Connor McFarland is Drifter’s rails editor.

Have you been to Central California? If you’ve never been to the Central Valley, like Fresno, Stockton, Bakersfield, well, that’s good. To paint the scene: Me and my buddy had just hopped trains from Baltimore to Los Angeles. We did it in record-breaking time. Everything went miraculously well. We made it in less than four days. Then all luck abandoned us.

We were gonna try to hop a train up the coast to Portland. We were staying with a buddy of mine in Koreatown and found out that the place we would have had to hop out from in L.A., which would have been a late night move, is literally in Skid Row. We also didn’t know for sure if it was a daily train. So we were like, “Eh, we won’t be able to go back to my friend’s apartment at three in the morning if the train never comes, because he’s working — he’s a normal guy — so we’re gonna be stuck in Skid Row.” Which, as it turns out, is probably better than Bakersfield. 

We ended up taking a Greyhound from downtown L.A. to Bakersfield, because we had heard that it’s easier to hop out of Bakersfield to go north. Once there, we were like, “God, we should have just hopped out of L.A.” 

In Bakersfield, the cargo theft problem is so bad that Union Pacific won’t stop any trains for more than 30 seconds in the city limits. And we’re trying to get a Union Pacific train north. So we get to Bakersfield and we walk from the bus depot to the tracks. Immediately, we’re like, “This is a fucking horrible place.” At least in this part of the city, it’s nothing but groups of homeless marauders wandering around, crystal meth addicts. We go to a 7-Eleven and there’s a homeless guy hanging around outside who was very friendly with us but also quite abrasive. His name was Time Bomb. We’re around some of the sketchiest people I’ve ever met, it’s kind of a predatory atmosphere. 

So we’re waiting around all day and into the night. There’s no trees there, because it’s a nightmare shit place. We’re just sitting next to a dirt pile on the side of the road. There’s a little train yard next to the Union Pacific line that’s run by a smaller railroad that does local industry switching. I have a railroad scanner, so I’m listening to that little railroad talk. At one point, some locals walked in front of a working train and they were like, “Hey, we got zombies in the yard.” Every 30 minutes a truck, that was railroad security, rolls by this little train yard. The thieves seem to know when the truck is gonna come, so they scurry away, the truck comes through, then a different group will come back and try to look for things to steal. 

Once it’s dark, we think the railroad’s done working for the day. There’s an open boxcar, which we decide to go sit in to be out of the elements and away from the meth heads. At one point, my buddy’s in the boxcar and I get out, because I get very restless and bored. I’m walking around, probably a few hundred feet away. All of the sudden, the train line with the boxcar, that all of my stuff is in, just starts moving, pulling away quickly. So I have to sprint. It’s not easy to hop into an open boxcar when it’s moving. There’s not a ladder there. You have to pull yourself up. Luckily, my friend is a big guy. I run up and get half my body up and he pulls me in.

It turns out they were just backing up, back and forth in the yard. We get shoved right back into the same place. This ends up happening again, and, finally, we get our stuff out of there. It’s midnight now. This is September, 2022. It’s really hot in Central California that time of year. I had just bought a big water jug, which is enough to get me through the whole train ride north to Portland. I drop it crossing between train lines and it just bursts. So I now have no water. I have to wander through this sketchy part of Bakersfield where nothing is open anymore and find another jug of water. The only place open is a head shop that, luckily, sold small bottles of water, so I bought a whole bunch of those.

Throughout the night, it’s different groups of these meth heads breaking into the kinds of trains that don’t even have valuable cargo. We’re sitting in the darkness, by the side of the tracks, and one person comes up to us. She’s clearly out of her mind on drugs. She picks up a piece of trash and just starts reading the label. I was like, “I’m not fucking sleeping here. The second a train comes through here going north, or even maybe going south, I’m fucking getting on it.” Because earlier, there had been a train that came through and stopped, but it had no rideable cars on it. Finally, a northbound train rolls up. Stops. Full speed, we’re not taking any chances, we run, jump on the first rideable cars. At the same time, these white trash meth heads come up and start trying to break into some of the intermodal containers. Luckily, the train starts hissing and gets ready to roll and they jump off before breaking into anything.

