Almost as quickly as we stepped off the east side of the Cesar Chavez Avenue bridge and under it, we unanimously peed like derelicts upon a graffiti-strewn wall, brandished knives as we traversed the railway corridor alongside the concrete banks of the L.A. River, and nestled ourselves inconspicuously into a mountain of rubble, conveniently placed at the best end of the Union Pacific Intermodal Operations yard. When the racket of the ghettobirds and trains-not-ours subsided, we were left with the sound of our own blood. And when the racket of our racing hearts subsided, the subtle-yet-unmistakable sound of idling locomotive engines emerged from noise floor.

More a sensation than the actual perturbance of air required to qualify something as a “sound”, the low-frequency rumbling teaches itself to you. The uninitiated can rarely detect it. Only until it is loaded full of significance will one attune themselves to its register.

With a quick scramble up the rubble pile, we confirmed that three engine units were tethered and being prepped for departure on the yard’s leading track. They would leave at midnight. We passed the moments with smalltalk and silence, occasionally breaking to hunker from the spotlight of a police helicopter or to casually spy the rides on passing freight. The full scorpion moon dominated the sky to the east, and the downtown skyline dominated the west. But it was the wash of red light being cast from the rail signals to our north that was coloring our world. And when those lights turned green, we were the first to know.

We clambered over several sets of rails in a jog toward the yard mouth. The train was not within our sight, but we could hear its rpms rising and its dominating presence growing stronger. We skirted the outside of the yard fence in almost full visibility under the orange metal-halide lamps, triangulating on the third unit and pacing ourselves for it. We lurked in the shadows when we saw the lead engine poke its nose from the yard and then stop completely, as if it had also seen us. Like a turtle’s head, it sucked back into the protective shell of the yard, and disappeared deep into its belly. At a loss, we returned to the rubble pile and waited; for a cop; for a chopper’s spotlight; for the engines to return. Whatever was to come next would be where adventure had led us, and for anything we were ready. But nothing happened at all. Over the following hour, the unnerving silence petered completely into midnight stillness as the adrenaline left our bloodstreams, and we adapted to comfort amidst the scrap metal, broken glass and poly-legged creatures that we couldn’t see. It was only at the plateau of this comfort that the engines returned with forward horns blasting. This time they came faster than before, so we worked double-time gearing up and re-executing our previous strategy verbatim to find ourselves upon the front stepladder of the third and final engine unit. We boarded single-file and then bumbled in confusion around our inability to locate the handle that opens the door on the nose cone; three men on a platform built for one. The train slowed, adding to the stress. Had we been spotted? Another train barreled by on an adjacent track on the other side of the rubble pile as our train came to crawl, then a stop. Once we realized that this third engine unit had been connected to the others backward, my companions quickly made their way back down the stepladder, as I stepped back onto a surface that wasn’t there.

There are limited components of the human architecture that can assist us when falling backward. All of our limbs and joints have evolved to favor the world that vision brings, and thus they face forward for their primary operations. It could’ve only been milliseconds that I was pivoting off the deck of the locomotive in a free-fall with an extra 25lbs of weight strapped to my back, before my right hand reached out to grasp the stepladder’s handrailing that quickly passed into my periphery. My left boot snagged in the gap between the left handrailing and the chassis of the locomotive. Splayed across these two points, I slid near-completely upside down until I reached the bottom of the handrailings. When I stopped, my head was a foot or two above the rocky ballast that lay below, and the lowest part of my dangling pack was scraping on it. I paused for a moment (though it didn’t matter, as time had ceased), and silently assessed my mortality or lack thereof. I honed in on my left foot, still twisted and stuck in the handrailing, searching for the slightest sensation of pain. There were none. My right leg was floating free, but was in dangerous proximity to the stationary steel wheels tucked within a dozen unfavorable places to snag a shoelace or pant-leg, should one find its way there. It might have been as easy to initiate some kind of “controlled fall” the remaining distance to the ground, but with my foot trapped and the looming expectation that the train would be moving again soon, I pulled myself up with everything my right arm had to give until I could rest my right foot safely upon the lowest step. It took just as much effort to unlock my booted foot from its predicament, but when it was liberated I climbed the ladder back to the platform, then down the other side to where my companions were still standing. They say that only seconds had passed.

On the better end of the third unit we found our elusive door handle, and made our way inside to the crew’s cab. We hugged the floor and waited for the train to move forward, and when it finally did we kept hugging the floor. The radio in the cab was tuned to the right channel for the L.A. yard, revealing some actions before they were executed, though still heavily coded in esoteric railspeak. So when the train stopped again and then reversed, we knew that it was going to happen. Double-backing; the crew was still building the train, attaching one long section of railcars to the next with each roll back into the yard. And when the work was done and it was time for us to go, we could sense it in the enthusiastic punctuation of the voices on the radio. One last call came through before the engines ramped up their rpms for departure.

“You know you’ve got riders?”

“Yeah…we know.”

