Two Trains Running

 Most train tramps spend far more time in squats and jungles and missions than they do on the rails, but riding the trains is the core experience of hobo life and they venerate it because it’s the only thing they have to venerate. All men, however debased their state, require a myth to sustain them. It may be a god, a devil, a lover, a dream of success or glory—whatever its nature, whether or not it reflects the least reality, we are moved to mythologize it, because our assumed intimacy with this presence elevates our self-esteem. For the hobo, whose functional relationship with the world is severely circumscribed, the train is the sole object worthy of deification. He conceives of it as embodying a romantic menace deserving of respect, this being the quality of which he feels most bereft. It is the trains, then, two-million-ton beasts with electric hearts and diesel blood, that function as god in the hobo pantheon, a god with whom he likes to believe he maintains a symbiotic relationship, one who transports him to places and experiences inaccessible to ordinary men, and whom he commonly refers to as the Steel.

I’ve talked to elderly train tramps, men in their sixties and seventies, who claim to have known Depression-era hobos, and from what I can gather, the freight trains have always been mythologized by those who rode them; but though it has never been other than difficult, it seems that hobo life was not so miserable or rife with danger in the old days as it can be now; thus I am convinced that the mythologizing of the trains has become more self-consciously devotional, an attitude necessary to sustain some men’s commitment to the life. Certainly this is true with regards to a man named Big Sky Dave whom I encountered one night underneath a system of overpasses on the edge of Portland, Oregon, where the interstate merged a series of exchanges, a contemporary wasteland mapped by mattes of rotted cardboard and defiles filled with broken bottles and crushed cans. Everywhere were the signs of a fugitive existence. Lost shoes, message graffiti, discarded clothing. There were pillars all around, the lights of the city showing blurred through fog, like the lights of a distant coast, and I spotted Dave sitting in a meditative pose beside an abutment in a spot where the fog had thinned. He appeared to be in his forties. Gaunt and rawboned, with large callused hands. Black hair threaded with gray hung to his shoulders. Dwarfed by the sweep of dirty concrete above him, he radiated an air of detachment and had about him a dynamic placidity such as you might associate with a librarian or a funeral director, of someone constantly forced to speak in soft tones. He wore an old army jacket with HENDERSON, R. G. stenciled on the pocket. It may or may not have been his real name.

The expanse of concrete directly above Dave’s head had been tagged with the brightly colored and skillfully rendered image of a demonic-looking locomotive, red lightnings spraying from its stack. A couple of cans of spray paint lay on the ground next to him, leading me to assume that he must be the artist. Naturally we mistrusted one another. Trust is a commodity not easy to come by in such circumstances. But after a while we fell to talking and Dave’s conversation, though it skated over a variety of subjects—politics; freight schedules; which local beer had the highest alcohol content; etc.—mainly centered upon trains. As we drank (few discussions one has with hobos are free of significant substance abuse), he pulled out a stack of spiral ring notebooks—they must have constituted nearly half the weight of his pack—and proceeded to read from the literally hundreds of tributes to trains that they contained. The majority of the poems and prose fragments he read were overly sentimental, often mawkishly so, but they all made clear that he viewed the trains in a quasi-religious context. He called them not only “the Steel,” but when speaking of a specific train, he would sometimes refer to it as “the Creature.” Among his writings were a handful of gems, in particular a long, singsongy ode to the old streamliner passenger trains of the ’40s and ’50s (for purposes of meter and rhyme, Dave used the word “streamline” to refer to them), whose chorus evoked a mournful train whistle:

“Streamline… 
All aboard for China and the Nile
Streamline…
Everything I ever thought I cried…”