TRAINS & TRACKS: CANTOS FOR CANADA
Boxcar Graffiti, Magic Rain Radio, and the call of the continental epic
I. A Thousand Miles From Nowhere
This photograph was taken by me on the Trans-Canada Highway outside Brandon, Manitoba, sometime in mid-to-late August 2007.
So today I went to go play on the train tracks.
I jumped on some slow-moving trains and rode for 200m or so, then jumped off. It was fun! Having almost died, it is time to get my sh*t in order and finally undertake the trip I have wanted to take since I was a kid.
I fulfilled my dream of hitchhiking across Canada in summer 2007 when I was 22. Later I got over my powerful stage fright and started singing in front of people on an almost-daily basis.
Sure, it nearly got me killed last week. But that’s because I ignored my initial instinct and allowed a dangerous person to get close to me for way too long. But almost getting killed has helped me focus a bit. It’s like those blinder horses wear during races. I know where I wanna go and I know what I need to do to acquire the resources to get there. Then, what has always been the easiest part (for me) shall commence: actually doing the thing. The act. The experience. Not the planning, not the what-ifs, memorizing emergency numbers, finding a pen whose ink won’t wash off my journals’ pages if it rains too hard (I lost my 2007 road journals that way. Rookie mistake. Amateur hour.) Also, I will have my life’s work, my novel released by the end of this calendar year, or if not, at LEAST by next summer before I head for the Klondike.
Now? I want to hop a freight train across Canada. My ultimate destination is Dawson City, Yukon. VERY doubtful I'll get a train up there so I'll have to hop one from Ontario that heads north, up and around Lake Huron and Lake Superior, then across the Great Plains and into the mountains. From there I will either hitchhike to the Yukon or take a Greyhound, depending on travel fatigue, Travelling like this, you NEVER know. I could get to B.C. in 5 days, or it could take 8 weeks. You just don't know. A woman I met on my travels showed me a way to identify, via the bar codes on the twist ties, which trains are going where. So I'll know, when getting on, whether that train is heading West or whatever.
I won’t be able to do this until summer 2023. I have to taper off from methadone, because the last place in the world one can procure hard drugs is, as we all know, the middle of nowhere. Cuz when you’re a thousand miles from nowhere, time don’t matter to you. So who gives a shit about drugs?
I don’t want drugs anyway. I want vitality. That is the source of my disappointment in adult life. The distinct lack of vitality.
So I hit a train yard today to try and get back in shape. I forgot how funny/beautiful boxcar graffiti can be. The best one I saw today? It said this:
WILD-EYED AND WENT ASTRAY. 5'9". 1993.
I wish I had a camera. Boxcar graffiti is sacred. Part of our cultural/historical inheritance. From dirty jokes to ardent pleas PLEASE TELL JEFF S. OF NELSON, B.C. TO PHONE HOME - DAD, I’ve been reading boxcar graffiti my whole life. The only rule is this: NEVER alter these writings. They’re not modern hieroglyphs (those would be emoticons), but they are part of a living history. Like clearing out your grandpa’s attics after his death and stumbling across a cache of telegrams from WWII. The fear, the excitement, I’m sure it’s all there. It’s the pulsating unsaid that is so heart wrenching about boxcar graffiti. Similar to WWII letters and telegrams I’ve read:
Darling, will you be there when I get back?
Ma. Pa. I’m scared. Tomorrow’s our first Day on the Somme and I can see my pen shaking every time my heart beats and I don’t wanna die but…
Not that far off from
Tell Jeff S. of Nelson B.C. to phone home. - Dad
They are sacred tidbits (timbits). Postcards from the past. We can enjoy them but we must never change them, not with sidewalk chalk, not with spray paint. I feel very strongly about this.
Anyway, regarding WILD-EYED AND WENT ASTRAY. 5'9". 1993. I thought to myself either this person did not try very hard to find their wild-eyed friend/partner, or they tried EVERY SINGLE METHOD IN THE WORLD.
