■   When we disembark, I come the closest yet to killing myself.

On the other trains, we’d gotten off on the right side of the cars, which I proceeded to do when we stopped around 3:30 a.m.. A minute or so after I jump down, though, Rapid-T calls my name from the other side. With a combination of sleep and adrelinine battling it out in my head, I toss my bag back on the beast and climb back on — doing it all as safely but as quickly as I can. Unbeknownst to me, the engineers were “cutting” the train: removing various cars and sending them to the hump yard, an area with a downhill slope where trains are pulled by gravity at 40 mph onto different tracks. The car I had just gotten back on was about to be cut.

The engineer doing the work noticed me just before he hit the release, which would have sent the car — and me — on a short, fast ride into the back of another car. Probable result: Tim paste.

The worker, who was as startled to see me as I him, relates the same story of the dead woman we heard in Willard, adding to it the tale of a railroad worker who was just killed. She, he says, was a new employee and had on a backpack like mine, which got snagged on another train while she climbed on the car. One or both of the trains started while the bag was caught, and she was dragged to her death. “We killed two people on two trains this week,” the older gent says. “One was a woman.

“Heh,” he added reflectively, “they both were woman. ‘magine that.”

Perhaps because of the tragedy, the yard is the least friendly one we’ve been in, with workers declining to provide information and indicating a general attitude that we get the hell out. There’s no trains to Cincinnati from this yard anyway, they add, although we thought we could catch out in that direction at 11 a.m.

Figuring we’ll have to try again after a shift change, we head about half a mile out of the yard, spreading our sleeping bags under a railroad bridge and nodding off. Rapid-T wakes me up at 8:35, explaining that he’s heading into town to check the place out and maybe get some maps, but he’ll be back soon. He gets back just past noon, right around the time I’m going nuts from boredom. (In his Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell argues that enforced boredom is one of the worst aspects of vagrancy. When you have no money, no job, no friends, no transportation and — especially — if you have no education, you’re reduced to simply sitting and waiting for stuff to happen.) Having none of the above save education, I page through a History of Protestant Theology and begin reading John Keegan’s History of Warfare, brought along for this very purpose. My education was trumped by hunger at one point, though, when I pulled out the can of potted meat we got in Willard. Potted meat, for the uninitiated, is a substance that aspires to be Spam. I’d list the ingredients, but was afraid to look at them after consuming the stuff.

When Rapid-T returns, he brings with him several boxes of cookies, which he founds in a dumpster behind a drug store. (Drug stores, he tells me, have some of the best dumpster hauls, though he’s unable to explain why.) With my last real meal a day and a half in the past, I dive into them. Rapid-T also got a hand-drawn map of the rail yard from somewhere, discovering in the process that Columbus boasts almost half-a-dozen yards — and the one we came in having nothing heading anywhere we want to go. Norfolk Southern trains head out near a bridge half a mile away, though, and might go in the right direction, so we head down there to check it out. There’s some freighters around, but none of them are moving anytime soon, so we repair to a doughnut shop a few blocks over and decide we need better maps. Rapid-T’s been walking around for hours now, so I leave the stuff with him and head three miles into town to find the nearest library. The branch’s offerings in the atlas section turn out to be all but nonexistent; I photocopy what little I can find, print out some Internet guides and head back to the shop (evincing more weirdness when I get back and offer to buy Rapid-T a doughnut. He insists on an apple turnover, badgers the worker ‘til she microwaves it (“I can’t eat them cold”) and gets yet another weird look when he asks for butter for it.)

With the library turning up little, Rapid-T gets a chance to show off his social engineering skills again. From a phone in a crowded doughnut shop, he’s somehow able to convince a CSX employee to lay out the schedule for the next few days. Norfolk Southern sounds like a better bet, though, so we head back to the yard around 6 p.m., seeing, from the bridge, a train that looks like a good bet. We hit (or perhaps “create” would be a better verb) some snags heading down three blocks to the actual yard.

One the way to the bridge that morning, we had passed a house with three mangy, yapping dogs in the yard. Rapid-T had wanted to feed them the Vienna sausages then, an idea I had talked him out of at the time. Passing them again, the temptation proves irresistible, and he spend a few minutes handing out cookies (it turns out he ate the (non-kosher) sausages) to the mutts. We then stop to fill my water bottles, and by the time we get down to the tracks, the train was gone.

It appears trains ran south from the yard all day, though, so we camp out by the tracks, setting out our sleeping bags on the foundation of a railroad bridge nearby. Rapid-T adds more to my railroad knowledge, showing me how to recognize different types of grainers, how to jump on a moving car and how to guess from a car’s content where it’s going.

Catching a train on the fly, he tells me, requires a hopper to concentrate on two things: just as when getting on while the train is standing still, the hopper must make sure to be braced at several points, so the rattling and rolling of the car doesn’t shake him off mid-climb. The hopper also has to make sure that he’s in a position that will throw him free of the car, rather than underneath it, if he does get knocked off. The correct way is to run alongside the train and match its speed and then grab the ladder adorning the side of all jumpable cars (other than boxcars) with an underhanded grip, in which the palm faces out. Instead of trying to lift your feet onto the ladder, you should then pull your body up, tucking your knees in underneath you, until your feet are above the bottom rung. You then put your feet on the ladder and clamber up as quickly as possible, moving only one limb at a time.

We drift off to sleep under the bridge, talking idly about our families and hobbies before sleep takes us. Three trains pass us in the night, all going the wrong direction.