cranberrydavid
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As my partner and I rolled into K-Falls on a March afternoon in ‘86 we noticed the yard was fuller than any I’d ever seen, and we knew something was wrong. When our boxcar came to a stop in the yard we jumped out and started walking south along the service road toward the SBD hop-out point. No need to hide.
As we approached the big overpass across the yard, a couple guys stood up to meet us. It was the biggest camp I’d ever seen. There were only maybe 15 guys in camp at that time, but there was gear for 3 times that many and a dozen fire-pits in terraces going up the bank to the bridge footing.
We introduced ourselves. No names, just routes as usual. “We’re 2 days out of Seattle headed for Sacramento.” “Well there’s nothing rolling southbound, so you could be here a while. If you’re hungry, the pantry’s up there.” Up under the bridge was a pallet-board shelf full of canned goods which were free for the taking. Nearby there was a pile of firewood for cooking-fires. Whenever anybody went to town, they brought back something for the camp. We learned that in town there were 2 food banks, a mission, and a famous supermarket dumpster, so nobody ever went hungry.
Once we’d spread out our gear to dry and eaten something we asked for news. It seems that the recent storm had closed both SBD lines in the mountains 4 days ago and UP and SP were waiting for equipment to open them. The plows and crews had all been routed to the Sierras which had been hit even harder. Trains had been piling up in the yard for 4 days, and each one had added a half dozen or more riders to the camp.
As it got later, guys started trickling back to the camp with food, firewood, cardboard and anything else they’d been able to score. Fires were lit, food was cooked, coffee was drunk, and stories were told. Hundreds of stories, all about trains and riders. I remember stories from the high-line of guys getting rolled for their sleeping bags, from CA of riders killed or injured by rocks thrown from overpasses (When we said we were headed for Sacramento there must have been a dozen guys warn us not to ride gondolas. You wanted something over your head!)
Everybody had a map in their head, and when a place name came up in a story they would always describe the route. You could hear people reciting routes all through the camp, and if somebody forgot to mention a junction or section-point they’d get corrected and sometimes some pretty hot words got flying.
The camp just naturally divided into 3 loose groups: the bad-ass city guys, the fruit tramps, and the stamp tramps collecting food stamps in 3 or 4 states (there were a bunch of them on their circuits so it must have been the first week of the month.) Because I was a farm kid and worked seasonal in AK fish-canneries and cranberry harvest I usually hung with the fruit tramps, but at night I’d drift from fire to fire and listen to all kinds of stories. We were there for 2 nights and it was like going to Hobo College!
Every hour or so a bull would drive by. He’d slow down and look the camp over for a minute, then drive on. I don’t know what he was looking for or what he’d have done if he’d found it! By our second day there were about 50 of us, and I’d guess a quarter were ‘Nam vets. Everybody had a be-good-stick or belt-knife where you could see it and, although nobody would have been uncool enough to mention if they were carrying, this was back in the day when anybody could buy a sleazy little saturday-night-special for 20 bucks and no ID in most gun stores. So whenever the white pickup would stop, the camp would go quiet and we’d stare at him from our terraces on the bank like the birds in the Hitchcock movie. It must have been really creepy for him!
One event stands out. It turned out to be nothing, but sometime after midnight a car pulled off the highway, down the service road beside the bridge, and parked twenty feet from the camp. You could feel the tension as everybody in camp sat up and cleared for action. There’d been a lot of stories told of townies beating up tramps, so you can imagine what everybody was thinking. The car sat there for ten minutes or so, then turned around and drove away. Probably just a couple high school kids smoking a joint with no idea they were sitting a few feet from a small army! I’m just glad nobody got out of that car to take a piss....
On the morning of the third day the trains started rolling again, about an hour apart. The first train went to the guys who’d been there the longest. I remember 4 guys had built a cardboard palace on the back porch of a grainer while they were waiting, though the fruit tramps I was with thought that was very uncool. My partner and I caught a grainer on the 3rd train out and cruised down to Sac-town with no problems.
