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I grew up in Spokane, Washington. A sleepy town on the eastern border rarely attracting national attention. Outside the white lady identifying as a black lady and rising to head the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People or the occasional serial killer, not much went on there.
It was a decent place to raise kids, I’m told. I came from there, so I have my doubts.
It was a rather dull affair punctuated with rare bouts of extreme enthusiasm. The kind a teenager can create just about anywhere if they’re bored enough. We crafted various schemes to stay entertained. Getting a job wasn’t one of them, but the following was.
McDonald’s started a promotion requiring players to fill up a Monopoly board with pull tabs you grabbed off a side of fries or other burnt offerings. If you got all three property types, or all four railroad properties, you scored a big prize.
More importantly, each pull tab had a chance at redemption for a free burger or fries. Every board came with two pull tabs on them.
We noticed a local rag had a board included in each copy. We did some quick and dirty math determining each board had a better profit to expense ratio than purchasing a cheeseburger. This was due to the burger costing a little less than a dollar, while a copy of The Inlander cost nothing at all.
The next step was an industriously obvious one.
Stacks of The Inlander were offered out front various businesses next to the real estate listings and other papers of ill-repute. So, we simply took every single copy every business in downtown Spokane had. This wasn’t technically illegal, which bothered us some, but we carried on anyway.
We dutifully violated every copy of their Monopoly boards and produced several stacks, each several feet high. We had thousands of tabs, and it took us more or less two entire days to pull them all.
As paragons of our community, we even returned the stripped copies of The Inlander more or less where we found them. We try to give back to the environment which spawned us.
With thousands of tabs, we had several hundred tokens we could redeem for free food. By the end of that summer, I was beginning to physically resemble a Big Mac. My varied bodily excretions smelled of pickles and ketchup.
We didn’t have to make all of our own fun, though.
One highlight of living in Spokane, if such things can be considered such, is a festival referred to as Pig Out In the Park. Food vendors from all over the city flock to the public park straddling the Spokane River, to sling some meat to hungry customers.
This park is referred to rather dully as Riverfront Park. A name so stupidly on the nose it was likely the winning submission in a contest of some type to name the place. With the winner determined by a committee to ensure its super-dullness.
This park is the most centrally recognizable point in Spokane and as such there is startling diversity lounging about, feeding ducks, chasing geese, riding the rickety and tetanus slathered carousel, and of course feeing the vacuum powered mechanical goat.
One such summer, I met a hobo in his early twenties whose name shall not be uttered on the off chance we engaged in any illegal activity here. I can’t seem to find a lawyer these days, so I don’t know.
This grungy looking fellow was feeding The Goat and after striking up a conversation it became clear he was from Washington D.C. He looked and smelled like a hobo. The stories this guy could tell were so hilariously incredible I had no trouble believing any of them completely.
He was only a few years older than I was at the time, about seventeen years old in 1999. We shared a love of not-bathing, a non-habit I have since discarded as completely disgusting. At the time we mused the merits of accruing a natural, protective crust in the summer to provide insulation during the winter months.
Apparently, we hated hoodies. Times change and I can rarely be seen without one these days. Hoodies, I mean. Not crusts. It also, in my case anyway, kept me far away from any sort of feminine companionship. That could’ve just been my face, of course.
This kid’s devilish stories kept me riveted for hours as we sat smoking and rolling cigarettes in the park, watching the normies chase their brats around and getting bit by the horrible goose who haunted those parts at the time.
I grew up reading Mark Twain, Tolkien, and Frank Herbert. These dead dudes have all been rattling around in what passed for my brain for decades. Adventure is a thing. They are nasty, dirty, and uncomfortable things, but they are wonderful all the same. I don’t see any other way to learn, personally.
I was no stranger to rough living myself but the idea of humping it across the country with next to nothing was deeply appealing and new. I wasn’t doing anything else at the time. It was summer in Spokane and the McDonald’s people were starting to get a bit suspicious anyway.
So, around the Fourth of July, my new Ho-bro and I decided we’d head down to California via freight to see what San Francisco and the Bay Area was all about.
I cannot recall who talked who into it first. At the time, I was definitely interested in dangerous travel and extremely enthusiastic about engaging in a variety of completely stupid and risky behaviors. So was my Ho-Bro obviously, which presumably had quite a bit to do with our friendship existing in the first place.
