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Sunday, Jan. 7

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.

Monday, Jan. 8

We hang out at the post office until it opens and then head back to the yard, stopping en route to break our fast on a couple Butterfinger bars and the filched oranges. We're not sure exactly what our next stop should be; we're trying for Ohio, but Rapid-T -- the name by which I came to know my guide -- says Buffalo might be our best option.

The departure area for Selkirk is on the other side of the yard, so we trudge along a nearby road to get to it. To obtain an overview of the yard, we head to a highway bridge near the middle of it, giving Rapid-T a chance to expand my train knowledge. Rapid-T came to train hopping after a childhood spent as a train buff. When he looks at a yard, he doesn't just see a bunch of cars and engines (units in railroad parlance.) Fascinatingly, he provides a rundown of the different types of cars -- what grainers can't be jumped, what units have historic significance, what type of loads different cars are carrying.

Around 5 p.m., we find a train going to Willard, a big Ohio yard Rapid-T has been in numerous times. The first hopable car we see is a mini grainer -- like the grainer from Sunday, but with one, much, much smaller cubbyhole. I force my 6"2' frame inside, with my legs hanging out, rubbing against the metal lip. After a few minutes of that, all circulation is cut off in my legs and I switch to a kneeling stance, in which my feet are inside the hole and my upper body hanging out. Twenty minutes later, I'm trying to think of other stances that might work when I hear my guide's quiet "Yo." Since the train hasn't left yet, he thinks we have time to find another car. A few minutes search turns up a boxcar; its door is closed, but it's not sealed, meaning there's nothing inside. A few minutes work with a crowbar is sufficient to unlatch the door and shove it back.

Once inside, I can actually lay out, the first time I've laid prone in a day, with the steel toe of my boot braced against the wall in case of sudden stops. (It's always a good idea to put your feet facing the front of the train. Hobos have had their necks broken by laying with their heads against the wall.) The jostling of the boxcar soon lulls me to sleep, but I wake up several times to watch the huge winter moon as it goes one direction in the sky and we go the other on the tracks. The temperature has dropped still further -- I know it's bad when Rapid-T starts complaining about how cold it is. In truth, it's not so much the wind and weather that makes it cold as the steel floor, which leeches my body heat like it was getting paid for it, despite a sleeping bag, four layers of clothing and a plastic tarp shielding me from it. Wearing my boots to bed doesn't help much with the cold, but makes it a little easier when I have to relieve my bladder in the middle of the night -- a process that introduced me to the odd pleasure of watching the world stream by while going to the bathroom from the door of a box car.

The moon is still big and beautiful as we pull into Willard around 2 a.m., lighting our way through the lines of train stretching every which way. Cold and tired, we walk the three blocks to town, where the tipsy barkeep at the Victory Inn lets us huddle in a corner, listen to old, sad country songs -- the type of music you can only find on the jukebox at a place like the Victory Inn, a tin-roofed tavern built some hundred years ago. We chat with the locals a bit, including a guy named Weed, who looks exactly like you'd expect a guy named Weed to look. Weed plans on heading to Los Angeles, he says, as soon as he can save up enough money from his job unloading trucks. When the bar shuts down at 3 a.m., we head back to the streets, declining an invitation by a horribly drunk woman to "come party" ("Where's the party?" she asks the barkeep. "I dunno," he slurs. She looks around the bar. "It'll be at your place," she says, pointing to me. "I don't have a place," I reply. "Then we'll have it at my place," she says. Her muscle-bound boyfriend looks on and glowers.)

We head a few more blocks down "the stem" -- hobo speak for a town's main drag -- and fetch up at the Post Office, which is left open all night. We discuss the historic WPA painting decorating the post office wall and play a few rounds of blackjack (sans money) before both falling asleep, Rapid-T with his head on a table holding tax forms and me lying on the floor next to the radiator.