“Jen 1” is an adventurous traveler who enjoys plants, trains, and slipping through the cracks.

You’re a young person and you hear about people doing things you want to do like ride barges to Mexico, Alaska, or Hawaii. I guess these are privileged people that aren’t trying to escape a catastrophic home life. In 2006, I was 24. I thought I’d already become an adult and fucked up and didn’t do all this cool stuff. So I was like, “I need to make this happen ASAP. I gotta ride!” My friends were all about to go boating down the Ohio River for the year and I didn’t have a boat. My parents were going to Italy and they didn’t invite me, because I didn’t take showers. So I thought, “Fuck all of you, I’m gonna go to Alaska for free.”

The first time I heard about the rail barges was from my friend Jen, who attempted to ride one out of Prince Rupert, Canada with a friend in a salt sack. The barge there’s a baby one, it’s a lot smaller and harder to hide on. But the one out of Seattle has multiple decks and stacked containers everywhere. There’s no way for the Alaska railroad to exist without this system, it’s the only way for trains to get there from the mainland United States. A train drives onto the barge, it’s strapped down, and then it drives off when it gets to Whittier. A tugboat pulls the unmanned barge for seven days, transporting the train cars, containers, and everything else going up there. The train’s only on the bottom part. You ride right on.

I was living in Asheville, North Carolina at the time. I made $700 and then I drove to New Mexico. I thought I was good. I was like, "$700! I have more money than I’ve ever had!” My at-the-time boyfriend and I then rode trains to Seattle. Somewhere between New Mexico and Portland, we woke up to 150 BNSF Railway employees standing next to our car, facing the opposite direction of us, except for three guys on a hill looking at me. Everyone else has no idea that we were there sleeping, except for these three guys on top of the hill. They’re just laughing hysterically. We didn’t get pulled off, so that was great.

In Seattle, we worked at the Green Tortoise Hostel at Pike Place Market. I learned about espresso for the first time, so it was a really eye opening experience. Human feces and espresso were the common threads of Seattle for me at that time. Weeks went by. That $700 was obviously long gone and I had to work multiple jobs to get another $700 before we left. Everyone in Seattle has the dream to go to Alaska, everyone’s got their own way of getting there, or think they do. Or they’re just stuck in Seattle forever.

This barge leaves once a week. You’re supposed to be there the night before it boards, be on the train outside of the yard, ride in, and be hidden from that point on. But by the time we showed up there was not a train car in the yard. At that point, we’d already been in Seattle for a month. We were probably gonna kill each other or ourselves if we were stuck there another week, so it was not an option to not make this happen. We slept in the yard. At 8 a.m., I walked the entire circumference of the island and found the spot that we were supposed to be in.

The train’s all ready to go. There was a worker right there, so I just played tourist for a second. I was like, “Wow, looky here! This is the train barge that goes to Alaska?” And he was like, “Yeah, it goes to Alaska.” I said, “Those two red BNSF grainers right there in the middle of the yard, they’re going to Alaska?” He was like, “Yep, sure are!” I was like, “Cool. When do you think that’s happening?” He was like, “An hour or so.” I was like, “How cool! I never thought I’d see it in person. That is so fun!” Then I just ran.

Now we’re two people huffing it with packs and seven gallons of water, because it’s seven days at sea so you have to be prepared. We carry it through the island at 9 a.m. — we’re not supposed to be daylighting at all. We walked right in, got into the grainer hole, and lay there for 12 hours. The train moved quickly onto the barge soon after we got on, but then they have to ratchet every car down. It takes hours. I was laying on my neck for 12 hours. There’s people walking around. We were hidden. I did not know what was going on until we started moving. We left the port and pulled away. It was almost dark.

We woke up the next morning, open ocean, out in the water. We’re running around the barge having a grand old time. I’m dangling my feet in the water off the back lower lip. I think back on that with horror. At the time, I was like, “It seems risky, but what doesn’t?” We’re having some lovely tea and I say something that I will regret for the rest of my life. I think anything I could have said at that point would have doomed me. I was holding a cup of tea in the air and I was like, “This is riding trains! This is amazing.”

This is the moment we hear this little “ting-ting-ting.” The tug is turning around and boarding the barge. They do that periodically to make sure everything’s working. They happened to board two cars next to us. It was all over. They called Homeland Security and were like, “We got stowaways.” We had to lower all our shit onto the tugboat, including our gallons of water, which was a waste. You have no idea how many miles we carried those gallons to not even get to use them. The captain yelled at us a bunch. He said, “You have no idea how much paperwork I’m gonna have to do!” But then they said Homeland Security was embarrassed and just wanted to sweep it under the rug. They had run our records and were like, “You guys are petty thieves. We’re good.”

We’d made it far enough on the Inside Passage that we were approaching Canada, so they couldn’t go ashore. We were on that tug for three days, getting fresh salmon every night for dinner, watching a lot of The Rock movies. The GIS system for ocean mapping blew my mind, I watched that for days. Two people on board had just “quit smoking” so they were excited that we had rolling tobacco. We smoked with them on the bow. I got really sick from sea sickness, but the most chilling time was when I watched that barge list in the water and imagined if we were on that deck navigating that. It’s so smooth until the ocean gets real. We would have been thrown around, it would have been really fucking gnarly.

They had to reroute to Ketchikan, whereas they usually go on the open ocean all the way to Whittier. In Ketchikan, they had a water taxi pick us up. The driver took our photos and said, “The immigration and naturalization service is here. You should get the fuck out of town.” We were like, “If INS is here for us, why aren’t they on the shore right now with you?” Maybe he was just saying that because he didn’t want us in town, but we believed him. We bought tickets to the Alaska Marine ferry and continued on to Juneau.

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