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At the advanced and noble age of forty or so I am often approached by police, detectives, private investigators, and others regarding precisely why I felt the need to hurl my feces at the mayor's wife.
I don't always have an answer and my lawyer always advises me to keep my trap shut anyway. But they come to me for counsel when they have questions, and I am always honored when they do.
It took many years to establish my reputation along such upright products of civilization as Pramila Jayapal, Jeffrey Dahmer, and whoever wrote this Netflix Resident Evil series. But I like to think I got there.
While others were exploring the higher mysteries of institutional education, I was learning things my own way. I didn't have to take out a loan for this. A copay covered the cost at the clinic.
Presumably, they turned their education into something real, something useful, while I just faffed along having adventures instead like some sort of miserable, fun-loving hobbit.
Rather than grow up, I opted to grow a pair instead and did some train hopping. I slept under the stars atop two-hundred-ton steel behemoths winding their way along tracks. Adventure called and I stupidly answered.
This is a DIY manual, dutifully self-inserted into the middle of something else. Like Al Sharpton, but without the antisemitism. And inserted in my own deal, like the cover of that Tool album.
I’d lazily looked around the internet for a sort of freight hopping best practices. My search was frustrated. Various search engines dutifully returned a variety of legal scolds but no pointers on how to get the job done if one needed to.
Hobos it seems, don’t do a lot of writing. Or they keep their secrets close, they keep them safe, like Gandalf himself. The Wizard King of the Hobos and Sensible Pipe Smokers.
In the interest of History, that magnificent bitch, I intend to correct this awful deficiency with a few pointers here. If just because Nostalgia, History’s gardener and lesbian lover has a strong pull. She tugs my wick every time I hear a train toot.
So read on if a life of degenerate discomfort sounds appealing.
First and foremost, jumping on freight trains is technically a federal crime. So there is a lawyer involved here. I hate him. But he says this kind of thing is illegal and I pay him good Reese's Pieces for his counsel. He pronounces it REE-SEES-PEE-SEES. Because he’s a dick.
He also says even if the local Mississippians are super-huge fans of John Steinbeck, train hopping remains a crime according to the busybody scolds over in D.C. What isn't?
I mean, it's illegal to sell spaghetti larger than 0.11” in diameter. Look it up.
He also says, though I cannot agree, one should never ever never ever never jump on a freight train. He quoted some legalism at me, whined about being socially conscious, and tried a variety of other ignoble arguments in service of inserting that disclaimer here.
Still, rather than continue to beat him with one of those pool-noodles I will relent.
So don’t jump on freight trains.
Unless it sounds really fun. But it shouldn’t. There’s nowhere to plug in your iPad, it’s dangerous, and everyone knows danger and fun never meet. That’s why it is best to hop on trains at night and only under cover of darkness. The mood is better, anyway.
Secrecy in the moment is key, since neither my lawyer nor anyone else in the United States appears capable of minding their own gods damned business. What they don’t know doesn’t end up in court.
So don’t let anyone see you hop on or off a train. This includes your mother. She won’t appreciate it at the time, but hopefully she will experience some amusement reading about it twenty years later.
This also means avoiding train yards like the vectors of authoritarian disease they are. Law enforcement at train yards takes the form of yard security. These bastards are known as bulls and they're not buying you drinks. These blokes will take your ass for free.
And that’s only prior to handing you over to polite society, who will give you a more proper fucking appropriate to your crime. This crime is freely moving about the land of the free.
Avoid yards and resist the urge to ask for directions to the nearest Starbucks.
The second point to understand about freight trains is the fact they always appear to be moving slower than they truly are when you are not on them. This is disconcerting and the effect is flipped whenever one is aboard.
Underestimating the speed of a train will kill you, whether aboard it or not. Risky. It’s like cracking sexist jokes at a Starbucks. Or being black at a Starbucks.
Overestimating the speed of a train will never kill you. It will simply lock you fearfully in place, quite alive if cowardly for the moment. Until you have to jump off anyway, which you will eventually. That could kill you. Might not.
The point is overestimating the speed of the train is a much safer method than the alternative. Approach moving trains with respect and deference.
My lawyer did not see this distinction as necessary or helpful, but he’s currently trying to breath chlorinated pool water, so forget him for now. He's not on our side, anyway.
