Riding Toward Everywhere

William T. Vollmann

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061847042
• Topic: Persönliche Entwicklung
• Subtopic: Reisen

Vollmann is a relentlessly curious, endlessly sensitive, and unequivocally adventurous examiner of human existence. He has investigated the causes and symptoms of humanity's obsession with violence ( Rising Up and Rising Down ), taken a personal look into the hearts and minds of the world's poorest inhabitants ( Poor People ), and now turns his attentions to America itself, to our romanticizing of "freedom" and the ways in which we restrict the very freedoms we profess to admire.

For Riding Toward Everywhere, Vollmann himself takes to the rails. His main accomplice is Steve, a captivating fellow trainhopper who expertly accompanies him through the secretive waters of this particular way of life. Vollmann describes the thrill and terror of lying in a trainyard in the dark, avoiding the flickering flashlights of the railroad bulls; the shockingly, gorgeously wild scenery of the American West as seen from a grainer platform; the complicated considerations involved in trying to hop on and off a moving train. It's a dangerous, thrilling, evocative examination of this underground lifestyle, and it is, without a doubt, one of Vollmann's most hauntingly beautiful narratives.

Questioning anything and everything, subjecting both our national romance and our skepticism about hobo life to his finely tuned, analytical eye and the reality of what he actually sees, Vollmann carries on in the tradition of Huckleberry Finn, providing a moving portrait of this strikingly modern vision of the American dream.

chapter one

A SHORT ESSAY ON FREIGHT TRAINS

1.

I am my father’s son. On a recent Christmas, in the bakery which not only is the best in town but never forgets it, we were waiting to pick up our pie, and my father came to my side to chat with me. One of the highest sugar-and-butter arbiters, who puts the public in its place even in seasons when it cannot overwhelm her, commanded: Sir, you need to stop blocking the line right now!—My father turned to me and remarked conversationally: Give some people a little power and they turn into Nazis, don’t they?

My father grew up in an era when to be an American—a white American, at least—was to be yourself. In some respects his generation was more ignorant, complacent, self-centered and parochial than mine. For better and for worse, it actually believed in progress, which is to say that it was also more sure of itself, comparatively self-reliant and accordingly less corrupted by toadying—more American in the best sense. My grandfather’s time must have been even more individualistic. With his by-Gods and goddamns, my grandfather laid down opinions without great reverence for the judgments of others.—I just don’t know, Bill, he said once at a museum exhibit on the history of female suffrage. Maybe we shouldn’t have given women the vote. What do you think?—And he got his reward: glares of hatred and outrage from all ladies present.—Does contrarianism equal freedom of thought? I prefer my grandfather’s abrasive and frequently tedious self-assertion to my neighbors’ equivalently wrongheaded chorus. But should I label him any the less conformist? He once told me that if I had been his son he would have beaten my differentness out of me. It was his faith that American authority could do no wrong, in evidence of which I quote one of his pronouncements: You know what burns me up? All those rioters complaining about the police trampling on their rights! Don’t they get it? When there’s a riot, those sons of bitches have no rights!—As for my father, his epoch was the heyday of the Organization Man, and he respected rules, hierarchies and technocratic methods more than he knew; he simply happened to be good enough to make some of the rules. I once asked him why he wore a suit every working day, and he replied that one picks one’s battles and he had more interesting battles to fight than dress code skirmishes. He was right. When I need to meet somebody important in Japan, I wear my suit. It is probable that my father enjoys his suits more than I do. In any event, fortified by them he looked factory managers in the eye and told them exactly where they were screwing up.—Weren’t you just a little hard on those guys? an Associate Vice-President inquired—an accolade my father reported with glee. He taught his students without fear or favor, never missing a lecture in all the decades of his career. He worked hard, lived the life he chose, and said precisely what he thought. On his desk lay a paperweight engraved with his favorite motto: BULLSHIT BAFFLES BRAINS.

I am my father’s son, which is to say that I am not exactly my father. In some ways I am shyer than he, in others more extreme and bold. My father believes that drugs should be legalized, regulated and taxed. So do I. My father has never sampled a controlled substance and never will. I’ve proudly committed every victimless crime that I can think of. My father actively does not want to know which acts I have performed and with whom.

I still go to the bakery my father hates, and the woman who told my father to get back in line nods at me. My father will never go back there. Perhaps if I were more my father’s son I wouldn’t patronize the place, either. But I am less proud than he, more submissive—or maybe more indifferent.

I work hard, make money, not as effectively as my father did but well enough to get by. I say what I think, and sometimes get a reward surpassing my grandfather’s: death threats. So far, I’ve never missed a deadline for a term paper, a review, a manuscript. I perform the mumbo-jumbo of voting with belief in my heart, I’ve not yet won even a jaywalking ticket, and unlike my father, whom I fault in this respect, I refrain from opting out of jury duty; instead, they mostly kick me out.

