkness with only fleeting lights to illuminate the night felt like plunging down Niagara Falls without so much as a barrel to cushion us. Suddenly we began to wonder how clever or wise we’d been to try crossing the Great Plains by boxcar. We had heard that true hobos usually try to sneak inside newly manufactured pickups being shipped to their destinations. Those many scenes in which they run alongside trains and leap aboard, then settle atop a boxcar with their hair streaming free behind them had come to feel dangerously deceptive.

Despite the chaos and cacophony, fatigue eventually forced surrender and at some point in the night we both fell into a harrowing, fitful sleep, our muscles tensed like tightly wound spools of wire. I awoke in the night to near-total silence, having altogether forgotten where we were. It took some time to realize that the train had halted in a tunnel. I could hear steam hissing as it was released from the undercarriages of the boxcars ahead and behind us. It took a while longer to realize that depending on how long the tunnel was and how far forward the locomotive, we could be breathing deadly carbon monoxide with no way to escape its vapors. I woke Sandi, who had been sleeping beside me, and we whispered to one another, wondering how long we’d been stopped in the tunnel and how much longer we’d be trapped there. As we remembered from high school science classes, carbon monoxide is lethal but odorless. It suddenly occurred to me that several years earlier in Washington, D.C., my friend Marshall Bloom, cofounder of Liberation News Service, had run a garden house from his exhaust pipe into his passenger seat and deliberately asphyxiated himself — death by carbon monoxide. We continued counting the time in the deceptively peaceful silence while toxic fumes engulfed the tunnel. We wondered how much longer we had before we ourselves would expire.

Lying in our sleeping bags lost in fathomless uncertainty, we listened keenly for sounds to indicate that the locomotive was about to move. At some point — who knows how long? — we began to hear steam and clanking echoing through the tunnel ahead of us. With an abrupt jerk that passed from the locomotive through the long succession of couplings leading down the line to our boxcar, we felt the wheels begin to creak and squeal. Ever so slowly the train picked up speed, from one to five to ten miles an hour, and with the sighing of releasing air pressure we ourselves sighed in infinite relief. At some point we emerged into fresh air and a star-spangled night sky.

“Hallelujah!” I almost whispered.

“Hallelujah indeed,” Sandi laughed in relief to be able to breathe free again.

Of all the housekeeping and personal care that needed attention while barreling down the rails in a boxcar, the most challenging was “toileting”. As a man I had it easy, or at least easier. We followed the advice of our boxmates Ace and Bud and cut off the top of a №10 can that had held tomato juice in its first incarnation. I would then wedge myself into the farthest corner opposite the door, leaning my shoulders into two steel walls to steady my swaying body against the lurching boxcar, attempt to calm myself enough to relax my bladder, and coax urine into the can. Can in hand with urine sloshing, I would then stagger back towards the door and, timing myself carefully, heave the contents downwind. Pooping required a bit more care. I would crouch backwards into said corner like a semi backing into a tight parking spot, release my sphincter in a deft exercise of meditative mind control and carefully nudge my offal into the №10 can. Heaving these solids into the wind required tossing them far without tossing myself out the door along with them.

But most challenging of all was helping Sandi vacate her own bladder. In her case, coordinating the release of her urine while squatting and bracing herself backwards against the corner of the swaying boxcar required that I crouch and face her while holding the can steady between her legs. But the lurching of the boxcar was so unpredictable that by the time she calmed her sphincter enough to pee, the can I was holding might be in an altogether different position and we’d end up with her urinating halfway up my arm. I would then stagger back to the open door and heave the contents into a 55-mile-an-hour hurricane. This maneuver more or less worked until one afternoon when, as I heaved, a gust sucked her pee into a vortex that ricocheted and flew back, spraying my face and mouth with urine all the way down to my waist. I stood there swaying and dripping, wiping my nose and mouth with my fetid shirt sleeve. Cleaning the reeking mess off my skin and clothes was its own challenge given that there was no running water on board and just a few gallons of clean water reserved for us to drink and brush teeth. Drenched in pee and dusted in soot, I realized in that moment that love sometimes requires self-sacrifice.

But for all the grubbiness and discomfort, there were many exalted and exultant moments. Several times during the 1200-mile journey the train came to a slow halt in the middle of a wheat field near no station, town or discernable landmarks. It had pulled onto a siding to make room for an oncoming train to pass. The constant cacophony of grinding wheels, swaying carriages, and steel against steel gradually subsided and in its place arose a silence so deafening that it rang in our ears. All that was left was the whirring of insect wings and the soughing of wheat stalks wafting in prairie breezes. Gazing forward towards the locomotive, I finally felt safe leaning out the boxcar door that lurched too much for safety when the train was in motion. I could see the long arc of freight cars leading to the engine, 25 or more, as much as a quarter mile ahead, but at that distance heard nothing from the engine itself.

