!Riding freight trains --- agk's diary 16 April 2023 @ 17:50 UTC --- written on iPad Air 4 (2020) after church sunshower birds sing a thousand songs --- d1337 told me things he wants me to write about. I love prompting; writing improves in conversation. First car I rode was a boxcar with some dirty kids & their dogs. 19, I hitched 4200 km from a protest against threatened invasion of Iraq to a 100-hr Wilderness First Responder training hosted by street medics in an old church/union hall. My first time in mountain or pacific timezones. A lot happened: frostbite, roadkill elk steak, almost falling through lake ice I slept on out of sight of shore, and people. People who did heroin, people who drove truck, people who stripped, people who tended bar, people who challenged the Dept of Livestock and Fish & Game. The biggest thing about hitching somewhere far away with a deadline is the emotions as hundreds drive past, one to a car, one to a truck. Hours, days of trying not to resent them when it's 30C below 0, hurting fingers holding cardboard sign indicating somewhere further west. With a train, yeah you wait for it, but there's nothing to resent. Doze on your pack, drink water, read a book, heat hot chocolate on canned heat or a fire of sticks, huddle under wet cardboard in rain. Not putting on a show, waiting. When the train arrives there's no time. Stomp fire, grab stuff, take off running down the string of cars. The crew can change in five minutes. Can I find something rideable in that time? A grainer with a solid porch (not a "suicide porch" exposed to spinning axles, wheels, track)? A 14.5 meter container in a 16 m solid-floor well car (not a "suicide" well car). Between wheels under the rear axle of a semi-trailer piggybacked on a flat car? Air brakes tick and hiss, keeping air in the system so it can roll quick after the short stop. Cars lurch and resound as the unit moves and slack pulls out of the system. Thundering wagons move at a walk, a trot. I spy a rideable car, throw pack and water jugs in, sprint, jam my knee in the ladder, climb on. Then rest, sleep, read, enjoy stunning sights for hours or days til I get where I'm going. d1337 wrote (hope he doesn't mind the quote) "can't even imagine hopping on a train...but the subversi- veness and reappropriating nature...strikes a posi- tive chord with me." I tried above to help you imagine hopping on. Now the other parts. I didn't want to leave a paper trail and mostly didn't. No address, car, ID, bank account, credit card, cellphone, limited time in cities with extensive surveillance infrastructure, no contact with family. It was outlaw life, romantic and lonely. Misdemeanor trespass, failure to appear in desert mountains where caught. That's it. I worked with experienced medics, took continuing ed, arrived far-flung places on time (except once). I carried a photocopied rail atlas with line tonnage and notes on where crews change. I didn't use a scanner and didn't call in car numbers to get their destinations. I rarely talked to train crews or other riders. To transfer from one line to another, you have to walk or ride public buses as inconspicuously as possible. A big pack, dirty face, etc makes you conspicuous. When the car you're on gets dropped somewhere stupid, you have to hitch. To eat on low or no dollars, I dumpster-dived, foraged, occasion- ally shoplifted. I slept outside, bathed in creeks and public toilets, sort of like a wild animal. Riding train as a girl (and young) wasn't a big deal. I didn't drink, but I had two beers and a knife. Once or twice, I offered to drink with a guy who menaced me. I sneakily poured most of mine out, but at the end of a beer around his fire I was humanized, we were buds, he was more likely to want to protect me than to want to use me roughly. Hitching was mostly fine though rarely I got stuck in a car with a guy going a long way my direction, and tolerated unredirectable grossness like him casually jacking off as he drove. Mostly guys admire and slightly fear adventurous women. I had a knife, could fly into a terrifying, screeching, dangerous "mentally ill" banshee if need be, get swiftly deposited in roadside wastes where semis & RVs blow by at 140 kph and no one'd even see me to pick me up. I love wilderness. Where track diverges from road, where you can see a thunderstorm and wall of rain for 15 km before entering it and getting soaked, where thundering trains go, I loved that. It's hard to nail a destination on time as a casual rider, though. It was lonely on the road. So I settled down, let myself get caught, did my time, and went on with life.