Two Trains Running

Lucius Shepard Two Trains Running

INTRODUCTION: THE STEEL

SEVERAL YEARS AGO I CONTRACTED TO DO AN article for Spin magazine concerning a hobo organization called the FTRA (Freight Train Riders of America), a group that certain elements of law enforcement claimed was a hobo mafia responsible for—among other crimes—hundreds of murders, drug running on a massive scale, and the derailing of trains. As a result, I wound up hopping freights over the span of a couple months. I talked to train tramps in hobo jungles, urban squats, wino bars, at a supermax prison, and in various other venues. For a time I traveled with a hobo whom I called Madcat in the article, holding back his real name for fear he might suffer reprisals from those who did not like what I wrote about them. In Madcat’s company I experienced a fair sampling of hobo life. It’s a life that has little connection with the commonly held, somewhat folkloric view of hobos, one chiefly conveyed by stories and songs and images that reference the Depression era, portraying hobos—or as they prefer to be distinguished these days, train tramps—as colorful kings-of-the-road, lazy, easygoing, good-time-loving, stogie-smoking gents who might be prone to a little drunkenness, a little petty larceny, but nothing worse than that. Though this image may loosely fit the contemporary train tramp, it scarcely describes them. While some of the men and women I met on the rails were seriously dysfunctional, the remainder were more-or-less whole. They were not truly homeless, not impoverished clue to fate—they had simply declined, for one reason or another, society’s invitation to join and claimed to be fulfilled by their vagrant lives. They enjoyed being able to indulge laziness and substance abuse, and enjoyed, too, the brotherhood they found on the rails (“brotherhood” and “sisterhood” were words I often heard used to evoke the chief virtue of the lifestyle). Yet I would characterize few of them as easy-going. Surrounded by violence, generally in poor health, afflicted with psychological difficulties resulting from the stress of their day-to-day existence, they all passed a significant portion of their time in states of aggravation, fear, anxiety, and delirium. When I would press them as to the reason they continued to live as they did, the vast majority responded in kind: the trains.

 There’s no doubt that riding on a freight car as it carries you through some moonlit, mysterious corner of the American night is a rush like mystical whiskey for anyone with half an imagination. It’s loud, uncomfortable, and a lot of the time it’s damn cold, but it’s also romantic. You’re riding with ghosts, those of Jack Kerouac and Jack London and Ernest Hemingway, and all the ghosts of famous hobos that only hobos have ever heard of, and the fact that it’s illegal and a little dangerous makes the moonlight extra silvery, and your bottled water tastes extra silvery, too. Working at my desk sometimes, I’ll find myself transported back to a rattling, rushing moment and remember how it felt to be lost and alone in America, to be seeing the country from a perspective not many of us achieve. In my head I’ve got a file of snapshots of things and places few people will ever have a chance to see. A perfect little canyon in New Mexico, a trough of yellow stone brimful with golden late afternoon light, decorated with pines and grazing deer. Being almost stalled on an upgrade in the Rockies, sitting on the back of a grain car and watching a young woman, topless, wearing ragged shorts, her body adorned with tattoos of vines and leaves, emerge from the underbrush like a woodland spirit materializing and stare calmly at me from fifteen feet away (a sight whose magic was somewhat diminished when her boyfriend appeared, dragging their packs, and they hopped aboard the next car down). Standing in the Salt Lake City yard and seeing a pack of crusty punks—pierced, tattooed, grimy boys and girls—burst out from behind a string of rusting boxcars and scatter through the weeds, reminiscent in the suddenness of their passage, their deft speed and efficient flight, of wild animals started up by a threatening scent. It’s one hell of an experience, but would I surrender my life to recapture it? Not hardly.