We watched only the tallest infrastructure pass from the floor of the cab; concrete overcrossings and cameras on poles. Each passing lamp post strobed our eyeballs with soft orange light in a hypnotic rhythm, syncopated against that of the track below. The train built speed, and speed became our cover. We took position in the three captain’s chairs; upright, angular, facing the wrong direction like everything else in this third unit. When we knew we were near Burbank, we waited for the jostling and irregularity in the track rhythms, and when it came we took posts at each window, where I watched a section of rails deviate from us steadily to the west, and then disappear; the coastal route to Oakland; slower, more scenic, though it didn’t matter much at night. But not this time. We were going northbound, central.

When we were clear of most of the city, we stepped out onto the nose for a smoke that became an hour. Slivers of other people’s lives arrived like photographs and faster that comprehendible, our aftward eyes tracing their eventual movements like Doppler-effected memories or assumptions. The lone driver waiting at a stoplight in an empty intersection. The transient setting up camp for the night in the doorway of a tailor, next door to the 24-hour donut shop. The nine police cruisers scattered haphazardly in front of the Saugus Café, all lights flashing, not a soul in sight. Last call.

We watched beams of green and red light from the signals ahead distort through the hot diesel exhaust spewing from the top of the lead engine, and then project upon the taller of the two intermodal shipping containers that were stacked on the railcar just behind us, its dirty white box working as the screen of an impromptu avant-garde theater; an improvisational 3D film for which there was no content, and for which we were given no glasses.

The dewy chill of the Tehachapi Pass eventually drove us back to the relative warmth of the cab, and before too long we were sleeping.

When we woke, the train was stopped in Bakersfield and the cab was flooded with daylight. If the crew had any interest in finding us, this is when they would’ve done it. But they didn’t, and that crew drove away in the van that the new crew arrived in. Minutes later we were once again under way. Over the next few hours we slowly graduated ourselves from the floor of the cab to the captain’s chairs, and slowly the captain’s chairs swiveled and adjusted to become our chairs, and by the time we reached Stockton we were the captains, our chairs now reclined, windows open, feet propped up onto their sills, the reflected light of infinite agriculture passing through them. On occasion we’d come upon a small yard, a passenger station, a trackside crew or some other reality that would demote us back to the floor, though even these actions became tertiary after a few iterations. So comfortable we’d become that by the time we reached the Elvas Wye, where the coastal and central lines reconnect just east of Sacramento, we were ready to abandon post. With each junction we were assured that this train would take us clear into the Pacific Northwest without incident. Eugene for sure. Portland, probably. Perhaps even Seattle. And when we would’ve reached the colder climes and mountain passes north of Shasta later that night, the protection of the crew cab would’ve spared us certain discomfort. But it might have been a shortage of that very discomfort that instilled a sense of lack, for every perk that was offered to us by this cab, this train, was at the expense of our adventure. Other rides on the same train were neither an option, as it was constructed entirely of double-stacked 53s and piggybacks. At Roseville we attempted to look a gift-horse in the mouth and plot our next move over lunch at the café just paces from the north mouth of the yard. But Roseville came and went, the train never slowing enough for a safe departure.

Just north of Redding, we perched upon the rear-facing nose cone again, to better appreciate the lush greenery about us. With the sun now low upon the horizon, harsh shadows of mountains and treetops cast long across the snaking Sacramento River, whose course we followed. Mt. Shasta loomed further north, whitened with snow, its presence mixing with that of the falling temperatures to foreshadow some alternate story of what happened to us that night, had we stayed on. But when the sun set and our train rolled into the sleepy town of Dunsmuir for a scheduled crew-change, we wrote a simpler story, based around the comforts of pizza, beer, motel rooms and television, living vicariously aboard our former train (which by then was approximately knee-deep in snow and sub-freezing temperatures as it crested into the Cascades) while we nodded off to a 70s horror flick called “Terror Train”.

A dozen hours later we convened upon a trackside café for breakfast, where they’d surely seen our type before. It was just as we’d scraped the last of the eggs from our plates that the familiar rumble caught our attention. The new train paraded its way through the middle of town, displaying all of its ride-friendly wares for us to select from, and then stopped for its crew-change just long enough for us to climb aboard and hole away in the cubbies of several Canadian grainers before it dragged us back into the pines and up the steady grade. The rhythms of the track beat like snares against the textural dissonance of the metal-on-metal whines that emanated from every wheel around every curve, and the music reverberated back to us via the canyon cathedral below. On the tightest curves, when the noise was most intense, we could spy each other from our respective grainers, each of us standing and clutching a crossbar, facing outward toward the better of our two vistas, unstated but cumulatively agreed upon by sheer turnout alone. And when the curve was long enough, we could spy the rider in the red jacket about fifteen cars ahead of us, doing the same thing.

From some perspectives, snow-capped Shasta merged seamlessly with pillowy white clouds traced with gray, lending all the more radiance to the places where sunlight and blue sky broke through. In one of those places, we spotted a bald eagle resituating itself amidst its oversized nest that rested precariously atop the highest and sagging limb of a lightening-stricken tree, each playing its respective part in one collective scene of hobbled nobility. From other perspectives, a roaring river of rusted metal railcars tore through its well-worn corridor, merging seamlessly with nothing save the handful of souls that rode within or upon it, each playing their respective part in another collective scene of hobbled nobility.

