HIPPIES

    We completed school at noon at Northwestern, drove to Mike Van Kirk's house in Enon Valley, and then to John Langraffs in Darlington, Jim Santelli's in Wampum, and then to the yards in West Pittsburgh. Jim's car an old red, white,and blue 1955 Nash did not make the yards. We could care less; he simply pulled it off the side on Route 168. We were riding trains. School was out!

    Dressed in jeans and leather, packed knapsacks, a guitar, long hair and beards, we were excited to catch out.  I was a month into forgetting a broken relationship, and I really wanted to escape to adventure. I had been doing  traveling for years like people sit down for supper and wanted to escape again.  I wanted a solution to the agony; I only intensified the problem. I was addicted to thrills.

        Yard workers said the Chicago Jet   would not be in till eight P.M. and that was at two.  At eleven that night the jet rolled into New Castle; waiting is part of train riding.  I found my anxiety abated waiting on a train.   Time could not be better sitting on old broken ties and laying on boxcar cardboard; I was with friends.

        Rode a silver pig to Chicago and arrived at eleven am. Ate lunch and then caught 97 out of the CB&Q yards in Cicero. Arrived at the Billygoat yards in St. Paul about midnight.  They were running 97 straight through to the coast, and we by passed the former Milwaukee and and Great Northern Yards.  The industry was changing fast and so was the atmosphere.  Two railroad bulls run us off.  We circled around and caught a pig. It was a fast rush of steel and speed across Minnesota, and  by noon Sunday we were in Minot, North Dakota at the big hump yard. New cabooses from the Burlington, Northern Pacific, SP&S were showing up.  Five years ago the yard was strictly a Goat yard. Along the main lead track I found a copy of the Railroad Evangelist blowing in the wind.   It was the last year the paper was published; times were changing.

97 TO THE COAST

    We showered in the crew quarters,loafed around for an hour, and then we discovered 97 was rebuilt and puling out on the main. We caught it on the fly. At nine thirty that night 97 was in Havre, Montana.  We ate in the railroad beanery, and waited an hour on our 500 mile checkup. We had covered 1000 steel miles in twenty four hours.  That night we had a good riding boxcar .

    At daybreak we passed Browning, the key town on the  Blackfeet Indian Reservation.  In the coming years I would learn some Sioux history and spend time in the town. Indian resentment was obvious; the American Indian was still fighting for his civil rights. An older tramp, bruised about the face, without having excitement in his voice told us how he was beaten by a group of Indians over in Spokane yards. Violence is often a way of the rails in the Northwest.

    Noon Monday 97 pulled into Yardley, the long Northern Pacific yard that paralled Division Avenue, the main street into Spokane that tramps would often walk or catch a bus for a quarter.  By the summer of 1968 Great Northern trains would no longer pull into Hillyard but were using Yardley.  Hillyard, once the star yard of the Northwest, was now a ghost yard with only the writings of unknown travelers left behind on cement tombstone bridge pillars, showing that they passed this way.

    The authors even in their writing displayed their comings or goings whether it be in Revelations or "east bound; Tex, King of the tramps;1956.  The walls were a lesson in psychology and travel. Men not rolling nowhere; they were just rolling.

   During our 500 mile checkup a switcher pulled behind and attached three empty crummies, all of varying colors and companies. During the sixties it was popular for railroads to put empty cabooses in the middle and the end of the train so they could split off and divide a train easily. Railroaders would do this on a slow movement and then save time.

    We immediately climbed on with another older tramp. He has been a traveler on the trains since 1935. Moments later a yard came through the caboose checking on the ice and water.  I asked him if this was 97.  He said no and then quickly said "yeah, it is 97".  He is one of the few workers in twenty years of riding that lied.  His practical joke sent us to Portland, Oregon, and not Seattle, Washington. We were on 197. They split the train! Not until we were outside of Spokane and running south did we discover our betrayal.  To us, his deceit was our fun.  We were just running.

    The three of us and an older tramp  about fifty road the waycar to Pasco where it was set off. We only had minutes to dash to an empty box car, and then we were flying southwest across the Columbia Basin.

    One hour and we stopped at a red block by the signal operator just outside of Wishram. John jumped off the car to the gravel below and pulled up a huge sage brush from this gray brown desert country. John who has an idea for colors laid the branch on the floor commenting on the beauty, " a bit of green in a dull bleak life".

    The tramp who had for hours talked little, had failed to smile,and was dressed in heavy pants and jacket  simply broke into a big grin when John jumped back in with this botanical find. Was this his first clash with new age thinking and aesthetics.  He had been traveling on the road for thirty five years.  Summers are spent in the Northwest and winters in Phoenix.

