Thirty years ago this year
On a day not unlike today, I was a seventeen year old looking to get into trouble. I always seemed to find a way, too- and this was a day like no other for self imposed trouble.
I had just graduated from high school, and started work at the aforementioned lumberyard. I had only weeks before received my driver’s license. We used to sit and eat our lunches on the bunks of lumber by the railroiad tracks. “hey” I said, ‘Those suckers are travelling slow enough to climb on!” So that saturday, after work I did, wiht one of my lumberyard co-workers.
We climbed up into a hopper destined to get coal from a Sesser, Illinois strip mine. We stood on the couplers between the cars and watched the cornfields and wheatfields and towns go by.
Towns?
We were a long way from home. Further than I’d ever driven before, even. We had gone past lowell and schneider, and we had crossed the kankakee river, and it was beginning to get cold. And the train had picked up some speed.
We kept waiting for a soft spot to jump off, but these were all WW2 era tracks- they were laid in the age of steam, and fully ten yards opn either side of the tracks was still clinker and fly ash, compacted hard and painful. Finally the train slowed for a curve and we hopped off, my companion messing up his shoulder, me twisting an ankle. We walked to what we remembered was the nearest road, some miles back, and started hitching.
It started to rain. We were wearing jeans and tshirts. I started to shiver and bit my tongue several times trying to keep my teeth from clacking.
Finally, after we had walked maybe four or five miles, we spotted a truck copming at us, and it stopped and picked us up. The driver heard our story and took us most of the way back in silence. I got in my car, and raced the engine until the heater was red hot against my shins, put my sodden tshirt on the back of the seat and wrapped myself in my spare coveralls until I warmed up. It was dark by now, the very first time I had ever driven my car by myself in the dark. I drove the two or three miles home, still shivering from time to time.
I never told my parents.
I still love trains- but I’ll never hop one again.
The big wide world is magical, but the first time you’re out there in it, somehow you always forget — you got out here, now you have to get back.
I remember a road gig in ’73… When I ended up walking — every night for two weeks — from 86th and Biscayne in Miami DOWN to a causeway that came out in Miami Beach at 14th Street, then walking BACK UP A1A (Collins Avenue) to Dania Beach, where the producer had rented the cast a houseboat. Something on the order of 25 miles.
Closing time was — if memory serves — 3AM. Most nights, I made it home by daybreak and ended up sitting on the beach by the Dania Pier and watching the sun come up before stumbling across the canal and falling into bed.
I’m not sure I remember why we picked that particular lounge — a Big Daddy’s — to hang out in, but… we were young and stupid. I do remember a cop exclaiming to me, “The 8600 Club! That’s a fighting bar!” Couldn’t’ve proved it by me, but… we were young and stupid.
One night, a brunette from Pompano Beach driving a black Caddy ragtop picked us up on Biscayne Boulevard and took us halfway to Lauderdale before she dropped us on an expressway ramp somewhere in the middle of — well, it might as well have been nowhere, ’cause we sure didn’t know where we were. I think we called a cab that night. Cost us all of $5 to get home.
M
I jumped on a fast moving train once. Got off six years later when I was discharged.