I hope he/she/they found him/her/whoever. It’s a big world but you’d be amazed how many times you run into the same people travelling. My mother says the same about her annual 3-month walks on the Camino, a series of interconnected paths and networks through France & Spain that used to comprise a religious pilgrimage and, for many, still do comprise a religious pilgrimage. My mother was transformed completely after her first one. FoR the better. And she’s gone back every year since except for those paused COVID years
Anyway, Jack Kerouac’s On The Road is the book that made me wanna hitchhike my continent. Hanging out beside trains my entire childhood made me wanna hop a train across Canada. But the book that showed me just how it could be done is William T Vollmann's Riding Toward Everywhere, a book that shows that riding the rails in America is not some phenomenon from the Depression era. There are women and men and those who identify otherwise riding the rails of this colossal continent for every possible reason you can think of. And I'm looking forward to joining them, finally.
Vollmann’s book is full of wonderful quotes by older generations of freight hoppers, like Jim Tully’s Beggars of Life: A Hobo Autobiography published in 1924, at the height of Calvin Coolidge’s Roaring Twenties, further proof that men and women and others were hopping freights on either side of the Great Depression and that, for some of them, being a hobo was a choice. Here’s a choice line of Tully’s that Vollmann quotes a fragment of. I’m posting the full paragraph:
The imaginative young vagabond quickly loses the social instincts that make life bearable for other men. Always he hears voices calling in the night from far-away places where blue waters lap strange shores. He hears birds singing and crickets chirping a luring roundelay. He sees the moon, yellow ghost of a dead planet, haunting the earth.
Vollmann goes into Hemingway’s Nick Adams, who we first meet in “The Battler” just as he landed after jumping from a moving train: Nick stood up. He was all right. He looked up the track at the lights of the caboose going out of sight around a curve.
Vollmann’s book ends with a series of photographs. I love the one of the ancient hobo giving the finger, a mauled-and-dog-eared copy of Pat Conroy’s The Great Santini sitting open behind him. Some of the photographs are accompanied by text, and Vollmann inadvertently shows his age in one of them, which is a photo of graffiti on a wall saying:
Fuck it all! fuck this world! Fuck everything that you stand for! Don't belong! don't exist! Don't give a shit! Don't ever judge me!
Vollmann wonders briefly if this new generation of freight-hoppers might be, if not the “super-predators” predicated (and later, much much too later, repudiated) by criminologist John J. DiIulio Jr, a theory endorsed by Hillary Clinton, which may have cost her the few more votes she needed in strategic regions in 2016, are at least of a different, angrier breed. “Such sheer anger in those words!" marvels Vollmann, oblivious that they are lyrics from a song called “Surfacing” from the 1999 self-titled record by the metal band Slipknot, a band that always performs wearing masks as if to say “what we do is more important than who we are.”
Now that’s a philosophy any anonymous train hopper could embrace, rolling beneath the Western stars or the strange pink city auras of the Eastern Seaboard. It should also be noted that, during the Free Love era, a different, angrier cohort was embracing a different philosophy, even paying to have it tattooed in in on their bodies: FTW, which stood for Fuck the World. Which is pretty much an identical sentiment to Fuck it all! fuck this world!, is is not?
Now, as for our missing wild-eyed one who went astray in ‘93, I can’t help but wonder how young they were when they ran away. Because if they hit the streets at the age of 15 or 16, they might not be 5’9” anymore.
I am sure the other qualities remain though. Romantics stay romantic, even when exhausted by the rolling miles of the continent beneath their feet.
Anybody know a "wild-eyed" (NOT "wide-eyed") person who is 5 foot 9 inches and went astray in 1993? Just tell them...someone is looking for them. Wrote their description on a bucket car (NOT a boxcar. Bucket cars are like boxcars sawed in half. Either filled with pipe or empty with a carpet of industrial detritus.)
That's vague but...most things in life aren't adequately explained. This is just another one of those things. Do you think maybe the wild-eyed person ended up in that Soul Asylum video for "Runaway Train"?
II. FAST AS YOU
My friend Maggie just wrote to me: Riding the rails is how my grandfather got from Winnipeg to Sudbury. A very short trip compared to your journey! Good luck Danny
I wrote back (this was on Facebook, a pretty public page, so I am not relating private communication):
Winnipeg to Sudbury is no small thing! Win isn't too from the Manitoba-Ontario border, but when you're up in that Northwestern area of Ontario, finding rides can feel ENDLESS. Rainy River, Kenora, Nipigon, Thunder Bay...you start to think "WHEN will I start seeing signs for Sault Ste Marie, North Bay, Sudbury, etc?"