The only successful method of leaping atop a speeding freight train has been to run alongside it at roughly the same speed the train is moving. If the train is moving faster than you can run alongside it, abort mission. Abort!
A great American philosopher once asserted, “This is the worst case of a boy being cut in half I ever saw.” Don't let those two-halves be you. Former you. Trains, like the State, are impersonal beasts without mercy or pity.
In addition to the most obvious danger of falling under something weighing about eight-hundred thousand times as much as your mom, many freight trains have chains dangling off their sides. Like Bob Marley in that Dickens novel.
At a good speed, these things are like cavalry scimitars, and they will murder your ass whether you convert to their religion and/or Communism or not. But I repeat myself.
I assume these chains are supposed to be secured via some sort of regulation, but I have never once seen a freight train that didn’t sport them hanging as free and loose as a Seattle Belltown whore.
And just like said whores, they regularly threaten to decapitate hobos who approach them. Failing that, these chains will at least leave the unwary victim brain damaged and/or pursuing law degree.
Anyway, do not jump on a train moving faster than your fat ass can waddle after it. If you missed your shot, you missed it. There is no glory in getting cut in two. The math doesn’t allow it. That's only half the glory and your corpse won't be beautiful.
It’ll be a corpse. The illusion of a beautiful corpse is precisely that. True Sounds of Liberty notwithstanding. That’s a punk band. Don’t worry about it if you don’t get it.
The third factor to consider is car selection. To hop on the train, you can choose any car that isn’t an engine. Attempting to hop on the engine, or too close to any of them would violate the first precept of hobo living. Don’t get seen. Those cars have people in them.
But when it comes to comfortably riding freight, the movies have done you dirty here. There are no cushions, no seats, no hot ladies in uncomfortable and uncomfortably hot shoes serving cold drinks. No USB jacks. No per diems to carpe.
Hollywood writers have expounded the virtues of box cars ever since they slouched forth from the LA River. For some reason, they wanted to make living dirty look comfortable. It is not. It is dirty.
Box cars aren’t meant to be ridden in. How things are “meant” to be used is often irrelevant. More importantly, they aren’t designed with occupants in mind. This means you quite often cannot open the door from the inside.
You’ll be quite warm until you starve to death, or a bull opens it up and rapes you to death. There is no cure for death, unless you’re a Christian or Muslim. But that cure isn't cheap.
Avoid box cars and Belltown whores alike. Keep in mind Belltown whores may also be UW grad students. They tend to wear the same uniform.
Instead of courting death or untreated infections, the intrepid hobo chooses a grain car to ride on. I say on rather than in. It is unlikely you will find a comfortable way to ride the rails without a ticket.
Grain cars are also known as hoppers, due to their being full of stuff, but they are also somewhat train hopper friendly entirely by coincidence. Usually, on either side of the tank is a covered ledge overlooking a small space to curl up in.
Some of them have floors, some do not. Those with floors are yours.
When hopping on the train, do not throw your bag on the car. It might not have a floor and you won't know until it gets chewed up and murdered on the tracks like your dumb ass will if you try to do any of this. Keep it strapped until you’re settled.
Some cars are much like my lawyer in this sense. In England there is a phrase, “That man has no bottom.” This isn’t a criticism of his fundament, but rather a manner of saying the man has no moral foundation.
Some grain cars have no bottom to stand on.
Unlike those Belltown whores or UW grad students. They got ass for days. Some grain cars do too. But not all of them.
Fourth, one must bring some things with them if they’re to ride the rails in a midlife or any other fractional life crisis. Train hopping is a minimalist adventure. Bring very little, since you can’t just make your husband carry all of it like you normally do.
Ironically, there isn’t much room on a freight train. I mean, some are a mile long.
Bring nothing you cannot securely strap to your person and absolutely nothing you have to carry with your hands. You’re going to need those to stay alive and to masturbate. It can get lonely out there on the rails.
This means a backpack, not a satchel or a purse or anything else. No bloody fanny pack, either. If for no reason than it makes an embarrassed corpse to have one of those vile things strapped to it. Old Wive’s Wisdom says wear clean underwear, too. Just in case.
You need to be carrying a few essentials. Food, water, tobacco obviously, just the bare necessities to keep a simple bear at ease. The experience of reading Twain atop a speeding freight train isn’t to be ignored if you’re a hopeless nerd, either.