We take off and get the fuck out of Bakersfield. At five in the morning, we have to hop off the train near Stockton and we get stuck. In Stockton, we found out there’s a serial killer out murdering homeless people. I’m listening to the railroad scanner. A BNSF crew was talking to the dispatcher and they were like, “Your train has to stop because there’s police activity on the tracks right now. I’ll let you know when the cops are done doing whatever they’re doing.” And they’re like, “Oh, is it because of the serial killer?” Mind you, we’re sitting in this sketchy neighborhood, on the back of this wall behind an apartment building against the Union Pacific tracks, in a very vulnerable position when we’re hearing this. They’re like, “Yeah, there’s this serial killer. He’s going around killing homeless people right now.” We looked it up and sure enough, it’s true. I think he got caught a day after we left.

Trying to get out of Stockton, a train stopped that would have been going to Portland. It stopped for 30 seconds, but we were sleeping. We didn’t have time to get our bed rolls rolled up to get on. And then we get out, finally, on this horrible train where we’re riding in soy bean hopper cars. It just smelled terrible. The hoppers are covered up top so the soybeans are protected inside, but there’s a little porch with this little hole that’s enough for one person to hide at least part of their body in. My buddy’s a big guy, so he had to find a different car. We were maybe 30 cars apart.

We pull up 40 miles to Roseville, California, which I thought was gonna be nice, but turns out is fucking horrible. We set up camp and fall asleep in this field. We wake up. We go to Walmart, get supplies, get ready, try to figure out how we’re going to catch the train to Portland, hopefully that night or the next day. We come back to this field by the tracks that we’re sleeping in and we’re so tired at this point we just crash out. There’s a path next to the tracks that a lot of the local homeless people and train riders and drug addicts seem to use. All night there are people walking around. At seven in the morning, this woman comes by and is screaming to herself and wakes both of us up. A different screaming meth addict had come through as we were trying to go to sleep the night before, so this doesn’t seem notable. My buddy talks to her. I’m so tired that I just woke up and went right back to sleep. 

15 minutes later, he’s waking me up. He’s like, “Connor, you gotta get up.”

I’m like, “What? Dude, fuck off. I don’t care. We’ll catch the next train.” 

He’s like, “No. We gotta get up. The field is on fire.” 

And me, I’m in that addicted-to-sleep mode. I’m like, “What do you mean, man? Come on, just put it out.” 

He’s like, “No, it’s bad. That lady lit some clothes on fire in the dry field.” 

Mind you, it was a drought out West. It didn’t rain the entire time we were out there. It’s light brush and the whole field is going up in flames. It was spreading incredibly quickly. We have to quickly gather our shit and get the fuck out of there. Luckily, a Union Pacific train rolled up and the conductor got out and called the fire department. Of course, the woman who started the fire is gone, so it just looks like we started the fire. But I get the feeling that this happens there a lot. So that was our introduction to Roseville, California. And then we got stuck there for another 24 hours. Shortly after, on this sunny Sunday morning, I saw someone smoking something off tin foil while walking across a busy crosswalk — in front of families in their cars — a white, crystally powder. 

It turns out the train we were trying to catch doesn’t even go through the yard, so we eventually catch a different train with two other guys who were also stranded there. Once you get further north, you go through Mount Shasta, Dunsmuir, all that. It’s a very dramatic landscape. You go along the Sacramento River. Then you go through the mountains of southern Oregon. We actually went through one of the big forest fires. My friend wakes me up in the middle of the night, we’re in the wilderness somewhere near Klamath Falls. I look up and the moon is red from all the smoke.

Finally, we emerge from these nightmare landscapes of Central California to libtard paradise in Portland, Oregon. We had at this point been on the rails for seven days. I’m the dirtiest and smelliest I’ve ever been in my entire life. When we’re coming into Portland, riding in an empty open-top scrap metal car, hipsters are seeing us from pedestrian bridges and waving. It’s this very warm welcome. When we get off the train, we’re right by a tattoo shop and they’re waving at us. That’s downtown Portland, middle of the day. I think it took 30 hours to get from Roseville to Portland. Then we go to my friend’s apartment and she buys us a hotel that night. So we start out dirtiest we’ve ever been, and by that night we’re in a four star hotel wearing robes and dining on a top floor bar in downtown Portland.

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Masthead

Editor-in-chief — Andrew Fedorov

Rails Editor — Connor McFarland

Altitude Editor — Matt Gu