By the time snow could be found on the tracks below us, we’d traded California for Oregon, and in the notorious yard at Klamath Falls we hid silently for hours, deep within the bellies of our strange Canadian grainers, sharing clandestine text-messages between them regarding all matters of movement, yard operations, location and humor, like modern-day Cold Warriors. In other places, when stopped on an isolated section of doubletrack in wait for a southbound freighter to clear itself from the singletrack, we’d reconvene trackside to combine our solo experiences. At one place, the rider in the red jacket came back to acknowledge us, and once he’d gone his female companion came back to do the same. Through mild conversation and querying, it was apparent to them and to us that nobody’s throat would be slit during the night. They were young and dirty and beautiful, and were in it for the long haul, so we sent them off with much of what we wouldn’t be needing, since it seemed that we’d be in Portland by suppertime.

By the time we neared the summit of the Cascades, we could touch the clouds. The setting sun was lost in the pines to our west, and every former shadow was now cast in ice. A deep guttural vibration resonated the string of metal railcars to the tune of the engines as they billowed their black. Even our best efforts couldn’t keep it from entering our lungs. The meter of time slowed and eventually stopped when our own cantankery ceased in wait for the daily southbound Amtrak. Periodically, we could hear the echo of its engines bouncing off adjacent mountains from the canyon below, providing due warning that accommodated miniature hikes away from our grainers to defecate in communion with nature.

Gravity paved the way for our downhill run, sometimes so fast and fierce that we pondered the name of the man who was sleeping at the brake lever. Blurs of white were broken by tunnels of black like a stream of binary riding on a carrier of sub-freezing wind. When we were no longer pressed against the bottoms of the clouds, we could once again see through them into the deep and dark blue of a post-sunset sky. And when the dense pines so bogged in snow were gradually replaced by barns and grazing fields, the clanging of the bells of the first crossing we’d intersected in hours signaled our arrival into the suburbs of Eugene under the cover of nightfall.

We could hear taunts of the trains racing through town in the not-so-distant distance, from the quiet switchyard on the outside of town where our train came to rest and released the air from its brakes. We were low-priority freight, and were being treated as such. After a significant spell of absolute stillness, we made good use of the dark to hold congress in the narrow strip of rocky ballast between our train and the fence separating the switchyard from some variety of factory that would occasionally interject with a deafening hiss, as if in opposition to our proposed measures. The first time the brakeman rode by on a silent set of boxcars being pushed from much further ahead, we petrified as if we’d seen a ghost, his flashlight rhythmically swinging in a lackadaisical motion that seemed more fluid than natural physics would permit. And when he returned time and time again like the night-shift prison guard, we watched him pass from deep inside our cubbies.

We lost hours in that switchyard, napping with one eye open, half-heartedly concerned with the future. The crew’s flashlights could be seen as they walked about the engines an easy half-mile ahead. Had they not been there, we could commit fully to our abandonment of the train in pursuit of genuine rest. But for as long as they took interest in this train, there was hope that it would eventually roll forth. So when, amidst the silence, the delicate sound of air passing through the pneumatics of the braking system finally tickled our eardrums, we knew to expect those first few centimeters of crawl before the slack between each coupling would be let out into the full-force SLAM! that would christen our departure onto the next leg of the journey. And when it finally happened, it happened just like that.

Under way, the northern midnight air crept down every collar and up every sleeve, loaded with icy drizzle that performed tactical acrobatics to ensure discomfort. My companions took cover deep inside the grainers, wrapped in down feathers and insulated from the cold metal surfaces by planks of cardboard. In the absence of such brilliant foresight, I draped myself in an undersized cotton blanket that I’d purchased ten years prior in Tijuana for ninety pesos, took bumps from a thermos full of cold caffeine, and stood on the insulated rubber soles of my twenty-dollar boots, propped in such a way so that if I were to fall asleep I’d stumble away from the churning teeth that gnashed consistently and indiscriminately mere paces from my platform. When the train would stop, and it did many times, I’d step down and run a few laps trackside to coerce the blood into motion and rouse my cohorts from their cubbies with ETAs and observations. They would patiently entertain me until the horn-blasts of the oncoming train were apparent and our movement was imminent and they’d return to their bedding and slumber and I to my glorified paper-towel and mind-over-matter strategies for ignoring the coldness.

At one of these stops it was apparent that there’d be no more of them before we reached Portland. Should our train have been bound for Seattle or one of the big switchyards to the east, we’d have been foolish to expect it to stop there, either. Though all of the northwestern cities had been weighed as possible destinations prior to setting out, we’d cumulatively agreed on simply heading “north”, and taking our cards as they were dealt to us. But nothing can end a long cold ride better than a soft landing, and my soft landing was in Portland. They had their sights set on Bellingham, Washington, just shy of the Canadian border. So when we rolled into the yard south of downtown pdx under a pale dawn, I made my way perpendicular from the tracks onto a nearby highway, and before the tail-end of our train had yet fallen out of sight, was whisked away to a breakfast of Belgian waffles with strawberries and whipped cream that digested famously while I slept the day away in a comfortable warm bed, though periodically waking to the slight pangs of guilt that came with knowing that my friends were still wicking up the cold Cascadian drizzle like sponges, pressing forward, with their waffles and warm beds still several days on, northbound.

