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Monday, Jan. 15

As do many big shipping or port cities, Richmond has several railyards, usually brought under the control of the big boys (CSX and Norfolk Southern) as companies merged. The yard we're looking for in Richmond is know as Acca Yard, but we're uncertain if the yard we've entered is that one or another. We argue for a bit, trying to tell what direction we're heading based on the moon -- a skill neither of us possess. Eventually we get off the train and wander around a bit, with Rapid-T, who has been to Acca Yard, determining this ain't it. We begin walking in the direction he says Acca lies -- but when we pass the back of the train, we realize we're walking in the wrong direction. Fed up with the entire thing, we head back to our car and sit around for half an hour until the train pulls out, depositing us 45 minutes later in Acca.

After stashing our bags in a switchman's shanty near the edge of the tracks and using the bathroom next to it, we wandered out of Acca Yard into Richmond, our first extended period off the train since Saturday. Our first stop is a bridge over the yard, where can get a sense of how things are laid out. From our vantage point, we see the ubiquitous black Blazer driven by bulls pull into the yard. All of the other times we saw them (in Columbus, Kentucky and West Virginia), the bulls -- hobo slang for railroad security agents -- had been on the other side of trains or far enough away that we could hide. General railyard workers, such as brakemen, engineers and conductors, are unlikely to call the bulls on hoppers; they're more concerned that you stay the hell off the tracks and get out of their yard as soon as possible. This bull, though, scared us a bit. When he got out of his truck, we could clearly see a gun strapped to his hip, and a cell phone and radio on the other. He was obviously a man who took his job seriously.

Hoping he'll be gone by the time we get back, we walk 20 minutes to a gas station, where I enjoy a blissful cup of actual coffee. I buy Rapid-T a package of Strawberry Newtons and a bottle of milk, but that's not enough for him. He ducks back in the store while I'm outside studying a map on the wall, returning a few minutes later with a cup of hot water into which he puts a tea bag he's been carrying around. Moments later the manager comes out, asking him if he paid for the cup. "It's just water," Rapid-T replies -- at which point the exact same conversation about charging for cups takes place, almost word for word, as we had at the Taco Bell. When it's over, and the manager takes the cup away from him, I go slightly insane myself, standing in the parking lot yelling "you have to pay for cups!" at him. (You know, I wonder if that's how the crazy people I see wandering the streets of New York got started. I'm sure I'd get weird looks if I walked around saying, "pay for cups, pay for cups" -- but it would, in a twisted way, make some sort of sense.)

After sitting around for a bit finishing our coffee and milk, Rapid-T heads back into the station to see about using their bathroom, a display of moxie I've never seen the likes of. He comes out in a few minutes and says he has to head across the street to another bathroom; the first one was too dirty for him.

He finishes up there and suggests stopping by the United Methodists Community Services Building a few doors down. Although it's closed for Martin Luther King Day, somebody comes to the door when we ring the bell, a man who we ask if there's a food bank around. He asks us to wait and returns a few minutes later with two vouchers for a restaurant across the street. We repair to the place, called McLean's, where I get the roast beef dinner and Rapid-T gets whole fried herring, which he douses with Tabasco sauce and maple syrup. It's the best meal we've had all trip, and on the way back, full and drowsy, we sprawl out in a field by the tracks, napping for an hour or so.

We hang around the yard all day, waiting for trains to show up, reading, napping and talking. From our research back in West Virginia, we know what trains we want: we can catch either the L148 or the Q409 from Richmond. to Waycross, Ga. The former, an intermodule, is supposed to arrive in Acca at 4:15 p.m., while the later is scheduled to be handed off to Richmond half an hour later.

The intermodule shows up on time, but is made up entirely of flat cars with tractor trailers on them, not the double stack cars that we could ride. (Double-stack trains, as their name implies, have two trailers on them, and a cubbyhole underneat them where hoppers can ride.) The manifest train, Q409, though, is nowhere to be seen. We hang around the top of slanted wall under a highway bridge we've made home for another hour, but I start getting antsy. I head down to the bathroom at the entrance of the yard, and on the way back stick my head into one of the yard offices to see about some information.

It's like my own private graduation ceremony, as I actually get to put into practice the knowledge I've picked up over the past week. I chat with Douglas, a clerk there, asking questions and getting information I wouldn't have even understood a week ago. Douglas pulls up the 409 schedule on the computer and tells me the train is about an hour away, indicating the track it will come in on. He then starts giving me tips on riding -- pointing out the garbage cars to avoid, telling me how to get into box cars. "Be careful who you ask questions of," he says, pointing to the cars in the parking lot and naming their drivers. "Those are Eric's and Jack's," he says. "They're good guys.

