I wrote this poem when I got back from my first trip in order to share the emotions and actions of trainhopping with the uninitiated. For a complete guide on how to trainhop, please see my guide.
Catching Out
Did you see it?
The third boxcar from the back.
With the side doors open and inviting.
The air around is cool and pregnant, belying the heat sinks of stone
and steel that radiate like infrared torches
Now, when the fears of the moment and my need for security overwhelm me
And I thrust forward into the unknown
with my backpack as counterweight to the overarching energy that steps
and leaps across the coarse gravel
Followed by the paws of a certain dog who gave up uncertainty a long time ago.
The endless serpent of freight train that stretches to the vanishing
point on both ends
Moving forward, grinding, slowing like a steel elephant running through molasses
And I can hear the crash roar clanking of machinery organizing the
stacks of shipping crates in the train yard
With people cars and cranes jostling in the certainty of work
Leaving the philosophy of the moment to spill out unimpeded
The two metal strips with their cleaving wooden ties divide the
knowable and the transcendent,
and with every heaving breath I hope that the other side of the tracks
is as lonesome as this one,
that no Hero will cross over and see my sweating body stumbling into the boxcar.
I follow my chariot, walking beside it until
the iron comes to a blinding stop, and the sections crash into each
other rolling with rabid moving thunder.
With seamless thought and action, lessons learned and absorbed into my movements
I start throwing in my bag and my dog and my expectations,
And I pull myself onto the burning rusted metal floor,
Dragging like a commando until my feet give me assurance that I made it.
I stand up
and begin the process of trying to put myself in the mind of a rail
worker checking cars for strays.
Shove my hoard into the back left corner, where the shadow from the
halogen lights of the rail yard falls like a wedge on the dusty
surface that breathes to me
But I don’t remember breathing
I don’t remember thinking
I wait
And wait
And wait
Huddled down like a fugitive
Running from machinations less personable than the core of a fired gas
burning locomotive that nurtures me like a mother
I’m waiting for a shit storm that spared me
I wait so long that the time on my watch becomes meaningless, if I had one.
Now, up in the front
I can hear a monster of petrol and electricity pawing the ground, aching to move
Letting out the long and lonesome swan song of the souls of a hundred
union workers
That pierces the atmosphere like a solar flare of sound.
Gaining traction
Mistaking action for persistence
I feel the distant lurch of machine move forward
Pulling it’s lame cargo,
pulling the daisy chain of compartments;
an expanding cacophony of effort and energy
that hits my boxcar like a bullet.
Things begin to move
I feel myself expelled from my stationary prison by some ungodly skyhook
tethered right into my soul, pulling me forward
And the nicotine tinged lights of the city begin to give way to the
starry dynamo and the machinery of night that makes me Howl
and bay like new and wild animal.
I move past alleys and drunks and graffiti on the walls of forgotten
power stations
into a tunnel of trees that blot out the forest on either side
and I smile, and I smile as big as the empty western sky above me
Luna smiles too, licking and staring out to the rumbling scenery
We are trapped in this moving metal prison
We are free
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