by Aaron Dactyl
After the train passed I noticed a couple of police cars drive underneath the bridge I was sitting on, but I had no problems until I was walking away and a macho, white SUV spotted me and quickly turned to park in front of the Chamber of Commerce in an attempt to cut me off. I did not walk across the tracks toward him but instead turned back toward the Laurel caboose, to which he quickly responded by getting back in his car, turning around, and driving back under the bridge. By then I was entirely off railroad property and had already tossed my half-full bottle of beer into the bushes, pretending to be walking toward the street. He pulled in at me with his lights on and jumped out demanding some I.D., threatening to take me to jail at the request of the railroad. I had to make up a story that a friend from Billings was picking me up in the parking lot across the street and that I was just killing time until then. He let me off with a warning, but I had to sit in that parking lot until nightfall before retrieving my bags. At least I know now that Laurel is hostile toward tramps.
It was not an easy catch out of Laurel. I walked on thin ice after dark, cowering at every headlight turning my way as I tried to make it down into the yard. I eventually lay out my sleeping bag under an awning in front of an abandoned cement-block train station (a nice place to sleep); minutes later a train rolled out of the yard toward me, full throttle on the mainline, hitting the southbound wye with little deceleration. Anxious to get out of Laurel, I scrambled to pack my stuff and approached the moving train disheveled, my sleeping bag and a jug of water in one arm and my camera bag held by my teeth. I caught the train dangerously on the fly, grabbing the ladder with one hand and landing my right knee sorely on the bottom rung. It jerked me from my feet and I struggled to get myself onto the porch as I drifted perilously behind the Chamber of Commerce and overtop the very bridge I was nearly arrested for sitting on. I let go of my jug of water and it hit the porch, exploded, and quickly turned the powdery cement was on the porch into a thick clay-like substance. But I was aboard. I immediately felt paranoia rolling through Laurel, hiding in thin shadows drifting across the porch. The train passed amid several industries and then rolled back out into the darkness. Globs of clay muddied my hands, clothes, bag, and hat, and I now had no water to drink. Twice the train stopped to work at industry sidings that night, and twice I tried to walk the line up to retrieve water from a unit, but each time was sent running back to the porch, thirstier than before.
Hours later I woke in a desert yard before dawn, a worker walking between lines releasing the air from the brakes of the train, half a carlength from me and approaching. In these situations I find it’s usually safest to just pretend to be asleep, because if he thinks you are sleeping he will be less likely to bother you and risk his own personal safety. And though he may alert the Bull, this will at least give you time to wake up and get off the train car. I didn’t budge at the startling hiss he created by pulling the gasket behind where I lay, and he didn’t linger an extra second like he had noticed me, but I find it hard to believe he did not. After he passed, I climbed off the train and out of the yard into the darkness.
I could’ve been at Hinkle, or any remote desert yard as there was nothing but desert, darkness, and stars in the sky. At first I was turned around and thought north was south, until I remembered I had switched to a front porch and rode dirty-face in order to avoid all the muddy clay I created. The yard, active on the north end where I stood, was dead on the other, so I stumbled south in search of an unoccupied unit that might provide some drinking water. I scored a six-pack from an inactive unit near the yard office, then went to find a decent porch to camp on for the night. I found one on a line full of busted cars that seemed to have not budged in quite a while. Several northbound trains came through as I slept hard and dreamt wildly of travel.
Greybull is a dusty little town in North-central Wyoming named for the Greybull River that the Native Americans named after a sacred albino buffalo that used to roam these plains. Red, painted hills backdrop the north end of the yard, but a thick cloud cover obscures the sun, leaving me a little confused still as to which direction I should catch-out from. (Several of the cars from the line I came down on are now built onto a line that seems to be headed back north and because I am anxious to catch-out, my excitement makes me further question my directional aptitude.) The Greybull yard is a flat sandy behemoth of red-shaded ballast. It is inactive, sleepy, and accessible from all sides, bordered on one side by nothing but empty desert and on the other by abandoned mills, corrugated metal shacks and the town itself. Like many small western towns up here Greybull is centered around cowboys and the railroad, and these are the insignia that appear about town. A couple of blocks from the yard, the Maverik food mart doubles as a small liquor store (thank god), and I bought a six-pack of local beer and managed to filch a bottle of Seagrams, several Clif bars to tide me over, and a new pair of gloves (since I apparently left my others in Helena). I sat in the yard all day, wrote, took pictures, drew on trains, and after being spotted by a lone worker on a switch engine, stashed my bags in the desert and killed hours wandering like a lost doe.
