“Let Me Tell You a Story”
A Collection of Ninety-Six Stories and Some Poems
Cliff Williams
PDF file of the whole collection
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Trains, 222–250
From 1990 to 2008, I made yearly forays into a subterranean world inhabited by people who don’t fit into the prevailing culture most Americans are part of. At the annual national hobo convention in Britt, Iowa, I immersed myself so much in the counterculture there that I sometimes wondered whether I was a hobo masquerading as a college professor or a professor masquerading as a hobo.
During the summers for a dozen of those years, I took short trips via the trains that hoboes themselves rode when they wanted to go someplace. Those trips were never more than a couple of days, but they decidedly plunged me into hobo territory.
A Professor Takes to the Rails
Not long after I started going to the National Hobo Convention in Britt, Iowa, in 1990, I began to wonder what it would be like to ride a freight train. By the fourth year, I had to know. I bought a one-way Amtrak ticket to a small town in south central Iowa that wanted some hoboes and hobo-types on hand to help them celebrate their sesquicentennial. By then, I figured that I could play the part of a hobo-type.
Luther the Jet happened to be at the celebration and was planning on traveling by freight train to Chicago, near where I lived.
“Can I come along?” I asked.
“Sure,” he replied.
We caught a train when it stopped to change its conductor and engineer (the crew), hopped off when the train pulled into a yard halfway to our destination, then for the rest of the way rode another train that had stopped to pick up cars.
Ever since that first ride, I had to go again and again. Perhaps it was the adventure. Maybe it was the awe-evoking largeness of the train cars or the excitement of doing something totally different. Whatever it was, I ended up going several dozen times over a dozen years, racking up a little over ten thousand miles. That may seem like a lot, but it was not much compared to real hoboes who rode between ten and twenty thousand miles a year.
Mostly I went alone, but sometimes I went with other trainriding acquaintances I had picked up—Milwaukee Mike, Leo, Collinwood Kid, Socx. Once I found myself with Train Doc, Shoefly Jay, and Brakeshoe in a boxcar heading south along the Mississippi River at dusk. At times we were so close to the river that we could just about jump into it. Its wide expanse divided the dim, dark mass of the opposite shore from the shadowy trees and bushes that rushed past us.
Alone I lay on the porch of a grain car or in the well of a doublestack gazing at the Milky Way. The rush of wind penetrating my sleeping bag often kept sound sleep at bay. Sometimes, though, I slept through the jolting of cars and the squealing of brakes. When I woke up in the middle of the night, I didn’t know where I was. No one else knew either. Something about that felt exhilarating.
Usually I knew where the train was going because of information I had gotten from other trainriders. Once, though, I ended up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, when I wanted to go to Minneapolis.
Most of the time I planned my trips some days in advance.
One Friday in early October, 1998, however, as I was heading up the stairs to my office, a sudden urge to go somewhere that night took hold of me. I taught my classes, held office hours, went home, ate supper, got my traveling gear together, then headed for a railroad yard and caught a train going west.
There is no doubt that riding the rails is romantic. You see things you could never see by car or plane. You are one with the moving, swaying train car. The wind blows in your face. You have done something few others do.
The romance wears off, though, when it starts to rain and you are on the front end of grain car or in the well of a doublestack, open to the sky. It withers when you tire of screeching brakes and jolting cars and long for a bit of quiet, or when you are in a boxcar riding in the blazing sun and fear you will get heatstroke. It pales into monotonous boredom when you have to wait a day or two for a ride.
By riding trains, I found out a little bit of what it is like to be a hobo. I felt the peace and calm of being completely alone. I encountered in a stark and dangerous way a force that I could not control. I went to out-of-the-way places. I was my own person. I felt as if I was back home again whenever I got onto a train. I sat under dark bridges and hid in bushes. I felt wild and free.
I did these things even though by day I was entrenched in “normal” culture. Except for a few acquaintances here and there, no one in my regular world knew that I made excursions into subterranean territory. To them, I was a respectable college professor.
