macks
Ballsy Adventurer
Portland to Santa Cruz and back
We started out hitching from Salem to Portland after a night of unsuccessful waiting for the P&W train to Beaverton from Salem. Around 4:00 pm we got a ride to Aurora (20mi S of Portland). Found a little jungle with a few old dudes in it by the onramp in Aurora when I went to go take a leak. They were nice, asked if we had a sign and told me I could take a leak practically in their camp, but I took a few steps away out of courtesy. A trucker ex-marine who was actually a pretty nice guy picked us up and took us to the Rose Quarter. That was actually my first ride with a trucker.
So we hung out in Portland for a few days and met up with friends. We took a free trip to OMSI with a bunch of dirty kids which was pretty funny. When our friend j-spot got into town we got some food and things together and headed down to the catch out spot. The cops did a sweep for people sleeping under the bridge but somehow didn’t see us or didn’t care. We missed a few trains that night then headed to a different spot across town to wait in some cover. Nothing good came through so we got some more food then headed back to the other spot. Around 2am a 4 unit train came around the bend, no DPUs as we’d hoped to see but whatever, it’d been 2 days and Eugene would be at least a different spot to wait in.
All 3 of us and the dog got into a Canadian grainer and stopped outside of Albany somewhere for a bit. While there we switched the stuff around and I moved into my own grainer 1 car down to have some more room. In the process of moving shit around j-spot’s camelback cap came off and soaked one of the cubbies, which I mopped up with my flannel. Man, that flannel was dirty as hell when I put it back on the next day.
We ended up rolling through Eugene in the AM hours, the sides of the grainer already heating up despite it being the morning. Once out of Eugene I hung out on the porch since not a lot is around on HWY 58. We had a great ride from there, stopped at what I think was Cascade Summit for a while sided for NBDs to pass. There we switched over to an open boxcar that got added somewhere that we stopped, and we now had DPUs. Spiked the doors and we were set to go.
The ride was so fucking gorgeous. Next stop was somewhere N of K-Falls where we got a new crew. We were getting a little low on water so I got sent to get some water out of the DPUs. It was a good 40 cars back and with lumber on the last 10. I didn’t want to get stuck on the DPU going into K-falls. About 20 cars back I ran back to the boxcar because I thought I heard a train coming. Turns out it was just the DPU engine idling (turns off and on every now and then) and I spooked myself. So we went back and the water wasn’t in a case so we took off our shirts to carry it. About 10 minutes after we got back in the boxcar the train aired up and we were rolling again.
I forgot how many hours it took from there to Roseville, but we ended up getting off as it was waiting for clearance to enter the yard. We climbed through a hole in the fence and on to a golf course. People were walking around playing golf with their umbrellas when I remembered that I took Widerstand’s advice and brought an umbrella myself. So we tried to fit in the best we could, 3 dirty ass kids and a dog walking around the golf course with packs. Even with the umbrella I don’t think we were fooling anyone. We got stopped by a guy missing half his teeth on a gator.
“Where you headed?”
“Out.”
“You can’t get out this way, it’s all closed off.”
“How to people get in?”
“Through the front gate, but you can’t go that way.… actually, if you go back over to the fence by the train tracks there’s a hole that has cones by it that you can go out.”
“Yeah, we know. I think away from the tracks is our best bet. Is there another way?”
after a shit eating grin and a pause..
“Well, there’s another hole over that hill there you could get out at.”
So we went for it, and it led us to this shitty field thing that didn’t have an outlet to the road. We walked through someone’s backyard to get out on to the street then hiked to a gas station to clean up and get a snack. After scrubbing off our dirt masks we thought we’d be semi hitch appropriate. We walked another few miles then stood out in a group of 3 with a dog for a few hours. We found a foam noodle like for a swimming pool and I cut a big hand with a thumb out of a piece of cardboard and attached it to the end. People laughed but no ride. We ended up splitting up, monster and I and j-spot and her dog. J-spot walked to the other onramp and got a ride right away. So we followed suit and ran over there. We got a ride in 20 minutes into Davis, bypassing Sacramento thank god.
