■   Note: At his request — and it’s no doubt a reasonable one — I’ve removed the name of my guide from this account. I should take this moment to note that I appreciate his teaching and assistance on this journey.

It took a day to get out of the house. My putative guide, Raymond T., called from a pay phone in Buffalo to wake me up around 8 a.m., letting me know he planned on hitting town sometime later in the day. He showed up at 2 or so, and I got my first warnings that he might have a sanity problem.

After asking if he could take a shower, he proceeded to spend the next two hours in the bathroom, apparently alternating between baths and showers. When he finally emerged, he asked to borrow some of my clothes and told me to wash his clothes. My surprised look — I was still being subtle at this point — went unnoticed, and I scrounged up enough money for him to do a few loads. Actually getting quarters required a trip to the corner mart for a dollar exchange, a trip he returned from with a fistful of quarters and a bag of clothes he found on the sidewalk.

This haul was augmented when we went down to the basement laundry room, a cubbyhole adjacent to the apartment trash pile, wher he found a bottle of Chinese herbs. Rapid-T emptied the odorous brown bills from the incomprehensibly labeled jar, debating with himself whether he should take them on the trip. When he finally decided not to, he offered them to me. I declined.

While we waited for the clothes to dry, my guide raided the cupboard, eating two bowls of cereal, three of oatmeal and all my milk. Before heading out, I made up an odd casserole of rice and vegetables, a mixture he topped off with salsa, honey mustard dressing and mayonnaise. To wash it down, he rifled through my roommate’s beer stash — three Coronas and an El Presidente. Pleas to not consume my roomie’s supplies fell on deaf ears; when I finally acquiesced and handed him a Corona, he handed it back. “I want the El Presidente,” he says. “I don’t drink Corona.”

I took the Corona. By that point, I needed one.

Eventually, we were ready to head out. We pored over the computer to find out the best way to go, deciding to catch a train from the Bronx to Selkirk, NY, a train yard my guide was familiar with. During our preparation time, I got my first glimpse of my new friend’s strange transformation when it came to dealing with the railroads. As a sort of Conductor Jeckle/Mr. Hyde, Rapid-T became eerily businesslike when it came time to hop.

“Hi, I’m Mr. [T.] and I’m trying to get through to the dispatch office in the Bronx,” he told a somewhat bewildered clerk in a Metro North office. A few minutes and a few calls later, he had the number. Posing as a freight shipper, he got the dispatcher to give us all the information we needed about the last train from the Bronx to Selkirk. We took to the subway, getting off the No. 6 train just across the street from the Oak Point yards. While Rapid-T went to check out the situation, I laid low under a bridge at the east end of the yard (“Act like a bum,” Rapid-T hissed before heading off to talk to a yard worker).

The worker turned out, Rapid-T says, to be “friendly-unfriendly” — confirming where the train was going and which track it was one, but warning that he’d be keeping an eye out and would be sure to kick us off if he discovered us.

Once he was out of view, we headed to a grainer, a large, empty, tank-like car with two little cubbyholes graciously built into the front of it. We crammed into one of the holes, blocking the entry point with my duffel bag and crouching down at every noise we heard. It was the first time I’d been in a freight train: when I backed into the minuscule compartment and brushed against the sloped wall, I inadvertently screamed like a little girl; I’m not sure what I thought was in there, but I know I didn’t expect to feel like someone was touching my back.

It took almost an hour before the train lurched into motion, screeching along at a good clip except for those time when were shunted to the side to make room for a passing Metro North passenger train.

(There’s a strict hierarchy of track usage among trains, I later learned. In general, the type of freight trains I rode is at the bottom, with passenger trains at the top. Anytime the faster passenger trains have to get by, the freighters are kicked to the side.)

After the train started moving, I crawled into the other cubbyhole, on the left side of the car, rolled out my sleeping bag and crawled in, laying so I could look out the door at the passing landscape. The snow-covered landscape looked like a postcard from Winterland, especially as we rattled past some bridge or other. “I feel like the ultimate passenger,” I write in my journal — a theme that will be repeated as the trip progresses. “I can just watch the world pass by — not worrying about directions, road signs or other drivers.” I fall asleep around midnight. Around 2:30 a.m., the train stops in a field somewhere, waking me up from my dozing reverie and giving me a glimpse of what may be the most tranquil scene I’ve ever seen: a snowy expanse, with not a person in sight or a sound in earshot. Later, we’re put “in the hole” between Yonkers and Greyhorse, making room for a Metro North passenger line to rocket by.

Already, my feet are frozen — another recurring theme. I took my boots off before getting in my sleeping bag and plan to try sleeping with my boots on next time. The root beer bottle I’d filled with water (now root-beer-tasting water) has frozen solid by the time we pull into Selkirk, around 4 a.m.

I begin increasing my train riding knowledge now, discovering what it sounds like when a train releases its brakes. Freight trains operate on air brakes: the brakes naturally reside in the closed position, holding the wheels in place. Before the train starts moving, air is pumped into the brake lines with one type of distinctive hiss, a kinda long-out, modulated one. When the brakes are cut, at a train’s final stop, the air is released, with a shorter, sharper hiss.

We clamor out of the train and walk between a line of cars, running into the first worker I’ve encountered on the trip. The worker is trying to force closed a boxcar full of oranges that came open while heading north, and pauses in his work to hand us a few of the fruits. He also directs us to a nearby convenience store — directions that my guide, an old hand in Selkirk, doesn’t really need. We stop by the store to use the bathroom and from there hike a block or two to the post office, where we loiter and doze for the rest of the night.