Two Trains Running

Bones is scarcely what the law would consider a credible witness, certainly not so credible as Officer Grandinetti. He has an extensive arrest record, and he goes on at some length about “utilizing personal magnetism to subdue ruthless people,” which speaks both to a measure of craftiness and a healthy streak of arrogance. He lies effortlessly; he’s lied to me and subsequently admitted it. Like anyone in prison, he’s working every angle he can, and I suspect he’s working some angle with me. Not that I can fault him for it—he’s alone, he has no idea where his wife is, no one writes him, and, except for his lawyer, I’m the only person from outside the walls with whom he’s had contact. But despite this, and while I’m hesitant to make an informed judgment about his character based on a single interview, I find what he tells me, if not credible, then at least genuine in its essence. My acceptance of what he says probably has something to do with his enthusiasm for hoboing, for trains, for animals—especially his German shepherd, Star—and the outdoors. This enthusiasm seems an irreducible distillate of the man, and the longer we talk, the more what he says seems funded by that portion of his sensibility; and the more frequently he goes back to what we’ve previously discussed in order to clarify some point, or to reshape a story so it better reflects the truth. It’s as if he’s gone past his natural suspicion of me, and is having a good time talking to someone from the world.

Our conversation turns to the trains, and when I tell Bones about my infant experiences on the rails, he lifts an eyebrow and says, “You’ve ridden?”

“Yeah, a little.”

Bones continues looking at me for a long moment, his expression neutral, and I think he’s trying to fit the information into his understanding of me, reassessing my potential. Or could be he’s merely surprised. Then he grins, and I can see the face of the boy emerge from all those lines and wrinkles. It’s a look of unalloyed pleasure, as if everything around us, walls and razor wire and guards, had vanished, and we were sitting on a patch of dirt somewhere warm, passing a bottle.

“Man, ain’t it fun!” he says.

I’m riding in a boxcar south along the Columbia River, which must be nearly a mile wide at this point, and it’s hard to tell which is the reflecting medium and which the source of light—the river, every eddy bearing a captive glint, or the starry sky above. The towering hills that follow the watercourse show dark and nearly featureless, all but their lowermost reaches in shadow, making it appear that the curtain of night has been gathered into great black folds at the edge of the bright stage it delimits. Though it’s incredibly loud in the car, too loud for speech, something about the solitude and immensity of the scene, and perhaps the sense I have of the peculiarly American tradition of which I’m now a small part, the rail riders of the Civil War era, the hobos of the Depression, the FTRA…all this serves to describe a silence inside me, to shut me off from the rattling and the cold iron smells of the train, even from the noise of ambient thought, and after a while, emerging from an almost meditative state, I wonder if this is what Adman means by “the Drift.”

Adman is the train name of Todd Waters, a brisk, fiftyish man with a neat gray beard who runs a successful Minneapolis advertising agency. He’s been riding for more than twenty years, and admits to being what is called a “yuppie rider” or a “yuppie hobo.” Most tramps use shoestrings to tie off their trouser cuffs when they’re boarding a freight to prevent the fabric from catching on something and causing them to fall. Adman uses Velcro fasteners. When I met him he was wearing a sporty cap, and a denim jacket and trousers that appeared to be matching, and I thought he would look more natural steering a yacht than hopping a freight. He’s given to comparing the quintessential hobo to a Hesse character whose purpose in life was “to make men homesick for their freedom,” and he asserts that the experience of riding elevates him into a state he calls “the Drift,” wherein it seems that his dreams and thoughts are colored not by his own past, but by the stars he’s passing beneath and the places he’s passing through.