©2011 by Braden Diotte

Three hours of driving placed me as a high-functioning catatonic at the end of a ten-mile dirt road where the Dos Cabezas Wash crosses the tracks of the San Diego & Arizona Eastern railway, at the easternmost boundary of the Anza-Borrego Desert. Four years prior, to the day, was the first time I’d walked these tracks out to the Goat Canyon Trestle; at one time it was the largest wooden trestle in the world, and is still high in the rankings. That trek marked a personal rite-of-passage, further exacerbating the ever-widening divide between “relationship me” and “sovereign me” by opting for adventure over another wine-soaked gathering on the arm of my sweetheart. Thus it was no mystery why the path of least resistance led me here, four years later, to purge the residue of a subsequent and extremely toxic relationship. For 365 days prior, I was in a beautiful place, arguing with a girlfriend about something unimportant, and that set the stage for what would be the worst year of my life.

Two hours of walking, a handful of tunnels and roughly five miles of track separating me from my vehicle placed me at the trestle at sunset. From there, the tracks lead only to the north and south, and the east-to-west gorge that the trestle spans across makes for a dermal exfoliation by means of rock and cholla, in a scramble to nowhere. Yet it was at this point that I reached a crossroads. While this hike to the trestle had, in previous visits, satiated my thirst for adventure, it had now become a predictably good time. Standing midway upon the 200-foot tall wooden lattice-work of the trestle, I knew that I hadn’t come this way, on this day, for a “good time”. My legs already wanted to give out on me for trudging through those last miles of rocky ballast, but my heart wasn’t being fooled by this now-familiar “day hike”. More immediate considerations began weighing in, helping to reduce the argument to fundamental logistics: unless I planned on spending the night on this trestle, there would be a five-mile northbound walk back to my truck, plus tax. The tax of dissatisfaction. Conversely, walking southbound along these tracks for another nine or ten miles would put me in the border town of Jacumba, where I could catch a comfortable night of sleep at the Inn, soak my aches in a hot tub filled with effluent from a nearby sulfur spring, plus benefits. The benefits of adventure sought, experienced, remembered. The benefit of a new story to tell. With the last glint of the sun-star falling behind the mountain to the immediate west, I made a secret pact with my brain to obscure the facts from my legs. For the next five miles they wouldn’t know which decision had been made, and would thus have no choice but to comply. At mile six the truth would be exposed, but at that point it would be a choice between “ten miles back” and “five miles forward”, and my legs would be left without a leg to stand on.

With the first tunnel south of the trestle, the true adventure began. New vistas, new rusted blasting powder cans, new general rain refuse, new barrel cacti that were bigger than the ones dotting the miles behind me, even if just by their newness; a tunnel so long and straight that standing on one end you can see the daylight on the other end like a solo porthole in the titanic blackness. Ten solid minutes of swift-paced walking found me on the opposing end, emerging into a world of red skies and twilight. The next tunnel must have been the same length, for it took just as long, and when I emerged from it my flashlight stayed on. Its beam caught some reflectors up ahead, and the apparent motion amidst the darkness startled me. Pressing forward cautiously, the beam began to illuminate the space between the reflectors, and I was no less startled. And odd section of passenger rail cars and an antagonistic caboose with busted out windows screamed of violence in its monolithic stillness.

This train was Mexican by origin, as evidenced by the fading paint on the side of the caboose that read “Tren Turistico del Noroeste”, serving as a reminder that these tracks crossed into Mexico about ten miles from here. One interesting quality that comes into play when plotting the course of a rail system, are the considerations that must be made when taking into account the gross weight of a loaded freight train, which could be thousands of tons. Part of what makes a rail system efficient is the relative lack of friction between the smooth steel wheels and the smooth steel rails, and thus two miles worth of rolling stock can tail behind a couple few locomotives using relatively little fuel once the momentum has been established. However, this very lack of friction causes concern when the train is required to ascend or descend a grade. Consequently, rail system engineers examine the topography between A and B, searching for the path of least resistance. Like any snaking river, this path is rarely a direct line between A and B, and so we find countless cases where the tracks divert deep into remote and scenic territory that the highway system, with it’s glass-impregnated concrete and steel-belted radials, need not go. In the case of the San Diego & Arizona Eastern line, it must have been more feasible to dip the route into Mexico for quite some length before reemerging at the San Ysidro – Tijuana border just south of the city of San Diego, as opposed to the feats of engineering that would be required to keep it exclusively domestic soil. It is also probable that at the time these rails were laid, the concerns surrounding the US-Mexico border weren’t quite as paramount.

