I am always secretly looking forward to noghting going as planned. That way, I'm not limited by my imagination. That way anything can, and always will, happen. Maybe not a bad plan, maybe a great plan. Best to travel with a plan and hope for chaos. Either way, I win.
It's always nice seeing a friendly face. Grasping for human connection in a state where every car was a truck, and every truck had a gun rack, I found something close on aisle 8 of Safeway. Two friendly kids, with unreserved admiration for a third who looks at freight trains and jumps on them.
Waiting for trains is almost as much fun as riding them. Like watching another crazy rainstorm from the loading dock of that warehouse, or four barefoot kids putting on a ghetto fireworks show, and just eating bagels for hours. But I had eaten alot of bagels, and I was begining to wonder if the train yard was abandoned, or a diversionary front, or the hallucinatory mirage of a city kid in Montana. I cornered a brakeman who told of a massive derailment in Idaho, and that northern line train traffic was shutdown until at least 1am. A big train disaster...
LAter, the sun had risen, and I left the dock for the trendy coffee house. The paper that morning confirmed the yard workers story- big derailment, traffic halted until an undetermined time, no casualties- Bur no train pulls out of a yard in the northwest without a hobo hiding in the shadows of an empty boxcar. I gave a moment of silence.
I was supposed to be on that train. It was moments like this that made an athiest believe in god, but evidence was mounting to suggest the presence of a Hobo God - an eternally filthy and drunk celestial guardian who saved kids from train crashes, left doors unlocked at critical moments, and made rational people throw everything imaginable into dumpsters.
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