The first southbound train of the day came through around six in the evening, stopping on the mainline to CC and remaining for hours. I found a clean hopper-porch with two-foot walls bordering it and after about an hour fell asleep exhausted under the mauve sky. I woke in the morning, to the train barreling across the dark prairie, temperatures near freezing and cumulustratus glowing a fiery orangish-red in the high atmosphere. Contrary to my thinking of it as being cozy, the porch’s high walls created a sort of wind tunnel that funneled in air from the leading train car and battered me into the morning, tearing open my sleeping bags and threatening to throw them from the porch. It was maddening, and for hours after the sun rose I wore my every layer, but still could not keep warm. The train rolled steadily south with nothing in sight, just cuts and crevices of dried-out streams and water flows, the landscape culminating in every direction with mountain ranges bearing the names of pioneers, Natives, and the creatures that roam here: Beartooth, Absaroka, Washakie, Owl Creek, Bridger, Bighorn, and Pryor.
The Wind River Basin compromises an enormous swath of land that no one seems to be doing anything with, a rugged, windswept prairie non-conducive to sustaining large settlements, yet endlessly picturesque in a simpler, less-dramatically beautiful way. For most of the ride from Greybull south to Casper not another car, road, house or building was ever in sight. After sunrise I climbed the ladder to the top of the hopper and sat soaking up the sun’s rays. But it was not until the train slowed on its approach to Casper that I began to warm enough to take off my many layers.
After CCing quickly in Casper, and rolling through a small yard there, the train continued on a south southeast trajectory following the old Oregon Trail and the North Platte River along the southern tip of the Powder River Basin, Wyoming’s coal-rich region. Again, the landscape bare and not visually striking, until we reached Elkhorn where the tracks border the large Glendo Reservoir. Here the earth deepens and light sandstone cliffs expose red striations as the train tracks cut into a narrow canyon of hundred-foot-high cliffs. Deep and remote, I again sat atop the hopper amazed at the beauty and diversity of the land, thinking how refreshing it must have appeared to the early pioneers traveling the Oregon Trail.
Emerging from the canyon at Wendover, a wye branches off south to Cheyenne from both the east and west but the train continued steadily east, through a short tunnel, and emerged on Stokes siding high above the Guernsey Reservoir and stopped. With the sun high and hot in the sky I pondered what to do; I sat there long enough to decide I did not want to continue east to Guernsey and then backtrack to Casper only to gamble on another southbound to Cheyenne. Instead, I opted to walk back to Wendover, and if my 2006 CC guide is correct, catch a southbound there when it stops to change crews.
Walking back I hid from a worker truck that drove through the tunnel and then hiked up over, which required me to step ov
er a gated fence onto private property. At East Wendover, on the other end of the tunnel, just before the wye, I observed my first bit of ancient graffiti, carved high into the rocks and still legible (the soft, Wyoming sandstone allowed travelers on the Oregon Trail to carve their names and dates, and pioneer graffiti dating back to the 1800s is known to be marked all along the old Oregon trail through here). Though these carvings are most likely from railroad workers and not original Oregon Trail Pioneers, the sheer antiquity of the preserved names made it feel like I had discovered a long lost Picasso: Bill Jenkins, Great Falls Montana, March 29, 1932; Freddie Wasnuk, Plevna Montana, March 27, 1937; Troy Jones, August 1, 1929, Leesville Louisiana; Frank Wilson, Sheridan Wyoming. And there was also a Wind Walker moniker from 1991, carved right next to the others.
