Lonesome Traveler (8 page)

GUADALOUPE IS 275.5 miles down the shining rail from San Francisco, down on the subdivision named after it, the Guadaloupe—the whole Coast Division begins at those sad dead end blocks of Third and Townsend where grass grows from soot beds like green hair of old tokay heroes long slanted into the ground like the railroad men of the 19th century whom I saw in the Colorado plains at little train order stations slanted into the ground of the hard dry dustcake, boxed, mawklipped, puking grit, fondled by the cricket, gone aslant so far sunk gravewise boxdeep into the foot of the sole of the earth Oh, you'd think they had never suffered and dropped real sweats to that unhumped earth, had never voiced juicy sorrow words from blackcaked lips now make no more noise than the tire of an old tin lizzy the tin of which is zinging in the sun winds this afternoon, ah spectral Cheyenne Wellses and train order
Denver Rio Grandes Northern Pacifies and Atlantic Coast Lines and Wunposts of America, all gone.— The Coast Division of the ole S.P. which was built in umpteen o too too and used to run a little crazy crooked mainline up and down the hills of Bayshore like a crazy cross country track for European runners, this was their gold carrying bandito held up railroad of the old Zorro night of inks and furly caped riders.— But now ‘tis the modern ole Coast Division S.P. and begins at those dead end blocks and at 4:30 the frantic Market Street and Sansome Street commuters as I say come hysterically running for their 112 to get home on time for the 5:30 televisions Howdy Doody of their gun toting Neal Cassady'd Hopalong childrens. 1.9 miles to 23rd Street, another 1.2 Newcomb, another 1.0 to Paul Avenue and etcetera these being the little piss stops on that 5 miles short run thru 4 tunnels to mighty Bayshore, Bayshore at milepost 5.2 shows you as I say that gigantic valley wall sloping in with sometimes in extinct winter dusks the huge fogs milking furling meerolling in without a sound but as if you could hear the radar hum, the oldfashioned dullmasks mouth of Potato Patch Jack London old scrollwaves crawling in across the gray bleak North Pacific with a wild fleck, a fish, the wall of a cabin, the old arranged wallworks of a sunken ship, the fish swimming in the pelvic bones of old lovers lay tangled at the bottom of the sea like slugs no longer discernible bone by bone but melted into one squid of time, that fog, that terrible and bleak Seattleish fog that potatopatch wise comes bringing messages from Alaska and from the Aleutian mongol, and from the seal, and from the wave, and from the smiling porpoise, that fog at Bayshore you can see waving in and filling in rills and rolling down and making milk on hillsides and you think, “It's hypocrisy of men makes these hills grim.”—To the left at the Bayshore mountain wall there's
all your San Fran Bay pointing across the broadflat blues to the Oakland lostness and the train the mainline train runs and clack and clackity clicks and makes the little Bayshore yard office a passing fancy things so important to the railroad men the little yellowish shack of clerks and paper onion skin train order lips and clearances of conductors and waybills tacked and typed and stamped from Kearney Neb. on in with mooing cows that have moved over 3 different railroads and all ye such facts, that passed in a flash and the train negotiates, on, passing Visitación Tower, that by old Okie railroad men of now-California aint at all mexicanized in pronunciation, Vi Zi Tah Sioh, but is simply called, Visitation, like on Sunday morning, and oft you hear, “Visitation Tower, Visitation Tower,” ah ah ah ah aha.— Mile post 6.9, the following 8.6 Butler Road far from being a mystery to me by the time I became a brakeman was the great sad scene of yard clerking nights when at the far end of a 80 car freight the numbers of which with my little lamp I was taking down as I crunched over the gravel and all backtired, measuring how far I had to go by the sad streetlamp of Butler Road shining up ahead at the wall's end of long black sadmouth longcars of ye iron reddark railroad night—with stars above, and the smashby Zipper and the fragrance of locomotive coalsmoke as I stand aside and let them pass and far down the line at night around that South San Fran airport you can see that sonofabitch red light waving Mars signal light waving in the dark big red markers blowing up and down and sending fires in the keenpure lostpurity lovelyskies of old California in the late sad night of autumn spring comefall winter's summertime tall, like trees.— all of it, and Butler Road no mystery to me, no blind spot in this song, but well known, I could also measure how far I had to go by the end of the gigantic rose neon six miles long you'd think saying WEST
