the Adventure Lifestyle magazine

WINNIPEG, MANITOBA In the morning, the sun rises like a new penny. The vast roll of wheat fields gives over to stands of poplar and cottonwood, and we pull into the huge switchyard of Winnipeg. A dozen tracks wide, trains are being broken down and built up, trains emblazoned with names of forgotten rail lines, companies swallowed up by mergers, their rolling freight rusting reminders of a time when rail freight was the only game in town. Now the Trans-Canada Highway carries a huge share of the cargo. As the train creeps through the yard, a flock of pigeons bursts from the darkness of an open boxcar, flash ing silver in the morning light. This train is the hotshot, a high priority freight train to Toronto that we've wanted all along. But now we have to get off because the crew is switching shifts and we don't want our guy to get in trou ble. We go to a diner near the tracks and in the bathroom I see how filthy I am. I'm covered in rust and oil, like AI Jolson with a big Cheshire cat smile on my face. For some reason it makes me happy, and I don't want to clean up. Bruised and worn out from the trains, Pike wants to try hitching again. We are in the Kenora yard at nightfall , a light rain is falling. We're worn out and arguing over trains or hitching, and both refusing to compromise. I decide to wait for a train no matter what. Pike decides to sleep by the highway, believing he'll have better luck hitching alone. This is where we split up. Pike will head south to Florida, I will go over the top of the Great Lakes to New York. He walks away into the darkness. A beautiful loneliness washes over me. I sit all night under a bridge in the rain, waiting for a train. Everything sounds like a train: the downshifting of trucks on the Trans-Canada, car horns, distant thunder, my own heart beating. I can't sleep. I'm feeling sordid, sitting in the weeds by the track's edge, five days out of Vancouver. Whenever a bull drives by, I duck down. In the middle of the night the roar of a passing train wakes me up. I look up and see it's a westbound hotshot, rolling right past an eastbound hotshot on the back, grab the ladder and step up. In a moment I'm sitting on the porch of a forty- eight, going through the predawn chill at 60 miles an hour. The stars wheel overhead, tracing our arc over the top of Lake Superior. DAY SIX: MILE 1,800 THUNDER BAY, ONTARIO As the sun rises I pass through a country of abandoned cabins, jack pines and birches in a sea of muskegs, still black lakes with clinging mist. The bogs of northern Ontario were as much a technical chal lenge in building the railroad as was going through the Rockies. It was like building a house on a sponge. Engineers would try to fill in the swamps with gravel to lay the rail bed down, and the soupy mud would swallow the tracks whole. We come out on bluffs above Lake Superior, which stretches like a black ocean away to the southern horizon. I feel like this train is the only place I belong. I slip easily into the habit of hiding when we roll through towns, I feel the rhythms of the wheels as a function of my own bocy. The train shudders to a stop with a rattle of slack action. The sounds of the forest, previously vei led by the train, rise up in an instant chorus. There is no town, maybe they are just waiting for a switch signal to side for another train. I hear frogs, bees, birdsongs, wind in the leaves. And there by the tracks, not ten feet away, is a heavily laden raspberry bramble. The train is at a dead stop. I jump off and grab raspberries by the fistful, scratching my arms, the sweet juice running down my neck through the rust and oil. Maybe only bears have ever eaten here, I think. Maybe I am the first human ever to eat from this patch, a hundred miles from the nearest town. The berries are perfect. I am nowhere near home. The train is waiting for me, it hasn't pulled out yet. All the ghosts of the workers who built this railroad, all the people who have knowingly or not helped me across the huge continent, all swirl around me in those few moments. This is a great secret of train hopping. And secondary track. Heart racing, I throw everything in my bag, throw the bag on my this is what it means to be alive. • Get way out of town. Thke the river road through the heart of some of the wilder West's most dramatic scenery on exciting new 5-, 6- and 7- day A&K River Rafting programs. On your own, with friends or your entire family-take a real break for a change.On an A&K rafting adven- For details, call your travel agent or Abercrombie & Kent at (800) 323-7308 Visit our website at www.abercrombiekent.com 108 ~_!..r.onCTIOM CST#2007274-20 USIfttll 11..;;;;;;"'1

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