From Davis we got a ride from this latino guy who was obviously running drugs. Between the wafting smell of weed from the trunk and his being up for days driving everywhere it was pretty obvious. He said he was going into the bay but actually dropped us off at a junction south of Napa. We stood at a slow onramp for about 30 minutes before getting picked up by a really awesome girl in a white pickup. She was funny as hell, not afraid to talk about fucking or whatnot with two random people. Turns out we actually lived about 30 miles from each other in Japan a few years ago.
She dropped us at the Oakland BART where we scored a plate of food from the trash and a package of pita chips from the top of the bike boxes. Then we rode the BART to Daly City and took a bus to Pacifica. In Pacifica we realized that we were going to actually make it to Santa Cruz in a day from Roseville so we bought a pint of whiskey to celebrate. We turned down a few rides to Half Moon Bay because the light was dwindling and we figured better to be stuck in Pacifica and hitch in the morning. But after a little bit these two guys who were bodyguards at American embassies in the Middle East and on a break dropped us right the door of my friends’ place in Santa Cruz. We said hello to everyone and drank whiskey on the porch waiting to hear from j-spot.
She ended up getting stuck in Lodi for a while, but made 30 bucks. Then she got a ride from a nice old tweaker in a van who took her to Santa Cruz, she got in about 11:00 and we decided to go get some vegan nachos to celebrate the accomplishment with the money she made.
I busked down on the boardwalk and made 4-5 bucks. Then this drunk home bum came and started playing some patriot songs so I took off. Because of the fires on the central coast, the city banned all fireworks on the fourth of July and weren’t going to do the boardwalk firework display. This of course just made people bring in a lot of illegal fireworks and shoot them off all over the city. It was a pretty funny scene to watch from the roof of the house by the beach, fireworks blowing up everywhere and cops driving around trying to find people.
The next day we were going to catch the local coal train on the way to Davenport and get off at the beach but it was Sunday and no train was running. We ended up hitching with 4 to a spot up the highway that was a few miles before the beach we wanted. We walked up the side of the cliffs for a while until we came up on a guy who looked like he was dancing around. Turns out he came down to the cliffs at like 5 in the morning “but I wasn’t even fucked up..” yeah right. He found a rope that led down to the rocks, climbed down it and then slipped and broke his ankle. It took him three hours to get to the top and he had to use the broken ankle so it was swollen as fuck. Evileyednick knew the guy from town and said he was alright, so we helped him get back to his truck, which he had lost the keys to. It took about 30 minutes to get him to the parking lot and he crawled the last bit. We turned down the case of beer offer because we didn’t want to wait for the dude to break into his car and headed up the beach a ways to meet up with the girls.
We split into 2 groups to hitch back into town and were back in a few hours, no problem. The girls hiked out to the highway to try to squat an abandoned house for the night but ended up just crashing in the bushes and hitching in the morning. Evileyednick and I watched Rambo and slept in, we made it to the highway and got picked up by a German kite surfer guy who dropped us in Davenport. We waited a bit with our signs (one saying “OY VEY!”, the other saying “THE BAY!”) We got picked up by this couple, the guy had just gotten back from Indonesia. Turns out he stayed at the house I lived at in Eugene for 6 months and knew some of my good buddies. Small world shit.
We got to Oakland on the BART and I caught a bus to Berkley, evileyednick went to his friends’ house there. I ended up walking back to Oakland to meet up with monster and j-spot at hellarity where we hung out with some cool kids. J-spot went to bed early but monster went on a crazy ass trip to the burbs to pick up a friend of ours just in from Portland. The next day we got up and out, got some food and said goodbye to j-spot and justin. We hit the onramp with an I-5 sign from Oakland.
A trucker stopped (“Big Rob”) and drove us to Lathrop, south of Stockton a bit. Big Rob had been a big coke dealer back in the day and got rolled. Right after he got released the first time he got rolled again and ran. He changed his name and all that then moved to Vermont. I guess one of the guys he used to party with was a US Marshall and tracked him down. His friend found him and pulled him over and basically pulled some strings to get his charges dropped and gave him a second chance. Crazy ass dude, fucking shit. That ride which was like 100 miles took 4 and 1/2 hours because we had to go with him to pick up his load. He kept getting lost and turned around because he wasn’t paying attention.
