Two Trains Running

I asked Dave if the spray-painted train was his doing and he told me he always left the same picture when he stayed in a place for a few days. Try as I might, I couldn’t redirect the course of the conversation. He was too drunk, too obsessed with his subject, with his evangelical desire to persuade me of the majesty of trains. His words grew almost unintelligible. Eventually he passed out. When I woke in the morning he was gone. After packing my belongings, I had a last look at the spray-painted locomotive, took a photograph of it, and as I glanced about at the ranks of great pillars, the high concrete arches, the slants of sunlight piercing down from the upper reaches of the interchange, for the first time I recognized how like churches were these all-but-deserted places on the edges of our cities. Like unfinished cathedrals whose congregations have run out of funds and moved on to try their luck elsewhere.

In contemplating this mini-collection, deciding to put together a magazine article with stories derived from the same material, I hoped the process by which the real is transformed into the fictive might be thereby illustrated, at least as regards my own work, and that this relationship might be interesting to certain readers. But in writing this introduction I’ve come to realize that perhaps the most significant function of the book is that it adds a small but hopefully interesting drop to the literature concerning hobos, a sketchy tradition that dates back to the end of the Civil War, when the first hobos, the defeated soldiers of the Confederacy, having no money, no horses, rode the rails en masse in order to return to their homes: You see them in old photographs, like flocks of gray crows inhabiting boxcar after boxcar, all staring listlessly, bleakly out at the world, drunk on blood and dying, an expression whose cousin one can still see today in the faces of train tramps drunk on less potent mixtures. It’s a tradition that’s unlikely to have many more additions. With increasingly effective high-tech security being utilized by the railroad companies, the freight yards are becoming harder and harder to infiltrate, and without access to slow-moving trains, train tramps may become—for all intents and purposes—extinct. According to the viewpoint of law enforcement and of society in general, this will be a good thing. For my part, even though most of the people in America have no awareness of hobos, I think we’ll miss them—I think not having that color running through the veins of the culture will thin our national blood. When I consider my brief time on the rails, I recall initially not scenes of degradation or violence, but the solitudes in which I found myself. Freight routes cover portions of the country never seen by anyone apart from those who ride the trains, and there are places of great beauty that will be forgotten. With no one to look at them, even if only through drunken and corrupted eyes, it will be as if parts of our map have vanished, in a very real sense restoring that map to something resembling the unfinished depiction of the continent that was deemed accurate more than a century ago. I remember, too, the stories I was told. Men grown old before their time, with gray beards, rheumy eyes, and poisoned livers, gazing back along the violent, dissolute corridors of their lives and relating observations and experiences informed by an oddly genteel aesthetic: moments of kindness, of unexpected good fortune, of happy days and boxcar parties that lasted from California to the Dakotas. All that lovely illusion and truth about the freedom of the rails and the inebriated Zen-monk illuminations that attend it…all that will be gone if the freight companies have their way and rid the yards of the derelicts, the dented souls, the human rats who ride the Steel. As will the skinny, million-mile-long city of the rails with its vagrant populace and anarchic laws. It’s a tough place to live, but there are many cities in America that offer fewer cultural rewards.

Perhaps I’m being too pessimistic here. Perhaps sufficient technology will filter down into the hobo jungles and in the near future, cybernetically savvy train tramps will confound heat and motion detectors, slip unseen into the yards and barnacle themselves to robot-driven bullet freights, becoming devotees and celebrants of the New Steel. Probably not. The dissolute nature of hobo life, its fundamental lack of competency, would seem to lobby against this possibility. At the least it’s an idea for another story and maybe in the end that’s what is important. The world is made of stories. A man’s life is a cloud of entangled narratives, and history a wagging tongue. And so as long as there are stories to be told about hobos, they’ll continue in the way we all continue, products of our own myths, heroes in a misperceived and diminutive cause.

The FTRA Story