Two Trains Running

Lee is a 42-year-old wilderness squatter who was involved with the Earth First movement, until he became fed up with the group’s internal politics. He lives in a tiny house he built himself in the midst of a redwood forest in Northern California; it’s so carefully camouflaged, it’s almost impossible to spot from a distance of 15 feet. There he publishes Hobos from Hell/There’s Something About a Train, a ’zine containing stories about the rails written by a variety of hobos. He’s dressed, as is his custom, all in black. Black sweats, black raincoat, black baseball hat. Makes him harder to spot in the yards at night. Though he’s no hermit, his face has the sort of mild openness I associate with someone who’s spent time in the solitudes. His features are weathered, but his energy and humor make him seem younger than his years. He says he looks forward “to the collapse of the Industrial State,” but when that happens, he’ll miss the trains. It strikes me that, for Lee, a perfect world would be one in which man has become extinct, the planet has reverted to a natural state, and the only reminders of the human past are the trains, evolved to an inorganic form of life, traveling endlessly across the wild and making their eerie music.

Because I want to talk about the FTRA, Lee decides to take our conversation up to the flags, where no one else will hear. But we wind up talking less about the FTRA than about “the next generation of hobos,” one that includes the “crusty punks” and young eco-activist riders. Lee places the latter in the tradition of the Wobblies, who used the rails to spread their political message back in the ’30s; he describes them as “goal-oriented, self-educated wanderers.” The crusty punks are pierced, tattooed, homeless youth who come out of hardcore squat scenes in urban areas, and are “apolitical, non-racist white trash.” A subgroup, the “gutter punks,” he likens to the Untouchable class excluded from the Hindus. He expresses concern that these younger riders haven’t been accepted by the old hobos, mainly because their rowdy behavior has attracted the attention of the police and thus brought down even more heat. He seems to like them all, has ridden with them, but he’s frustrated by the crusties’ self-destructiveness. I wonder if his attitude toward them, his compassion, may echo a similar attitude that caused him frustration when he was involved with the Earth Firsters.

That night people gather around the campfire, drinking beer and swapping rail stories. There’s SLC, a hobo out of Salt Lake who once owned a mail-order computer company, which he lost to the IRS, and has just spent a month working on a hog farm; there’s Dante Faqwa, an old-time hobo; there’s Buzz Potter, editor of the Hobo Times; there’s a lady hobo, Connecticut Shorty; there’s a short, truculent guy in his late twenties who calls himself Bad Bob. Lee is there with a couple of friends. Adman is there. Along with many, many others I haven’t met. Listening to scraps of conversation, it’s possible to believe that I’m in a hobo jungle back during the Depression:

“Is the Sacramento Kid around the fire?”

“…wasn’t a bull for a thousand miles…”

“…it’s always been a motherfucker to catch out of…”

“…they closed the mission in Atlanta…”

“…the train didn’t go till sundown…”

“…best chicken I ever ate came from that alley…”

Whenever a train draws close, fireworks are set off; starbursts flower overhead as the engine approaches the camp, roaring and moaning, flattening the brush with the wind of its passage. Night is the best time to watch trains; they seem grander and more magical. There’s a gravity about them you can’t feel as strongly in the daylight. They are, I think, kind of like the giant sandworms in Dune…of course, it’s possible this and all my previous perceptions are colored by the fact that I’m seriously baked. Two monster joints and a bunch of beer. Whatever, I realize that I’m being seduced by all the happy-wanderer, freedom’s-just-another-word-for-freight-hopping, hash-cooking, dumpster-diving esprit de poverty that’s rising up from these sons and daughters of the iron horse, like heat from Mother Nature’s steaming yoni. Which is okay, I suppose. I’ll have to turn in my cynic’s card, but hey, maybe I’ve migrated to a better world. Maybe the stars are actually spelling out song lyrics, and the pile of stones shadowing us has turned into the Big Rock Candy Mountain.