I once thought you had to do thrilling and exciting things to experience the romance of life. But I have discovered that you can experience the romance of life and be your own person even though you are not out roaming the rails. You are, to be sure, limited by social realities, but you are also limited when you are hiding in tall weeds or under bridges. The truth is that you can find as much romance in one as in the other. You do not need grand adventures to get it. You can get it in the thousand and one settings you find yourself in during a single day.
P.S. If you are tempted to try riding a freight train for yourself, read this warning from Nomad, a veteran railrider: “Do not do what I do. It is dangerous. It could get you killed. It’s illegal—you can go to jail. And you’re going to get addicted to it and possibly destroy whatever chance you could have at a real life.”
P.P.S. Hoboes have road names, so I took one as well—Oats—because I eat rolled oats with milk and honey for breakfast every day. That is what I was called when I was at hobo conventions and what I am called to this day whenever I have contact with someone in the hobo culture.
I originally intended to include this story in my One More Train to Ride: The Underground World of Modern American Hoboes (Indiana University Press, 2003), but decided not to at the last minute.
Train Whistle
Most trains blow their horns
To warn or announce.
Occasionally a train wails
From a distance,
Long and slow.
You can tune out a warning
(If you are not too close),
But a long wail
Haunts you,
Calls up dreams of
Faraway places.
Riding in a Boxcar
First you have to find an empty one,
Which is not easy, because the doors
Are usually closed.
Then you have to get in,
Which also is not easy, because the floor
Is chest high—head high if you are short.
When you are in, you put your pack
In a corner of the car,
Sit on your cardboard next to the pack,
And wait.
Waiting is even harder.
The string of cars you thought would move
Might not.
Or it might be broken up
And leave you stranded on another track.
Or, worse, a yard worker might check your car
And toss you out.
The slow hissing makes you want to shout—
The engine crew is putting air into the brake hoses.
The train will clank and jerk,
Then roll
In two minutes, maybe three or four.
You stay in the corner until
The train gets out of the yard,
Then move cautiously to the middle of the car,
Not right in the doorway,
Lest the car jerk,
Throwing you out or
Slamming the door shut and crushing you.
You become absorbed in watching passing scenery
As it shifts from trees to backyards
To fields to little towns.
Sometimes the train stops for a few minutes
Or a few hours.
You wait again for the hiss and the jerk.
If it is night, you lie on your cardboard
Or in your sleeping bag and sleep.
When you wake, you look out the door
And watch for signs of where you are.
At your destination, you drop
Your pack and cardboard onto the rocks,
Jump down, and walk off,
Making sure you are not seen.
Once you are off railroad property,
You smile with pleasure
At an uneventful, though successful,
Boxcar ride.
A Friendly Yard Worker
I was sitting next to a small railroad yard, waiting for a train to pull in that I could catch. The yardmaster’s office was on the other side of several sets of tracks. I hoped not to be seen, but wasn’t worried if I were, as I wasn’t actually in the yard.
Someone came out of the office, saw me, and came over. "Where’re you headed?” he asked.
“South,” I said.
“This string of cars,” he pointed, “is going that way. There’s a boxcar about twenty cars up. Wait a minute, I’ll get you some water.”
He came back with several small, plastic bottles of water. I thanked him, walked along the string of cars, found the boxcar, and got in. The train left a couple of hours later, and I got where I wanted to go.
A Quick Transfer
I arrived at a small railroad yard in Wisconsin about 11:30 p.m. No one was around, so I found a grain car at the end of a string of cars, curled up on its porch, and waited for a train that would take me back home.
About 4:00 a.m. I was awakened by the noise of cars being shuffled around—strings of cars were being moved to make up a train. They rumbled when moving and banged when they hit another string.
And then, suddenly, I saw a string of cars heading straight toward me. The yard workers were adding it to my string of cars. When it hit my string, the graincar I was on would shake vigorously. I braced myself for the impact. It jolted me a bit, but the jolt was not as forceful as I thought it would be. However, it certainly would have knocked someone over who had been standing and who had not been expecting it.
Half a minute later, a yard worker arrived to join the air hoses of the two cars. When he saw me, he said, “There’s a caboose on the next tracks over, about ten cars up.”
I thanked him, got off the grain car, found the caboose, and lay down on the padded bench in it, keeping my shoes on in case I needed to make a fast exit.