Those are obvious packs, however. The less apparent necessity is a handkerchief or two. Not for offering to society ladies riding a bullet out of San Diego, but for holding over your own mouth during train tunnels. Get it wet and clamp your trap.
If your train enters a tunnel as they do quite often - not a euphemism or joke for your penis, we know it doesn’t - this thing will save your life. The alternatives to this method are pretty much just suffocation and/or a few prayers the tunnel is a short one.
Prayer won’t hurt, but it seems unlikely to help on its own. Rely on handkerchiefs rather than divine intervention. Can I get an amen?
Pack a blanket as well. Assuming you survive the mount and intend to ride the thing for a while, it’s going to get cold. Even in the deep depths of a halcyon summer heat, you will be exposed to wind at all times.
Pack light, but don’t skimp on necessities. Linus never went anywhere without his dear blankie, and neither should a hobo.
Agility matters. Do bring a book, though. And one more item so important it gets its own section.
Fifth, there is a most important item to consider when using freight to travel about.
Riding freight is a dangerous endeavor, and you definitely shouldn’t do it. But there is more peril involved than a mindless train attempting to kill you at all times. At times, it is possible to meet people on one.
The kind of person who rides a freight train is necessarily at least a few things, if not all of the following. They are either a criminal, insane, and/or a desperate degenerate. My lawyer reminds me they are all at least criminals and I have to agree.
Lawyers can smell their own. Even with a gallon of pool water up their nose it turns out. This is where I met him, and he still remembers.
The variety of legal commuting alternatives to traveling by freight are many and do not usually include the risk of being cut in half.
Anyone the train hopper encounters during their adventure on the train or around it is to be viewed and treated with extreme skepticism. You will be viewed that way, too. If just because you’re fucking shady, man.
Jumping on freight trains is not generally condoned by polite society. Unlike genocide has been. One assumes it is the personal risk involved which turns up their noses, considering how insane polite society has proven to be at all times in human history.
They prefer madness without risk. Risk dries them right up unless it’s someone else’s.
Only a fool would believe someone they met on a freight train was as safe as a chatty old lady showing them pictures of their two-dozen cats on the bus. As such, one should pack a knife for an adventure like this. You hope you won’t need it, but you might.
You never do know when you’ll have to cut a bitch before they get the point. This isn’t a light disciplining, with pool noodles close at hand. Be prepared to gut a someone if you have to, knowing full well they are considering doing the same to you.
I never had to use my own tiger-hilted Indian means of argumentation on my trips and I’m glad for that. But I also wasn’t going to risk getting raped by a lawyer I met on a freight train.
Not until I publish this, anyway. I guess. And assuming he survives his swim.
Finally, there is one last point to make about getting yourself out of the mess you stupidly got yourself into when you jumped on the thing.
You have to jump off it. It will almost certainly be moving at the time. No getting around this unless you want to meet the bulls and maybe you do. That’s none of my business. Drinks are expensive these days.
As mentioned at the beginning of this thing, the train will definitely look like it is moving faster than it is. This won’t change even if it creeps down to ten miles per hour. It will still look like it is racing faster than your heart and prolapsed rectum.
Your survival instincts kick in here despite being absent when you jumped on top of the train. Your brain short circuits and decides now is the time to put safety first. It probably has to do with the fact jumping off of trains is insane.
But jump you must. You got yourself into this - without any help from me for the record - so now you have to get your dumb ass out of it. Remember, I told you not to do this like a dozen times by now.
All of my leaps from freight trains have resulted in either dozens of bruises or a narrow miss by another oncoming train. I survived them, but only just. I also jumped off a bridge to dodge a train, but more on that later.
When you think maybe, just maybe, it has slowed enough, take a leap. Don’t jump into tree branches or anything stupid like that.
Tuck and roll, as well as offering up a prayer to whatever heathen gods would have you as a worshipper. After you jump, the thing is mostly out of your dumb ass hands and firmly in their cold, uncaring ones.
Try not to ruin your clean undies midflight. The paramedics will appreciate starched white drawers when they roll you onto the gurney and down to the coroners to figure out cause of death.
You might survive. You might not. The world is a wild place, and it isn’t entirely up to you honestly. We live in an uncertain world and if the risk of death is something you worry about, don’t do any of this.
To be completely safe, don’t do anything. Just sit around watching TikTok videos, arguing with strangers on the internet, and voting accordingly.
The adventure continues on a freight train. Obviously.