Tuesday

Tuesday April 11
8:45 am
St. Catharines bus terminal

My mom, exhorting me to "be careful," drops me off to catch my bus to Buffalo. It's cold - April is surprisingly cold, I never get used to it. And I have no tent - only a small tarp, a sleeping bag and my Thermarest. My newly-acquired $2.00 canvas travel pack - frameless, as trainhopping requires - weighs a fucking ton even so. At the top of the deep, broad bag is my book for the journey - Steven Bach's "Final Cut," the story of 'Heaven's Gate' and the ruin of United Artists. Waiting for my bus, I crack it open and start reading.

But my concentration is repeatedly disrupted as my mind races ahead to the border. What will I tell them? Purpose of journey: to hop a freight train to DC in order to disrupt the World Bank. Obviously this will not do. I could leave out the train-hopping part, but that seems an unnecessary risk. Finally I settle on my story: I am going to visit my friend in Buffalo. I will be there for a week. Will they notice the train maps? What about the tarp? But what can I do. I repeat and refine my story for the entire bus ride there, my heart racing.

Tuesday April 11
10 am
Canada-US border: Niagara Falls

Crossing the border by bus, you are first grilled on the purpose of your visit, then led to a separate room for the search. This is kind of a relief - no need to square my fabricated story with the contents of my bag. But, suddenly, I can't find my wallet.

I run back to the bus - not there. It's not in my pocket. The line moves me closer to the inspection. I feel sick. I close my eyes, concentrate really hard, and finally remember that I've stashed it in my pack. I don't know why. I snatch it out and bring it to the first border guard, who buys my story.

I am dressed conservatively and am trying very hard to speak calmly and smile, but at the inspection I remember an offensive item I had overlooked: my day pack itself.

This was given to me as a gift when a film of mine played at the Inside Out festival. A compact black vinyl bag, it read:

UNITED COLORS OF BENETTON - TREVISO ITALY

I hate Benetton, as I hate corporations generally. I was certainly not going to be a walking billboard for these guys. So, immediately upon receipt, I blacked out the letters so that it read:

UNITE             OR                                   R     I   O  T

I am quite sure that this gag will expose me as an anarchist subversive, and that I will be strip-searched, arrested, and tortured.

He doesn't even look at it.

By the time I get back on the bus, I feel like I have been raped. Lying is a drag.

Tuesday April 11
11 am
Buffalo

I arrive in Buffalo. here I am obliged to kill four hours.

I can hardly believe that the institution which exchanges my currency is a bank. It's this vast cavernous thing with fifty-foot ceilings and huge expanses of useless space; it feels like Union Station, with all the cold stone and echoing footsteps. It seems to be designed to encourage feelings of inadequacy, and with the enormous slab on my back I know am an The Enemy. I get out as soon as I can get directions to the library. Here I spend a long time on the internet, seeking and copying street and train maps of Salamanca. The vibe here is totally different - everyone seems friendly, helpful, communicative. They don't even make me pay for my copies.

I turn up my nose at a lengthy procession of restaurants. I don't feel like eating, but I know what I'm about to get into. Eat now, starve later! Eventually I go for the worst lunch of all, a cheap cheese pizza in a clamorous food court, above a fashion store hilariously named "Hit or Miss." Here I reflect on what, in my rush, I have left in Toronto: flashlight, compass, cup. Pretty bad. I miss Siue already. What the hell am I doing. I'm a wreck.

And it's snowing.

Tuesday April 11
3:30 pm
Southbound on Hwy. 219

At the terminal, I had been looking for the proper bus. At what I thought was my platform, I saw a bus marked "Dubois." You know, french, like Claude dew-BWAH, right? I looked it up on my map, which I continued to clutch manically. I asked the driver if he went to Salamanca. He said yes. "And you end up in Dubois?"

He gave me a funny look.

"Doo-BOYZ."

At that moment I knew I had entered another dimension.

As the bus glides down the highway, I note that it would be a fine one for hitching. I had felt this consciousness ever since my first big trips - now every highway was evaluated for sightlines and available sleeping cover. Lately, this impulse had detoured into an obsessive perusal of every passing freight train for rideable cars. Now all I have to do is choose one and get on. A very different thing.