Exploring the exterior of the alien-looking train (this was no repurposed Amtrak, but rather some completely foreign design whose likes I’d never seen before, exhibiting an unusual lack of detail and resembling what it might look like if a model train were enlarged to full scale), I pondered what variety of northbound foot-traffic I might encounter on this trek, and couldn’t help but wonder if any of them might be holed up in these very railcars, hearts racing in hopes that whoever was wielding my flashlight would fail to land it’s light upon them. Rather than investigate, I just kept walking, beam affixed upon the train until it didn’t matter anymore.

A few short tunnels later I stopped for a moment and turned off the flashlight to get a feel for what I could see without it. Ironically, the flashlight was an afterthought as I left the house, and the condition of the batteries that had long been residing inside of it was an assumption, at best. I carried no spares. The full moon had occurred the previous night, and so I could expect a nearly-full moon to rise from the eastern horizon about an hour after sunset. But because these rails were on a mountainside excavation, and the mountain itself was just footsteps to my east, any moonlight would be obscured until it was almost directly overhead, which wouldn’t be until around midnight. It was currently about seven o’clock. With the flashlight off, the distant glow of cities to the west cast a silhouette of the mountains across the canyon, though they remained otherwise featureless. As my eyes adapted to the darkness, I began to recognize the ground surrounding me, and could detect several nearby rock outcroppings. Whifflettes of cool air skirted the up the mountainside from the canyon floor, it’s friction upon my ears breaking the silence. If the flashlight batteries failed, I’d have no choice but to stop and wait for the moon to rise above the ridge, but my little experiment assured me that the wait would be a worthwhile experience of its very own.

It was only a matter of time before time was no longer a matter. With each monotonous crunch of the ballast beneath my feet, I was hypnotized into the luminous tunnel that lay perpetually before me at my own lazy discretion, and carried on this way for miles. The trance was only broken by the subtle observation that the delicate-yet-consistent incline that had began many thousands of paces prior at the desert floor had tapered to level ground. Like a waking-state, my senses sharpened to near-maximum acuteness, and the environment spoke to me. The sensation of a vast expanse all about me had subsided in exchange for a much closer and contained resonance, and the air was still and cool and carried the essence of swamp water. The tracks intersected a small, snaking creek several times, and the reeds sprouting from it’s bed, twenty-odd feet below, still towered over me as I carefully navigated each plank of each narrow bridge. Distant sounds of large trucks compression-braking became increasingly prevalent before the highway could finally be seen. And when I was standing immediately beneath it, I was back on the map. I’d driven over this length of tracks many times, and had traced them with my eyes in both directions from the roadway, in passing. Though I’d never walked them before, the tracks ahead would carry no surprises; the smooth and easy “glory lap” on my triumphant arrival to the town of Jacumba. A status-check over a few swills of water and an aspirin had my legs and feet resisting every step, and a rash forming on my upper-inner-thighs from chaffing. My ankles were behaving like drunks due to the baker’s-dozen miles of uneven surface behind me, and if I was skilled in walking on my hands I would’ve seriously considered completing the trek in that fashion. But with respite so nearby, each fall forward was good enough for me.

By the time the highway was a distant anachronism, I could look over my shoulder to see the moon rising well above the mountains I’d just walked out of. Diffused by a gossamer scud, it cast enough light for me to put my flashlight away. Just beyond the lights of Jacumba, I could see the flickering lights of La Rumorosa, a Mexican town across the border, though only accessible via a long dusty road eastbound out of Tecate. The presence of La Rumorosa reminded me of where I was, geographically, politically, and helped to influence my character into something less suspicious, should a US Border Patrol agent decide to investigate the stumbling infrared figure making it’s way down the remote set of tracks within eye-shot of the border fence. But it was the coyotes that detected me first, with an inquisitive yip, followed by an annoyed cackle before the all-out howling began. Their noise segued seamlessly with that of the dogs in the backyards of homes on the outskirts of town, and before too long I was the most interesting thing happening in Jacumba that night. When I reached Railroad Avenue, at the old Jacumba train station, I cut left from the tracks and put my aching feet on pavement long overdue.

It was roughly 9pm on New Years Day when the clerk at the Jacumba Inn informed me that they had no vacancy for the evening. Some deeper querying and a full disclosure helped to employ the man as a collaborator in my conundrum, but the best solutions we could come up with involved bivouacking in the parking lot or convincing one of the locals drinking at the bar to float me a ride down the hill into Ocotillo. Because I carried no bedding or shelter whatsoever, and the clerk didn’t offer any forward, the former option seemed strange, though it was appreciated. Because there was a Border Patrol checkpoint between Jacumba and Ocotillo, and because it was New Years Day, and because the majority of bar patrons that I’d passed on my way in were visibly intoxicated, there were several factors that made the latter less than a viable option. And because the Jacumba Inn was literally the only place open in town, if not simply ‘the only place in town’ period, the clerk and I came to the conclusion that I should sit down and have a burger and a beer and rest for a bit, so that is exactly what I did.