That and a love of putting things in goats. This is how I justify my first marriage, too.
On the morning of the Fourth of July in 1999, I packed a bugout bag. A couple bottles of water, an extra pouch of either Top or Bugle tobacco - I cannot recall which, they were both dirt cheap - my trusty Indian knife, and an extra hoody.
With the bag strapped to my back and my pair of crusty green Chucks, I met my co-conspirator in Riverfront Park and said a few farewells to skeptical friends. They wagered we wouldn’t make it out of town at all, considering it more likely we’d be cut in half instead and if I could please make that happen.
I have always surrounded myself with the most positive and supportive peers possible.
We set off from the Brown’s Addition neighborhood and wandered east, paralleling the railroad tracks which cut through downtown. We headed closer to the rail station while still staying on the street. Walking the tracks was frowned upon and they cut straight through downtown Spokane.
We weren’t interested in attracting attention we didn’t need for once. We’d made it about a mile until the sun started to go down. Riverfront Park was maybe a mile or so north of us. Shadows lengthened so we didn’t see who called out to us from a dark loading dock at first.
It seemed we had been identified as persons of interest up to no good, so this group of three fellows quaffing beers wagered they wanted to get to know us. I should say two and a half fellows, as the most vocal of the bunch appeared to be missing his legs below mid-thigh, holding court from a wheeled throne.
All were drinking from forty-ounce Mickey’s, a personal favorite of my own. So, while they may beat and rape us to death, at least their good taste on a budget sensibility was confirmed. Though I doubted Wheels was in the rape business, to be honest.
We’re all a little bit ableist, okay. Still, it’s hard to imagine how he’d thrust himself inside us exactly without legs for leverage. Pulley system? Some sort of fulcrum? I don’t know. I wasn’t an engineer yet. I was barely sentient.
Unable to see how we could get raped really, we complied with their request and waltzed over to the gentlemen enjoying the finest of malt liquors. We hoped perhaps they’d have a beer or eight for us to justify their inconveniencing and interrupting our perfectly dangerous plans to jump atop freight trains.
Our hopes were not disappointed and within a few minutes we found ourselves holding a couple forties ourselves assured our buttholes were safe enough. We hung there under the loading dock roof, shooting the shit with a few professional hobos.
I met so many hobos in the summer of ‘99 I think of it as my Hobo Summer. Most were quite lovely people to take in mild doses. I can’t recall our gracious hosts’ names, nor would I provide them here if I did, but Wheels looked rough.
The kind of guy that comes out the business end of a life lived and to this day I recall a kind of whistle he made when he spoke. The man resembled the gopher from those Winnie the Pooh cartoons after Christopher Robin had enough of him not paying what he owed and finally chopped off his legs.
He laughed often and hard, and at the strangest things. I loved him.
We exchanged the usual pleasantries one does when drinking with strangers while underage. These grizzled elders betrayed no discomfort at handing out alcohol to a teenager. I took this to mean we were in the presence of truly great men. That didn’t keep me from asking where his legs ran off to, however.
“Train hopping!” Wheels wheezed, laughing at the rather permanent loss.
To my credit, and my traveling companion, neither of us laughed along with him. His friends roared, though. We knew damned well one did not laugh at a man’s misfortune directly prior to trying your own hand at the thing. That’s the best way to get run over by a train the way I see it.
Instead, we asked him what happened. To hear him tell it, he’d climbed up and into the back of a grain car and neglected to verify the thing had a floor to dropping his legs over the lip. He fell straight through and bounced a bit underneath the thing until his legs parted company with him.
We shuddered, but certainly didn’t consider canceling our trip. That seemed the reasonable thing to do, so it was straight out.
Instead, with the sun now fully down, we got back on the road with bellies full of beer intent on catching a train. They watched us grab our bags and head out, certain we would be cut clean in half. Or at least lose a finger or something. Wheels never tried to stop us. Not like he could catch us if he did.
Not without his legs, the stupid prick.
With the first fireworks booming over Riverfront Park our shot at bloody, violent death and/or adventure arrived.
Whatever security there was closer to the station, if any, was nowhere in sight and a double-engine freight was trudging westward at a manageable five miles per hour or so. Without thinking about it at all - the time for that shit had long passed - we ran alongside the thing and clambered aboard a handy grain car ladder.