From the spot he dropped us off it was a good 2 hour wait in the 110 degree central valley heat. It was fucking oppressive. After a while a creepy trucker that just got off work and was driving to his place in Stockton gave us a ride. He definitely had some gross porn in the back seat. He dropped us at a ramp and showed us a good spot actually on the highway that trucks could pull over in and said we’d get a ride no problem. We got our stuff together and started walking up the onramp when we heard on the loudspeaker “You don’t go up there.” It was a cop that felt like being a chode so we talked for a second. He said we had to be 500 feet from the highway but ‘let’ us stay on the corner by the ramp.
We were about 12 miles from the closest truck stop so we just made a sign for the junction with HWY 20 and hoped. I thought for sure we were going to get stuck there but eventually a guy who used to be a cab driver in frisco and wrote a book about it picked us up. He had some pretty funny stories and was a nice dude, so monster asked why he just wasn’t going to Oregon. He gave it some thought and pitched the idea that if we went to the bay with him for a day so he could see some friends, and I drove the whole way we could go tomorrow in his car for free. We thought about it for a little bit but since we were right by a truck stop that we’d spent all fucking day getting to FROM the bay we thought we’d just hitch instead. Besides, I didn’t want to fucking drive 16 hours straight the next day.
So we crossed the highway and went to the onramp outside of the truck stop, we held our OREGON sign up high and the first trucker stopped for us. He was a nice enough guy, had been doing it for 12 years or so. Pretty quiet but he wasn’t creepy or weird so it was a nice ride. He was cutting over toward Idaho at Weed so we got out there and slept by the highway until morning.
We had originally thought of getting a train from weed but were having good luck with truckers, so we decided to keep going with it. About 30 minutes on the ramp and we got picked up by a guy going all the way to Portland. He was all right, lived in a double wide in Florida and farmed a bunch of stuff. “When things get hard and everyone is starving I’ll be eating filet mignon!” He had some weird ideas about shit but for a trucker seemed like a pretty alright guy.
About 6 hours later we got dropped off in Salem and as we were walking down the ramp into town a guy yelled from the shoulder asking us if we needed a ride. We declined and walked into town happy as hell to be back earlier than we expected.
We started out hitching from Salem to Portland after a night of unsuccessful waiting for the P&W train to Beaverton from Salem. Around 4:00 pm we got a ride to Aurora (20mi S of Portland). Found a little jungle with a few old dudes in it by the onramp in Aurora when I went to go take a leak. They were nice, asked if we had a sign and told me I could take a leak practically in their camp, but I took a few steps away out of courtesy. A trucker ex-marine who was actually a pretty nice guy picked us up and took us to the Rose Quarter. That was actually my first ride with a trucker.
So we hung out in Portland for a few days and met up with friends. We took a free trip to OMSI with a bunch of dirty kids which was pretty funny. When our friend j-spot got into town we got some food and things together and headed down to the catch out spot. The cops did a sweep for people sleeping under the bridge but somehow didn’t see us or didn’t care. We missed a few trains that night then headed to a different spot across town to wait in some cover. Nothing good came through so we got some more food then headed back to the other spot. Around 2am a 4 unit train came around the bend, no DPUs as we’d hoped to see but whatever, it’d been 2 days and Eugene would be at least a different spot to wait in.
All 3 of us and the dog got into a Canadian grainer and stopped outside of Albany somewhere for a bit. While there we switched the stuff around and I moved into my own grainer 1 car down to have some more room. In the process of moving shit around j-spot’s camelback cap came off and soaked one of the cubbies, which I mopped up with my flannel. Man, that flannel was dirty as hell when I put it back on the next day.
We ended up rolling through Eugene in the AM hours, the sides of the grainer already heating up despite it being the morning. Once out of Eugene I hung out on the porch since not a lot is around on HWY 58. We had a great ride from there, stopped at what I think was Cascade Summit for a while sided for NBDs to pass. There we switched over to an open boxcar that got added somewhere that we stopped, and we now had DPUs. Spiked the doors and we were set to go.