About 6:30 a.m., the screeching of an incoming train as it rounded a curve woke me from my snooze. I jumped up, grabbed my backpack, dashed out of the caboose, and headed toward the other side of the yard, where the train was slowing down. It stopped.
I knew it would be stopped no longer than it took for the engineer and the conductor to get off and a new crew to get on. That sometimes took only half a minute.
I started running, located a rideable car, got on, and not more than twenty seconds later, the train started moving. I took out my train whistle and blew it several times to celebrate another successful catch.
Along the Mississippi River
I wanted to go by train to a hobo gathering in Marquette, Iowa, but doing so would have involved catching a couple of trains, one to Dubuque, Iowa, from Chicago and one north to Marquette from Dubuque. That made getting to Marquette uncertain. So I took a bus to Dubuque, planning to catch a train north along the Mississippi River to Marquette.
Alas, there were no trains north out of Dubuque on the day I arrived. So I slept overnight in a “jungle” near the yard in Dubuque—a small, hobo camp. Someone had kept it clean and hidden.
There were no trains going north the next morning, either. I badly wanted to get to the gathering, so I decided I would hitchhike, the first time ever. I secured my backpack and started walking south along the tracks to a place where I could get out of the yard.
Just as I started walking, a train that had stopped to take on a new crew also started going south. I glanced at the crew’s window at the front of the first engine, and the engineer pointed south with an expectant look on his face, as if to say, “Want to get on my train?”
I pointed north, back where I had just come from.
The engineer held up two fingers and mouthed the words, “Two hours.”
I smiled and mouthed, “Thank you.”
Several hours later, I was on a northbound train. The tracks kept close to the Mississippi River, sometimes getting about forty or fifty feet from the shoreline, up on an embankment.
A couple of hours later I hopped off the train when it stopped at Marquette, then walked to the little park where other train travelers had assembled.
At the gathering, I listened to the hobo songs and poetry, talked with fellow travelers, and slept high underneath a bridge. My sleeping pad kept the concrete from being uncomfortably hard, but my earplugs could not keep out the sound of rumbling trucks up above. I had to take a nap the next day under a tree at the park where we hoboes and hobo-types had congregated.
At the end of the gathering, four of us caught a train south, also along the Mississippi River, on a couple of grain cars—Brakeshoe, Train Doc, Shoefly Jay, and me. We switched to a boxcar along the way. In the middle of the night, the brakes squealed, and Brakeshoe, who was headed elsewhere, executed an exquisite and precise exit from the slowing train, and ran alongside the train as he took hold of his backpack that Shoefly Jay handed to him.
That ride in the boxcar, was the most enchanting of all my train rides. During the first part of the ride, it was dusk, and shadows from the trees along the banks of the river raced past. The wide expanse of the river lay enshrouded in the growing dark. I sat gazing out the boxcar door the entire trip, both in the dusk and in the dark.
Kicked Off
The train I was on was scheduled to go through a small city. It stopped at a yard in the city, however, and blew the air in the brake system, which meant that they were breaking up the train.
I peered out of my “bathtub” at the end of a doublestack, a long car with two long, stacked boxes in it. The front of the train was moving away from my part of the train.
“Oh, no!” I thought. “I will be stranded here.”
I dumped my backpack onto the gravel, hopped out of the car, put on my backpack, and headed toward the yard worker near the end of my part of the broken train.
“Can you tell me whether any train will be going south?” I asked.
“This train right here,” he replied, pointing to the part of the train I had just gotten off of. “We are adding cars to it.” I thanked him, walked back to a car different from the one I had been in, and got in.
Some minutes later I heard the crunch of the gravel—a dreaded sound to a train traveler. The crunch stopped at my car, and someone stepped up on the ladder, saw me, and exclaimed, “Get out! If I see you again, you will be arrested.”
I got out and left the yard. I wanted to try to get on again at a different part of the train, but decided not to chance it. I headed to the nearby Amtrak station, where I bought a ticket for the rest of my ride.
In the Weeds
Near midnight, I caught out easily underneath a bridge not far west of Chicago and had ridden four hundred ninety miles to eastern Nebraska in thirteen hours. I got off, stashed my backpack in some weeds, and ate a late lunch at a local restaurant.