"The bad guy is Gumshoe Andy," he explains, describing the starched white shirt, tie and gun we'd seen from the bridge in the morning. "He used to be a special inspector. Now he's called a property protection specialist. I call him Gumshoe Andy. He's an asshole."

I thank Douglas for the info and the dozen little bottles of water he gives me and head back to the bridge, successfully spotting and dodging the Amtrack train as it passes. I realize for the first time that I feel at home in the train yard.

While I was gone, Rapid-T started a fire in a can a quarter full of motor oil and raided the dumpster at a nearby Budweiser plant for a handful of dented but full cans. While we're sitting there enjoying the fire, we see a train pull in. It fits the schedule Douglas gave and appears to be going the right way, but we're not certain it's the 409 -- and the train is too long, the conductor too far away, to ask him. When we ask a conductor on another train he says he has no idea, but points to another train, which has been sitting in the yard all day, which he says in going to Newport News, from which we can catch out to Georgia. This creates something of a quandary. The worker in Charleston also suggested going to Newport News, but he had says the train we got on went there, which it hadn't. Also, Newport News wasn't listed on any of the Internet resources we'd been using to plan the trip.

Rapid-T says its my call, and I opt for the 409. We pick a mini-grainer -- the type that have one small hole, meaning it's my turn to sit on the porch -- and climb on, finding it covered with some sort of corn syrup cement, a sticky, slippery, nasty concoction that coats everything we own in minutes. We continue arguing about what train we should be on. I stick to my guns, but agree to get off and find another car. If we can't get something more comfortable than the grainer, I say, we'll head to Newport News. A dozen cars down, though, we find an open boxcar complete with cardboard padding and climb aboard.

Eventually, the train takes off like a bat out of hell who's not receiving overtime. Despite starting some four hours late, we pick up three-and-a-half hours while booming through the night, getting to Rocky Mount, N.C. around 2 a.m., only a half-hour behind schedule. Bizarrely, the train then sat there for the rest of the early morning, finally leaving at 9 a.m.

Tuesday, Jan. 16

This is the most classic hobo experience I've had all trip. The weather is beautiful, making sitting in the doorway of the "personal Pullman" a delight, and most of the trip is being done during the day, actually letting me see the countryside through my moving picture window. The land is beautiful -- rolling hills and fields, dotted with tobacco drying sheds blanketing the air with a spicy odor. We swoop through little towns like Wilson, N.C., the type of town time forget, with the old-fashioned downtown not having needed a citizen's committee to create it, but having just evolved over time. I wave to cars at grade crossings, wondering what goes through their minds when they see a grinning figure standing at the entrance to a boxcar. Hey, Mable, they say, nudging their wives, there's one of them old-fashioned hobo folks. If nothing else, I figure it's sort of an adventure by proxy; how many kids that I waved to chattered excitedly about it at the dinner table that night?

When I got tired of standing, I lean back against the door on the other side, nicely warmed by the rising sun. A woodsy odor creeps in, replacing the tobacco fumes, as we pass sites of new construction, seeing the carcasses of recently cleared scrub pines. Later, a fishy odor takes over as we cross trestles with rivers babbling away below.

Once again I realize how relaxed I am. The ride is smooth, letting me return every so often to my tome on military history, but most of the time I just sit and stare, wondering about the lives we're rolling through. We rumble by trailer parks and office parks, cutting through horse farms, goat farms and cotton plantations, seeing the cycles of city life from urban sprawl to quaint downtowns to suburban homesteads set far back from the tracks. I lean back on a pile of cardboard pallets, put my feet up on a block of vulcanized rubber left in the car and just look.

All of the books I've read on hoboing talk about the meditative qualities of train hopping -- something I've somehow missed in-between dealing with a nut, freezing off my feet and worrying about missing trains. Now, though, the rolling pines and jostling box car lull me into a state of calm, into which I just sit and relax.

As the afternoon wears on and we pick up speed, I get up and stick my head out the door, watching the countryside roll by first hand. As the warming wind blows into my face, I at first reach up and hold my hat on my head, before finally pulling it off and let the air blow through my hair for the first time in days. I continue reading Keegan's history of warfare, coming across this passage: "The nomads had a weakness: they liked the nomadic way of life and despised the weary cultivator, bound to his furrows and his plough-ox. What the nomads wanted was the best of both worlds: the comfort and luxury that settled ways yielded but also the freedom of the horseman's life, of the tented camp, of the hunt and of the seasonal shift of quarters."

I look out at the blurring landscape and think how nomadism will never die.

The trip continues through the day and night as we sweep through North and South Carolina, stopping for about five hours in Charleston, S.C., in mid-afternoon, but finally getting to Waycross, Ga., shortly after noon Wednesday.