Train Hopping Across Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, California, and Oregon

by Aaron Dactyl

  Railroad Semantics

  Number Four

  by Aaron Dactyl

  Photos by Aaron Dactyl

  Edited by Markell West

  Designed by Joe Biel

  All text and photos © Aaron Dactyl, 2015

  This edition is © Microcosm Publishing, 2015

  Microcosm Publishing

  2752 N Williams

  Portland, OR 97227

  www.microcosmpublishing.com

  ISBN 978-1-62106-374-2

  This is Microcosm #236

  First Published June 7, 2016

  First printing of 3,000 copies

  Printed in the U.S. on post-consumer paper

  Distributed worldwide by Legato / Perseus

  and in the UK by Turnaround

  Under impressive light conditions—dark storm clouds to the south and the sunset beaming over the mountains west—a vibrant rainbow shot out from behind Spencer Butte as I waited in the middle of the Eugene yard aboard a southbound train. Though the rainbow was visible all throughout town, I think I had the best view from the DPU, the rear unit of the train.

  The train, which pulled into the departure tracks from the north, then had me chase it down into the yard, departed just after dark, inched through town on the secondary, low-speed mainline, blared through crossings where stood more bikes stalled than cars and where night owls waited in gripped hands on their way to the bar; it stopped briefly along the river in Glenwood before crossing the Willamette to Springfield, and then picked up speed toward Oakridge. I settled in the Conductor’s chair watching the lights pass, and fell asleep lightly into the climb over the mountains.

  I woke in Chiloquin, the dawn sky a million shades of violet and mauve, a thin wisp of fog hovering in the forest like a geist cloaking the trunks of the ponderosas. The complexity of the high-altitude, low-humidity environment reacted to the early morning sun creating unearthly atmospheric conditions, a dynamic, multilayered stratosphere at eye level to the surface of the land. Wisps of fog rose off the gelid surface of the Williamson River, evaporating in plumes twenty- and thirty-feet high; thick fog hovered across the basin where distant cumulus bisected the plane of the mountains, casting shadows like a foreground range over which the peaks silhouetted against the clear dawn sky. The world’s most prized meteorologists would have a difficult time deciphering the atmospheric effects at work here, but to the flora and fauna to whom the Klamath Basin is home it is science-fair simple, as well as for the native Klamath tribes who for thousands of years subsisted here on anadromous fish, with minimal agriculture production, once under the towering gaze of Mt. Mazama, then its aftermath, forever drinking from the glacial peaks that dot the horizon. I can still almost imagine this alluvial landscape before being drained and before the railroad bisected it noisily, importing rock, tar-drenched crossties, and miles of steel, forever altering migration patterns, relocating the Natives to compromised plots of earth, and establishing towns with cabbaged names, like Chiloquin.

  Soon, Upper Klamath Lake appeared like a Paleolithic pond, a place you might expect to see long Lochness Monster like necks poking out of the water. While on the far west horizon, crests I could be convinced form the rim of Crater Lake add a snowy hint of perpetual winter to this otherwise migratory marshland.

  After a brief crew-change in Klamath Falls, the train made its way south across acres of drained marshland now under heavy agricultural production, then began to climb around the base of Mt. Shasta on steep grades that signify where the landscape unmistakably turns into California territory. 1% inclines continued for the next twenty miles, peaking at Grass Lake—elevation 5,100 ft.—then descended steeper grades down through Black Butte. The legendary siding looked unceremoniously glorious as it drifted by with its ashen earth and nearby cinder cones; framed against Mt. Shasta it is the perfect backdrop for this volcanic landscape. This is high-country too I realized while crossing a high trestle above the Shasta Valley, its rolling hills and rippled land looking like the bottom of an ancient lake.

