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shadows the Trans-Canada Highway, the main artery running 3,000 miles from Vancouver to St John's, Newfoundland, in more or less a straight shot. We're catching out to go all the way home. We find a hidden spot in the trees about twenty yards from the Today is the day. It's early August, but this far north the summer is waning fast, and I am ready to begin the long trip from Vancouver to New York City. The plan, hatched around a campfire on the beach a week previous, is to ride the Canadian Pacific rail line 3,000 miles east, across half a dozen mountain ranges and the vast wheat ocean of the great plains. I wake up to a gray dawn on Wreck Beach at the western edge of Vancouver, wrapped up in a tent fly that has kept out none of the night's drizzle. A mist rises off the Georgia Strait reveal ing Vancouver Island in the distance. I wake up Pike, my traveling companion since we met several weeks before in Southern Colorado. He's from Clearwater, Florida, with a bushy beard that doesn't hide a babyface. Pike is a much more experienced train hopper, who I hope wi ll serve as a fitting guide for our trip . Neither of us has ever been on this line, and aren't really sure what we're in for. All we have to guide us are a few notes cribbed from some trainhoppers in Eugene, Oregon, and a diner placemat printed with a rough map of Canada. But greater journeys have been undertaken with less. After packing up our gear, we ride a bus to the eastern edge of the ci ty where the yard of the CP I ies hidden beh i nd a row of warehouses. We stock up on suppl ies for what cou ld be a five-day ride: trai l mix, granola bars, dried fruit and as much water as we can carry. We walk several miles to the yard, and the long low sound of a train whistle grabs our attention . The trains from this yard, according to my rough notes, are only going one way. Although Canada is the second largest country in the world (after Russia), it is remarkably linear; 90 percent of the population lives within 200 miles of the US border, and freight lines on ly run where they are needed. The Canadian Pacific line tracks to sit and wait. It is a truism with riding freight that you spend as much time sitting around and waiting for the train as you do actually riding it. Even with a tip from a friend ly worker about when the train is pulling out, you are a nonpaying customer and on the railroad's schedule. Pike lectures me as we sit in the shade. "What we want is a hotshot, high priority freight that's going express from the coast to Toronto. Usually they're pulled by four units. That's gonna take us four days non- stop, except for crew changes every eight hours or so. It 'l l be loaded with mixed freight: car carriers, piggybacks, gondolas, forty-eights. Tankers are unridable. There might be some grainers, which are good to ride in , but try and pick a double-holed grainer over a single. There's more room. Don't get in a gondola that's carrying anything. The freight tends to shift, and it can squish you like a bug. And always throw your bag off first when you get off. If we get in an empty boxcar, make sure you stick a railroad spike in the door to hold it open, because if that door closes with you in it, they might not find you for months. But we probably aren't gonna ride any boxcars. They're on ly on junkers. Oh, and if we go in a tunnel, wet a cloth and cover your nose and mouth." I get him to explain to me that a unit is the train's engine, a piggyback is a truck trailer loaded on a flatbed , a gondola is an open- topped cargo container, and a forty-eight is a double-stacked cargo container that can go on a boat, train or truck. Tankers are sealed oil cars with no place to ride, and grainers are for carrying dry freight like gra in and fertilizer. A junker, which we want to avoid, is a low-priority train that stops to let hotshots by and probably isn't going very far. There's a whistle, and the low thunder of a train taking up its slack as it heads out. I feel like I'm going to puke from sheer terror at the thought of running up after a moving train and climbing on. From where the rai ls vanish behind a copse, the rumbling gets louder and, in what seems li ke slow motion, the first engine bursts into view. I can see the engineer, leaning out the window, his forearm on the si ll. I swear he looks straight at me, even though he's 50 yards away and I'm well hidden. Three [38 .;: .

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