Rolling Blackouts
Well-known member
Dawn – somewhere near the town of Mojave. We’d covered more than a few hundred miles overnight and were now high-balling through the vacant desert. I was truly thankful to sleep through the hideous wasteland of much of the central valley. However, sleep is only an approximation when riding freight. The violence of motion and mass combined with biting winds keeps the brain marginally active, enough that the senses are still mildly aware that everything around you is treacherous.
Sometime around 9am, we sided for a moment, and Haplo and Hayduke scrambled to the clean-face side of our 53’ double stack to join Rags and myself. Passing schwills of breakfast wine and trying vainly to roll cigarettes in the wind, we rejoiced in the absurdity of everything. Despite the entire nightmare of terrifying events in the three nights prior, the team was in excellent spirits. It was astounding how a disorganized, half-drunk squad of punks had miraculously invaded a transnational shipping port and successfully evaded a military helicopter. Either the state and all its security forces were outrageously incompetent in their capacity for domestic control, or we were straight up fucking ninjas. Clearly, we were ninjas.
The ride into the LA basin wasn’t the most scenic journey, but we did pass dozens of abandoned motor homes, and entire compounds of RV camping that had long since been foreclosed and could easily be converted into squat utopias. At one point we cruised past a large African wildlife preserve. Of all the weird shit to pass, I really didn’t expect to see a Giraffe and cage full of Leopards. Now, riding into L.A. with four people blatantly exposed on the porch of a 53’ really isn’t the most tactical thing you can do, a wise hobo is never seen, but we didn’t have a lot of options. We probably spent a good two hours waving at passing motorists. I always get a kick when some little kid in the backseat of his parent’s luxury SUV spots you on the train and starts laughing and waving, encouraging his distracted parents to take a look, only to take cover when they turn their heads. At a brief siding, we grabbed a bunch of ballast rocks and made a competitive game of trying to hit all the No Trespassing Signs along the tracks, and then billboards as we got further south. I recall Hayduke saying something along the lines of, “When I was a little kid, I used to throw rocks at trains. Now, I’m a little bit older, and a little bit wiser, and I throw rocks from moving trains.”
With sleep deprivation driving us all nuts, we jumped off somewhere in East Los Angeles in search of food foremost, beer hopefully, and then at some point down the line – sleep. It felt damn good to finally depart from the tracks for the first time in three days. Roseville already seemed like a distant memory. On the other hand, East LA was a complete culture shock compared to the Bay Area. The graffiti scene was dope as fuck – lots of people throwin’ lots of good work, which definitely helped distract me from the fact that the air was poison and the soil long since dead.
We voted to hang out, fly a sign outside a local grocery store, and meet the locals. Sure enough, in about twenty minutes we got kicked down some weed from a nice Chola girl coming out of the medical marijuana club. I have plenty of resentments about California, but the medical clubs are simply Banner, as in so good you gotta make a sign. A short hour later two firemen emerging from the store approached us, one being the Chief of the East LA Fire Department, a balding white guy in his mid 50s. “You boys been ridin’ them freight trains?” Clearly, no rational human being would want to, or logistically could, hitchhike into this neighborhood, so the best answer we could give was a polite Fuck yea! He proceeded to explain that in his youth he’d once ridden from Los Angeles to Minnesota, which is a mighty decent stretch of continent by any comparison, and that when he retired in eight months he was going back out. “Ya’ll take donations?” Suddenly we were $10 richer and had gained the approval of one of Los Angeles’ most upright, respectable citizens.
It’s always strange when you meet people while traveling, particularly hitchhiking, who ramble on about how much they dream of just dropping everything, ditching their worldly possessions, throw a dart on a map, and hit the road. But there’s always an external factor holding them back– kids, mortgage, debt, health, something. It makes me grateful for even the worst of situations, because when it comes down to it, the chaos of traveling is infinitely more uplifting than the monotony of typical 9-5 life. I’d rather spend a thousand nights sleeping in the rain than a year in a corporate desk job. Simultaneously, it makes me depressed, because our society has erected so many economic and social barriers that unless destroyed, will prevent people from roaming free. If you ask people what they’ll do, When / If they get rich, most of them will say travel the world. If that’s the case, then I guess I’m a rich man. Regardless, I sure hope I run into that fireman someday, somewhere down the line. I suppose I owe him a drink. X? > $!
