Riding the Rails, Part II

No, not again!

Returning home to our coastal homestead after our summer hitching to and from Midwestern adventures, we spent a winter considering our next move. Much as we had loved living by the sea, we realized that we still needed to find a more affordable region to settle into. With a certain reluctance, we arranged to let go of our rented hundred-dollar-a-month log house in Pescadero. Packing twenty cartons filled with all the belongings we had accumulated, we placed them in a friend’s garage.

This time we were prepared to leave our home country for an extended period of time, perhaps as much as five or ten years. We even considered settling permanently abroad in some other, hopefully “better” society. This had been a recurring dream for us, two souls so out of sync with mainstream American culture. Researching possible next destinations, we decided to head towards Europe, a set of cultures we imagined, perhaps erroneously, to be more “civilized” than our the rough-hewn nature of our own and therefore more humane. In characteristically exotic fashion, we booked passage on a Yugoslav freighter for a September departure from a port in Newport News, Virginia on a ship with room for just 25 passengers. Our destination was cinematically dramatic — the Moroccan city of Casablanca made legendary by Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in the classic wartime film by the same name. Like many Sixties college students, we’d learned snippets of dialogue by heart while taking breaks from jamming for finals to watch it at the “near far” theater in downtown Ithaca. “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine,” Rick Blaine mutters into his drink, remembering his flame Isle in Paris while his piano player Dooley rhapsodizes regret with the classic ballad, “As Time Goes By.”

To fill the time before our Moroccan departure, we decided to head out again for the summer in June of 1976, only this time on ten-speeds rather than on foot. We took much the same route north to British Columbia, then pedaled east across the province on Route 3, a two-lane alternative to the TransCanada nicknamed the Crowsnest Highway. It was so narrow that it offered no clearance between through traffic and the steep-sloped walls of tunnels. We had to wait for gaps between vehicles to pedal through, sprinting to the far end to avoid being picked off by barreling semi’s.

Heading further east, we cycled through a town called Hope, at least a decade before Bill Clinton sprang out of another town called Hope and moved into the White House. At the base of a steep hill a few miles east of town, we encountered a road sign informing us, “Hill Next Forty Miles.” This turned out to be a considerable understatement. After a full afternoon and a following morning of relentless climbing, our exhaustion signaled that we were indeed beyond hope. Sandi lagged far behind me on the way up. But at the top she took the lead and became a downhill racer, while I sought to catch my breath and relax.

We were surprised to find that while local Canadians were pleasant enough, few offered a spot to camp for the night. We ended up finding spots just off the highway in the narrow margin of roadside between private farms and ranches. There we heated instant rice atop a can of Sterno for dinner and quick-cooking rolled oats the next morning. One evening a farmer kindly gave us permission to lay down our tarp in an apricot grove redolent with fruity fragrances. Grateful for our soft landing, we spent the night in exhausted contentment and were awakened the following morning by a soft hailstorm of overripe apricots bombing and burying us head to foot.

It was on this leg of the journey that I turned for sustenance to a Canadian favorite, Hovis wheat germ bread. Each day I consumed a whole dry one-pound loaf. In the course of the three weeks we spent crossing British Columbia I gained twenty-five pounds of what must have been pure muscle. Over the rest of the summer, I added that much again, growing from my long, lean 135 pounds to a substantial 185. I fully expected to lose it all again at the end of the trip, but to my astonishment I never did. Though I remained lean, from then on I no longer carried myself inside a skeletal frame.

Having pedaled the Crowsnest Highway across three mountain ranges all the way to the eastern end of B.C., we found we hadn’t the drive left to cross the Great Plains through variable winds, thunderstorms and day after day of flat, largely featureless land. Without a deliberate decision or a specific route in mind, we turned our bicycles south and found ourselves in Eureka, Montana, wondering where we were headed. We spread our well-creased map across our handlebars and found to our astonishment that we were just half an hour from our now-familiar haunt. There they were, the rail yards of Whitefish where we had launched our previous year’s freight-hopping adventure. We were genuinely mystified that we had apparently been drawn back, as if by some unseen magnetic force, to the very place where we had landed quite by accident just one year earlier.