Just to be safe, we hunkered down in the back-bottom platform of a grain car while it crawled its way west back the way we had walked. To our right, fireworks blasted the night sky into pieces. To our left, we crept passed Lewis and Clark High School and the Westminster Church, a favorite venue for punk rock bands oddly enough.
We stayed hunkered for most the city, but once we were out of the streetlights and above commuters, shrouded in darkness broken only by the explosion of fireworks over the city, we clambered atop the train cars. This alone was worth all the risk and is quite indescribable.
I suspect it’s a lot like surfing. Except you have no control and rather than getting wet or eaten you risk falling bisecting yourself most bloodily. Also, the sharks are bulls, not sharks.
The west side of downtown Spokane’s train tracks snake over a bridge maybe one-hundred feet up in the air. As the train crossed it and picked up speed, we leapt from car to car. We felt utterly invincible, and we seemed intent on testing the proposition.
During my Hobo Summer I rolled my own cigarettes. Top Tobacco was cheap, dirt cheap, so long as one could stomach smoking the vile things. I thought I was good at rolling a solid cigarette prior to this train trip, heading west a bit before rolling south, but by the end of it I was a professional.
The challenge of rolling a decent smoke while sitting atop a train car hurtling through the forest at fifty miles per hour made a decent Roller’s Crucible. I should put it on my resume. Right next to several months spent conducting telephone surveys inquiring of cold-called victims whether they used toilet paper to wipe their asses.
I really did do this.
If the person I was speaking with copped to using toilet paper, I then asked how many squares they used. If they didn’t hang up, I then interrogated them further on whether they folded the paper or not. If, beyond minimal politeness, stayed on the line even longer I would ask if they folded it long like a hot dog or square like a hamburger.
I really was paid to do this. It was a strange job, but it beat selling pagers.
This talent for rolling cigarettes has since left me, however. It isn’t like learning to fall off a bike. My current lifestyle pampered and decadent as it is, affords me the luxury of cigarettes which have already been rolled. We call those Tailor-Made, which I’m sure offends tailors.
I can still roll a serviceable joint, however. I was never paid for this.
That first train ride took us to the darkest portions of the countryside, where it wasn’t odd to be confronted with pitch blackness aside from the anemic moonlight. I lay on my back atop a car, staring straight up at a star-studded sky as it peeked out between treetops. The soundtrack a steady clickety-clack-clack, clickety-clack-clack.
Deep thoughts were had and forgotten as quickly as they arose, always subsumed by the understanding I’d done something the vast majority of people would never do in their lives. The civilized among them would never once consider doing it.
The upright and respectable portion of a society do not do these things and despite how much a bleeding heart may claim they feel for the hobo and the homeless, they would never come within five feet of a hobo if they could help it.
At some point, I fell asleep. The excitement and adrenaline of the hop having left me exhausted. The reader may be wondering how it is possible to fall asleep flat on one’s back atop a moving freight train. They’re right to wonder. It is a remarkably stupid thing to do, but perfectly in keeping with my character.
In the morning our course continued. The curves of the tracks followed the lay of the land, despite a worrisome tunnel or two boring straight through it. One can suffocate riding a freight in a long enough tunnel, but we made it without issue.
This was mostly luck of course as we certainly hadn’t pored over maps prior to determine if we would die. We never really considered we might die at any point. The arrogance of youth, or of freedom.
They often appear identical to those unfamiliar with either.
I marveled at the sheer volume of shacks and odd little edifices out in the middle of nowhere. One wonders what the hell they’re for. One also wonders where the hell they are. There aren’t any maps posted atop freight cars and it is unwise to clamber aboard the engine to inquire with the conductor.
Train hopping hobos these days with their GPS and hula hoops have it easy. They just load up their mobile data plans and geolocate their sorry asses. It is cheating and a metric of how old I’ve become I think the homeless kids have it easy.
But they do. Objectively.
Back in my day we had to risk death jumping off the thing to ask around, which is exactly what we did in a small town we later learned was Pasco. I figured we’d gotten much further along than we had.
Our train had to have stopped for some reason during the night. It had been a solid eight hours or so since we’d hopped on and it certainly didn’t take that long to drive from Spokane to Pasco. But in those early hours of the morning, we’d only made it that far.
Recall San Francisco and Oakland were our final destination and a night’s journey had magically only brought us to the southeast of Washington State.