Back in the yard, I waited for a train to come through to take me back to Illinois. None came. I waited some more. Still none came.
Finally, as it began to get dark, I decided to go investigate. I discovered that a mile west of the yard a set of tracks veered off south. “Hmmm,” I thought. “Maybe the trains are going south before they head east again.” I found some weeds, dumped my backpack in them, and waited for a train.
When one came, it stopped for a bit, but it did not have any rideable cars. I waited for another train. It had rideable cars, but they were too far away for me to catch before the train started up again.
That night eleven trains came through, each going in the same direction. Only the second and the eleventh had rideable cars. The eleventh is the one I caught after enduring sporadic sleep and a couple dozen chigger bites as I lay in the weeds. That train took me back home to Illinois.
Will
When he first spied me,
He smiled with glee.
Like him, I was dirty
And had a traveler’s pack,
Though his was stashed
In nearby weeds.
He had gotten off a freight
From Portland, Oregon.
I had gotten off one
From Milwaukee.
He had rescued several overripe bananas
From a dumpster
And a pack of old Reader’s Digests,
Which he showed me with a grin.
Did I want a banana?
I declined at first
But could tell he was disappointed.
So when he asked again—
For the third time—
I accepted.
A Salvation Army worker
Had given him the light-brown
Coveralls he wore.
He was looking for work in Chicago.
I was simply out riding.
He was “Will” and I was “Cliff.”
Rough Tracks
The yard worker told me that there was a boxcar on the other side of the yard that was heading south. I found it, got in, and waited four or five hours.
The train pulled out of the yard slowly, but picked up speed as we got out of the city the yard was in. “A perfect ride,” I thought as I sat in the middle of the car gazing out the open door at the small towns we were passing.
Suddenly the car began to sway. Then it swayed wildly—back and forth so much that if I had been standing I would have been thrown to the floor.
I grabbed the floor in a desperate attempt to secure myself. But, of course, the floor was flat and smooth, and I could not hold on to it. But even if I could have held on to something, that would not have freed me from my worst fear—that the car would jump the tracks and toss me wildly about, maybe crush me after it had thrown me through the open door.
For three, four, five minutes this went on. Then as suddenly as it started, it stopped. Twice more the same thing happened, producing terror in me each time.
I mentioned these episodes to Milwaukee Mike the next time I saw him. “Oh, yes,” he replied, “that track is a little rough.”
Almost Stranded
I was on a train headed north. It pulled into a railroad yard at night part way to my destination, stopped, and let out a loud “Poof!” That was the sound of air suddenly escaping from the hoses in the brake system, which meant that the train would not be moving, or at least that my part of the train would not be moving.
Some minutes later, I peered out of the grain car I was on and saw that the train was broken—there were just two cars in front of mine, with no engine.
“Oooh!” I thought. “Now what?”
After a bit I noticed that a string of cars two tracks over was moving back and forth. “Maybe the front of my train is being connected to that string of cars,” I thought.
A yard worker was walking alongside the moving string of cars. I waited some minutes, checked to make sure no yard worker could see me along my string of cars, got out of the grain car I was on, climbed through the string next to mine, looked for a yard worker between that string and the one that had been moving, then found a rideable car on that string. It left fifteen minutes later, going north, with me on it.
Sleeping on a Moving Train
It was an easy catch. Every night the train came out of the yard at roughly the same time and stopped. I sat high under the bridge waiting for it to stop. I simply went down to the tracks, found a car, and got on.
To those who have never been on a freight train, it might seem that it would be difficult to sleep because of the noise and the swaying of the cars. But one can, indeed, fall asleep on a noisy train.
First, you lay cardboard on the floor of the boxcar you are in, or on the platform at the end of a grain car, or on the floor of the well of a doublestack. Then you put your foam sleeping pad on top of the cardboard, unroll your sleeping bag, and crawl in. If you are sleepy, you will fall asleep soon enough.
On the night in question, I woke up about 2:30 a.m., not knowing where I was—maybe western Illinois or the middle of Iowa. The train had stopped in some dark place, and I gazed at the stars as I lay in the well of a doublestack.