With the sun rapidly setting, getting the fuck out of the hood seemed like a pretty bright idea, especially considering every single corner store was wrapped in bulletproof glass. A few phone calls later, a friend of Hayduke’s picked us up and we were gone once again, this time crash landing somewhere further East of LA. We spent the next two days getting absolutely shitcan wasted while going to various house parties. There’s a lot of scene’s missing as far as my blurred recollection goes, but at one point a golf cart was acquired along with 8 bottles of various Stone Brewery barley wines. Both were put to good use immediately. The transition from homebum to highlife was some genuine miracle only conceptually possible in the bourgeois dregs of Southern California.
Despite the luxurious tirade of shenanigans So Cal had to offer, it was not our final destination. We didn’t exactly have a final destination, but if we did, a giant desert punchbowl of suburbs definitely wasn’t it. And so again…we were gone. Bumming a ride, we found ourselves dropped off near the West Colton hop-out with our bearings set on the low-line to Tucson. With minimal difficulty, our crew navigated towards the LA Loop at the East end of the Yard. Having never been here, it would have been virtually impossible to navigate the track layouts, which cross and turn in absurd fashions, were it not for the hundreds of hobo monikers scrawled beneath the bridges quietly offering all sorts of contradictory advice. I must’ve spent three hours milling about the area, carefully reading the faded messages left by tramps long gone. Slogans, travel advice, personal threats, memorials to the departed, political symbols, elaborate artwork, all competing for space and giving life to the concrete bowels of an LA overpass. I pondered how many generations of travelers have had their only written history obliterated by a graffiti removal task force. All is temporal.
Aside from all the hobo vandalism, the Colton bridge hop-out consisted of an alluvial flow of trash emanating from the highway and a steel shopping cart converted into a stove. The aesthetics of this trash-hole were far greater than most of the LA that I’d observed. The mid-noon heat would likely have wrecked us, were it not for the bountiful spring of Natural Ice. I was quite content with the situation until a crustoid calling himself Sunny came stumbling down the tracks, dragging a sleeping bag so filthy a hazmat team should have been called. Sporting a grateful dead shirt, sandals, and the weathered red face of an aging man who’d clearly chugged himself into a stuttering vomit-coma every day that year, it was no surprise the first words out his mouth were “Got any Pot Brother bear?”
Sometime around 9am, we sided for a moment, and Haplo and Hayduke scrambled to the clean-face side of our 53’ double stack to join Rags and myself. Passing schwills of breakfast wine and trying vainly to roll cigarettes in the wind, we rejoiced in the absurdity of everything. Despite the entire nightmare of terrifying events in the three nights prior, the team was in excellent spirits. It was astounding how a disorganized, half-drunk squad of punks had miraculously invaded a transnational shipping port and successfully evaded a military helicopter. Either the state and all its security forces were outrageously incompetent in their capacity for domestic control, or we were straight up fucking ninjas. Clearly, we were ninjas.
The ride into the LA basin wasn’t the most scenic journey, but we did pass dozens of abandoned motor homes, and entire compounds of RV camping that had long since been foreclosed and could easily be converted into squat utopias. At one point we cruised past a large African wildlife preserve. Of all the weird shit to pass, I really didn’t expect to see a Giraffe and cage full of Leopards. Now, riding into L.A. with four people blatantly exposed on the porch of a 53’ really isn’t the most tactical thing you can do, a wise hobo is never seen, but we didn’t have a lot of options. We probably spent a good two hours waving at passing motorists. I always get a kick when some little kid in the backseat of his parent’s luxury SUV spots you on the train and starts laughing and waving, encouraging his distracted parents to take a look, only to take cover when they turn their heads. At a brief siding, we grabbed a bunch of ballast rocks and made a competitive game of trying to hit all the No Trespassing Signs along the tracks, and then billboards as we got further south. I recall Hayduke saying something along the lines of, “When I was a little kid, I used to throw rocks at trains. Now, I’m a little bit older, and a little bit wiser, and I throw rocks from moving trains.”
