Reporter

Strangers on a Train

With a nineteen-year-old Houston street kid as my guide, I hopped freight cars, gave bulls the slip, and tasted freedom—for a day, anyway.

by John Spong

May 2005

(Page 2 of 2)

When the train finally started moving, sometime around three in the morning, Dennis ordered everybody out of the engine. We found a stacker, an open car with four-foot-tall sides and no floor, just two-by-four steel crossbeams on which freight containers sit. Jutting from the inner walls of the car was a six-inch-wide metal shelf, and that’s where we stood, in a four-by-seven-foot space in front of a container, hanging on to the sides as the train crawled by downtown Houston. The view was stunning, although my attention was split between the bright skyline and the exposed tracks passing just inches beneath my feet. When the train stopped thirty minutes later, on the other side of downtown, Dennis directed us off again.

“Back to those grainers!” he barked as we jogged down the tracks. The ladder was harder to climb than it had been the first time, but I pulled myself up.

Finally Dennis announced he was going to sleep. I moved my backpack under my head to do the same. It was four-thirty, below freezing, and as the train picked up speed, pushing itself to 50, then 60 miles an hour, a light drizzle started to fall. It grew into a cold, heavy rain. Such were the joys of being a gutter punk.

DENNIS IS NOT BIG on explaining himself. The charm he radiates in large groups gets turned off quickly. I spent time with him in Houston in the months before our trip, and there he was different, sullen. He’d go long stretches without talking, piping up only to describe some graffiti he’d recently painted or to say he wanted some pot or to complain about “actual people”—folks with houses and jobs, what he called “actual lives.” He repeatedly asked me how much he’d be paid for our trip, although I had told him that that was not part of the deal. Our plan was to take a freight train to San Francisco, just the two of us, except for a short first stretch when we’d be joined by his girlfriend, a journalism student at a Houston college whose well-to-do family had been kept deep in the dark about Dennis. She hoped to take some photos to sell to texas monthly, and Dennis wanted the article to make him a star. I wanted to ride a freight train. That was the exchange.

But plans change. The girlfriend backed out, and Dennis brought along his two buddies, announcing that the destination was now San Diego. He said he didn’t have time for a longer trip: “I want to get back to Houston, get a job, and start a family with my gal.” There was no negotiation. With such little control over the rest of his life, he was intent on running the show.

We woke up just after dawn with the train stopped somewhere west of Houston. The rain was done, but the wind blew hard. Dennis directed us back to the empty engine, where we manned our previous lookout positions. While the boys talked about which rap styles sounded best on which prescription meds, I largely stayed quiet, thinking instead about the difference between being 19, like Dennis, and 38, like me. Rich tried to bring me into the conversation.

“Hey, man, do you have any tattoos?”

“No. Those weren’t quite cool yet when I was y’all’s age,” I said. “Then all of a sudden there’s Dennis Rodman, just covered in them.”

“Yeah,” said Dennis sarcastically. “Dennis Rodman invented tattoos.” Dave and Rich laughed.

Then the front door, which Dave was supposed to be watching, opened, and a mildly startled conductor walked in.

“I didn’t know anybody was riding in here,” he said. “It’s just us,” offered Dennis.

“Where are y’all going?” he asked.

“To California,” said Dennis.

“Y’all are on the wrong train,” said the conductor. “We’re fixing to switch tracks and head to Laredo. But I tell you what. I’ll slow the train down when it makes its turn south. Then you can hop off.”

“Will that be somewhere that we can catch another train?” asked Dennis.

“It could be,” the conductor said, raising an eyebrow. “Let me show you something. But remember, you didn’t hear it from me.” He pulled up a cushion on the seat Rich had been sitting on and revealed a big box of flares. They looked like sticks of dynamite. “Take some of these with you. Then wait in the woods, and when you see a train coming, light two of them and leave them in the middle of the tracks. Any train has to stop when they see these flares. Then you can get on any car you want.” Dennis eyeballed a flare.

“Have you been riding all night?” the conductor asked. We shook our heads yes. “Man, you kids must be freezing. This engine you’re in doesn’t get any juice. Let me go up to the next engine and turn on the heater. That should be a little warmer for you.”

I was thrilled, and not just because I hadn’t been called a kid in fifteen years. This was unexpected generosity. Dennis said that 99 percent of train crewmen would have done us the same favor, at least in the South. Now I felt good. I had a comfortable seat, and I saw no chance of jail. I asked Dennis why we didn’t reroute our trip to Mexico and just stay in the engine.

He didn’t acknowledge the question. A train rolled slowly by on the tracks beside us, and he yelled, “That’s our train west. Come on!” Again we ran along the tracks until Dennis found a stacker and pulled himself over the side. It’s a tricky move; if you miss the frame, you’ve got an instant on the ground and then the rest of your life—a very brief rest of your life—under the train. But I made it in and held the side of the stacker as the train picked up speed. We got up to 70 miles an hour, the tracks passing below so fast you couldn’t distinguish the ties. The ground was a gray blur, and I knew that one bump would send me under the car. Of course, given the twenty-ton weight of our stacker, the chance of a bump was small. But thinking of the stacker’s weight, its big iron wheels grinding two feet from my hip, did not put me at ease. I looked at Dennis. He was focused on lighting another bowl as the train barreled on.

AN HOUR LATER, I didn’t really mind when Dennis ordered us to the ground. He said we were headed to the engines. But then he grabbed a ladder between two freight cars and said to climb up. We lay down on a platform above where the cars connected as the train rolled out again. Once it was up to about 30 miles an hour, we moved to a bench on the platform and sat up. Dave and Rich were nowhere in sight. Dennis said, “Follow me!” and scaled the side of the freight car, then headed across the top of it to the engine. I stayed where I was.

A few minutes later he jumped back down. He was furious. “What’s wrong with you?” he yelled.

“Dennis, I’m not walking on top of any freight cars on a train going forty miles an hour.”

He put his face in his hands and cussed into fingerless gloves. Then he started screaming. “You’re ruining everything! I’m tired of being homeless, but I couldn’t get a job and get off the streets because I knew I wouldn’t be able to take two weeks off to take your ass on this trip!”

“Hey, Dennis, you know what?” I asked, knowing I’d sound like some middle-aged jerk. “I’m not the reason you live on the streets. And you know what else? I’m not getting on top of any moving freight cars.”

He crossed his arms and stewed for five silent minutes. Then he hopped on top of the freight car and walked to the engines. I stood and watched his greatcoat flap as he jumped to the next car, and I finally understood the philosophy of the kid and his method. A train’s just something to mess with, a playground, a chance to show a world that doesn’t care about him that he doesn’t care about it. To me, on the other hand, a train was something eminently capable of messing with me.

I sat back down. South Central Texas farmland was on both sides of the train. Trees and creeks and cows and fields. This was the view I’d been waiting for. I waved at kids in cars when the highway got close to the tracks. And when the train stopped just west of Luling, I climbed down of my own accord. Three freight trains, fifteen hours, and 150 miles into it, my train-hopping days—make that “day”—were over.

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