FINALLY near Marathon you start seeing signs for names you remember like Wawa, Sudbury, North Bay, etc. The numbers are REALLY high. You are still very far from home. The Great Canadian Shield, pock-marked with more lakes than you could ever see, much less name, is massive. It takes a long time to cross.
Another thing that sucks about switching from prairie to Canadian Shield (people from out west complain incessantly about this) but the instant you cross into Ontario from Manitoba, despite being on the exact same highway (Trans-Canada), the speed limit inexplicably drops from 100km/h to 90km/h. You start to see why people call it “On-terrible.” It’s so emblematic of Ontario’s red-tape nanny state bureaucratic bullshit. The Trans-Canada highway is 100km/h in every province except this one. Because Ontario is soooooo important, we need you to slow down. Make sure you see every single detail of all 57087835785780 dairy farms here. Seriously, what a dumb speed limit change. For no reason at all! It’s a two-lane highway most of the way. That doesn’t change. Here’s an old photo from a 2006 Canadian Tour I did with an old band, from left to right that’s Andrew, James, Carey, and me.
Where we’re standing, the speed limit is 90km/h. Four feet behind us, where Manitoba begins on the other side of that sign, the speed limit 100 km/h.
That’s some arbitrary shit right there.
Anyway, once you get to Marathon, you begin to see recognizable city names on the the signs again. A typical highway sign in Marathon, ON, will say:
WAWA 14O km
SAULT STE MARIE 410 km
SUDBURY 710 km
TORONTO 1102 km
There’s no Tim Horton’s in Marathon. In fact, there are still a LOT of Northwestern Ontario towns where Tim Horton's has not gained a foothold, nor has Wal-Mart. So they have Home Hardware, and a North Ontario coffee/donut chain called Robin's Donuts. I wish I could find my 2003 photo of Robin’s Donuts, back when their corporate colour scheme was to make every store “Neon Yellow striped with Tweety Bird Yellow” but I can’t locate it. Someone sane took over, and Robin’s stores look like this now. I prefer the yellow ones though. I like it when things are more interesting, even if they are only interesting because they are silly.
Sorry if you already know all this stuff. I'm just saying: Hopping a freight from Winnipeg to Sudbury is no small feat! That's something to be proud of!
FEW Canadians get to see the sights your uncle would have seen because they would've been from the railroad, not a highway and the money he saved not taking a Greyhound. Up north, the buses are not Greyhounds anymore. They are Ontario Northland. They run the same routes, and a Greyhound ticket bought in Toronto meant to take you to Thunder Bay will change in an Ontario Northland somewhere north of Barrie. I think Greyhound leases or contracts their routes out to Ontario Northland. This is a worryingly rickety arrangement, to me.
Without Ontario Northland, the people of North & Northwestern Ontario who don’t drive would be SCREWED. And O.N. (like Greyhound) doesn’t just pull passenger service. You can send stuff across the country via Greyhound, super cheap. It’s inexpensive because it takes a long time. Say you have a friend in Northern B.C. and you want him to have your old lawnmower. You can pay Greyhound to transport it for you for less than $70, and it’ll get to your buddy sometime between 3 and 4 weeks. That’s refreshingly old fashioned to me. There have been rumours and rumblings for years about Ontario Northland going belly up, and I just pray it doesn’t happen because there is no alternative (not everybody is like me or Maggie uncle and will hop a freight train. Not everybody is nuts.)
I'm pretty sure Northland is heavily subsidized though, meaning it probably won't go away. Like the useless Shepherd Line in Toronto, once you give people something, even if nobody uses it, it is political suicide to take it away. Even GO Transit is 90% subsidized, a percentage that blew my mind when I heard about it. Every train & bus is packed! How the hell is 90% of their operating cash just given to them by government? Maybe the nanny state is a good thing. Maybe I’ve been looking at this wrong. I will drop down to 90km/h after being used to going 100km/h for roughly 2000 km if it means our Ontario government will keep these crucial services around. As ever, they are needed most by those on the fringes. And those are my people, because I am one of them.
ANYWAY, it’s Aug 2007 I'm tired and wet and I just wanna get home and sleep for a week. I was standing outside one of those flat motels in Vermillion Bay, the single story ones, with my thumb out for HOURS as the sun went down. The more the sun sank, the more my heart sank with it.
I never tried to catch rides in the dark at night because the likelihood of being SEEN/NOTICED roadside w/ outstretched thumb and then picked up seemed equal to being NOT seen and run over.
