# Travel Journal no 3- A city that's untouchable like Elliot Ness



## wokofshame (Mar 17, 2009)

I had a couple days to kill in the Quincy area so I thumbed it to Reno in a rainstorm ( it was to only keep raining), trying in vain to find a childhood friend of mine, ending up getting a Motel 6 and catching up on the lovely phenomenon known as cable TV.

I showed up at court as I was interested in keeping a valid driving liscence and my charges weren't on the schedule. A cop sends me upstairs and I end up talking to the DA, who basically tells me it's not worth his time to actually file the charges. "thank you SIR"

I started hitching towards Keddie and this lady pulls around in her shitbucket and gives me a ride back to her pad to come smoke a bowl, I hang with her and her daughter and they give me a ride up after a while totally out of their way, finally I am out of Quincy, or so I think. It starts doing this intense freezing drizzle and after 4 hours or so under my tarp a NBD crew changes, I watch it thunder away up the hill and shortly am like "fuck this!", with my coffee getting cold as soon as I boil it up and the sky just puking on me and the coffee, no southbound in sight and shit for brains.
I pack it up and hitch a ride to the hotsprings a few miles down the Feather River Canyon, they are closed so I hop a gate, it turned out the river was flooding to within inches of the concrete tubs and i have the place alone. It stinks with an intensity of boiled eggs, the ground letting sulfur run forth with the water. 
You can only understand just how good it feels to immerse yourself in a steaming, comfy hottub after hours in shit weather if you've done it. It's pure ecstasy.

After an hour or so a bunch a bunch of kids show up, I'm like "darn, hope they don't mind butt-naked dudes in the water". They hook me up with a bunch of beers and
end up taking me back to their house in Quincy (by then i have spent 6 hours straight, at the minimum, without removing myself from this tub) when dusk rolls in. 
The weather changes in to snow and this kid Tim insists on crushing Ambiens into a cigar and smoking it next to me in the backseat, I fucking hate the smell of people smoking pills so bad it's not even funny, but just grit my teeth and bear it. When we get back to their pad he passes out on the couch sleeping like a tranquilized horse. He wakes up later that night and is like "darn It! i'm never doing Ambiens again, it just put me to sleep and i missed the whole evening". Welll, dude, it's a freakin sleeping pill.
They play me a demo from their metal band and we drive to the bassists house for the blunt connection, it turns out he has this hash that makes things real copasetic.
The next morning there is 4 feet of snow, i shit you not. i leave early with one kid on the couch another in a chair, it's always the people with the least that give the most, they had Tim sleeping in a reclining chair. Hitch up to Portola and it takes 30 hours to get out of town, w/ major delays caused by the storm. I was under the catchout bridge that night when I saw a town cop pull up down the access road by the trax, he stops and spotlights the other side of the bridge, scanning the underbelly. Random trainrider check? I still don't know. Though he could have easily spotlighted my side, he didn't, in fact I don;t think he even saw me and was just a stupid mother fucker. I left my pac boots in PDX and this much snow is no fun in tennis shoes, I had to take them off and empty them every time after crossing a snowbank to my camp. One final note on Portola: fuck the Station Cafe. They are fucking cold to trainriders even though they market a sandwich they market as "The Hobo". We should get together and collect back royalties from those jamokes.
I woke up across from UP's Lathrop IM Terminal sometime in the wee hours and fortunately got pulled ahead so i could avoid detraining next to the long section of razor wire tipped fence guarding the well patrolled Army Depot across from Lathrop. Literally on one side of the mains is razor fence and hot IM terminal, on the other side, San Joaquin Defense Distribution Depot, patrolled by military police. Private property all the way down the mile-long fence.
It took me 2 days to get out of Lathrop/Stockton/Mariposa, I made some $ flying a sign, tried hitching to Modesto as I ended up by the 120 freeway, tried catching the commuter train to San Jose but it turns out that the thing only runs one way in the afternoon, and then headed to the BNSF Stockton yards, it turned out the crew change catchout spot only worked for northbounds/westbounds and I realized I didn't really want to change trains till at least Barstow, so on to Mariposa I hoofed it, a good deal of walking over two days, oh yeah I even looked around for what my chances were of getting fieldwork but they didn't seem that great. So on I rambled.
I kept getting water at churches on my way to Mariposa, trying not to disturb the congregation(it was a sunday), both times people came out to see what I was doing and the 1st time they came out with a pair of pliers and a Styrofoam cup! I showed them my sillcock key and they invited me in to the service.
I was walking down a residential road towards Mariposa when a guy drove up to me in his pickup wondering where I am going. He gives me a ride in the back to the end of the road and it was only a few hours before a Z train was carrying me along-out of site, out of mind. 
Cali is a pretty swell ride at 70 mph although the 200 miles or so north of bakersfield smell like cowshit 

fuck time's up- finish this later love n light


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## veggieguy12 (Apr 5, 2009)

damn, this has been here since mid March and nobody's commented?
that's a shame, 'cos this is a good telling of a yarn, brother.
thanks!!!


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## bote (Apr 6, 2009)

yep. I like the title too, appropriate for a story about the wild, wild west...


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