a round-trip journey to nowhere
It’s raining. It shouldn’t be raining. It isn’t supposed to be raining. Though I have to thank the skies for a clear night while I slept in the rough near hole 2.
I am in Louisville, Kentucky. That’s pronounced Low-ville down here. I drive for hours looking for the train yards. The train yards, which are usually so prominent, so unavoidable, elude me. Louisville is a big new town and I know next to nothing about it. Here is all I know about it: Someone told me I must visit a certain quirky cafe.
I try two approaches to get to know the city. First, the old standby, somewhat exhausting and somewhat fruitless here: aimless wandering. Second, I leverage all the information I can find to slowly learn all I can about this big city. I find a nice hotel and pick up a freebie chamber of commerce map. I check the white pages and look up the railroad companies, who provide no addresses and only phone numbers. I look in the local newspaper’s weekend entertainment section and find my quirky cafe. Though I still haven’t found the train yards, I find the cool part of town, a long avenue of restaurants, coffee bars, antique stores, and galleries.
I’m cruising around in the dark looking for trains and hip coffee shops. I’m trying to keep my eyes open for a place to crash. I deeply desire to sleep in the familiar safety and grungy emptiness of the freight yards in this strange city.
I ask a young guy if he knows a safe place I can crash for the night. He misunderstands and says, “I can’t let you sleep at my place.” I’m embarrassed and explain that I am just looking for a place to lay down where I won’t be messed with. He points me in the direction of a large public park and golf course on the east side of town.
The park is deserted. I ride off the road and across a fairway into a stand of trees. I’ve been run off for sleeping in public parks before, so I try to make myself invisible. I use tree branches to semi-camouflage my motorcycle. I sleep well in a bed of soft fallen leaves.
Next morning, I ask one of the guys working at Lynn’s Paradise Cafe where the rail yards are. He happens to be a former rail worker. He helped build CSX’s Strawberry Yard south of the airport in Louisville. Back then, it was still the L&N, the Louisville and Nashville Railroad.
I’m ready to go, but now it is raining.
The trick to feeling safe anywhere is to always feel at home inside your body. Wherever you go, you bring your home and your most important possession with you.
However, realizing this when you are scared and in unfamiliar surroundings is the hard thing. I still need to latch on to things familiar: the safe, white, middle-class part of town, the trendy, hip, young part of town, an alternative weekly, a used bookstore, a coffee shop, the railroad yards.
The man at Lynn’s asks, “Why you wanna hop a train? You know it’s dangerous, don’t you? There are more derailments than they let you know. Not all of them are dramatic. And they carry a lot of toxic stuff. The trains going real slow at 3 or 4 in the morning? Those are the ones carrying toxic waste.”
“I’ve seen people’s lives ruined by derailments. Part of our job was to go and clean up the messes. Cars would go off the tracks and straight through people’s houses. People’ll come home and there’ll be a train car sitting in their front yard. And where their house used to be, there’ll be nothing. Just gone.”
While I am waiting to catch a train, I have to urinate every few minutes. My body is sending me a message. It tells me that it doesn’t want to haul around any extra weight if it is going to have to run for its life. It makes its demands heard loud and clear. Not just urination. I am glad that I packed little folded-up lengths of toilet paper.
While I am pacing back and forth making false starts and nervous little forays, another hobo lies sleeping without a care in the world in an old chair by a small fire. He is very neat and clean with an olive green Army duffle bag just like mine. He has short hair and clean clothes.
I assume he is another yuppie rider. Out for a cheap thrill. I find later that he has been on the road for 21 years, riding back and forth, far and near, out on the road just to be free. He is an ex-junkie and now mentions God like an old friend. He says, “I’ve been out on the road for a long time and I figure this is just about where I belong, thank the Good Sweet Lord.”
I am riding on a freight train. A freight train hauls things made in one place to people who think they want to buy them in another. Sometimes the stuff is made mostly in one place and is used mostly somewhere else. After a train delivers a load to the people who will buy it, it returns empty to where the goods are made. Empty trains are good for riders like me.
I am a flea. No one knows I am here. No one cares. I am along for the ride. Nothing I do affects the train on which I am riding. If halfway through the ride, I decide I do not want to ride anymore, the train goes along heedlessly. If I throw myself in front of the train, it will not even slow as it rolls over me. Train riding teaches humility.
I have been lying in the weeds all morning. In all likelihood, there are thousands of tiny creatures hitching rides on me. Ad infinitum.
I pass through Cave City, Kentucky on my way to Nashville, Tennessee. I pass not more than ten miles from Mammoth Caves, Kentucky, the cave that was formerly thought to be the longest cave in the world. It has over 300 miles of passages underground. Actually, the longest cave in the world was discovered recently not more than fifty miles from another big long-known cave, Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico.