So I'm in front of this Vermillion Bay motel for the last 4 hours of sunlight. No ride. Every passing vehicle is a pickup full of white men. (I wrote a recent post about how white men can be BRUTAL with stuff like this. They are VERY hard to get rides from unless they're over 60 or 65 and remember a time when hitchhikers were everywhere. Pierre Trudeau had once said "every Canadian should hitchhike Canada once," but....that was a different time. So often the men who would pick me up were themselves hitchhikers once and they would tell me about the Trudeau quote. I think 4 or 5 different men told me this.)
I'd gotten a ride the night before from somewhere in Manitoba from a cool Canadian fingerpicking guitar musician named Joel Fafard.
He played mainly finger-picking instrumental guitar and at the time (I think he started singing later on), his most recent album in summer '07 had two arguing roosters on the front cover and was called ...and ANOTHER thing...
Fafard (god bless him) took me into Vermillion Bay to buy me a Subway sandwich, then he brought me back to the Trans-Canada but the sun was almost gone and it was a BIT too late for me to be seen roadside. Still, I tried for four hours in the fading daylight to catch a ride, but no luck.
I’m going to switch to present tense now. It’s more immediate.
I spend the night in Vermillion Bay not sleeping but warm in my sleeping bag and relatively safe behind a building that said, simply, "Credit Union." There was no name. It was just the local “Credit Union.” I hide behind this unimaginatively named building because there’s a stretch of bars on the other side of the highway and there are Hell’s Angels guys everywhere drinking, cursing, smashing bottles, and the last thing I want this late in the game, just 2-3 days from home, is to get shanked by an angry drunk biker.
I figure bikers don’t have much need for credit, and I’m right. No one bothers me and in the morning I'm back in front of that same motel before 6AM, thumb outstretched. (Since leaving Calgary four days earlier, I've slept once, for 6 hours, somewhere in SASK.)
I swear to GOD it felt like every pickup truck in the WORLD driven by a lone white man, with room in back, passed me as I stood there with my thumb outstretched. I was beginning to feel like a stupid failure. Like maybe there was local ordinance I didn't about banning all hitchhiking
FINALLY at 10AM an elderly woman walks up to me squinting, and says" "You were standing out here when I closed my blinds last night to go to sleep," gesturing at the motel behind her. "You were standing out here when I woke up. Now I've just checked out and you're STILL standing out here. I think I'd better give you a ride. Where are you headed?"
"Ohmygod thank you so so much. I'm going to Brampton/Toronto but if you can get me to Nipigon that'd be amazing!"
There is a junction in Nipigon where you can either head even MORE north, or you start to come back to civilization and I couldn't afford to get stuck with a driver who took me north. So I give a strict command to my brain NOT to sleep through Nipigon, lest I end up in Pickle Lake, which is 600 km north of Thunder Bay,.
The old lady drives me to Nipigon. I'm so tired I immediately pass out and sleep the whole way, but she remembers and sweetly wakes me up when we get to the junction. We bid each other farewell and exchange email address and will later send each other one follow-up email each, both just to tell the other "I'm home! I'm safe! Just wanted to let you know!"
She was taking a rare solo trip herself to some folk festival (now that I think about it, Joel Fafard was probably playing that festival. This is a SMALL country, after all. Fafard said he was heading to play a festival. HOW am I just putting 2 and 2 together now, 15 years later, in 2022?)
I stand roadside in Nipigon for MAYBE an hour when I get the best ride of my life from a guy I won't name, just because he doesn't use his real name on Facebook and I don't wanna disrespect that choice. Mad Scientist pulls his van over outside Nipigon and starts helping me throw my guitar and clothes bag in the back of his van. As he's doing this he asks me "you ever heard of Scarborough?" I say yes. "Then you got a ride, man, let's go!" I am so grateful I can explode.
He took me the whole way.
He bought me dinner.
He played music LOUD and drove with the windows rolled down, which I LOVE.
It was awesome.
It started raining hard and he just cackled and drove faster, yelling things like "IT'S A DELUGE!"
He dropped me off at the Junction of the 407 and the 400 just as the sun was coming up 24 hours after that lady had given me a ride from Vermillion Bay.
It was embarrassing though! I'd hitchhiked my entire country but I couldn't get ride in my OWN hometown. I walked for an hour and just got honked at, over and over. (I would learn later that hitchhiking on 400-series highways is illegal, so at least I didn't get arrested).