Wendover, Wyoming- The Last Frontier. The alphabetical last stop in the CC guide. Once a post office and train station and now nothing more than a ghost town. Nestled in the middle of the wye along the banks of the North Platte River, Wendover looks like a bombed-out nuclear test site from the Cold War era. All that remains are two dilapidated wood shacks, old fence posts, caging from a chicken coop, rusted truck frames from the fifties, and an abandoned two-story house with white siding that is haunting just in the condition in which it was left. Two short lines of old coal-cars are sided on the tracks coming off the wye from the east and opposite the mainline is a boat ramp for access to the river. Though tire tracks mark the dirt and names dating from the past few years are carved in thick mud coating the concrete bridge supports, I have never been in a place quite as deserted and ghostly as Wendover, much less stranded. I feel utterly alone in the loneliest sense of the word, yet somehow also privileged to be able to experience the beauty of the place so solemnly and intensely. I explored the forgotten, trying to imagine the place as a once-lively homestead, a place that welcomed Conestoga wagons to overnight along the Oregon Trail, a place that travelers returned to every summer to fish, hunt, and trade. I imagined the place bustling after the railroad was built, trains stopping daily to pick up passengers and mail to take to Cheyenne, or up to Casper; later, perhaps after the train station closed and the post office left, I imagined a large family homesteading Wendover and farming the land, hens clucking around, roosters crowing all hours of the day, and kids swinging from the trees and playing in the river’s cool rushing water, all the while with trains rushing by; and sometimes the children would wave excitedly to the engineer as he blew the whistle and waved back.
I pump water from the rushing river through a cheap, water purifier into several small water bottles I saved, drag a large plywood board onto the rocks beside the tracks to sleep, and assemble a circular fire-pit using the largest rocks. I collect dry birchwood for kindling and used pieces of the shanty—sections of window frames—for firewood; I light the fire from a matchbook using old receipts and paper from my notebook.
A southbound coal train awoke me just after dark, its engine rumbling by loudly a few feet from my head. It slowed momentarily but then sped back up too quickly for me to catch, especially in the dark. Though I saw no crew-change vehicle or anything else, I figured that if it had crew-changed then it must’ve done so further back in the canyon; so I picked up my stuff and walked the tracks back about 500 yards in the utter blackness to the mouth of the canyon and there lay on the rocks. Trains roared by all night long in east and west directions. The distant howling of wolves filled the air.
The thousand-dollar train, the first southbound in over twelve hours, arrived at dawn, creeping out of the canyon and onto the wye. It began picking up speed with no rideables in sight and I had about a thirty-second window to get up and gather my stuff and catch the damn thing on the fly. With no food and very little water, I had to catch the train lest I were to starve to death in Wendover or walk the one hundred miles to Cheyenne. I grabbed the ladder on a white tanker car—the only option I had—landed my right knee sorely on the bottommost rung, and struggled for leverage with my pack weighing me down, and I ended up losing a sleeping bag to the siding but managed to climb onto the grating between two tankers—not a good ride in the least but I figured I would only have to go as far as the crew-change point (if there is one) or at most to the first siding. But I ended up riding that damn grating ninety miles with a black sleeping bag draped over my slouched body as if I were a bag of trash might anyone spot me. Luckily, the southeastern Wyoming landscape was as bare as the Wind River Basin and being seen was not a worry. However, I knew I was going to pass through Warren Air Force Base before reaching Cheyenne, and that I had to get on a different car before then.
After an hour-long high-plateau ascension toward Cheyenne, I expected the train to stop. But as it gained momentum on the downslope and I had no choice but to do something I have never before done, but thought incredibly necessary in my circumstances: I reached across the grating of the moving train, grabbed the air-gasket hook, and pulled it, releasing the air pressure in the brakes. A few miles later, around Horse Creek, the train stopped dead on a downhill grade on the mainline. I’m not sure if it was just coincidence or if I actually caused the train to stop, but I climbed off my treacherous ride and hustled back to the nearest rideable: an empty gondola. Ten minutes passed and nothing happened before the train aired up and began to move forward again. A few sidings later it stopped again, pulling in beside a northbound whose conductor (I peeked out and saw) gave my train a careful roll-by. After that it was off again, on the way to Cheyenne.
Things got interesting at mile 23 when the train rolled into Warren Air Force Base a few miles north of Cheyenne, passing into a restricted area under dozens of security cameras pointing every direction. I crouched in the thin shadows of the gondola car not knowing what to expect. For the next four miles the train crept slowly through the middle of the base, past army barracks and undesignated trailers, until another utility pole of cameras spied the train out and into the Cheyenne yard, where I quickly climbed off into the bright afternoon.
