The Best American Travel Writing 2012

by Jason Wilson

  Later, the train pulled down to the departure tracks from a long slow crawl out of the yard, and it was a little hairy getting out of there. The very last car on the line screeched and rattled raucously back and forth as a white jeep followed the train, paralleling my boxcar the entire way. A worker switched the tracks and the train rolled slowly toward a pair of headlights shining brightly in through the boxcar door. As the train creaked along slower and slower I felt increasingly afraid that the last car would stop right in front of that jeep and they would look inside and pull me off. But oh-so-slowly my boxcar crept by. The train stopped briefly beside a large lumberyard just north of Eugene, then finally pulled onto the main line and began to highball. Bumping and bouncing along the dark land, through Junction City, across the Willamette River, along sowed fields spanning to the dark, milky horizon, the train felt like it was going to splinter and fall apart at any second—by far the bumpiest ride I have been on in a long time—and reminded me of my first ever train ride, on a Disko grainer to Kansas City some years ago. Balled up in the rear cubbyhole on the back end of a long junk train, I was thrust violently back and forth as the train clanked, shunted, and jerked endlessly along the miserable Missouri landscape. I remember thinking then that if I ever rode a train again I would surely have to wear a bike helmet the next time. Now, trying to lie down in that back corner was preposterous, thinking that I could get any sleep. On a surprisingly warm night I stood leaning out the doorway with the wind at my face, watching the valley roll by just like I used to. And as the train continued to rock violently, I had to be extra-careful to not end up another Michael Andrew Birkinshaw (the train had slacked and shunted with such a force that it already nearly jolted me out the boxcar door)!

  Stopping at Shedd alongside a rancid-smelling cattle pasture and a cesspool pond of some sort with a road on the other side of that, a red light shone ahead . . . With all Amtraks through for the night it could only be another freight this train is waiting on. (As long as I’m not at Marion I’m really not concerned.) It smells pretty fucking rancid as I stand pissing on the main line, watching Freddy’s blink reflecting off the tracks toward two distant signal lights. It’s warm out still, probably about sixty, and that and the wind doesn’t help the stench any . . . The signal looking south turned green and minutes later headlights shone distantly ahead as a southbound approached. It passed in a whirlwind of lights and roar and with two DPUs, and after it cattle stench filled the boxcar as frogs croaked wildly in the trackside watershed. The train stopped abruptly again before reaching Albany, on the main line behind a corrugated Oregon RV Appliance Repair shed, where again frogs croaked incessantly in the confusion, perhaps wondering if each other frog was okay. (I’ve heard this before in a train yard in Watsonville, California, where the main line borders acres of Driscoll strawberry fields, and where every time a train passed on the main line and I stepped out of the yard into the furrows I would hear frogs down in the watershed at the base of the ballast croaking wildly about all the confusion.) . . . No doubt it must be putrid, as these amphibians are, cruelly, living in chemical runoff from the tracks. It’s sad, but precious at the same time as they communicate to maintain some anuran solidarity . . .

  I awoke in the morning on a siding somewhere north of Salem . . . Marion County probably . . . where acres of grass(seed) sprawled out from the boxcar door and heavy clouds lingered west above distant I-5. Swollen fields held large puddles and a small single-engine plane flew back and forth over the land very low. It almost seemed like a remote control gig but was most likely spraying the fields. A very short train then blew by—the 0530 Cascades from Eugene making its morning run north. My train pulled forward a little bit, but only to stop again and I had no idea what was happening so I fell back asleep. Several hours later the train was on the move again, passing through Woodburn, where a small cemetery on the north side of town marks the spot from which southbound trains often stop on the main line to work. I realized then that I had been sided at Gervais—north of Salem indeed. Shortly thereafter, the train violently cut its air, stopping abruptly on the main line again. The smell of burned rubber snuffed my nose. I wondered if the train had possibly hit something or was just malfunctioning badly. It sat on the main line in a hilly area around a bend where a little road wrapped through the hills (a dirt access road or perhaps someone’s driveway). A worker walked back and I heard him fooling around the back of the boxcar I was in, but he didn’t look inside. The train then slowly pulled up to unblock a road crossing and I suspected the worker was riding the ladder on the back of the car so I remained still. But I don’t know what happened to him . . . It has been a manically unstable ride all the way from those rickety departure tracks in Eugene and I am quickly losing faith in my train. I feel like it’s just going to splinter and fall apart or leave me here altogether . . .

  A malfunction of some sort definitely destabilized the train because after rolling again it again blew its air abruptly and smoke rose from the brake pads several car lengths ahead as the train stopped dead on the main line before reaching Coalca. I walked around the wooded riverbank for a while, then was just about to climb back into the boxcar when I checked back at the last second to make sure no one was looking but sure enough saw a worker in a bright green vest walking back my side of the train. I pretended to be taking pictures in case he saw me, then walked around the back of the train with a wide berth and, watching his feet from underneath the car, dodged him. He walked to the back end of the train and around it, and as he crossed over I cut through a coupler ahead of him and hopped back over to the other side. Then, as he continued up the other side of the train, I walked back to my boxcar and climbed safely inside.