Suddenly I heard the crunch of gravel approaching my car along with voices. I tensed. What if I was found and kicked off?
The voices passed my car, and I thought, “Of course, the engineer and conductor would not check each car in the middle of the night for hidden riders.” The train started up again shortly, and I fell asleep again.
Slow Train
The train rumbles along the tracks without haste.
I am the only passenger, I think,
sitting alone in a boxcar
with rusty doors
and graffiti sprawled across its sides.
I am not in a hurry to get where I am going.
Actually, I do not know where I am going,
nor does it matter.
I want only one thing⎯
to move,
to lose myself in the swaying and jerking
of the boxcar.
When the train stops, I will jump down
and walk off⎯
but not for long.
I will find another slow train soon
and let it take me wherever it goes.
Wrong Train
I had caught the train to Minneapolis from near Chicago a couple of times before. A half hour before seven in the evening it pulled out of the yard, sat until seven, then left north for an overnight trip. It was easy to find a rideable car while it waited to leave.
I had told a friend in the hobo community who lived in Minneapolis that I would be riding there on a certain day. I arrived at the yard extra early, and there on the tracks was a train.
“Ah!” I thought. “It is early today.”
I found a car, got on, and when it left soon after, about six instead of the normal seven, I blew my train whistle to celebrate its departure.
It did not take me long, however, to discover that the train was not heading north. It had turned south instead. At one point, I could have gotten off and gotten public transportation back home. But I decided to stay on and see where I was going.
The train ended up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the next morning. I got off the train, ate breakfast in an unfrequented part of the railroad yard, and looked for a train back.
It didn’t take me long to find one that was going south. I did not know, though, whether it was going back to Chicago. But having no choice in the matter, and not wanting to ask yard workers lest I be kicked out of the yard, I got on.
The train did go back to Chicago. So even though I did not make it to Minneapolis, the trip was, nevertheless, successful.
A Death
On my very first freight train trip, from south central Iowa to Chicago, the train pulled into a railroad yard in a small city in western Illinois. I was riding with Luther. He and I got off the train and immediately saw someone walking toward us along the train. It turned out to be a fellow traveler, a rather scruffy looking male with alcohol on his breath. He was distraught because the person he had been traveling with had fallen off the top of the grain car they were on and he didn’t know what to do with his backpack.
The top of a grain car has a walkway on it that one can lie on. But that will not prevent someone from falling off, as grain cars typically sway and jolt.
“What were you doing up there?” I asked, wondering why anyone would so foolishly ride on top of a grain car.
“It was hot,” the traveler replied. That was definitely true—above ninety and humid.
“He fell asleep,” the traveler continued. “I tried to catch him as he moved toward the edge, but couldn’t.”
I had clocked the speed of the train with my watch at forty-five miles per hour, using the mileposts beside the tracks. It was impossible for someone to land on the jagged rocks beside the tracks at forty-five miles per hour from a height of fifteen feet and live.
“Do you know where he lives,” we asked.
“Yes. In Ohio.”
“The thing to do is to send his backpack there,” we replied.
With nothing else we could do, we made our way to the tracks that would take us to Chicago.
I wondered how long it would take for someone to find the fallen person’s body. The train had gone through long stretches of country where no one lived adjacent to the tracks. It was likely that the person had fallen off while going through one of those stretches.
Encounter with Police in a Parking Lot
I had driven to a parking lot at a commuter train stop west of Chicago one evening, parked my car, walked to a nearby bridge, and hopped a freight as it pulled out of the yard next to the train stop. It was going to Nebraska. I got off at a city in eastern Nebraska the next day around noon, stashed my gear in weeds, walked to a nearby restaurant, had lunch under a No Trespassing sign on the wall of the restaurant, and caught back that evening.
I had done the trip before, and each time the train had stopped about a mile before it got to the parking lot where I had parked my car.
This time, however, the train did not stop at its usual place. It had slowed down, but it was going too fast to get off. The train passed the parking lot as well.
“Oh, no!” I thought. “How am I going to get my car?”
Fortunately, the train stopped a couple of miles down the tracks. I got off and walked back to the parking lot. My car was the only car in the lot, as it was about two or three in the morning. It had taken me nearly an hour to walk there.