  Quick came the steep descent into Dunsmuir, which had me digging in my heels as the momentum seemed too much for the train to slow enough to manage the demanding curves. At one point, while looking down over a decade-old derailment left to rust on the mountainside, the mainline track appeared hundreds of feet vertically below in a ravine of pines and I marveled at the engineering it took to descend an 8,000 ton freight-train 1,000-ft. of elevation in less than 10 miles, a feat accomplished without one tunnel. This feat, known as Sawmill Curve, descends northward the mountain on a near-2% grade, and at Cantara Loop, a severe 14-degree turn that spans the Sacramento River, switches back heading south. Named for the Cantara Lumber Company which once operated on the patch of land cradled by the curve, the only recent construction at this site is a giant Lego looking bridge reinforcement installed by Union Pacific after a catastrophic 1991 derailment spilled 19,000 gallons of Metam Sodium Herbicide into the Sacramento destroying the ecosystem downstream for some forty miles. Yet still, on this dangerous horseshoe curve, the incessant screeching of brakeshoes and squealing of flanged wheels is not enough to slow the train to its 20 mph speed limit.

  Pulling into Dunsmuir around noon, I climbed down from the unit just before the arch bridge and hiked the tracks into town. I then made my way down toward the train yard to Road Hog’s jungle down by the river (yep, it’s still there). A line of empty boxcars sat in the Dunsmuir yard slowly amassing monikers of those who have recently passed through. Some have been here long enough that they have even been lived in. I expected the night to be cold so I prepared a fire, ready to light. But if all else fails I know that the Amtrak station always stays open.

  The wind howled through the canyon all night, waking me occasionally to ominous shadows that played with my bad vision. Occasionally waking, I wished silently for some old hobo apparition to appear. But the wind only continued to howl.

  I spend the day at Mossbrae Falls, sitting in the ice-cold Sacramento River, hiking the surrounding woods, reading and writing and drinking beer, and just waiting for the perfect light conditions to photograph. Locked in almost perpetual shadow, the cascading beauty of the falls is difficult to photograph most summer days, making it uniquely easier to appreciate in person. Located three miles north of Dunsmuir and at least a two-mile hike along the tracks, it is the only place I know of that active train tracks are a sanctioned hiking path (despite a couple of those No Trespassing signs that occasionally appear. In the early 1900s trains did actually take passengers to the falls and drop them off at a gazebo sitting next to the tracks. But that’s long gone and trains don’t as much as slow along the curving rails anymore. And though George H. W. Bush attracted moderate attention by visiting the falls in 1994, it remains comfortably secluded and not flaunted as a tourist destination like nearby Hedge Creek Falls.

  The river is high and especially cold, submerging rocks and logs I’ve climbed on before. However snowmelt does not fuel the falls like one might think. Mossbrae Falls is actually the result of multiple springs flowing naturally from the mountains, as they do all along the tracks north. For it was a spring that founded Dunsmuir, a so called “soda spring” of carbonated water, where in 1852 a simple log-cabin was built, which turned into a resort with an inn by 1855, attracting travelers, prospectors, and eventually the railroad that in 1890 established Dunsmuir as a crew-change point between Klamath Falls and Roseville, CA.

  It was a nice Fourth of July but I did not
much celebrate the occasion. In town folks were grilling in their backyards along the river, across from where I stood on the tracks drinking Dead Guy Whiskey listening to Skynard blasting from a nearby stereo. That’s about as patriotic as I got, which may have been quite a lot. But so suddenly did a strange wind blow and I heard a lone train whistling up through the canyon: the 5:30 hotshot: the daily Z-train to Portland. It stopped on the mainline in front of me and the time was just right to depart and possibly be back in Eugene by morning to see someone before they leave town.

  And so I rode dirty face back up into the mountains at dusk, waiving to a few excited retreatists straggling back from Mossbrae Falls. The train made its steep and steady climb around Cantara Loop and back up around Sawmill Curve, and at Black Butte four crustpunks stood watching the train blow past. I would liked to have been hanging out with them on all that ash and soot, but could only smile back and wave. One bad thing about riding hotshots is they are filthy. On a hotshot you are sure to get covered in coal dust, grease and oil from the trailers, soot and exhaust from tunnels, mud slung up from the wheels, and everything else imaginable. I’m always dirty when I get off a hotshot and in desperate need of a shower, and not only my person but my sleeping bag as well.