My father hates organized religion, probably because he hates the God who killed his little girl back in 1968. I find religions variously bemusing. My father likes nice cars and is a sucker for the latest gadget. I enjoy the few mechanical devices which are simple enough for me to understand, such as semiautomatic pistols. My father hunted in his youth and still occasionally shoots handguns with me, but has come to disapprove of civilian firearms ownership, an attitude which disappoints me. He has voted Republican most of his life, but he and I agree in hating the current President.

My father has lived in Europe for many years. I am not sure that he realizes how much his native country has changed. People don’t dare anymore to talk back the way he used to.

As I get older, I find myself getting angrier and angrier. Doubtless change itself, not to mention physical decline and inevitable petty tragedies of disappointed expectations, would have made for resentment in any event; but I used to be a passive schoolboy, my negative impulses turned obediently inward. Now I gaze around this increasingly un-American America of mine, and I rage.

So many of these developments are well-meaning. Children must buckle up in the school buses, and, speaking of children, I had better not enter into conversation with a child I don’t know, in case the parents brand me a molester. On that same subject, a schoolboy has sex with his teacher, gets her pregnant, and off she goes to prison! The safety announcements on airplanes get not only longer, but louder and more authoritarian. (Rousseau, 1754: It is thus with man…as he becomes sociable and a slave, he grows weak, timid and servile…his effeminate way of life totally enervates his strength and courage.) My city passes an ordinance to confiscate the cars of men who pick up prostitutes. That compels me to walk. Whenever I check into a motel with my own companion of the evening, the clerk requires an identification card. Many of these establishments reject my business nowadays, because I lack a credit card. A two-hundred-dollar deposit or even five hundred for a forty-dollar room will not persuade them to take a chance on me. The few who do insist on photocopying my identification. Should I leave the country with a large wad of cash on my person, it is incumbent on me to report it. What don’t I have to report, and what happens to the information which I so dutifully give?

Year by year, those good Germans march deeper into my life. I have been interrogated by the FBI twice now, and by the U.S. Customs and Immigration functionaries more times than I can remember. The FBI have always been polite, although I would hardly call them warm. Their colleagues in other branches of authority have occasionally intimidated, insulted and detained me. I used to be with a woman who would plead with me to play the game a little; I was doing this to myself, she said. But I figured that they were doing it to me.

I am my father’s son. I stare back into their eyes. Once upon a time, a Customs bully who had already held my underwear high in the air for the delectation of people in line behind me dumped every carefully packed item out of my suitcase, tore the wrappers off my presents, brought his face close to mine and said: You know what? I’m just getting warmed up.—Oh, officer, I replied, if only I’d saved some of those neat little green pills for you to find. You know, those cute little green happy pills.—And I kept smiling and staring into the creep’s face.

My father, I am sorry to say, now believes that I should cool it. (I’ve told you that he and I both hate the President. But I would like to see the President in prison.) It may well be that I am a sullen and truculent citizen; possibly I should play the game a trifle. But I do, I do: When I pick up prostitutes I use somebody else’s car.

2.

My critique of American society remains fundamentally incoherent. Would I really have preferred my grandfather’s time, when Pinkertons were cracking Wobblies over the head, or my father’s, when Joe McCarthy could ruin anyone by calling him Red? All I know is that although I live a freer life than many people, I want to be freer still; I’m sometimes positively dazzled with longing for a better way of being. What is it that I need?

3.

What do you need? asked the woman in the bushes.

To catch out.

No, what do you need?

The other bush people waved me away, not threateningly but urgently. They were accomplishing crystal deals; oh, yes; they were buying and selling the Big Rock Candy Mountain. Nobody would tell where the freight trains stopped.

So we went south along the rails, the three of us, all the way to the overpass from whose exalted edge we hoped to see the telltale double track, and we entered the graffiti’d warren beneath. Like most experiments, this became a cul-de-sac; but the cyclone fence enclosing us daunted only me: my pelvis, recently healed of a fracture, still ached in bad weather. I stayed there with my ridiculous orange bucket, listening to truck-thuds upon the concrete over my head while my fitter friends climbed up and over. They never said a word to make me feel ashamed. Nor did I feel downcast or beholden; for among the equipment of us adventurers who’ve ridden the iron horse bareback, so to speak—the seat one finds on a freightcar is scarcely gifted with overmuch padding—is very commonly to be found my father’s three best qualities: courage, generosity and integrity. I sat on my orange bucket, and my friends came back saying they’d found no spoor of any train.

So we walked back to the passenger station of Salinas, California. I had been useless beneath the overpass, but I was the one who spied our train through an alley! We ran, then circumspectly walked down the yard, passing a woman who was fellating a man on the gravel. Moments after we rounded the tail of the snake, the hissing of compressed air warned us that it was about to slither off the edge of the world. We leaped on just in time, or rather my friends did; I employed my risible orange bucket, which I upended, stood on, and then after stepping easily up from onto the train pulled it after me by means of a string attached to the handle; I was my father’s son; I liked my gadgets.—Hey! somebody had kidded me when we were walking down the tracks. You stole my bucket! Gimme back my orange bucket!—An orange bucket was not such a bad thing, aside from the fact that it was orange. One could sit on it, carry things in it and piss into it. I sat on it and looked around.