I had gone no more than seventy or eighty feet into the lot when a police car pulled into it and stopped beside me. The officer rolled down the window of his car and asked, “Did you just get off a train?”
I replied, “That’s my car over there,” as I pointed to it.
The officer said, “There’s a camera at the entrance to the lot,” as though to explain his presence there.
I nodded my head and proceeded toward the car. As I was walking toward it, another police car pulled into the parking lot and stopped beside the first one. I kept walking.
When I got to the car, I opened the hatchback, dumped my backpack into it, got into the car, and drove off.
Stopped by Local Police
Milwaukee Mike and I had arrived at a town in eastern Iowa about two in the morning, walked to a nearby all night restaurant, had a middle-of-the-night breakfast, walked back to the yard, watched all day as four coal trains went through, and finally caught back toward Chicago about seven in the evening. We called the trip our “breakfast run.”
In Rochelle, Illinois, which is about halfway between that town in eastern Iowa and Chicago, there is a train-watching pavilion. Two sets of tracks cross right at the pavilion, so people can see trains go by rather frequently.
Mike and I were on the porch of a grain car, where you can be seen if you are sitting on it. One of us said to the other, “Rochelle is coming.”
Mike lay down. I put my backpack between the triangular beams just behind the porch we had been sitting on and sat on it. The beams were a couple of feet wide, and I thought I was fairly well hidden.
But I wasn’t completely hidden. Someone could catch a glimpse of me at an oblique angle as the train passed. And that is what happened. A person at the train-watching pavilion pointed at me when Mike and I were some fifty feet beyond him.
I said to Mike, “We’ve been spotted.”
About ten or fifteen minutes later, as we were rolling into a small city along the tracks, the train slowed down. It got real slow. Mike said, “What’s going on?”
Then we saw. Three police officers were standing beside the tracks. The train stopped. The police officers came over to us. One was older—he turned out to be the chief of police of the city.
We did not have to be told to get off the train. Just as we were about to do so, the engineer came running back and exclaimed to the police officers, “It’s okay with me! It’s okay with me!” Evidently, he had known that Mike and I were on the train.
The chief of police replied, “Houston called. They want them off. We are not going to arrest them, just get them off.”
The engineer left.
So, we surmised, the person who had spotted me called the local police, who in turn had called someone at the train company, which apparently was located in Houston, Texas, who then called the police in the city we had just gotten to.
We got off and showed the officers our identifications. They checked us on their cell phones, and the two younger officers left. They must have concluded that Mike and I were harmless.
Mike was annoyed. It was dusk, and he wanted to get back home. He asked, “Where is the bus station?” The chief said, “That way two blocks,” pointing along the tracks.
Mike is sometimes rather audacious, and what he said next astounded me: “Can you take us there?”
The chief replied, “Sure. Put your things into the trunk and climb in the back.” We did.
As we pulled into the parking lot of the bus station, the chief said, “You two don’t look like the normal people I deal with. The bus station is right there [pointing straight ahead], and the train is that way [pointing to the tracks]. If you go back to the train, I won’t see you.”
We got our things out of the trunk, the chief drove off, we crossed the parking lot, walked through the field between the parking lot and the train, and climbed onto a grain car. The train left a minute later.
Cinderbox Cindy’s Ashes
They had arrived in kitchen Tupperware
wrapped in brown paper—
about half of her,
said her brother.
He wanted to scatter some
along Texas railroad tracks.
I was to take the rest to the Friday morning
memorial service at the annual
hobo convention in Britt, Iowa,
for burial alongside other departed travelers.
In her wild years,
Cinderbox had lived in boxcars
and slept under bridges,
her hair stringy,
her words sometimes raw.
Once she had cut a cast off her leg.
In recent years she had gotten new teeth
and washed her hair,
no longer moving about.
But she still smoked,
which killed her three days
before her forty-ninth birthday.
I tossed a handful of her into the wind
from the porch of a grain car
as it rumbled west across northern Illinois,
then lowered the rest of her into
black dirt in northern Iowa,
tears in my eyes.
Cindy would have gotten a big smile on her face if she had known I had tossed some of her ashes off a moving freight train.
© 2024 by Cliff Williams