Fuckin' Brampton.
I found a payphone at a gas station and called a cab. SOMETIME in my absence, between May and August 2007, the price of a payphone call had risen by 100%. It was now TWO QUARTERS, not just ONE. I would also learn later than I was walking through Woodbridge, one of the highest income areas of the GTA. No way in HELL would I have gotten a ride, but a walk home would've taken me 5-8 hours, tired and lugging a guitar. I had $18 and some change left on me. That was all I had in the world. It took negotiating with 3 separate cab drivers, but one finally agreed to take me to Queen & Kennedy in Brampton, about a 40 min walk from home. That whole 40 min walk I was totally dehydrated and exhausted, but I made it! Drank a litre of tap water with like...ten ice cubes thrown in there and collapsed into bed for 14 hours.
ANYWAY my point is, your uncle did no small thing! Anytime you depend on the WORLD to take you somewhere, you kinda give up your agency, while retaining a larger "I'm my own boss. I say when it's bedtime. I eat when I wanna eat (so long as I have food), I'm not involved in office politics, etc etc..."
III. Suspicious Minds (can keep you alive)
It can take a long time for the ride you need to come along, but it ALWAYS comes. I really believe that. Also, Mad Scientist is a truly great soul and human being. I really believe that. I recognize my privilege here being a white man, it is WAY diff for hitchhiking, train-hopping women. But all the women I met on my travels were WAY more seasoned than I was. Met a girl in Ontario determined to hitch to California. I thought she was nuts. Ran into her 3 months later in Victoria, B.C. She'd made it to Cali, then crept up the coast. BUT her head was now totally shaved, she wore suspenders and a flannel shirt, and basically looked Justin Bieber. I bought her a bento box at some sushi place and we talked. She'd had TRIPLE the amount of close calls I had.
But since making herself look like a boy, and giving a boy's name, the unwanted sexual advances had dropped significantly, if not completely. She's the one who told me that it's legal to carry a knife, so long as you carry an apple with you (you tell the cops the knife is for peeling the apple.) So her bag smelled like apples. But the KA-BAR has a 7-inch blade. "That's longer than most guys' dicks. And they know it. They leave you alone pretty quick after that."
Traveling women have to have suspicious minds to stay alive.
She and I also discussed the strange phenomenon, known only to truckers, hitchhikers, and people who regularly drive long distance, of “magic rain radio.” Let me explain. I was cruising through a thunder and lightning storm in Saskatchewan a few days earlier. It was raining hard and lightning was flashing every few seconds. This is the normal part of the story. What wasn’t normal is that our car radio was picking up signals from radio stations in both Seattle and Amarillo. Amarillo was (and still is, last I checked) in fucking Texas.
The Trans-Canada Highway in Saskatchewan is about 180 km from the US-Canada border. It runs through Moose Jaw and Regina, not Saskatoon, which is another 2 hours north. We were roughly halfway between Swift Current and Moose Jaw when the storm began, which was 180 km from the Saskatchewan-Montana border.
We were 1,894 km from Amarillo, Texas (that’s an 18-hour drive if you don’t stop at all, so add another hour for filling up your gasoline tank and buying terrible food in gas stations and fast food restaurants.) We were 1,602 km from Seattle, Washington. This was 2007, so they weren’t playing the latest single from Pearl Jam, but I wasn’t alone, I did not hallucinate this, we heard the DJ mindless patter. We were getting a station from Amarillo, Texas, and a station from Seattle, Washington.
For some reason though, the Texas station blew my mind even more, even though it sort of made more sense. It was only an extra 200 km but from Saskatchewan down to Texas, the landscape is the same. It’s all flat plains. Also, I’d physically set foot in Seattle so hearing radio from there seemed less impressive to me. Texas was more exotic.
But wouldn’t you think that the natural barrier of the rocky mountains would block a radio signal from Seattle? How the hell were we listening to either of those radio stations that night? The radio signal travelling from Amarillo didn’t have any natural barriers. If rain and lightning was general that night, all the way down from Saskatchewan, through Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and then a tiny slice of New Mexico before reaching the Texas panhandle, then maybe that’s what was going on? Maybe somehow the rain drops were electrified and carrying radio signals?