    Wishram is a crew change before we would reach the coast at Vancouver, Washington.  Also, trains cross the Columbia River to Klamath Falls, Oregon. A major train bridge operation takes place in Wishram with the raising and lowering of the bridge for rail traffic.  A large hobo camp lies west of the bridge.  When 197 arrived at the yard limit the tramp said, "I have had enough of this -- train; I'm going to get myself a good cup of coffee."

    Wishram was a small town that had a magnetic appeal.  A trainman told me it was located in the banana belt in Washington, a location warm enough with enough rain to grow bananas.  A tramp said it was a place where people watched each others garbage.  Somewhere I looked down and found a match cover on some railroad gravel bed, and I thought of the poet Rod McCuen "growing up I found match cover thrown by unknown travelers from northern towns".   Now I was one of those travelers. 

    In college I used alliteration in a speech Wendover, Winnemuca, Walla Walla, and then Wishram, but I forgot Wishram.  Names that appealed to me, but  I was just passing through towns, hurrying somewhere else; it didn't matter.  I would not be hurrying back; I was anxious and on the wing.

    A half a dozen tramps were on every train.   Men were always looking for empties and cardboard.  We threw wooden skids off our train to boes for fires at the camp on the west end of the yard limit. They waved and shouted ,and we rolled down the line. Two hours later at seventy miles an hour we were in Vancouver and had crossed the country in 71 hours.

    That night we caught a smooth rider into Seattle.  Our train rolled passed the Boeing plants right up to where the King Dome now stands.  We were in the Northern Pacific yards right behind the green and gold SP&S engines. We simply just walked away.

  Feelings, sites, and buildings of the sixties persist.   The Public Market still struggles on; it will not be revived for another decade.   Long hairs drift in groups, the drug culture flourishes, fiddle players strum with cases open for money, and dive hotels go for three bucks a night.  We stayed at the Elliot Hotel on Pike Street, the former residence of Jack Keroauc.  In 1969 I had stayed the Elliot on my way up to Alaska tracking Jack London footsteps.  Today I was just walking, and I was lonely,but I had friends.

    We caught a bus up to Vancouver, British Columbia, for a few days and then returned to Seattle.  As restless as we were, we no sooner arrived, and we were ready to start south.  In Ballard yards waiting for a train south we were invited into the home of a Norwegian ship captain who lived a few streets off the yards.  He served us goat cheese, pastries, and drink.  He was enchanted with our tales. He was half a world away waiting on a ship.

VANCOUVER YARDS

    In the Vancouver yards we gathered under a bridge waiting. An old Christmas tree burned in a rusted 55 gallon drum.  We drank hot coffee from blacken cans.  Smoke shifted as restless as the men. It drifted south in the direction we were headed as we waited on the California Man. Over a dozen men gathered around in a light drizzle. One man in a long torn coat had a carved down two-by- four for a leg.

   A bo called the "ticket man" stood at the box car entrance crying out," Get your tickets here boys".  His name was Billy Cotton and he was on his way to New Orleans to work on oil rigs.  He looked older than his twenty four years, had a little goatee, and wore tennis shoes. He carried on possessions.

    I asked another tramp how far was Klamath Falls?  He smiled and looked at me and said,"How long ago was Christ born?" I replied, "one thousand nine hundred and seventy years ago." He said,"That is how long it takes."

    Another tramp looking over at distant mountains said,"An eternal time saver is some where over those mountains. I am looking for God."  Beneath the steel girders a drunk recovering from a hang over simply lifted up his head and shouted,"Why?"  Tramps in the yards are always looking for a time saver, the hot shot going to the coast, Chicago, California, or just going.

     A second tramp said that he had seen another tramp before.  The man replied, Yeah, somewhere between east and west." Two men walked into camp, they had been to the blood bank earning $5.50 for a pint of blood.  For many tramps this was a living.

    A forty five year old tramp said he had meant Carl Sandburg in Chicago twenty five years ago in 1945.  He had tag along friend he despised.  When the man turned his back, he would cuss him out and make obscene gestures at him.  He thought he would come along with us; perhaps he saw youth for he looked much older than his years. He played the guitar and sang. His friend said he played the guitar and picked away one of his fingers; his one index was cut off in train accident.

     A blue kersosene railroad lantern burned at both end of the California Man.  The blue globe marked SP&S was a warning that this train could not be moved, men were working on it.  Three workers checked the brakes, drawbars, and  pumped air into the train.  They also posted us on departure.

THE INSIDE PASSAGE

HOMEPAGE                                                                  A RAILROAD GONE PAST