Outside my window, the snow is turning into freezing rain. Through the torrent I can see that the scenery is beautiful - and mountainous too, which I had not expected, but which rationalizes the big green blob to the south of Salamanca's dot on the map.

As I read my book, annoyances are piling up - buddy in the back chortling at his portable TV, lady up front smacking her lips, sleepy legs blocking my path to the scary open-pit toilet. As we near my destination, the sleepy-legs guy asks me the time and where we are. He doesn't speak English very well, but we talk a bit about the mountains' names, which neither of us know. I am getting jumpy.

Tuesday April 11
4 pm
East Salamanca

I am deposited at the side of the road - gray and ripe-smelling from the spring rain - in this weird place that, by my pathetic map, looks like the Eastern edge of town. Several 24-hour convenience/gas bars; a darkened redwood shack with beer signs in the window; a 'drug-free zone' wrapping an impregnable-looking high school. All the houses are dilapidated wood things; they are interspersed with tiny, overgrown woodlots. A Small Town.

On the left I discern some grassy, dead-as-a-doorknob train tracks, old grainers rusting away on them. I hope this isn't all that's left. By my notes, the crew change happens at 9 tonight. Right now, I need groceries.

When I see the cop car for the second time, I decide to get off the main drag and ditch my backpack. This is not a tourist town - I must look suspicious. Heading toward town, I walk under a bridge with badly-eroded pillars - wouldn't it be funny, going trainhopping and being killed by a collapsing bridge? Ha ha ha. A nearby insurance billboard featuring two grimacing Buffalo dweebs is the newest, shiniest thing in the whole town.

Not long after a truck absolutely plastered with multicolored Jesus-is-doom stickers, I duck into a library to avoid the increasingly torrential rain. Here I read more of 'Final Cut' - this chapter is an account of the founding of United Artists. Chaplin, Griffith, Pickford and Fairbanks aiming to create an apparatus where artists, not businesspeople, controlled the production of art. Sounds like what I've ben working on for years, only on a much larger scale. Theirs didn't work too good either. I'll have to do an analysis of this someday...

Tuesday April 11
7 pm
East Salamanca

I'm back - I've got my groceries, plus Tylenol for my splitting headache. Back at those beached grain cars, I duck into the undergrowth, scampering across a wide, open lawn that feels like no-man's land. I don't have to go far. On the next block is a chugging, steaming freight train, headlight staring into the encroaching dusk. This is the place.

This is not a major yard, that's for sure. The station house is good and derelict. No security to speak of. Conveniently, a street curves around and runs the length of the yard, so once again I ditch my pack, and stroll along to take stock.

This train isn't going anywhere, just moving cars around the yard; I haven't figured out how to read this kind of activity yet. This side of the tracks is half dead industrial buildings, half treed-in homes; the other side is solid jungle. The rain is still coming down, now light, now heavy.

As the road curves back from the yard, a dirt trail leads off and follows the tracks, and I take it. Now there are trees on my side, too, and a deep gully which I decide to investigate. Surveying the gully in the end of daylight, I find that the area is flat, not swampy, and well-placed to catch out.

Then I run across the tracks and, even as it gets steadily darker and colder and rainier, I sit on my fallen hydro pole and watch this mystery train, its air brakes spitting sporadically, engine running, but standing hopelessly still. I don't even know what I'm looking for - I'm just mesmerized, fascinated by the workings of the train, hypnotized by the little lights, the shadows of the workers. But this was clearly not the 'crew change' indicated in my hobo bible. After well over an hour of this I have to move or risk hypothermia, so I decide to go to bed. I cross back to retrieve my pack, narrowly missing a run-in with an angrily hectoring skunk.

Back in the gully. The rain isn't going away, so I use a half-fallen tree to hang my tarp (fastened on with soft sapling twigs - ingenuity!), and excavate an old hunk of fiberglass to lay under me. I hunker down, with my jeans hanging from the trunk above me, and try to sleep.