Freight Yard Memories

“These rocks get pretty hard after you’ve been breaking them up for 90 days.”

Late afternoon.  The rutted gravel road leads past blackberry bushes.  I stop, pick a handful, and eat them slowly as I look out over the rows of tracks.

An engine passes, the powerful vibration from its motors felt in the body as much as heard.  Smell of diesel smoke mixed with the smell from a gondola car full of black, freshly creosoted ties.  Boxcar graffiti:  COLOSSUS OF ROADS.  Beside it there’s a drawing of a determined-looking character in a cowboy hat, John Wayne-ish, wisecracking out of the corner of his mouth.  More graffiti:  KAYPRO IS FRESH!

 BURLINGTON NORTHERN; ST. MARY'S RAILROAD; SOUTHERN GIVING A GREEN LIGHT TO INNOVATIONS.

 I walk down the row of cars, my feet crunching gravel.

 "These rocks are pretty hard," said the Florence, South Carolina railroad detective.  "They get really hard after you've been breaking them up for 90 days."

His point made, he escorted my friend and me to the edge of the yard.  We blackened his name as we walked through town, then hitchhiked to Rocky Mount, North Carolina, where we caught another freight back to Richmond.

I did a fair amount of hoboing in the early '70s.  I was in my twenties, full of wanderlust, intoxicated with the exhilarating loneliness of the back-roads scenes you could only see from an open boxcar on a moving train. 

I don't recommend it to anyone.  It's incredibly dangerous.  A moving train has no mercy.  There are dents and scars on all but the newest cars--they're hard metal and your body is soft tissue. 

Still, I saw a part of America I couldn't have seen any other way. 

There are towns where the tracks run down Main Street.  You flash past a noonday scene with people bustling about.  Then a half-hour later you're parked on a siding surrounded by miles of pine trees.  You get out, walk to a bridge and look down into the sluggish brown waters of a river whose name you'll never know. 

One day I hopped a westbound freight by myself.  From one door of the boxcar I caught glimpses of the James River--painted turtles on logs with their necks stuck out to catch the sun.  From the other door I saw the massive stonework of the locks of the Kanawha Canal. 

When the train stopped in Appomattox I got off and stuck out my thumb.  A truck driver carrying a load of wood chips picked me up.  Two more rides and I was back in Richmond--same day service.

Another time, in the western part of the state, I climbed the corrugated door of a boxcar and rode on top of the train for miles.  Highballing through the mountains, the far-off engine disappearing and appearing around curves, the car below me rocking and rolling. 

It seems crazy now from the perspective of my late 30s.  Wonderful too--back then I was determined to live life to the fullest even if it killed me.

Another ride, in January, heading south.  It was too cold to sleep.  Walking the car to keep warm, sometime after midnight, I saw in the distance the surreal apparition of a huge, garishly lit sombrero:  SOUTH OF THE BORDER.

Closer to morning, Spanish moss appeared on the trees.  Then the sun coming up over downtown Jacksonville, and I took off my jacket because it was warm.

It's almost evening now.  The yard engine bangs into a row of car, the shock wave dominoing all the way to the end.  Hiss of air brakes.  Then the engine revs up, clanking the slack from the couplings in the opposite direction. 

 On a Santa Fe boxcar, a sentimentally rendered weeping Jesus:  LA LEY DE LA TIERRA ES CRISTO.  Background of stars.

 "The law of the world is Christ."  Beside it, in a different script:  RIPPIN RAY FASTBO SAYS RIGHT ON!

The sunset is fading fast.  A cool breeze ripples my t-shirt.  High jet trail like the line from an Etch-A-Sketch against the pink sky.  I walk past a black tank car feeling warmth on my cheek from heat it stored during the day. 

A workman with a flashlight riding on the back of a row of cars.  He gets off, walks a few paces, then shines the light on his watch.

 It's time to go. 

 Freight Yard Memories was first published in the July 16, 1991 issue of Style Weekly.

 The photo is by Doug Dobey.