The ride was so fucking gorgeous. Next stop was somewhere N of K-Falls where we got a new crew. We were getting a little low on water so I got sent to get some water out of the DPUs. It was a good 40 cars back and with lumber on the last 10. I didn’t want to get stuck on the DPU going into K-falls. About 20 cars back I ran back to the boxcar because I thought I heard a train coming. Turns out it was just the DPU engine idling (turns off and on every now and then) and I spooked myself. So we went back and the water wasn’t in a case so we took off our shirts to carry it. About 10 minutes after we got back in the boxcar the train aired up and we were rolling again.
I forgot how many hours it took from there to Roseville, but we ended up getting off as it was waiting for clearance to enter the yard. We climbed through a hole in the fence and on to a golf course. People were walking around playing golf with their umbrellas when I remembered that I took Widerstand’s advice and brought an umbrella myself. So we tried to fit in the best we could, 3 dirty ass kids and a dog walking around the golf course with packs. Even with the umbrella I don’t think we were fooling anyone. We got stopped by a guy missing half his teeth on a gator.
“Where you headed?”
“Out.”
“You can’t get out this way, it’s all closed off.”
“How to people get in?”
“Through the front gate, but you can’t go that way.… actually, if you go back over to the fence by the train tracks there’s a hole that has cones by it that you can go out.”
“Yeah, we know. I think away from the tracks is our best bet. Is there another way?”
after a shit eating grin and a pause..
“Well, there’s another hole over that hill there you could get out at.”
So we went for it, and it led us to this shitty field thing that didn’t have an outlet to the road. We walked through someone’s backyard to get out on to the street then hiked to a gas station to clean up and get a snack. After scrubbing off our dirt masks we thought we’d be semi hitch appropriate. We walked another few miles then stood out in a group of 3 with a dog for a few hours. We found a foam noodle like for a swimming pool and I cut a big hand with a thumb out of a piece of cardboard and attached it to the end. People laughed but no ride. We ended up splitting up, monster and I and j-spot and her dog. J-spot walked to the other onramp and got a ride right away. So we followed suit and ran over there. We got a ride in 20 minutes into Davis, bypassing Sacramento thank god.
From Davis we got a ride from this latino guy who was obviously running drugs. Between the wafting smell of weed from the trunk and his being up for days driving everywhere it was pretty obvious. He said he was going into the bay but actually dropped us off at a junction south of Napa. We stood at a slow onramp for about 30 minutes before getting picked up by a really awesome girl in a white pickup. She was funny as hell, not afraid to talk about fucking or whatnot with two random people. Turns out we actually lived about 30 miles from each other in Japan a few years ago.
She dropped us at the Oakland BART where we scored a plate of food from the trash and a package of pita chips from the top of the bike boxes. Then we rode the BART to Daly City and took a bus to Pacifica. In Pacifica we realized that we were going to actually make it to Santa Cruz in a day from Roseville so we bought a pint of whiskey to celebrate. We turned down a few rides to Half Moon Bay because the light was dwindling and we figured better to be stuck in Pacifica and hitch in the morning. But after a little bit these two guys who were bodyguards at American embassies in the Middle East and on a break dropped us right the door of my friends’ place in Santa Cruz. We said hello to everyone and drank whiskey on the porch waiting to hear from j-spot.
She ended up getting stuck in Lodi for a while, but made 30 bucks. Then she got a ride from a nice old tweaker in a van who took her to Santa Cruz, she got in about 11:00 and we decided to go get some vegan nachos to celebrate the accomplishment with the money she made.
I busked down on the boardwalk and made 4-5 bucks. Then this drunk home bum came and started playing some patriot songs so I took off. Because of the fires on the central coast, the city banned all fireworks on the fourth of July and weren’t going to do the boardwalk firework display. This of course just made people bring in a lot of illegal fireworks and shoot them off all over the city. It was a pretty funny scene to watch from the roof of the house by the beach, fireworks blowing up everywhere and cops driving around trying to find people.
The next day we were going to catch the local coal train on the way to Davenport and get off at the beach but it was Sunday and no train was running. We ended up hitching with 4 to a spot up the highway that was a few miles before the beach we wanted. We walked up the side of the cliffs for a while until we came up on a guy who looked like he was dancing around. Turns out he came down to the cliffs at like 5 in the morning “but I wasn’t even fucked up..” yeah right. He found a rope that led down to the rocks, climbed down it and then slipped and broke his ankle. It took him three hours to get to the top and he had to use the broken ankle so it was swollen as fuck. Evileyednick knew the guy from town and said he was alright, so we helped him get back to his truck, which he had lost the keys to. It took about 30 minutes to get him to the parking lot and he crawled the last bit. We turned down the case of beer offer because we didn’t want to wait for the dude to break into his car and headed up the beach a ways to meet up with the girls.