Cheyenne, Wyoming- Lastnight’s festival in downtown Depot Square boasted families with kids and a large crowd of cowboys drinking Busch from clear plastic cups and dancing with their girlfriends who all looked 10-15 years younger, like done-up twelve year olds yet somehow still like their mothers. I drank for free at the Albany restaurant and bar (apparently any found, expired creditcard can be swiped to open a tab). This morning a large farmers market occupies Depot Square, which is great except that they do not accept foodstamps (Cheyenne is just not that advanced yet); and since no grocery is within walking distance of downtown I have to eat from the Kum & Go.
I encounter several train hoppers downtown on this particular morning, including one hipster with a mullet who was from Nebraska, he says, and his peroxide-haired friend from Iowa, both of who are heading to Oakland, they say. I sense poseur in them both. There are also two kids from Michigan who are just about the most lively humans I can imagine—dirt-poor train-riders in subtle crusty attire, full of life, adventure, and charisma, humbled yet emboldened by their life experiences and humored by their hardships (having to eat some of their dog’s food after running out of foodstamps and showing no fear or remorse for sometimes having to steal their sustenance). They are heading to New Mexico with a young girl from Washington State who has adopted the crusty dress code, complete with a septum piercing (but who on her I.D. looks like Avril Lavine). One of the guys, Floppy Bag or something (I forgot), travels with a small dog, and the girl, Dove, I think, travels with a year-old cat attached to a leash. I found them in front of the Kum & Go loitering cordially, eating Arbys sandwiches on day-old and week-old receipts, a scam they informed me of along with several other ways to acquire food from fastfood chains. Floppy, or whatever was his name, then relayed a monumental story about getting pulled out of a suicide-well in Troy Montana a few weeks before. Workers saw them and called the cops, who came and wrote them trespassing tickets (“You guys aren’t going to pay these are you?” “Fuck no, we’re
not going to pay them!”), then gave them food vouchers and a ride to the police station and let them glean snipes from their ashtrays. They ended up hanging around Troy for five more days, hiking, swimming, and cliff-diving around nearby Yaak Mountain, never again being hassled. They do appear to have this sort of good fortune, and are enjoying kick-downs from all over town. But I think it is their got-nothin’-to-lose mentality that serves them most well.
Downtown under Warren overpass I run into Rick drinking with another man who does not wish to talk. Rick, an older tramp who used to ride with the FTRA years ago, is dying from some kind of colon or liver cancer. He lifts up his shirt to show me a discharge bag attached to him like an insulin tube.
“They gave me six months to live… this is what I’m doing,” he says outstretching his arms, a half bottle of vodka to his side—“Drinkin’ and thinkin’ about robbin’ banks.”
He is kidding about robbing banks. I think.
Down the tracks behind the Eagle’s Nest I find a shady tree with a pallet set beneath it, where I sit all afternoon watching trains, writing, and drinking Lost Lake, an delicious lager I found for $5 a twelve-pack at the Albany Liquor Store.
West from Cheyenne I rode one luxurious porch, mid-line back on a three-unit general manifest with two DPUs. The landscape, marked by knobs and red-rock boulders, is relatively featureless, and the Rockies not noticeably dramatic. That’s due to the tracks building over the mountains on a low-gradient ramp of sorts called the Gangplank. The Gangplank stretches from the Great Plains to the top of the Laramie range of the Rockies, providing a natural geologic construct ideal for railroad and interstate travel.
Four mainline tracks lead out of Cheyenne and diverge in two different routes: Mainlines 1 and 2 lead north along I-80 on the Gangplank while Mainlines 3 and 4 detour ten miles south to the Colorado border. There, Mainline 4 breaks off to Denver while Mainline 3 continues a separate course west, ultimately reconnecting with Mainlines 1 and 2 at Dale Junction, just before Hermosa. But three miles later the tracks again split off on separate routes and don’t rejoin again until Laramie. My train took the lower route west, Track 3, and didn’t stop until just past Laramie, where I walked back to the second DPU and continued west into the warm night kicked back in the conductor’s chair.