With sleep deprivation driving us all nuts, we jumped off somewhere in East Los Angeles in search of food foremost, beer hopefully, and then at some point down the line – sleep. It felt damn good to finally depart from the tracks for the first time in three days. Roseville already seemed like a distant memory. On the other hand, East LA was a complete culture shock compared to the Bay Area. The graffiti scene was dope as fuck – lots of people throwin’ lots of good work, which definitely helped distract me from the fact that the air was poison and the soil long since dead.
We voted to hang out, fly a sign outside a local grocery store, and meet the locals. Sure enough, in about twenty minutes we got kicked down some weed from a nice Chola girl coming out of the medical marijuana club. I have plenty of resentments about California, but the medical clubs are simply Banner, as in so good you gotta make a sign. A short hour later two firemen emerging from the store approached us, one being the Chief of the East LA Fire Department, a balding white guy in his mid 50s. “You boys been ridin’ them freight trains?” Clearly, no rational human being would want to, or logistically could, hitchhike into this neighborhood, so the best answer we could give was a polite Fuck yea! He proceeded to explain that in his youth he’d once ridden from Los Angeles to Minnesota, which is a mighty decent stretch of continent by any comparison, and that when he retired in eight months he was going back out. “Ya’ll take donations?” Suddenly we were $10 richer and had gained the approval of one of Los Angeles’ most upright, respectable citizens.
It’s always strange when you meet people while traveling, particularly hitchhiking, who ramble on about how much they dream of just dropping everything, ditching their worldly possessions, throw a dart on a map, and hit the road. But there’s always an external factor holding them back– kids, mortgage, debt, health, something. It makes me grateful for even the worst of situations, because when it comes down to it, the chaos of traveling is infinitely more uplifting than the monotony of typical 9-5 life. I’d rather spend a thousand nights sleeping in the rain than a year in a corporate desk job. Simultaneously, it makes me depressed, because our society has erected so many economic and social barriers that unless destroyed, will prevent people from roaming free. If you ask people what they’ll do, When / If they get rich, most of them will say travel the world. If that’s the case, then I guess I’m a rich man. Regardless, I sure hope I run into that fireman someday, somewhere down the line. I suppose I owe him a drink. X? > $!
With the sun rapidly setting, getting the fuck out of the hood seemed like a pretty bright idea, especially considering every single corner store was wrapped in bulletproof glass. A few phone calls later, a friend of Hayduke’s picked us up and we were gone once again, this time crash landing somewhere further East of LA. We spent the next two days getting absolutely shitcan wasted while going to various house parties. There’s a lot of scene’s missing as far as my blurred recollection goes, but at one point a golf cart was acquired along with 8 bottles of various Stone Brewery barley wines. Both were put to good use immediately. The transition from homebum to highlife was some genuine miracle only conceptually possible in the bourgeois dregs of Southern California.
Despite the luxurious tirade of shenanigans So Cal had to offer, it was not our final destination. We didn’t exactly have a final destination, but if we did, a giant desert punchbowl of suburbs definitely wasn’t it. And so again…we were gone. Bumming a ride, we found ourselves dropped off near the West Colton hop-out with our bearings set on the low-line to Tucson. With minimal difficulty, our crew navigated towards the LA Loop at the East end of the Yard. Having never been here, it would have been virtually impossible to navigate the track layouts, which cross and turn in absurd fashions, were it not for the hundreds of hobo monikers scrawled beneath the bridges quietly offering all sorts of contradictory advice. I must’ve spent three hours milling about the area, carefully reading the faded messages left by tramps long gone. Slogans, travel advice, personal threats, memorials to the departed, political symbols, elaborate artwork, all competing for space and giving life to the concrete bowels of an LA overpass. I pondered how many generations of travelers have had their only written history obliterated by a graffiti removal task force. All is temporal.
Aside from all the hobo vandalism, the Colton bridge hop-out consisted of an alluvial flow of trash emanating from the highway and a steel shopping cart converted into a stove. The aesthetics of this trash-hole were far greater than most of the LA that I’d observed. The mid-noon heat would likely have wrecked us, were it not for the bountiful spring of Natural Ice. I was quite content with the situation until a crustoid calling himself Sunny came stumbling down the tracks, dragging a sleeping bag so filthy a hazmat team should have been called. Sporting a grateful dead shirt, sandals, and the weathered red face of an aging man who’d clearly chugged himself into a stuttering vomit-coma every day that year, it was no surprise the first words out his mouth were “Got any Pot Brother bear?”