  3.31.11

  Oregon City, OR—What a blower that train was. I rode the last car on the line, a dilapidated old MP boxcar with missing floorboards, and abandoned it twelve hours later at Coalca after a series of malfunctions. I put my thumb out on Hwy 99 but no one picked me up, and twenty minutes later the malfunctioning train clanked together and rattled off and I said Fuck it and walked the tracks north.

  The section of tracks from Coalca to the recently shuttered Blue Heron Paper Mill in Oregon City follows the Willamette on a high riverbank of enormous, sometimes mossy boulders and a vertical cliffside that feeds the river waterfalls of runoff from the roller-coaster-like highway it holds. While several dilapidated marina buildings and other undetermined structural remains designate the area largely abandoned, it is rather superb if you take the time to observe its intrinsic qualities. A quaint little neighborhood sits a mile south of Oregon City with houses that face the tracks in an old-timey way and have little white picket fences with waist-high gates opening to pathways crossing the tracks to recreational river access. It looks like a small town on some discontinued shortline in the south, and is totally idyllic in that sense . . . The thought of this being the very same view of the Willamette River the first settlers in Oregon saw two hundred years ago, and that the Kalapuya Indians had known long before that, is refreshing to my mind. However, behind me the highway cuts brutally through the rest of the landscape and everything is centered around easy access to that concrete trail. And of course Union Pacific renders the riverbank a constant threat, as is apparent from the tracks being strewn with deer carnage and the scattered remains of mammalian skeletons . . .

  I reached Oregon City with frustrated sweat upon my brow and wandered into a coffee shop to clean up and caffeinate myself for the day. From outside there I caught the #33 bus to Portland. A rather cramped ride to begin with, I had to sit in the front reserved-for-handicapped-persons seats across from a plump, sorry-looking goth girl clutching a library copy of a thick Stephen King novel and who sobbed into her cell phone to a no doubt equally pathetic white-bread boyfriend about her own personal problems as if it were a sorrowing, real-life soap opera. After hanging up she begged for stranger-comfort by making eyes at others and sobbing loudly for all to hear—her voluminous cleavage and cut-too-short denim
skirt was an affront to all taste and decency. And then, if her life couldn’t get any worse, the bus broke down at Silver Springs Road with Portland looming visibly on the horizon. The bus just quit, and all passengers—wheelchairs, travel packs (mine), and bikes alike—had to walk down the busy street to the next bus stop and wait to cram into an even more crowded next bus . . . First it was the train that broke down repeatedly, huffing and puffing for hours before even nearing Portland, and now the bus. After getting this far it has taken me three hours just to get another five miles and I’m not even to Portland yet. I should’ve went back to sleep and stayed with the train . . .

  4.6.11

  Portland, OR—It’s not unlike Portland to suddenly revert to winter in the spring with freezing storms that make you run for shelter. While walking through the shadows of the already wet train cars in Albina yard, a rogue sleet began and continued relentlessly, thick and visible in the spectrum of the yard’s lights. Skittle-sized pellets of ice pummeled down on the Northeast Portland riverbank, careening loudly off the vertical steel walls of boxcars and echoing oddly off empty tankers and hoppers. Wooden cross-ties became white and slippery to the boot’s touch, like from a fresh frost. I took refuge under Going Street, but the bridge is not exactly conducive to human settlement—the concrete slanting up to the road is too steep to climb and there is no room to lie at the top, and the pillars below comprise one of Portland’s hiviest areas, to say the least. One headless line of trains sat on the departure tracks extending north past the bridge and after the sleet had quelled to a drizzle I called several of the cars in to find them destined for midwestern towns days and nights away. Because the stock was mostly bound for BNSF yards (one of them interchanging at a BNSF location in Washington and several others going to Minnesota), my feeling was that the train was headed north, mostly likely to Seattle to interchange there, then heading east. On an ALY boxcar with no seal, I opened the door, put my stuff inside, and with some beer I picked up at my favorite convenient store (the Plaid Pantry at the top of the hill on Interstate) sat in the boxcar door staring out into the wet night.

  Around 2200 a northbound pulled down the main line and stopped—a line of mostly empty well cars. It was Seattle-bound, I presumed, and though wet, suicidal, and exposed to perhaps even more wet, I climbed aboard and found somewhat of a ledge to lie on at the front end of one of the cars so that if the rain did again come, it would do so at an angle and spare me as much as possible.