  As the night grew cold and dark I lay out on the grating in my sleeping bag on the train winding up around the base of towering Mt. Shasta. Next thing I know I’m just south of Springfield; I pack my bag through the final miles. The train rolls through Eugene in the early A.M., down the mainline alongside the yard, and stops to CC at the first hint of dawn. I climb off, fill my water bottle from a spigot on some house off North Park, and then walk back into the yard to find a boxcar to sleep a few more hours in.

  Our train came from the west side of the train yard out onto the Departure Tracks and we ran like drunken buffoons to catch it on the fly. Whisky and I caught the ladder on a Canadian bigbelly, and the Drunken Man, stumbling behind, caught a suicide porch on a different car. But all was in vain as the train soon slowed to a halt; we walked the line back to Maxwell Bridge. But before we could find a preferred rideable the train jolted forward again and we all climbed hurriedly onto the back porch of another Canadian big-belly. As the train departed we drank High Lifes in preemptive celebration, and when the train stopped a few miles later at Swain siding we walked back and climbed inside an empty boxcar.

  It was a great ride the first half of the trip, through Junction City past various lumber industries, crossing a very full Willamette River on a rusty old railroad bridge paralleling the Portland & Western shortline, and nowhere a car in sight. Rich tilth dominates the valley north of Eugene and one farm in particular, a long curving piece of acreage nestled between two railroad lines just across the river, I have photographed repeatedly over the years in all different stages of vegetation; I have determined the plot is monocropped, that crop rotation routinely occurs, and that some years the plot is left fallow so as to regenerate the soil. On this particular day the plot sprouted a yellowish-green grass, perhaps for grass seed, as this is the grass seed capital of the world. (Could between two active railroad lines be a healthy place to grow crops considering the herbicides railroads routinely spray to combat weed growth, along with the carcinogenic chemicals used to tar and preserve railroad ties, all of which inevitably seep into the watershed due to erosion.) Past the narrow corridors of steel and ballast the valley stretches flat and uniformly, and the sun, for the first time all day, broke through the western clouds to warm the inside of the boxcar. Like I said, it was a great ride the first half of the trip. But we only made it halfway.

  We live in a cell-phone age, not to mention one of web cameras (the eye in the sky), which allows a railroad Bull to monitor departure tracks and train yards from a crew-change away. Word on the rails is that Vanderfang, the notorious Bull from Klamath Falls, has moved up to Eugene and Portland and is really putting the squeeze on the Brooklyn subdivision. I’ve heard several firsthand stories off people being pulled of trains day and night, sometimes by the Bull and sometimes by the Sheriff, getting ticketed and if warranted going to jail. My intuition is that a policy is being re-enforced that requires railroad workers to report all potential liabilities, and that there is possibly a web camera set up at some remote point along the subdivision where one’d least expect to be spotted.

  At Marion siding, somewhere between Albany and Salem, along a lone country road bordering acres of farmland and “lots of pot” (as the Sheriff later remarked), they came and pulled the Drunken Man—passed out shirtless on the floor of the boxcar listening to his headphones—from the train, handcuffed him and took him away in a squad car. Whisky and I, out walking along the mainline, watched in silence from the opposite side of the train, peering over the slope of the mainline from a half dozen cars. We knew not what was happening exactly but did noticed they left his and all our bags inside the boxcar, and as soon as they drove off we ran back to the boxcar and retrieved them. At first we thought to make a run for it. But we were miles from anything in the middle of nowhere and weren’t sure if They would even come looking for us. All we knew was we could not leave our bags or his. So Whisky, being more incredulous than I, volunteered to stay on the train with the bags and try to make it to Portland, while I, not wanting the trouble, fled. He walked back several cars and climbed up into a tall gondola, and I hit the acres of farmland to try and find a road to hitch out from.

  Four sheriffs in all showed up to search for the other rider who they took to have made off with the Drunken Man’s luggage. Train traffic was stopped for an hour and in the end they had to bring a K-9 unit to sniff Whisky out, passed out in the bottom of a rusty scrap-metal car.

  “Wake up Douche bag!” a sheriff he described simply as bulging hollered at him from above as an ornery dog barked at the outside of the train.