We jumped off the train as it crawled through town with the sun just beginning to rise. We were hungry and while I’d packed a couple cans of food, I’d neglected to include any sort of means to open the useless things.
My traveling companion wasn’t anymore prepared than I was, so we wandered on foot towards town to pick up some food. I had my pouch of McDonald’s pull tabs, so we’d eat well if we could find one of those. As well as one can eat McDonald’s anyway.
The stretch we’d disembarked on was fairly barren, populated by a single train bridge spanning the river and a fantastically lonely looking Taco Bell at a dusty crossroads. The crossroads resembled the kind one strikes a bargain at. A covenant between a dark, ancient god and a singularly stupid, modern man.
The bargain we made at those crossroads involved a cashier and an exchange of well over half the cash we’d managed to bring with us. In return, we were promised our screaming stomachs would settle a bit, or at least cease screaming about hunger. Our assholes would likely pick up the tune later.
Deals with crossroad demons generally come with a catch; in this case contorted and constricted bowels. But that’s Taco Bell for you. In the moment one never realizes they’re striking a covenant. Moses didn’t, for instance. He probably just thought he ate something weird. Pork likely.
We grabbed our food and scuttled under the nearby train bridge like the dirt encrusted trolls we were and set about stuffing edibles of questionable quality into ourselves. I must have eaten four seven-layer burritos under that bridge.
They were most excellent so far as fast-food burritos go. Simple, elegant, possibly horsemeat. They don’t sell these things anymore and one must settle for the inferior five-layer burrito, or some similarly inferior number of layers.
The taste of Taco Bell after a long, dirty train ride is most satisfying. I can still recall my rational brain recoiling in horror at what I was eating, while my tongue soothed it, telling it to quit making it weird. This was happening.
Our bellies full after having old-school geolocated ourselves, we sat in the shade under the train bridge wondering when the next train would be by. It was in this bored and sleepy condition a couple fellows joined us under the bridge.
They seemed surprised to see us, perhaps we’d encroached on their territory in some way, but they were friendly enough. They spoke Spanish though we did not, not a single lick. They had Taco Bell as well.
The Pasco Crossroads Demon was doing a brisk business, apparently.
Noting his attempts at verbal communication were only resulting in confused smiles, our visitor resorted to hand gestures. I couldn’t comprehend this language, either. I couldn’t get a handle on his dialect.
Admittedly, my familiarity with American Sign Language is limited to the middle finger of either hand. But my traveling companion seemed to understand the guy’s meaning and he tossed him some leftover hot sauce packets from our bag.
He caught it with a grin, dumped its contents on his own food and inhaled it in roughly two bites.
We sat in silence after that, as our bodies digested questionable meat as well as they could. We stared at the water. I learned later it was the Colombia River. My understanding of geography at the time was dull and completely useless.
No train had rolled by our dusty crossroads for hours and I crawled up to the top of the bridge with hopes I could see one coming. On either side of me about twenty feet below was the river, lazily winding by.
Suddenly, a train horn blasted into the bright noonday sky. I’d fallen asleep and a two-hundred-ton beast was creeping towards me.
The only thing left to do at that point was get cut in half like My Man Wheels. Or in a completely stupid panic, roll straight off the bridge into open air and hopefully relatively deep water. Decision time.
Without weighing the options too carefully I chose the latter, flailing through the air and slamming into the river I did my absolute best to inhale entirely. I suppose I resembled a majestic, midflight manatee.
My head broke the surface, my lungs exchanged river water for oxygen, and noted the train was creeping so slowly, so painfully slowly, to a soundtrack of maniacal laughter.
My friend, far from showing concern for my wellbeing in any fashion, had opted instead to double over in what seemed to be a painful fit of hysteria. When he wasn’t screaming at me to, “Get the fuck out of the water this is our train.”
One dries out surprisingly quick atop a moving freight train. My little swim had left me soaked through and through but after a miserable hour spent wind-drying I was good, ignoring my much-abused undies anyway.
My traveling companion had hopped on before I’d even gotten out of the water, so I had to hop a couple dozen cars forward before I caught up with him.
I wonder what the train conductor thought of the whole thing. Whatever he may or may not have screamed upon seeing an idiot fall into the river occurred while I was doing my best to breath water. I doubt he suspected said idiot hopped on. But I did.
I was incensed about my improvised swan dive. I’d worked hard on developing a protective crust all about my body, cultivated through a studious avoidance of showers and bathing and women. That last one was sort of incidental, not purposeful.