We split into 2 groups to hitch back into town and were back in a few hours, no problem. The girls hiked out to the highway to try to squat an abandoned house for the night but ended up just crashing in the bushes and hitching in the morning. Evileyednick and I watched Rambo and slept in, we made it to the highway and got picked up by a German kite surfer guy who dropped us in Davenport. We waited a bit with our signs (one saying “OY VEY!”, the other saying “THE BAY!”) We got picked up by this couple, the guy had just gotten back from Indonesia. Turns out he stayed at the house I lived at in Eugene for 6 months and knew some of my good buddies. Small world shit.
We got to Oakland on the BART and I caught a bus to Berkley, evileyednick went to his friends’ house there. I ended up walking back to Oakland to meet up with monster and j-spot at hellarity where we hung out with some cool kids. J-spot went to bed early but monster went on a crazy ass trip to the burbs to pick up a friend of ours just in from Portland. The next day we got up and out, got some food and said goodbye to j-spot and justin. We hit the onramp with an I-5 sign from Oakland.
A trucker stopped (“Big Rob”) and drove us to Lathrop, south of Stockton a bit. Big Rob had been a big coke dealer back in the day and got rolled. Right after he got released the first time he got rolled again and ran. He changed his name and all that then moved to Vermont. I guess one of the guys he used to party with was a US Marshall and tracked him down. His friend found him and pulled him over and basically pulled some strings to get his charges dropped and gave him a second chance. Crazy ass dude, fucking shit. That ride which was like 100 miles took 4 and 1/2 hours because we had to go with him to pick up his load. He kept getting lost and turned around because he wasn’t paying attention.
From the spot he dropped us off it was a good 2 hour wait in the 110 degree central valley heat. It was fucking oppressive. After a while a creepy trucker that just got off work and was driving to his place in Stockton gave us a ride. He definitely had some gross porn in the back seat. He dropped us at a ramp and showed us a good spot actually on the highway that trucks could pull over in and said we’d get a ride no problem. We got our stuff together and started walking up the onramp when we heard on the loudspeaker “You don’t go up there.” It was a cop that felt like being a chode so we talked for a second. He said we had to be 500 feet from the highway but ‘let’ us stay on the corner by the ramp.
We were about 12 miles from the closest truck stop so we just made a sign for the junction with HWY 20 and hoped. I thought for sure we were going to get stuck there but eventually a guy who used to be a cab driver in frisco and wrote a book about it picked us up. He had some pretty funny stories and was a nice dude, so monster asked why he just wasn’t going to Oregon. He gave it some thought and pitched the idea that if we went to the bay with him for a day so he could see some friends, and I drove the whole way we could go tomorrow in his car for free. We thought about it for a little bit but since we were right by a truck stop that we’d spent all fucking day getting to FROM the bay we thought we’d just hitch instead. Besides, I didn’t want to fucking drive 16 hours straight the next day.
So we crossed the highway and went to the onramp outside of the truck stop, we held our OREGON sign up high and the first trucker stopped for us. He was a nice enough guy, had been doing it for 12 years or so. Pretty quiet but he wasn’t creepy or weird so it was a nice ride. He was cutting over toward Idaho at Weed so we got out there and slept by the highway until morning.
We had originally thought of getting a train from weed but were having good luck with truckers, so we decided to keep going with it. About 30 minutes on the ramp and we got picked up by a guy going all the way to Portland. He was all right, lived in a double wide in Florida and farmed a bunch of stuff. “When things get hard and everyone is starving I’ll be eating filet mignon!” He had some weird ideas about shit but for a trucker seemed like a pretty alright guy.
About 6 hours later we got dropped off in Salem and as we were walking down the ramp into town a guy yelled from the shoulder asking us if we needed a ride. We declined and walked into town happy as hell to be back earlier than we expected.