At the restaurant at Jacumba Inn, I pulled a chair up to a table of women at the request of one of them. An acquaintance had been researching spa culture for her master’s thesis at UCSD, and often used Jacumba as her home base, in part because of its rich history as a retreat for mid-twentieth-century Hollywood celebrities. It was no surprise to me that she was there, but it was surely a pleasure. Despite having literally just crawled out of the hills, I engaged in delightful and fun intellectual conversation with interesting new people over that burger and beer. The five of them had rented a one-room suite for several days straddling the New Year, and it also happened to be my acquaintance’s birthday. When asked about where I’d come from, I made light, and obscured any concern about my temporary predicament in order to avoid inadvertent impositions upon them. After about an hour of dining and socializing I felt much better, but knew that the night’s journey was not over. Like a gentleman and an idiot, I bid them adieu with the last swig of my beer.

Mere footsteps off the property of the Jacumba Inn, the efferent liveliness of the party I’d just left dissipated back into oceanic darkness, and a few footsteps later it was just me and the moon again. Rather than taking the tracks back the way I’d came, I hit the pavement in hopes of catching a ride down the highway into Ocotillo, from which I could then walk a different section of the same tracks to where my truck was parked. The highway was a few miles away, but there was a gas station and an onramp there that could aid me in caffeine and communication, and the aching of my muscles wasn’t being as exacerbated by the relatively solid surface of the paved roadway. But within minutes my mood began to shift. Each Blazer that roared past was a threat to my experience, and evoked the latent animal reflex inside of me. Bigger. Brighter. Louder. Run! As a civilized human of the modern era, I felt like I would’ve known better, though I probably shouldn’t have. By the time I arrived at the gas station by the highway almost an hour after leaving the Inn, I knew that I’d made a bad choice by coming this way. I bought a coffee and conferred with the cashier about catching rides. Her optimism inspired me, but it was unduly matched against reality, as the traffic through the gas station was unsympathetic. The downtime only made the aches worse, lactic acid coagulating in every muscle in my legs, them quickly retiring into the notion of a “job well done” for the night. I brought us back up to idle by walking up the eastbound onramp, and continuing onto the highway shoulder. One thumb went out, and the other did its part in clenching the coffee cup while I walked backward with my face to traffic. I’d been a hiker, then a diner. Now I was a drifter in the eyes of all passersby. And I was asking for their help. With every viable ride that passed me came a rejection, first indifferent, then bitter, then downright spiteful, as I swore that the drivers were spewing mechanical noise from their vehicles at me, on command.

I’d nearly committed myself to walking the highway shoulder down the long grade to Ocotillo when my cell phone chimed with the alert of a new text message. I raced into my pocket to fish out the phone, and all but completely ignored the new message while I navigated my way to the phone’s GPS mapping feature. For, at every prior point on this journey, I’d either been outside of a service area or accidentally intercepting Mexican coverage at rates equivalent to international piracy. My return to civilization (albeit still standing on the littered should of a high-desert interstate at midnight) brought me new insight: my plan to walk the tracks from the town of Ocotillo to where my truck was parked at the Dos Cabezas crossing would gain me no ground whatsoever. That is, the distance from town to truck on tracks was the same distance as it would be if I were to simply turn around in my current position and walk the tracks back the way I came. This equidistance also meant that catching the elusive ride down the hill was no longer necessary; an epiphany that was very relieving, since my relations with mankind had degraded significantly by this point.

Marching headlong against traffic, adamantly westbound along the shoulder of the eastbound lanes with the explicit ferocity expected of whatever madman would be in my specific location at that specific moment in my specific shoes, my eyes beamed straight back at each set of shadowed figures hiding behind each set of oncoming headlights. Another half-hour of walking and a scramble down the embankment had me back on familiar ground again, where the highway passed over the tracks that had led me into Jacumba. With each step away from the overpass, I was restored. My saturated rods could once again see more and more of the ground beneath me; my tightened stapedius muscles loosening to hear more and more of the subtle stirring of crickets and lizards and rabbits about me. My disposition recovered just as quickly, and I was seeing this familiar terrain now for the first time under a wash of full moonlight. And when the highway was once again that distant anachronism, I stopped to rest on a large set of boulders that strangely resembled a sacrificial altar, adorned with stenciled “private property” warnings that were sprayed in yellow paint directly upon the rock surface itself. I watched the sky, sprawled across the gentle dome of the boulder that still held onto the last traces of the warmth of the day, and my rest became slumber. But the dormancy subjected me to the falling air temperature, which became my alarm clock, and before long I was moving again.

Having traversed all of them only hours earlier, the tunnels were no less disturbing the second time through. And in one, the longest one, I roused a vulture that had taken up residency in the rafters for the night. He wanted nothing more to do with me than I wanted to do with him, but this stopped neither of us from making our own brands of frightened fuss as we flailed away from one another. And five minutes later, as I exited the tunnel, he was there again, ten feet above my head, broad wings flapping and a guttural squawk that had my nerves convinced that he was coming for me, so much that I turned to punch the air all about me until it was clear that he’d once again retreated.

