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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Towns?<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
I never told my parents. <\/p>\n
I still love trains- but I’ll never hop one again. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1471"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1471\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}