Once in Whitefish we headed straight for the railway station and wheeled our ten-speeds over to the freight office. There we encountered a burly, good-humored man with silver hair. He wore red suspenders around his rotund waist. He radiated the settled, contented energy of someone who’s spent his entire life in a fifty-mile radius of where he was born.

“Afternoon, folks,” he greeted us. “How can I help you?”

“We’d like to ship our bikes to Minneapolis,” I answered with the casual confidence of someone who knows what he’s doing and where he’s headed.

“Is that where you’re headed yourselves?” he asked.

“Yes indeed,” I nodded.

“And how do you plan to get there?”

I glanced at Sandi, checking to be sure she was with me on this. She nodded.

“Hitchhike,” I replied.

“I wouldn’t let my daughter hitchhike across the Plains,” he shook his head. “No sir, no way. Too dangerous.”

“Oh yeah?” I said, my curiosity battling inwardly with my slipping confidence in our decision. “So how would you have us get across the Plains?”

“Ride in a freight car,” said the old man. “Faster, safer and a whole lot more comfortable.”

Sandi and I looked at each other and laughed.

“Oh no!” we shook our heads and moaning in unison, our bones aching in muscle memory. “Been there, done that.”

A wonderful adventure,” I continued, “and a great story to tell your grandkids. But best remembered, not repeated.”

“That’s because you didn’t find a boxcar with good enough suspension,” the old man responded. “There’s a Burlington Northern coming in from Spokane at midnight tonight. That’s when my shift ends. I can help you find a better boxcar.”

Sandi and I turned to each other and shook our heads. We felt that familiar sinking sensation, the ground sinking beneath our unsettled feet. At the same time, we felt ourselves held steady by the old man’s firm direction and relieved to be guided by a solidity and strength blessedly more assured than ourselves.

“There’s a thunderstorm comin’ through this evening. You’ll get drenched if you sit in it when the passenger depot closes. You can wait it out in a boxcar if you like. I’ll show you where. It’s on a siding over there,” he said, pointing over our heads to the right. “You and your bikes can take shelter inside till I come pick you up at midnight.”

Grateful for his offer, we followed him over to the siding and stashed our ten-speeds in a dark corner of a vacant boxcar. Then we went shopping for what we’d need for the journey — food, drink, water, washcloths and a variety of goods we hadn’t thought to bring the first time around. Most crucially, we gathered a hefty pile of cardboard boxes to cushion our bodies from the battering they’d endured the first time around. We broke them down into six-ply stacks of corrugated mattresses. By the time we returned to the boxcar, the winds had begun to pick up in advance of the storm. Leaves and debris skittered across the freight yard, then swirled into eddies in the roiling air. Rolling peals of thunder of a volume and intensity we hadn’t experienced since childhood echoed across the Flathead River into Glacier Park. Flashes of lightning were followed in quick succession by thunder, signaling the perilously close proximity of lightning strikes.

We hoisted ourselves into the boxcar and arranged our things at the back, out of range of pelting rainfall yet within view when the old man would come to rouse us. As soon as we’d settled in, the storm swept across the freight yard in all its tempestuous fury. Yet in the shelter of the boxcar we felt surprisingly secure, even cozy. Giant raindrops pelted the steel hull surrounding us, leaving us awash in sound as if tumbling to and fro in an undersea tsunami. Nodding off, we fell into a tranquil sleep like nothing we’d known since first embarking on the summer’s journey.

We didn’t awaken again till sometime in the middle of the night. We opened our bleary eyes and peered out to find the old man standing at the front of the boxcar. He was wearing his miner’s headlamp. The rain had stopped but it was still dripping everywhere. You could see mist in the air, a halo of moisture illuminated by the lamp surrounding his head.

“You folks still want to catch the train east?” he asked.

It took us a moment to realize where we were.