Looking to the north and with the moon directly above, I could see land for a hundred or more miles at one vista, where the canyon cut straight all the way to the desert floor, and dissipated into horizon. The detail about me was almost as clear as in daylight, in its fleeting shadowless state, making the baron infinity across the canyon and beyond appear like a vintage Hollywood backdrop in its fixed inseparability. Even the formerly unnerving Mexican railcars seemed somewhat hospitable under this new light perspective, and when I reached them in near exhaustion, I sought out a place to sleep inside the formerly antagonistic caboose with the broken windows; broken windows through which I was conveniently granted access beyond locked doors. By design, the caboose is essentially a clubhouse for crew members who are off-duty during long hauls. The typical caboose is adorned with several bunks, a bathroom, a small galley, and a common area, and this one was no different. The first bunk was directly in front of the broken window I’d straddled through, and it was strewn in shards of broken glass. The second bunk was a sheet of cold steel atop a footlocker of sorts, and after a brief trial I determined that amidst this silence it might be like sleeping on a large drum that doubled as a frozen lake. Feeling a tad like a post-apocalyptic princess, squabbling about her insufficient, pea-riddled options in a castle where the odd piece of cardboard might make for luxury, I settled on the common area; a “crow’s nest” atop the caboose, accessible by ladder, and furnished with several padded bench seats that faced each other. Appearing clean and secluded by comparison, I distributed myself across two of the benches and prepped for sleep. Desperately tired and physically drained, it was no great task to fall into slumber. But every few minutes, some nearby pop or creak would snap my eyes back open. Even after loosely checking the passenger cars for other souls, I wasn’t totally convinced that I was alone, and even entertained the idea that there might be someone on top of the crow’s nest, as a few of the sounds were coming from above. But in the end, it was the chalky dryness that was accumulating on my tongue that spurred my return to the tracks, as I came to realize that the appearance of cleanliness on the benches was actually a uniform layer of thick desert dust, which I now carried upon my surfaces.

Before long, I was back on the trestle. It was two-thirty in the morning, and I knew the terrain back to my truck at the desert floor well enough that it would make every inch of it painfully slow in its complete predictability. I knew that this tunnel would empty onto that stretch before turning this direction into that tunnel which was still several tunnels away from the final one. But despite the physical suffering that each step brought with it, I knew that perseverance would mean that I was going to be at my truck in about two hours, and most importantly, in my bed in a little over four. Punctuating each quarter-mile jaunt with a five-minute rest, I made surprisingly good time, though it was only perceivable this way from a clock-face perspective, as it was otherwise purgatory. And whether or not this would be logged as an experience that I wished to have more of in the coming year, I crawled like vulture-fodder out of the desert and into the humanity of my truck, where I parked it roughly 33 miles ago, at four-thirty in the morning, on the second day of January, twenty-ten.

©2010 – Braden Diotte

Struggling to preserve my night vision in the twilight, I hunkered deep into a neglected corner with my back to the forthcoming train’s three radiant eyes, bearing slowly down, the residual heat of the day evaporating the urine from the soil beneath my feet, the stench of ammonia stifling my breath. One glance into those Medusan fires and I’d lose my rods for enough minutes to lose my train, or lose my legs trying for it. The burden fell upon my ears, tracking the linear rise in amplitude that metered its progress, tracking its pitch for adjustments in speed, the pressure and intensity building to such extreme levels that something would have to give, then building even more until something finally did. The light traded for heat, the horns replaced with hiss, and in the shadow of the passing engines I became invisible.

The crew manned the lead engine, and the second engine was too close for comfort, so I chose cover in the cab of the third engine unit – already flat on its floor and staring skyward through its windows by the time that the soft orange light of the downtown passenger rail station shone through them, casting confounding bands of harsh shadow that scanned all surfaces in all directions like some dystopian digital surveyor. Inside the cab, the churning engine noise was subdued into a guttural pulse that beat far slower than my own, but its rhythm remained steady and the forward-horns kept blasting. The last shot of adrenaline had left my bloodstream and I wore a thin sheen of sweat on my skin when I took post in the brakeman’s chair to watch the city fall behind me.

The unit was a guaranteed ride, though for all of its warmth, comfort and security it was as underwhelming as they come. At first opportunity, when stopped at a signal in wait for a southbound passenger train to clear the tracks ahead, I walked the length of the train in search of a better ride. When I found it, I spread myself across the deck of the cleanest grainer in the lot of them, and slept the warmest of summer nights through obstacles that once had me playing mouse to an imaginary cat.

I woke in Corona with the rise of the sun and the first traces of its heat, stopped for who knows how long beneath a fishbowl slew of concrete overpasses clogged with commuters that were, if only in that moment, my most polar antithesis. I stepped from the train to brush the grit from my teeth and vacate my bladder onto the stark blend of dirt, rocks, glass and industrial minutiae that only mimicked nature from a distance, but bore the distinct mark of the collective human in its absence of life. I gazed up at the commuters – seemingly desperate and drugged in their struggle for significance – then attempting to view myself from their perspectives, wondering how easily I could be written off as the bum – listless, impotent, another waste of flesh wasting away in a wasteland; answering my own question when I realized how quickly I’d committed the same disservice to them.