  I woke up somewhere in Washington getting dumped on—sound asleep, just getting dumped on. The train was sided and I could soon feel the wet beginning to seep through to my clothes as it collected in the grooves of my sleeping mat. I got my umbrella out and packed up my sopping sleeping bag and just sat there in the rain. (There’s something about the alignment our solar body in the spring and the relative declination of the Pacific Northwest that just seems to suck the moisture from the sky at sunrise and sunset, the same way that the clouds then burn off around noon and reveal the day, only to reappear again around dusk.) With the sun rising bright in the overcast east and the landscape agriculturally nondescript—a barbed-wired-in distribution warehouse, I-5 moving along 200 yards to the west under lush, wet hills with fog cutting through the evergreens—I felt like I was still in the Wapato Valley. Looking ahead down the tracks it looked like my train was snaking out from the siding onto the main line, blocking it, but that was not the case. A series of long drawn-out horns eventually led to a southbound hotshot, and before it passed entirely, the empty train I was on clanked together and rolled off along the wet Washington landscape. Catching up to the rain that had previously woken and soaked me, I put my umbrella up and sat helplessly under it with my back to the front of the well car, hunched up with my knees in my sweatshirt trying to warm my painfully cold hands. Urbanity reigned on both sides of the tracks, confining me to remain down so that the only things I could see were the ground passing below and occasionally the tops of trains as I passed them . . . I don’t know where I am but my best guess is nearing Tacoma . . .

  On several occasions I tried to take notice of my surroundings, hoping to gauge some sort of claim on my trajectory, but nothing proved useful. (I saw Emerald Downs, a racetrack or something that I thought looked familiar, a sign designating the Black River and a small wooden trestle following it, and a multitude of BNSF freightage and rail equipment.) Suddenly the valley seemed to dissolve and immense hills grew around the train. Arms of the freeway overlapped in myriad spans, wrapping around each other and ultimately transporting the entire I-5 corridor to the east side of the tracks. Idle trains were passed and a Puget Sound Sounder snuck up from behind, no doubt seeing me plain as day sitting down in the well—that’s when I knew I must be close. Busier and busier the landscape became as what looked like an airport took to the west side of the train and multiple tracks fed an increasing intermodel presence suggesting a nearby port: the Puget Sound. But I could not see water. The train then passed under a large scaffolding archway with the name Georgetown on it, telling, no doubt, but I didn’t even have my maps to figure out where that was. As the train slowed I almost hopped off in case the Sounder had called me in, but it continued on so I stayed with it. But I could tell by looking at the ground below that it had switched tracks and veered off the main line, and again I had not done my research like I should have, and when I looked up and saw an intermodel yard with the name Argo, it only sounded vaguely familiar. Two workers stood on both sides of the train ahead operating a remote control engine and my train car stopped beside one of them. Vulnerable anyhow, I stood up, knowing the worker would see me but hoping he would not care, or at least that I could get safely out of the yard before anything could happen.

  “Whooooa!” he exclaimed, obviously taken aback. He looked at his partner to confirm what he was seeing as I hopped off the train and walked up to him.

  “You know that’s illegal?” he asked in an obvious rhetorical question.

  “Yessir!” I responded. “Can you tell me where is Argo?”

  “You’re in Seattle,” he said, pointing to a distant dreary cityscape on the horizon that I then turned to see for myself.

  “Yes! I made it.”

  “Where are you trying to go?”

  “Seattle.”

  “Where did you get on?”

  “Portland. Last night.”

  “Really?”

  “Thank you, sir,” I said, ending our brief conversation. “I’m getting out of the yard.” And with that I walked briskly out of the yard and to a nearby street where I stood to catch the #106 bus downtown.

  4.7.11

  Seattle, WA—Seattle is wet and gray and cold and not unlike I imagined it would be: spitting rain. I am hanging out with Read, a graffiti artist wanted in several states, apparently (according to The Stranger), and he is putting the final touches on his first gallery show as part of the Lawrimore Project, on display in a small storefront in a renovated old architectural office building in Pioneer Square, a skuzzier part of downtown. He has been up all night for the second night in a row hanging pieces, finishing an enormous black roller that looks like it could only have been accomplished with the aid of a projector, but wasn’t, and organizing several hijacked newspaper boxes that he has repainted and claimed to display his own book The Reader—all inside this little bathroom-sized space with a high ceiling.

  It was my first time in Seattle and Read and Herman Beans cordially showed me around. We spent the hours before the opening drinking at the Central, Seattle’s oldest saloon (established in 1896), where a buffet of cheese ravioli and mini hot dogs adorned the corner. The dark, musty interior of the Central made me feel right at home as I drank Manny’s, a local beer that everyone seems to prefer by the pitcher. By eveningtime hot dog vendors and shoe-shiners had set up on the sidewalk outside and patrons began to pour in from Friday’s Art Walk. The night was a wild success (critics agree!), and one to remember on the streets of Seattle. Long after the gallery had closed, some env
ious coward threw a stereo speaker through the front window, breaking it and gouging the plaster on the back wall but otherwise doing no damage to anything. And no one really cared either. I think it enhanced the show, and if anything added to Read’s credibility as a street artist. Last call later, five shots rang deafeningly into the musty night air, echoing across the Sound, and through the brick alleyways of Pioneer Square people scattered in all different directions. I passed out in the back of a big white moving van parked somewhere nearby.