Anyway, I spoke to my friend about this, expecting her to look at me like I was nuts. Instead she nodded excitedly and mentioned hearing a hockey game (she didn’t like hockey, she was just homesick) from a radio station in Medicine Hat, Alberta while caught in a similar thunder and lightning storm while working a quasi-legal job for a cannabis grower on California’s Lost Coast. That would be Humboldt County. The place she was staying was near Fortuna, California. The distance between Fortuna and Medicine Hat is 2,015 km. That’s an extra 200 km than my magic rain radio experience. I can’t wait to one day maybe meet a hitchhiker in the Yukon who will tell me that he listened to a live-to-air Frosh Week radio party coming from Orlando while he sat in a car pounded by rain in a thunder and lightning storm. That would be 6476 km. That would extend beyond the realm of “magic radio” and step firmly into the realm of supernatural radio. But if the one person I met had a story whose distance bested mine by 200 km, there’s got to be someone out there whose story bests hers by 200 km, right? Maybe some lonely oil worker in Fort McMurray picked up some Mariachi from Mexico City one night during a particularly violent storm. (That would be 5,098 km, less than my made-up Frosh Week wonder.) I wonder though. And the only way for a wonderer like me to find out more about this phenomenon, is by wandering.)
I wonder about her sometimes. She was paranoid about people knowing her name so I cannot post HER name either but I hope she's out there somewhere. She wanted a homestead, like in a Willa Cather novel. Find some land and start from scratch building a house then establishing a farm. Sounds like Of Mice and Men almost. "And we'll live off the fat of the land."
And here's the “majestic” Ontario Northland. They have trains too! I'm thinking I'll see plenty of those before my trip to the Klondike is through.
I wrote a post a few weeks back about how I haven’t kissed a woman, touched a woman, asked a woman out, or anything like that since my marriage collapsed in mid-July 2020.
The gist of the piece was “I’m freaking lonely, but asking someone out? I ain’t that lonely yet.”
Well, maybe things change.
Well, I am seeing a girl the week after next. A girl I like a lot. And she likes me too! (I think!) We’ve known each other for ages, we’ve just never been single at the same time. But we’re both single now, which she brought to my recent attention.
I take that as a good omen.
I’ve been listening to a lot of Dwight Yoakam since the assault a week ago tonight.
In case you hadn’t noticed, each chapter heading in this post has a link to a Dwight Yoakam song. Don’t laugh! He was Johnny Cash’s favourite singer and has the strongest vibrato and the best yodel I have ever heard. He is also a fabulous songwriter. Most country artists (cough, Garth Brooks, “Friends In Low Places” and “The Dance”) just phone up the Nashville songwriter’s assembly line and ask what the newest hit song is. Not Dwight. From this video, you’d swear he just hops freight trains and sings lonely songs. Not a bad way to live, you ask me.
(Note the heavy train imagery of this video. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence.)
“A Thousand Miles From Nowhere,” was Yoakam’s first big country hit. It plays during those cinematic ending credits of the classic 1993 film noir Red Rock West, a movie in which Yoakam himself plays a trucker with a hair-trigger temper alongside a straight-back Dennis Hopper playing a Texan assassin, J.T. Walsh, a Sheriff and bar-owner who has paid said Texan to kill his wife, Lara Flynn Boyle. When drifter Nicolas Cage gets stuck in town, penniless, and J.T. Walsh mistakes him for the killer and advances him $2500, the plot starts to heat up pretty fast.
Anyway, after “A Thousand Miles From Nowhere,” this is my favourite Dwight Yoakam song, a simple country ballad called “Things Change.” They sure fuckin’ do, Dwight.
She said, “baby things change.” I said, “but I feel the same.”
She said, “well let me explain baby, how things can change.”
I said, “but that doesn't show how a love that could grow
would become so strange.” She said, “well baby…things change.”
She said, “Na, na, na, na, na, Now, now, now baby, don't try
To figure this out or ask questions 'bout why. Forever’s a promise
no love can survive. And trust with hearts just don't apply
She said, “Cuz baby, things change.”
She said, “I still love you so”
I said, “I don’t care to know.”
She said, “you once cried my name!”
I said, “well baby, things change. Let’s don’t go placin’ no blame. You know things can change.”
So yesterday I’m hangin’ on the railroad tracks in the railyard near my house. Six rail lines across. Trains parked on most of ‘em. I feel a vibration and look east. Oh, I think. That’s a GO train. I jog over into the bushes and huddle down. The train passes on the track closest to me, puffing up my clothes like parachutes and slicing through my hair. Gave me a shiver of ecstasy cuz it was hot as hell out there yesterday.