The return to passable nature came with the slow climb into the Cajon Pass just north of San Berdoo, where blankets of coastal shrubbery are pocked by monumental boulder outcroppings, and ancient seafloors churn skyward in fragmented diagonals, as if collapsed under their own mass and sinking from their centers.

Cresting the summit, I climbed into the tight v-shaped cubbyhole of my grainer, and watched through a sliver as tall fences with razor-wire appeared on either side of the tracks. Cameras on towering poles prompted me to take deeper cover, hiding blind beneath the uniform black of my jacket, from where I could hear the idling engines of trucks come and go as we passed them. It was the construction of this isolated maximum-security zone that had kept me off this particular stretch of rails for nearly fifteen years until this day, when my confidence matched my recklessness, I resigned myself to the circumstances, and was spared.

We built speed, the fences subsided, and I emerged from the cubbyhole wearing a satisfied grin and the gray dust of the grainer’s mysterious contents, riding the deck through the last of the small towns where my freedom was less prone to be jeopardized. And when the lead engine dipped its nose into the west end of its northernmost terminus, only eighteen hours after I’d boarded it two-hundred miles prior, my boots crunched down into the scorching volcanic ballast of Barstow under the full brunt of the mid-summer sun.

Triple-digit heat radiated from the blinding white sand of the wash that bounds the northern edge of the five-mile-long classification yard at Barstow. I took shelter in a pine grove on the crest of a ridge from which I could clandestinely spy the rolling stock of Los Angeles, Chicago and Salt Lake City interchangeably, thought indeterminately. The ends of the yard were too distant on either horizon to witness which train went where, with the exception that anything rolling on the spur-line that connected Barstow to the Bakersfield mainline via the barren Mojave Desert could be seen in profile several miles yonder as it cut north from the westernmost mouth of the yard. It was the only track that concerned me, and any train but a train leaving on that spur-line in late afternoon or evening would spell catastrophic disaster for a rider with as little water as I was carrying.

The worst of the day’s hours were spent face-down, drooling vital saliva into a bed of dry pine needles, waking periodically to replenish my lost fluids with a dwindling reserve of water; to peel the painful crust of soot and snot and blood from the inside of my nose; to swat the unrelenting flies from my bare feet; or to acknowledge the unfavorable speed and/or unpredictable destination of a train departing on the closest tracks, fifteen feet from where I lay. When anything pulled through the yard westbound, I’d perch on the ridge and watch for it to appear on the spur-line far in the distance. Most times it wouldn’t. But for the few times that it did, there were no common behaviors; any train on any track in that yard could leave in any direction at any time. I swilled the last of my water and watched in frustration as the one that got away got away, its silhouette slow and black against the monochrome orange of a post-sunset sky.

The night brought reprieve from the heat. A gentle breeze tickled the pines, and the desert fauna rustled from its burrows. The yard had fallen silent with the sun, so I abandoned the coddling security of the pine ridge to put myself on that distant spur-line, where every train goes my way. But there I just slept for hours, as nothing came by to rouse me. When the pre-dawn chill set in, I rose to investigate the gargantuan box train that sat dormant on the northbound curve; lights on, but lifeless. It offered no rides, consisting solely of two solid miles of loaded rock boxes, topped off and tarped, with barely a ladder to hold on to. Any three of the four engines would’ve sufficed had I not been wildly suspicious of their destination. Loads like this end up in places best described as hell-on-Earth, and I could name a few of them within a 50-mile radius: the borax mines at Boron, the cement mill at Black Mountain, or any of the many quarries of the Mojave Desert. Opting out, I pilfered the fourth unit for all of the water bottles I could carry, and hid from eyes and the rising sun in the alcove beneath the overpass spanning the westernmost mouth of the yard, laying in wait to grab hold of the next thing that passed north through it. And for the next 12 hours, I waited.

I squandered those hours hucking small chunks of concrete at other small chunks of concrete, breaking the monotony only with other similarly monotonous behaviors, and periodically slow-dancing with an incoming freight in an attempt to stay out of sight. I observed closely the color of my urine fluctuating between clear and a deep yellow, and watched as each small bottle of water in my stash ran dry in a similar rhythm. I found thirty years of graffiti, written in some of the most obtuse angles by people who found themselves contorted into the same obtuse places from which I read it. One needn’t be a sociologist to infer from the three-decade story arc that the world has undoubtedly become a more volatile place.

I said it best when I said it first; nothing good can come out of Barstow. I watched it be attempted repeatedly, and I attempted right alongside of it. We’d get about a long-arm’s length out of the yard before it grabbed us by the caboose to drag us back in, sometimes pulling me a mile or more into its depth. I’d not come here to die, nor to stay forever. But when the day had passed, and the Sun’s brutal command lost reign to the penetrating full moon that glared down sharply on my situation, I was no longer ‘good’. I was angry, exhausted, and so desperate to leave Barstow that I bet it all on the ladder of a train moving faster than I could run, and won.

©2012 – Braden Diotte