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All t he next day we wind slowly into the Rockies toward the Great Divide, through fie lds of wi ldflowers and bright blue glacia l streams. The palette of colors is impossibly bright, with glaciers looming thousands of feet above us like great pieces of sky fa llen on the mountaintops. Our train dead-ends in Fie ld, BC, the engines disconnect. Now we have to get to the next crew change spot to try and catch another t ra in. We hitch 100 mi les to Calgary and so bypass the famous spira l t unnels outside Fie ld, where the train does two consecutive loops inside the mountain as it climbs. I don't mind not having to spend 20 minutes in that black, fume-fi lled hole. At Calgary the mountains end and the plains begin an un interrupted flow across the continent. "You can see Regina from here," our ri de te lls us. There are 500 miles of treeless prairie between us and there . An oi l rig roughneck rides us through a hundred miles sagebrush of and pumpjacks bobbing their heads like awful metal birds drinking oil from the earth. He lets us off in the town of Red Cliff, where a long grain train happens to sit sided by the road. We jump down, shoulder our packs and run through the grass to the rai l bed, climbing on just as the train pulls out. A litany of towns pass by: Medicine Hat, Maplecreek, Gull Lake, Antelope, Swift Current. We never know exactly where we are, f iguring out by random signs and landmarks where the tra in is taking us. In the unendurable expanse of the plains, east is all that matters for the moment. A t iny wooden sign, surrounded for miles in every direction by nothing but waving wheat, informs us that we are in Saskatchewan . Over two hundred square miles and a million people, two-thirds in cities, Saskatchewan exudes a loneliness that makes me think of the Russian steppes. Many of the towns are known on ly from the names on grain elevators. Their on ly reason for existing is to provide a place to load the mil lions of tons of wheat a year hauled to the urban centers and coasts. They loom up out of the plains like skyscrapers, a beautiful weathered functionality that inspired the international style of Le Corbusier. In the f laming red sunset we ro ll past a doe splayed by the side of the tracks after being hit by our tra in. We pass a flock of migrating pelicans in a lake at dusk. The sound of the tra in fades into the background, and I sing Woody Guthri e's "Hobo's Lullaby" off-key to Pike, but he's already sleeping. We wake up in Moose Jaw, an outpost in the middle of the endless wheat fields. The train shudders to a full stop and we sneak off through a drainage ditch of cattails. A lift tells us that Moose Jaw is what the Indians thought this bend in the river looked like, or maybe what the first settler used to repair his wagon wheel. An hour later, in Regina, we walk to the railyard, climb a fence and wait for a train to pull out. A bull drives back and forth in his white pickup. A string of grainers starts edging out of the yard and we scramble on, diving into a hole before we're seen. I've gotten much more adept at climbing on a moving train now. I look back out from the hole and I'm greeted by two smiling faces sticking out from the back hole of the car ahead. A boy and a girl, maybe 15 and 16, all dreadlocks and bright smiles. Suddenly, the tra in takes a sharp left going out of the yard and the kids across shout, "Jump' t his tra in's going to Saskatoon'" Saskatoon, 350 miles to the northwest, is the last place I want to go. We throw our packs off and jump, landing running in the loose gravel. By some miracle and a little grace, I'm the only one who doesn't face plant. The kids are returning to Winnipeg after a rave in Regina, neither has a car or money and hitching in Saskatchewan is difficult, especia lly with dreadlocks. That pretty much leaves freight riding as the on ly option. Another train is pulling out, two bright red units pull ing mixed freight. The engineer looks right at us. My heart drops. The boy, whose name I don't even know, walks right up to the engineer and they gesticu late over the roar of the engine. The boy runs back, grabs his pack and gestures us to follow him as we climb up the ladder into the second engine. "What did you say to him?" I ask. " I said, 'Are you going to Winnipeg, eh?' " he replies with a smile. Canadian Pacific has provided us with hydraulic chairs, a computerized readout of speed and weight, a bath room and a refrigerator. We patch up our cuts with the first aid kit and sit back for the 12-hour ride to Winnipeg. The engineer gets on the intercom from the lead engine and says to us, " Stay down until we're out of town. And don't touch anything." The number one ru le of riding trains is to never damage rai l property. We know he's putting his job on the line by givi ng us a ride. If we get caught, he'll just pretend he didn't know we were there. We speed through the night, sleeping splayed on the chairs, on the floor, watchi ng the dark prairie tear by out the open window. continued on page 108