Anyway, I’ve kept journals my whole life. I’m a huge fan of David Berman, the singer/poet/guitarist behind the Silver Jews who sadly took his own life not long ago.
Berman had that talent of turning an everyday phrase into something epic. “Punks In The Beerlight” from 2005’s Tanglewood Numbers is a favourite of mine, especially it’s jaw dropping first half:
Where's the paper bag that holds the liquor?
Just in case I feel the need to puke
If we'd known what it'd take to get here
Would we have chosen to, would we have chosen to?
So you wanna build an altar on a summer night?
You wanna smoke the gel off a fentanyl patch?
Ain'tcha heard the news? That Adam and Eve were Jews?
And I always loved you to the max?
I loved you to the max
Taking a cheesy 90s phrase like “to the max” and rhyming it with “fentanyl patch.”
OMG…swoon. Muah! I just kissed my fingers like an Italian chef.
Berman’s music is terrific but his literary output is just as impressive. He published a collection called Actual Air and he was working on an endless series called Cantos For James Michener. That’s a literary joke that only people who read a lot would understand. Michener wrote “more than 40 books, most of which were long, fictional family sagas covering the lives of many generations in particular geographic locales and incorporating detailed history.” 1983’s Poland, was a best-seller. I remember seeing Michener’s Texas (1985), glaring balefully down at me from my mother’s bookshelf when I was a kid. It was never a challenge to me. It was never “someday I’ll read that thing.” I’d skimmed some of Michener’s books. Even the modestly plotted ones covered 8 centuries and had over 300 characters. To me, James Michener’s books were gibbering, chimerical monsters and life was too damn short and there was always so much else I wanted to read first. I still feel that way.
Michener wrote over 600 000 words in his lifetime. Humour columnist for the Miami Herald, Dave Berry, writing about the rock band he plays in with Stephen King, Amy Tan, and Matt Groening, once described a jam session his band had with Bruce Springsteen, a session in which Berry found himself asking if Bruce knew the chords to “Gloria.”
"Do you know the guitar part to Gloria?"
This is like asking James Michener if he knows how to write his name.
LAWL. Anyway, the poet Ezra Pound worked on an endless and unfinished lifelong poem he titled Cantos. So David Berman working on a lifelong unfinished poem and titling it Cantos for James Michener is funny if you know all the things I just told you.
Berman’s suicide in August 2019 seemed to come out of nowhere. Although he constantly told friends, almost proudly, that he had “treatment resistant depression,” he’d kicked a few nasty habits, like heroin and crack. In fact he’d overdosed and almost died after the album release party for the Silver Jews 2001 album Bright Flight. And after a suicide attempt sometime after, he reconnected with his Jewish faith and took. trip to Israel. The resulting documentary, Silver Jew, showed a playful side of Berman that fans had never seen, though his sarcasm remained intact. His lyrics seems to reflect a new lease on life though:
Later I come to find….life is sweeter than Jewish wine.
But the combination of negative reviews for the final Silver Jews album (reviews I found a tad too mean-spirited and unfair, for the album has some of Berman’s best compositions) and the revelation that Berman’s father was a lobbyist for the most toxic, shitty, ruinous companies in the world, proved a bit much for Berman, and he shut the Silver Jews down in 2009 with a note that railed more against his father than the industry he claimed to be sick of. Famous for his stage fright, Berman had finally taken the Silver Jews out on tour and the band was, to Berman’s utter shock, rapturously received.
But he was breaking up the Silver Jews, he claimed, so that he could undo some of the horrible shit his father had done. Never one to mince words, he said the following on the “Joos” (as Berman was fond of calling his band) message board:
Now that the Joos are over I can tell you my gravest secret. Worse than suicide, worse than crack addiction: My father is a despicable man... [a] human molestor... an exploiter...a scoundrel.
A couple of years ago I demanded he stop his work. Close down his company or I would sever our relationship. He refused. He has just gotten worse. More evil. More powerful. We've been 'estranged' for over three years ... Previously I thought that through songs and poems and drawings I could find and build a refuge away from his world. But there is the matter of Justice. And I'll tell you it's not just a metaphor. The desire for it actually burns. It hurts. There needs to be something more. I'll see what that might be.