“Why, yes,” I answered, gradually coming to. “For sure. What time is it anyway?”

“One a.m.” he answered. “The train was late coming in from Spokane, so I stayed after my shift ended to find you a good boxcar.”

“Oh, you shouldn’t have,” protested Sandi. But in truth we would have been lost without him. We gathered our belongings and handed the ten-speeds down to him, then climbed down ourselves. Following his lead, we clambered across multiple lines of rails. The yard was brightly illuminated with floodlights. The old man led us wheeling our ten-speeds alongside the Spokane to Chicago freight, which hovered half over our heads on its massive elevated bank. He leaned down and peered carefully at the intricate undercarriages of each boxcar, then aimed his miner’s light at each coupling to check its condition.

“This one looks good enough,” he finally announced. “Step in.” He clasped his hands together in the shape of a stirrup. We placed our boots gingerly inside them and hoisted ourselves up onto the lip of the giant door. Then he lifted our ten-speeds up to us. Finally he handed up a weathered six-foot-long 4” x 4”. It was heavy and a bit ungainly. At first we were puzzled.

“What’s this for?” I asked.

“To make sure the door doesn’t close on you if the train makes a sudden stop,” he told us. “If it does, it might not be opened again for a few months, and by that time you’ll be long gone.”

A chill ran down my spine. Neither of us had ever imagined that such massive steel doors could close on their own, let alone that anyone would be able to open them without help from the outside. “Put the 4x4 in the doorway,” he added, ”so it doesn’t fall out but stays in place even if things shift.”

“They’ll also come in handy if anyone tries to climb in,” he added. We tried to imagine beating anyone back with the whack of a 4x4. We were clearly playing in the major leagues now. We were not yet fully aware of the hazards that come with riding a rougher road than the relatively sheltered lives of backcountry homesteaders — sheltered not from wild creatures but from far more dangerous humans.

“Good luck to you folks,” the old man said. His voice was surprisingly gentle. He stood on the embankment, the miner’s light on his forehead illuminating the mist surrounnding him. His face was wizened with age but creased with kindness. We were overcome with gratitude for what he was doing for us. Here we were perfect strangers to him. Why would he go so far out of his way to stay long past his midnight shift and tuck us into the best boxcar on the Burlington Northern Spokane-Chicago line? What had we done to deserve such treatment?

“We’ll never forget you,” we told him, our voices quavering, throats clotting and tears welling up in our eyes. Sandi reached down and grasped his hands in hers. I shook his firm, warm hand.

“It’ll be pulling out anytime now,” he told us. “Take care of yourselves.” And with that, he turned around and clambered down the sloping embankment, then back in the direction from which we’d come. In time he disappeared into the misted distance, but his presence lingered in our minds and hearts long after. Even today it shimmers in memory, a mystery of random kindness and occasion for lasting gratitude. Moments later we heard the first stirrings of the locomotive a few dozen cars ahead. We glided almost silently out of the Whitefish rail yard and its floodlit illumination into the stunning darkness of a star-spangled Montana night.

This second journey across the heartland was decidedly more comfortable than the first. Thirty-six hours later we pulled into the vast maze of locomotives, boxcars and rails in Minneapolis. As Sandi lowered the ten-speeds down to me, I heard distant voices off to my left and looked in that direction to see several men headed our way. We’d been warned that railroad bulls (as hobos less than fondly called them) could get pretty rough, a good reason not to continue on to Chicago. But it was too late to try to hide from them, so we simply continued to unload our gear. Several were wearing work overalls but one among them wore a uniform with a proper cap. It was he who called out to us once he was within earshot.

“How was your trip?” he called in a reassuringly light-hearted tone.

“Uh, well,” I responded, caught in the act and not certain how to answer. But then I sensed a certain hint of friendliness and relaxed into the moment. “Fine,” I said, “but next time it’d be great if we could arrange for more comfortable seats.”

He laughed while his team looked on in astonishment. “We’ll see if we can arrange it.”