Jumping Trains

Nothing makes a man feel small quite like jumping on a train. He is weak, unknown, and inconsequential. (Unless, of course, he gets caught. They used to figure his crime was worth at least a few broken bones so they threw him off. Nowadays, I’ve heard, it’s worth about a thousand bucks to the state—in Minnesota, at least.)

Feeling small and insignificant can be depressing, but there in that boxcar it’s invigorating. What makes the difference isn’t always why we feel small and insignificant. (The answer, after all, is because we are.) Sometimes what makes the difference in whether we’re depressed or invigorated by our insignificance is where we feel it.

As the train tumbles forward with all its tonnage, I don’t matter. It’s all the same to the train and its engineer whether I ride along happily or get my legs run over because I tripped jumping on. They don’t know I exist. In my worthlessness is my freedom. I’m bound to a direction, route, and speed I cannot influence; but I’m free.

I’m lying on my back smoking whatever I got and feeling how wonderful the world is even if I am down and out. Feeling how wonderful the world is—all the more wonderful for all its blues and grays. Feeling how wonderfully big the world is.

People gather and tend to remain where the world is little and tight. Construction, constriction. But trains still travel where the world is huge and I am small, wonderfully small.

Waiting in the dark, outside the yard in St. Paul, close enough that the train won’t have accelerated too fast to jump onto, but far enough away that no one will see me do it—that’s where it begins. I ignore the flatbeds, tankers, coal cars, and locked up boxcars. They’re easy to climb on, but easy to get caught on, too.

There’s nowhere to hide, so if  the train doesn’t slow down before the next yard, hapless drifters would have to jump off at 30 miles an hour. I’ve jumped off at what felt like 15 or 20 before, and I’m not interested in breaking my record.

From behind a tree, about 60 feet from the tracks, I’m looking for the elusive, empty, unlocked boxcar—the hobo’s limo since the smoggy dawn of the industrial revolution.

When it’s stormy out—but you’ve remained mostly dry except for the dampness on your coat and shoes from running between the shelter of a tree to the shelter of a train—that’s when there’s room to think, to feel, to question. The clatter and the wind blend with the noisy troubles of a sad, sad mind like white noise, creating still out of a storm.

Cliché as rambling may be, especially rambling along the rails, there’s no catharsis like it.

Where else can fear be left behind like a cheating wife or happiness be stolen away with like it’s somebody else’s suitcase? It’s not a place for glee or elation like heaven or an orgy; it’s a place for peace, violently tranquil like a bombed-out chapel or a honeymoon morning when she’s still asleep.

When life is a hurricane, here is its rusty, creaking, transcontinental eye.

But there’s been no train-hopping for me in years. I have a wife, kids. Now all I have is the daydream that brings me across the plains to the mountains to the sea. And maybe back again, but not too quickly.

Often, when we’re driving south into downtown, a slow freight train rumbles overhead on the bridge that runs parallel to Broadway over 35. Usually the cars carry huge containers  that look like semi trailers stacked two high. Occasionally, there will be an empty flatbed or a tanker.

And sometimes I see an open boxcar, rolling past like an invitation. When the door is slid open and the sun is on the other side, the car is a vacuous, black cavern. I know that if I climbed in it, the other side would only be 10 feet from me, but I can’t tell by looking, at least not from here at 60 miles an hour.

Perhaps it opens into another universe like Narnia’s wardrobe, but rusty, with wheels and graffiti. I keep my eye out as if I ever would leave this Honda on the highway side and sprint up the embankment, jumping into the next boxcar. Just in time to catch a ride to Vancouver or Wichita.

I keep watch, but I never would go. Not now at least.