I guess I am moving over to another category. Screenwriting or Muckraking ... I'm 42 and I know what to do. I'm a writer, see?
Berman, once a devout R.E.M. disciple who’d felt personally wounded by their “breakthrough” 1987 album Document, the one that has “The One I Love” and “It’s the End of the World and We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” couldn’t resist a jab at his former heroes:
I always said we would stop before we got bad. If I continue to record I might accidentally write the answer song to “Shiny Happy People.”
“Shiny Happy People” is roundly acknowledged as the worst R.E.M. song, by far. Their absolute nadir. But Berman was coming off the release of an album called Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea whose best song took more than a little influence from Dwight Yoakam’s “A Thousand Miles From Nowhere.” The fan-made video put a bunch of trains in there. Not a coincidence. Nothing is anymore.
My absolute fav lines?
Well I guess all that mad misery must make it seem to true to you
But money lights your world up, you're trapped what can you do?
You got Tennessee tendencies and chemical dependencies
You make the same old jokes and malaprops on cue
Rest in Power, Berman. You inspired me and many others, though I am not attracted to the fatalistic, “fuck-it” aspect of your personality. I love the generous part, the funny part, the part full of love for fuck-ups on the fringes of life. I will always love ANY person who once wrote a song titled “How To Rent A Room.” LOL.
VII. Trains & Tracks: Cantos for a Continent
I no longer believe too much in “the United States”or “Canada.” All I see is people.
A small cabal of rich with expensive boots on the necks of our poor. But I wrote the first of a series of railroad poems yesterday on the tracks.
I have always kept a physical journal, and though I suffer no delusions regarding the quality of these “poems.” I can’t even call them poems without blushing. They are “noems” and the inside of the cover says THIS DOGGEREL WAS WRITTEN BY DANNY. PLEASE GIVE IT BACK IF YOU DON’T MIND. I’LL COME GET IT FROM YOU. CALL ME @ _________
So here it is, folks. Station One from Trains & Tracks, my big book of noems about train travel. The rule? I can only write in it if I am physically on a train, or just got/hopped off one and am sitting beside the railroad tracks, scribbling away. I rode a train yesterday, then huddled hiding from a GO Train’s impossibly fast rush yesterday, and wrote this:
1a. Days
It’s been a long time since I have physically felt the distance of this colossal continent beneath me.
The Great Plains (a.k.a. “The Inner American Ocean.” I love that nickname. Just like how I love how, in prairie towns, you can feel beyond the butter-yellow brick buildings the great emptiness beyond…an absence with a presence so strong it pushes on you, or maybe it pulls on you and you become it)
The Canadian Shield.
A flag in a field.
A long gone lake on a once-great plain.
Some days packed & some mundane.
The sounds of summer in one ear, out the other:
railroad spikes
& spokes spin on bikes
& folks on porches gazing out @ the night
@ the violet delight of a dark dome of sky
Saskatoon prairie and a piece of peach pie
what will the weather be like when you die?
I mean the day
I mean will it rain?
How long do you have to be dead before you lose your name?
Can I be a skeleton & Danny to you?
Or would that just be weird
& eerie to boot?
To the railroad bulls,
a rehearsed speech,
one half-bravado, half-deference:
Well if you’re gonna hit me
you should go ahead and hit me
but if you think you can stop me
you got the wrong idea…sir
cuz it’s a coast to coast continent
they’re American dreams
you think you can stop every car?
police every street?
no
no no no
no you can’t stop me
you can’t stop us
you could even throw away your big bad country, the one y’all call the “U.S.”
& even then there will still be an us
there will still be days that we get through unscathed
tho maybe some bleed
& maybe some pray
or the mania maps of American dreams (even up here with our CDN scenes, our CDN dollars and CDN fees, it’s a Merican continent. We’re Americanese.)
like old men on sidewalks I’ve seen in my dreams
in my mind now, sharp shards of youth
don’t touch them too hard, they can hurt you
just watch them go by, they’re part of your life
they’re not fucking trying to make you cry
pictures of Jennifer, my sister, as a young girl
both stubborn & bright
it’s really quite a thing
to watch her intelligence unfurl
like a flag of the mind
like the swoon of being kind
her art and her clay and her writing in swirls
she’s a bit like me
stubborn, I mean
cuz if I could…sir
I’d ride this train across the whole fucking world.