  Out Whisky climbed into a pair of handcuffs and, after being rolled under the train car, into the back of the Sheriff’s jeep with only a thin layer of Plexiglas separating him from the panting canine. Meanwhile, the Drunken Man, cited and released, stood on the side of the road waiting to get his bag back and pretending he had only several hours earlier met Whisky. Like the Drunken Man, Whisky was cited for a misdemeanor, Criminal Trespassing I, and despite the manpower required to locate him was also released on the spot.

  “How’d they know you guys were on the train,” the Sheriff asked indifferently. “They called us, and said ‘we got a couple of riders.’” The train’s conductor, a man with gray shoulder-length hair who looked like the Big Lebowski, walked out the front of the lead engine and groovily thanked the sheriff for doing his job, hair swinging forward to backward in a hippy-like sway. Whisky and the Drunken Man, now both free, staggered down the road two miles to tiny Marion, a Podunk town with a cluster of cluttered houses and a Korean run convenient store across the railroad tracks, which is where they found me, drinking a consolation beer.

  Fortunately two fine young girls, both raised there in tiny Marion, came walking out of the grocery at the right time and I convinced them to give us all a ride to Salem, where they were heading anyway. They were skeptical at first, but I convinced them our story was true by showing them the photos on my camera. Twenty minutes later they dropped us off at the Amtrak Station in Salem, and we gravitated across the street to a brewpub called the Ram to celebrate our not being in jail. Through pints of hideous laughter we commenced our drinking there until the early A.M. (I suggest the India Red Ale), then stumbled down the tracks and passed out in a rusty boxcar abandoned in the back of the Salem yard.

  In hindsight, we should have left the Drunken Man’s bag where it was, got our own bags, and stayed on the train to Portland, then retrieved his. Therefore, if They came back for his bag, which I believe is the only reason they went to so much trouble to locate a second rider, they would have found it and had less of an incentive to initiate a manhunt for the other rider.

  •••

  A mon
th later Whisky agreed to honor his court appearance in Salem if I accompanied him, so we got an early ride from my friend Gretsky. However, the courthouse was not in downtown Salem like we assumed. Not the one Whisky was scheduled to appear in anyway. So we had to track it down in a hurry, 14 miles southeast of town off Lancaster Hwy, right next to the Salem Correctional Institution in a rural part of Marion County. The Drunken Man also showed up for his court appearance, which was a little surprising, and they were both late.

  I’d say both men were a little intimidated by the $5,000 base-fine written on their tickets, but from the get-go things worked out in their favor. It seems that Marion County, its courts clogged with tweekers, petty criminals and perverts, just wants to get lesser cases over with and out of the way and so has instituted a new “early dismissal” program in which certain low-level crimes and violations, like trespassing and possession of marijuana, can be settled on first appearance with a small fine and a guilty plea. It’s a true slap on the wrist, and within five minutes of speaking to a court-appointed attorney both Whisky and the Drunken Man signed statements acknowledging that they did indeed trespass on Union Pacific Railroad property last month, and agreed to a laughable fine—$122 for the Drunken Man and $222 for Whisky due to his priors.

  The new Marion County courthouse is an oppressive masterpiece. I sat alone in the back of Courtroom A watching all the hapless rednecks dressed in Tommy Hilfiger appear for petty crimes (underage drinking, possession of marijuana, driving under the influence, etc.), and a crop of sad middle-age women plead guilty to stealing from places like Winco, JC Penny, and even the Goodwill. About halfway through the demoralizing affair Whisky abruptly had his cell-phone confiscated by a big dummy of a sheriff after taking a picture with it in the courtroom. His immediate glance back at me painted worry of added charges (who knows what other photographs were on his phone) and degenerate guilt. Twenty minutes later both men entered guilty pleas consecutively without a hitch and were ordered to appear within a week for booking—the only catch. After they returned to the pews the big sheriff descended on Whisky, cell-phone in hand, and I watched Whisky shrug and shake his head as he denied ever taking any picture inside the courtroom. As the dumb bastard stood there trying to figure out how to navigate the phone’s applications to find the pictures, I realized the absolutely priceless opportunity before me, took my own cell-phone out of my pocket and, without flipping it open to view the screen, took a picture of the sheriff towering over Whisky, sitting with his back to me. Success.