A brief moment of weakness, falling asleep on train tracks above a river followed by my twenty-foot plunge had been all it took to undo all my good work. The worst part about all of it was I could once again smell my companion, whose protective crust and homegrown crust remained strongly intact.
In any event, on the other side of the river alongside the bridge our Taco Bell friend awaited us. He waved what looked like a plastic bag rolled into the shape of a cylinder.
I knew what this was. Anyone into reggae knows what that was. My traveling companion, once again a champion, smoothly plucked the eighth of weed out of his hand as we rolled by.
That was, perhaps, the cheapest bag of weed I’ve ever come into in my life. It cost a mere packet of Taco Bell hot sauce. To this day, I am never stingy with my condiments, outside Zip’s tartar sauce. Get your own gods damned sauce. It’s free. It’s right there. We went through the drive-thru together why didn’t you ask for some?
This train moved at a much brisker pace than our last. We roared at unreal speeds. We rolled passed dozens of small American towns as we cut nearly straight west.
Southern Washington State is gorgeous. Aside from the startling, defiant blue of the Colombia River itself, it is flanked on either side with the ever-present evergreens one trips over constantly in the state.
We are the Evergreen State, we tell people with some justification. It is only the central chunk of the state where we opt for a desert climate. The Colombia down south vivifies the entire area. Peppered among the evergreens are grassy meadows.
I knew nothing about any of this until this trip. My ignorance of my own home was and remains somewhat astounding to me. To call it breathtaking is to call the Carnival do Brasil a rather lively affair. Or to call a Pride Parade modest.
All that scenery rolled around us on this second leg of our trip. Despite all the rust and dirt we were quite comfortable after a joint or two. Again, I rolled these while sitting cross-legged atop the train. Again, I mention this, because it is badass.
Once again, we were never quite clear on exactly where the hell we were, but we trusted the train to not take too many bad turns. This leg would end at the coast, fingers crossed, and then head south hugging the ocean.
The steady clacking of train wheels on the tracks occasionally punctuated with honks from the conductor encouraging people to stay the hell out of his way were our only companions. I suspect our lack of personal hygiene beyond the accidental was a factor.
To this day, the sound of a passing train gets me all weepy and hopeful like no lying political speech ever could. The sound invokes memories of this day. A moment where nothing made sense and it didn’t matter one bloody bit.
We had no idea where our next meal would come from, where we were, when we would arrive anywhere, or if we would manage to arrive anywhere at all. None of these things were planned in any real detail. Broad strokes for hobo folks, goes the adage.
Hobo or not, this is the proper manner of adventuring.
The only rub in the ointment could have been security on the train somehow, but they were absent. We were breaking at least a dozen laws just existing on that train in motion. We made no victims, we hurt no one, not even ourselves. But they don’t care.
The lack of security in such a situation has the effect of making one feel extremely alive. You are simply not as aware of the environment around you as you are when it is quite possible to die at any given moment.
The landscape screaming by was sharp and clear to my eye. The air was crisp, minus the taint of exhaust from our leviathan. Cigarettes took on a loving burn, rather than a mildly hateful one. If I did have to die, that day would have been acceptable.
Alas, we survived another day and night and now you’re reading about it. Curse God if you like.
In the early morning hours, just a bit after growing comfortable with discomfort, we spotted another town and determined we had best be off and into it to grab some food somehow. If we didn’t, we would likely get picked off by security, after all.
The town creeping towards us was sizeable in comparison to the others we’d rolled through and the tracks bored straight into its center from what we could see. Time to go.
Determined to improve on my bridge dismount the day before, I leaped off the train and rolled across the gravel. Gravel is shaper than you’d think, but I managed to not break anything. I even managed to roll straight up onto my two feet.
This rather impressive gymnastic feat was somewhat ruined by falling straight back right onto my ass, of course. I didn’t have my land legs yet. You land-lubbers with your automobiles don’t even know you have land legs.
Still, I’d survived another train ride. My companion did too, of course. He nailed his dismount with professional grace. An effect somewhat ruined by yet another hysterical laugh at my expense.
I allowed it. It’s hard not to when you’re full to the tip with adrenaline while sitting square on your very much alive ass. I just hope you’re all laughing as well.
The adventure continues in tolerant Portland, Oregon.