COAST BETHLEHEM STEEL as I'd be taking down the numbers of boxcars JC 74635 (Jersey Central) D&RG 38376 and NYC and PR and all the others, my work almost done when that huge neon was even with me and at the same time this meant the sad little streetlamp of Butler Road was only 50 feet away and no cars beyond that because that was the crossing where they'd cut them and then fold them over into another track of the South City yards, things of brake significance switch significance I only got to learn later.— So SF milepost 9.3 and what a bleak little main street, o my goodness, the fog'd roll in fine from there and the little neon cocktails with a little cherry on a toothpick and the bleak foglike green Chronicles in 10^ sidewalk tin clonks, and yr bars with fat slick haired ex troopers inside drinking and October in the poolhall and all, where I'd go for a few bars of candy or desultory soups between chores as yardclerk when I was a yard-clerk digging the lostness on that side, the human, and then having to go to the other end, a mile towards the Bay, to the great Armour & Swift slaughterplants where I'd take down the numbers of meat reefers and sometimes have to step aside and wait while the local came in and did some switching and the tagman or conductor would always tell me which ones were staying, which ones going.— Always at night, and always soft ground of like manure but really rat ground underneath, the countless rats I saw and threw rocks at till I felt like being sick, I'd hurry fleeing as from nightmare from that hole and sometimes fabricated phoney numbers instead of going too near a gigantic woodpile which was so full of rats it was like their tenement.— And the sad cows mooing inside where little ratty Mexicans and Californians with bleak unpleasant unfriendly faces and going-to-work jalopies were milling around in their bloody work—till finally I worked it on a Sunday,
the Armour & Swift yards, and saw that the Bay was 60 feet away and I'd never known it, but a dump yard a recka of crap and rat havens worse than ever tho beyond it the waters did ripple bluely and did in the sad morning clarity show clear flat mirrors clear to Oakland and the Alameda places across the way.— And in the hard wind of the Sunday morning I heard the mutter of the tinware walls of brokendown abandoned slaughter house warehouses, the crap inside and dead rats killed by that local on off nights and some even I might have hit with my jacketful of protective rocks, but mostly systematically killed rats laying around in the keen heartbreaking cloud haunted wildwind day with big silver airplanes of civilized hope taking off across the stinking swamp and filthy tin flats for places in the air.— Gah, bah, ieoeoeoeoe—it has a horrible filthy moaning sound you'd hear eiderdowning in that flydung those hideaway silos and murdered tinpaint aisles, scum, of salt, and bah oh bah and harbors of the rat, the axe, the sledgehammer, the moo cows and all that, one big South San Francisco horror there's your milepost 9.3.—- After that the rushing train takes you to San Bruno clear and far around a long bend circling the marsh of the SSF airport and then on in to Lomita Park milepost 12.1 where the sweet commuter trees are and the redwoods crash and talk about you when you pass in the engine the boilers of which redly cast your omnipotent shadow out on the night.— You see all the lil ranchstyle California homes and in the evening people sipping in livingrooms open to the sweetness, the stars, the hope that lil children must see when they lay in little beds and bedtime and look up and a star throbs for them above the railroad earth, and the train calls, and they think tonite the stars will be out, they come, they leave, they lave, they angelicize, ah me, I must come from a land where they let the children cry, ah me
I wish I was a child in California when the sun's gone down and the Zipper crashes by and I could see thru the redwood or the fig tree my throbbing hope-light shining just for me and making milk on Permanente hillsides horrible Kafka cement factories or no, rats of South City slaughterhouses or no, no, or no, I wish I was a little child in a crib in a little ranchstyle sweet house with my parents sipping in the livingroom with their picture window pointing out on the little backyard of lawning chairs and the fence, the ranchstyle brown pointed full fence, the stars above, the pure dry golden smelling night, and just beyond a few weeds, and blocks of wood, and rubber tires, bam the main line of the Ole SP and the train flashing by, toom, tboom, the great crash of the black engine, the grimy red men inside, the tender, then the long snake freighttrain and all the numbers and all the whole thing flashing by, gcrachs, thunder, the world is going by all of it finally terminated by the sweet little caboose with its brown smoky light inside where old conductor bends over waybills and up in the cupolo the rear man sits looking out once in a while and saying to himself all black, and the rear markers, red, the lamps in the caboose rear porch, and the thing all gone howling around the bend to Burlingame to Mountain View to the sweet San Joses of the night the further down Gilroys Carnaderos Corporals and that bird of Chittenden of the dawn, your Logans of the strange night all be-lit and insected and mad, your Watsonvilles sea marshes your long long line and mainline track sticky to the touch in the midnight star.

