Our New Rock Kitty

When I was rather young, I loved trains. I was probably in elementary school or younger during this whole time, so I was still rather young. But I just loved trains. I have pictures of me as a child wearing my “conductor hat.” We lived a couple blocks from a railroad, and I used to go down and search for pieces of coal that had fallen from the cars.

My dad set me up with a model railroad. I thought it was brilliant. I used to play with those trains for hours. They were up on a big table, with switches and different tracks, and some of the trains spit out actual smoke and made train sounds when they went around. Endless fun.

Which probably has something to do with why I was so excited at the offer to hop trains to Seattle (from Minneapolis) when I was 20 years old. I was invited by a woman with whom I am ironically friends with on Facebook. She changed her mind at the last minute, but I just went ahead.

A group of about sixteen of us waited in a train yard just out of Minneapolis. We paired up and hopped a train headed west, bound for Seattle. The average age was probably about 21, and we got a little bit cocky. After being altogether too obvious while passing slowly through Fargo, North Dakota, the police decided to kick us off the train. Since it was probably pretty apparent that we didn’t have anywhere particular to go around there, they strongly hinted that we might try to sneak on the next train, a little less conspicuously.

Unfortunately, we didn’t really have a clear idea of where or when to find that train. The group had no decision, so everyone split up into larger groups. Some decided to just turn back. We were among the group that decided to continue. We planted our stuff in the recesses of a public park near the rail yard, and waited.

It was I think the next evening when we finally caught a train out of there. It was a hustle, as the cars were going fairly quickly before we caught the train. In the hurry to jump between cars to catch up to my traveling partner, I unfortunately dropped my backpack and it was lost, unfortunately along with all our food and water. The only thing we had to eat between us for the rest of the almost 48 hour trip was a jar of peanut butter.

And for the longest time, I just couldn’t bring myself to eat it. I still just don’t have the same feeling for it that I once did.

At any rate, once we got to Seattle, I felt nearly dead. It became very rainy through the Rockies, and I was probably very sick when we got into town. I thought it was all very picturesque, though, as we got out there. There were actual hoboes in the rail yards, with actual fires in those big cans. Wow! Just like in the old movies. If I wasn’t half sick, I probably would have stuck around to talk.

In Seattle, I quickly got into a groove in the University area. There were houses to crash in near there, lots of activity of other “gutter punks,” and panhandling was not hard. You could sit in front of a pizza parlor and make ten dollars an hour. And one recurring theme was that I would walk down to the nearest grocery store and get a pint of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, when I wanted to celebrate.

Which is to say that this whole story was brought back when I was thinking about how awful it would be to eat a whole pint of ice cream. Because that’s what I used to do. It felt so luxurious.