We were riding a lumber gondola whose huge packets of planks bore one rectangular gap on the righthand side, another smaller gap on the left, and a passage between them. It was the perfect refuge; we could dodge the bulls no matter which side they chose. Hunkering down against officialdom, we passed through the yard at increasing speed, reached and left that former overpass in a couple of breaths, and off we sped, accompanied by fog, mountains and water-lined fields, with the dim dusk scrolling by, the train shuddering and groaning, the wood groaning. Our hope was Santa Barbara.

Departing a yard always feels to me somewhat like crossing a bridge over a deep gorge; one commits oneself to someone else’s defense against the void. By the time the signal has fallen behind, and many tracks have gone to one, the freight’s velocity is usually too great for the rider to do anything but ride. In short: Next stop Santa Barbara, always assuming that we stop in Santa Barbara—

I had never ridden among lumber-stacks before and was apprehensive that they might shift. Eventually I consoled myself with the thought that if they did slam together, I would likely die instantly, so there was nothing to fear. Moreover, Steve, who is the hero of this book, had ridden gondolas many times and seemed unworried, so I let it go, relishing the open air and the smell of fresh lumber around me.^*

That was the great thing about this sort of ride: breathing the air of reality. In the Gilroy country the evening smelled of garlic; later on, near Santa Barbara, the dawn would smell of anise. Freight train rides are parables. Why have we chosen to live behind walls and windows? For an answer, feel the shocking blackness and feeling of asphyxiation when a freight train enters a tunnel! An old man once told me about riding a freight in some nebulous northern realm where a tunnel was so long that the hobo on top of the gondola fell off dead; the old man succeeded in becoming an old man because he rode in a boxcar full of air! Was that a tall tale? I don’t know.† But I can assure you that the tunnel-darkness beyond the window of a subway car or passenger car, however eerie it might be, is quite innocuus compared to the real blackness that wrenches breath away. Reality caresses and stings! For a fact, reality kills; so does reality denied; at least when reality lays hands on me I feel it. I never want not to feel.

But the peculiarity was that our train was so loud that the vibrations of the diagonal cables holding the lumber-stacks to the center beam could be perceived only by touch, not through the ears. So that aspect of my experience was not entirely real, either, which confused and bemused me; because just as outside is more real than inside, and the freight train experience of outside perceived at high speeds is more real still, so it seems only right that every sensation should expand; the fact that one of reality’s fundamental characteristics is constraint is something that freight riding seduces me into denying whenever I can. On the iron horse I experience the state of unlimited expansion.

We rushed on. A flare of evening sun in the Gabilan Range (pink chalcedony), the white loveliness of rainbirds blowing spray in elongated flower petals, the Sierra de Salinas to the west, the leaden darkness of a lettuce field, all these perceptions granted to me right next to the freeway became my loveliest treasures which I hope to hoard right up to the cemetery lights amidst the last golden-green of the fields.

At dusk the train halted alongside a dingy white wall whose graffiti had been whitewashed into irregular shapes of a different griminess, and on the far side of that wall and its weeds, a beautiful young Latina stood holding her daughter’s hand and gazing at the train. I waved to them, and they smiled and waved back. The loneliness went away from me, and even now I feel gladdened by the memory of that moment. After a time their men came out. They too stood and waved. I never called a word to them, but I will remember them forever.

Into the dark went the train now, accompanied by few and pale lights and by more darkness which compressed the already flattened ground. I inhaled the darkness of vegetation and pallid darknesses of fields, the corpse-white dirt roads, everything glimpsed between stacks of lumber, in the cut between high ridges of darkness. Halfway up my lumber-stack I suddenly spied the lemony-yellow lights of a small ranch and wondered what it would be like to live there for the rest of my life. Like the lumber piles shifting subtly back and forth, neither solid enough to be entirely safe nor sufficiently yielding not to crush me, the lives I could have lived or at least imagined living teased me; in two steps I could have leaped off the rusty metal trainbed and made landfall in sight of that ranch; then I would have lived out my life there in truth, for my speed would have killed me. But nothing felt inimical, except occasionally those lashed-down towers of Canadian Douglas fir around me—and when I say me this is not to deny the presence of my two companions, with whom I shared my pleasures in common; but just as a family can go to church together and sit side by side on the pew while experiencing (or not) separate communions with the many-faced Spirit, so I, for whom “organized religion” is useless, and likewise my friends, although we shared food, water, booze, cigars and vigilance, remained gloriously alone in that nightscape. I saw a tall palm silhouetted in the night, then a tall forest. I saw it, and then it was gone. How could I know what my companions...