“Is it all right if I jump down and take a look?” I asked Ace and Bud.

“Yeah, it’s okay so long as you stay close,” said Bud. “You never know when the train will start up again and once it’s moving you won’t be able to catch it. You wouldn’t want to be left behind. It’d be a long walk to town and tough to reconnect with your partner.”

The myth of freight-hopping propagated in films about the lives of hobos has them running alongside a boxcar and leaping aboard, but the reality is that rails are mounted on raised levees whose slopes are too steep for leaping. The only safe way to hop a freight is when it’s stationary. The floor of the boxcar is at about eye level, maybe higher, so you need to reach up and hoist yourself aboard or get a hand to reach down from inside.

I leapt down to the levee, then down the slope and into the wheatfield. The grasses grew six feet tall, a good several inches over my head. It was a veritable wheat forest. I stood immersed in insect and bird activity with the razor rasp of grasshoppers and buzzing of bees, the clinks of wheat stalks stirring in the breeze. I could no longer see the horizon through the thicket. I was suddenly overcome by drowsiness in the heat and somnolence of a prairie summer afternoon, tempted to lie down and curl up. But I was also aware that at any moment the train might start up again without warning. The spacious silence and swaying stalks felt almost like kayaking on ocean swells on a calm day. Growing up in the flatlands of central Ohio, I’d always thought that the heartlands of America lacked the drama I yearned for in the more adventurous topography of mountain peaks. But the plains in eastern Montana and across the Dakotas featured subtle contours of swells and swales that together with breezes and towering cumulus cloud formations conveyed a sense of perpetual motion.

My prairie reverie was suddenly broken by a whistle — not from the locomotive but from two fingers in Ace’s mouth.

“Time to get your ass back inside!” he called. “This rig may pull out any minute.”

Regretfully, I abandoned my reverie and waded through the wheat stalks till the boxcar re-emerged. Ace reached down to my outstretched arms and pulled me up to the elevated floor, where I clambered inside. All four of us sat down on the lip of the ten-foot-wide door and dangled our legs off the edge. Another ten minutes elapsed in mid-afternoon stillness. Then, emerging out of the silence, a distant rumble began to grow from an invisible source on the opposite side of our boxcar, growing in volume and intensity as it approached. Highballing past us, its whistle reached a crescendo, then dropped half an octave as it barreled past. Its rumble faded into the distance, replaced by the desultory hum of insects and wheat stalks. Then out of the stillness a sudden jolt began traveling back from the locomotive, starting with a sound like a distant shotgun, then passing down the line of boxcars with a sound every few seconds like a thundering cannon as each coupling transmitted the shock of gripping the one behind. With each engagement the jolt grew louder and we braced ourselves for it to reach us like an earthquake as its shake comes rumbling through. When it hit us, we felt the steel and wood creak and tremble under its blow. Past the jolt, the entire train began to move again, the tracks and wheels grinding beneath us as it gained velocity. The locomotive let out three blasts that echoed down the line from a quarter mile ahead of us. We resumed our route rattling across the landscape and didn’t stop again for another long spell.

Thirty-six hours after climbing aboard in Whitefish, we pulled into the vast freight yards of Minneapolis. Battered and bruised, we made our way to the son of Sandi’s childhood next-door neighbors. When he saw us, he stood back and surveyed our disheveled appearance with a mix of amazement and amusement.

“Oh man, where have you two been? Living under Wacker Drive?”

Since we hadn’t had access to a mirror, we had no idea how we looked. I caught a glimpse of myself in the bathroom and stood aghast at my unrecognizable appearance. My face resembled that of an Appalachian coal miner after a tunnel collapse — two bloodshot eyes peering out of a soot-begrimed face, hair blown helter-skelter as if by a nuclear blast, and overalls turned from blue to gray. The specter was simultaneously horrifying and hilarious. I was almost proud of myself. How many Ivy League graduates had managed such a precipitously downward plunge in so short a time?

Looking back from the perspective of half a century, I’m astonished at how much credence we invested in the few words we exchanged with that Midwestern stranger in the laundromat that day. Our one brief conversation had launched an epic 36-hour freight-hopping journey across the Great Plains. Little did we realize at the time that we would do it all over again the next year. Some people never learn.

Excerpt from a forthcoming memoir, “Blinded by the Light”.