I hadn’t thought about this for a while, but when I read Arrow’s “Rock Salt” story I got to wondering. Do you think when that bull was staring at us all those times as he made his rounds, he just might have been daydreaming about shotguns.....?
As we approached the big overpass across the yard, a couple guys stood up to meet us. It was the biggest camp I’d ever seen. There were only maybe 15 guys in camp at that time, but there was gear for 3 times that many and a dozen fire-pits in terraces going up the bank to the bridge footing.
We introduced ourselves. No names, just routes as usual. “We’re 2 days out of Seattle headed for Sacramento.” “Well there’s nothing rolling southbound, so you could be here a while. If you’re hungry, the pantry’s up there.” Up under the bridge was a pallet-board shelf full of canned goods which were free for the taking. Nearby there was a pile of firewood for cooking-fires. Whenever anybody went to town, they brought back something for the camp. We learned that in town there were 2 food banks, a mission, and a famous supermarket dumpster, so nobody ever went hungry.
Once we’d spread out our gear to dry and eaten something we asked for news. It seems that the recent storm had closed both SBD lines in the mountains 4 days ago and UP and SP were waiting for equipment to open them. The plows and crews had all been routed to the Sierras which had been hit even harder. Trains had been piling up in the yard for 4 days, and each one had added a half dozen or more riders to the camp.
As it got later, guys started trickling back to the camp with food, firewood, cardboard and anything else they’d been able to score. Fires were lit, food was cooked, coffee was drunk, and stories were told. Hundreds of stories, all about trains and riders. I remember stories from the high-line of guys getting rolled for their sleeping bags, from CA of riders killed or injured by rocks thrown from overpasses (When we said we were headed for Sacramento there must have been a dozen guys warn us not to ride gondolas. You wanted something over your head!)
Everybody had a map in their head, and when a place name came up in a story they would always describe the route. You could hear people reciting routes all through the camp, and if somebody forgot to mention a junction or section-point they’d get corrected and sometimes some pretty hot words got flying.
The camp just naturally divided into 3 loose groups: the bad-ass city guys, the fruit tramps, and the stamp tramps collecting food stamps in 3 or 4 states (there were a bunch of them on their circuits so it must have been the first week of the month.) Because I was a farm kid and worked seasonal in AK fish-canneries and cranberry harvest I usually hung with the fruit tramps, but at night I’d drift from fire to fire and listen to all kinds of stories. We were there for 2 nights and it was like going to Hobo College!
Every hour or so a bull would drive by. He’d slow down and look the camp over for a minute, then drive on. I don’t know what he was looking for or what he’d have done if he’d found it! By our second day there were about 50 of us, and I’d guess a quarter were ‘Nam vets. Everybody had a be-good-stick or belt-knife where you could see it and, although nobody would have been uncool enough to mention if they were carrying, this was back in the day when anybody could buy a sleazy little saturday-night-special for 20 bucks and no ID in most gun stores. So whenever the white pickup would stop, the camp would go quiet and we’d stare at him from our terraces on the bank like the birds in the Hitchcock movie. It must have been really creepy for him!
One event stands out. It turned out to be nothing, but sometime after midnight a car pulled off the highway, down the service road beside the bridge, and parked twenty feet from the camp. You could feel the tension as everybody in camp sat up and cleared for action. There’d been a lot of stories told of townies beating up tramps, so you can imagine what everybody was thinking. The car sat there for ten minutes or so, then turned around and drove away. Probably just a couple high school kids smoking a joint with no idea they were sitting a few feet from a small army! I’m just glad nobody got out of that car to take a piss....
On the morning of the third day the trains started rolling again, about an hour apart. The first train went to the guys who’d been there the longest. I remember 4 guys had built a cardboard palace on the back porch of a grainer while they were waiting, though the fruit tramps I was with thought that was very uncool. My partner and I caught a grainer on the 3rd train out and cruised down to Sac-town with no problems.
I hadn’t thought about this for a while, but when I read Arrow’s “Rock Salt” story I got to wondering. Do you think when that bull was staring at us all those times as he made his rounds, he just might have been daydreaming about shotguns.....?