MILE POST 46.9 is San Jose scene of a hundred interested bums lounging in the weeds along the track with their packs of junk, their buddies, their private water
tanks, their cans of water to make coffee or tea or soup with, and their bottle of tokay wine or usually muskatel.—The Muskat California is all around them, in the sky blue, tatteredly white clouds are being shoved across the top of the Santa Clara Valley from Bayshore where a high fogwind came and thru South City gaps too and the peace lies heavy in the sheltered valley where the bums have found a temporary rest.— Hot drowse in the dry weeds, just hollows of dry reed stick up and you walk against them crashing.— “Well boy, how's about a shot of rum to Watsonville.” “This aintrum boy, this is a new kinda shit”—a colored hobo sitting on a shitty old newspaper of last year and's been used by Rat Eye Jim of the Denver viaducts who came thru here last spring with a package of dates on his back—“Things aint been as bad as this since 1906!” Now it's 1952 October and the dew is on the grain of this real ground. One of the boys picks up a piece of tin from the ground (that got bounced off a gon in a sudden sprrram of freights ramming together in the yard from the bucklin slack) (bowm!)—pieces of tin go flying off, fall in the weeds, outside track No. 1.— The hobo puts the tin on rocks over the fire and uses it to toast some bread but's drinking tokay and talking to the other boys and toast burns just like in tile kitchen tragedies.— The bum comes curses angrily because he lost some bread, and kicks a rock, and says “Twenty eight years I spent inside the walls of Dannemora and I had my fill of excitin panoramas of the great actions like when drunken Canneman wrote me that letter fum minneapoly and it was jess about Chicago sponges—I turd him looka jock you caint—well I wrote im a letter ennyways.” Aint been a soul listening because no one listens to a bum all the other bums are blagdengabsting and you cant find nor finangilate yr way out of that—all talking at the same time and all of them confused. You have
to go back to the railroad man to understand.— Like, say, you ask a man “Where's track 109?”—nu—if it's a bum he'll say “Cart right over there dadday, and see if the old boy in the blue bandana knows, I'm Slim Holmes Hubbard from Ruston Louisiana and I got no time and got no knowledge to make me ways of knowin what where that track 109—only thing's I got, is—I want a dime, if you can spare a dime I'll go along my way peacefully—if you cant I'll go along my way peacefully—ya cant win—ya cant lose—and from between here to Bismarck Idaho I got nothing but lost and lost and lost everything I ever had.” You've got to admit these bums into your soul when they talk like that—most of them rasp “Track 109 Chillicothe Ioway” thru the stubbles and spits of their beard—and wander off dragassing packs so huge, profound, heavy—dismembered bodies are in there you'd think—red eyes, wild wild hair, the railroad men look at them with amazement and at first sight then never look again—what would wives say?—If you ask a railroad man what track is 109, he stop, stop chewing his gum, shift his package his coatlamp or lunch and turn, and spit, and squint at the mountains to the east and roll his eyes very slowly in the private cavern of his eyebone between brow bone and cheek bone, and say, still deliberating and having deliberated “They call it track 109 but they should call it no, it's right next to the ice platform you know the icehouse up there—” “Yeah—” “There it is, from track one on the main line here we start the numbers but the ice house make em jump they make a turn and you have to go across track 110 to get to 109—But you never have to go to 109 too often—so it's just like 109 was jess missing from the yard … numbers, see …” “Yeah”—I know it for sure—“I know it for sure now.” “And there she is—” “Thanks—I gotta get there fast”—“That's the
trouble with the railroad, you always gotta get there fast—‘cause if you dont it's like turning down a local on the phone and say you want to turn over and go to sleep (like Mike Ryan did last Monday)” he's sayin to himself.— And we walk wave and are gone.

This is the cricket in the reed. I sat down in the Pajaro riverbottoms and lit fires and slept with my coat on top of my brakeman's lantern and considered the California life staring at the blue sky —