The biggest cave is so big that they haven’t even explored it all, they haven’t even found the end of it yet.
The people who were proud to say that Mammoth Cave was the biggest cave in the world must have been bummed. I suppose they had to change all the signs. I imagine they now say “Mammoth Cave—Second Longest Cave in the World.”
I wish I’d brought a novel. I am bored stiff. Though we approached Nashville at a good clip, we have been in and out of the hole since Bowling Green. Fits and starts. I change from the back porch of a grainer to an empty gondola to get some sun. A grainer is a closed train car for holding grain or gravel or powdered chemicals. A gondola is an open-top car for holding scrap metal or steel beams or coal. I stand up and let my hair blow in the wind. I nap. I pace back and forth. I read the one book I have.
Finally, in the hole again just outside of Nashville, I change to an empty boxcar. “In the hole” means the train is stopped on a siding, waiting for something. Sometimes the train waits for work on the rails to finish, waits for other trains to pass, or waits for seemingly no reason at all. I watch enviously as a mixed consist train rockets past us.
Train-hopping develops strange appetites. I’ve been eating dry granola, bagels, tuna, and peanut butter washed down with 20/20. 20/20 is a fortified wine popular with hobos because it is cheap, sweet, and has a high alcohol content.
In my boredom, I get a hankering to eat the can of sardines that has been knocking around in my pack for the last few trips. For being such disgusting-looking things, the little boogers sure taste good. This is a “food” item I would never even consider eating at home.
Yet another train gets the right-of-way while we still sit, sit, sit. As each train passes, I get a sense of anticipation, knowing, “Okay, now. At any moment, we’ll be good to go.” But for all I know, this train could be parked here for the rest of my life.
Out of sheer boredom, I walk up the length of the train and meet another rider who I’d seen earlier in Louisville.
He says, “My mom wants me to come home and take care of my dad. I don’t want to disrespect my mom, but the Good Lord put me out here and I expect this is where he wants me to stay.”
He is very neat and clean for a hobo. Trains are dirty and riders get dirty too. I am very dirty. My long hair is matted. I cannot run my fingers through it. I have put a bandana over my head so others can’t see that my hair is a single big mat. This hobo has stylishly cut short gray hair. He has many teeth missing though, and he makes me glad I brushed my teeth on the train after my meal.
He says, “But the Lord has been sorely trying me. He’s making me think hard on this. I don’t want to disrespect my mom. I suppose the Lord could just turn me around and march me right back up there. But for now, I’m riding.”
I think too much about sustainability. I look at something neat and think, first thing, Can that go on?
I look at my new hobo friend and think, Yes, he’s living and doing it pretty well. He’s not burning the candle at both ends. He looks healthy and happy and homeless.
He’s found a way to live on the outside that isn’t tearing himself or anyone else apart. He’s found some kind of balance.
I have to respect that.
I spend less than a few hours in Nashville, Tennessee, and see only the train yard. I fall asleep in a boxcar I hope is going back to Louisville.
I wake up in the morning and I have no idea where I am or where I’m going. I go to sleep in a boxcar and wake up moving. As I sleep, I am vaguely aware of movement, jostling, banging around. I don’t care. I am comfortable and sleepy. I am in my sleeping bag with an inch of carpeting under me. I found the carpet in the train yard and dragged it into my boxcar. I sleep well.
When I slept, I did so believing I was in the right boxcar to get back to Louisville. A friendly car knocker told me that the train on track 8 was going to Louisville. A car knocker hooks up trains. He seemed to know what he was telling me, but they are sometimes wrong. I was too tired to care.
I wake up unsure of anything. After a time, I spot a familiar landmark. Before I left Louisville, I memorized landmarks so I’d recognize the yard when I came back. I am going to jump off the train at exactly the right spot for a short walk to my bike. I’m on my way back to Kentucky.
The train stops. My car is on a small bridge across a stream. I wonder idly when it will go again. I stare across a grassy field at a distant factory. The factory is owned by the Olympic company, which makes paint products. I watch the birds fluttering in the field. I watch leaves drift by in the stream. I wonder if the stream is polluted. I spot a turtle in the stream and watch him for a while. He goes into deeper water and I lose sight of him.
I go around to the other side of my boxcar and pry the other door open a crack.
My, there are a lot of tracks here. And trains too. If I didn’t know better, it looks like we are in a train yard.
I spike one door of my boxcar. I consider moving to an empty gondola for a better view when we go again. I watch the birds for a while.
Suddenly it dawns on me, could I already be in Louisville? No, couldn’t be. I climb a grainer for a better view. It couldn’t be the Louisville yard because I can’t see either the yard tower or the distant airport tower in—wait! Well, I’ll be. I’m here the whole time.
I walk a couple miles through the yard, alternately laughing at and cursing myself.
Another trip and I’m back where I’ve started. I’m exactly nowhere and glad of it.
