January 18, 2023 • 39 mins
When her daughter Ruby skips town to hop trains, Danelle follows her into the train yard. Yes, there still are hobos, and they live in a secret city filled with unforgettable characters. Train hopping photographer Mike Brodie shows her how to catch a train, and explains why he rides in head-to-toe Gucci.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Just a heads up. This episode contains adult language and
some violence, so take care while listening. We're almost like
cliff Bluff thing looking over like kind of like the
(00:26):
east end of the train yard, train yard up on
the hill. Let's see, there's the other train line. That's
where Amtrak comes in. It's a warm night in northern
California and I'm drinking beers on a hill with a
hobo named Mike while he waits to hop a train
to Kansas City. This train has been leaving since the
seventies um and it hauls mail alway to Chicago and
(00:48):
like Kansas City to um So the same train has
leaves pretty much every day, like at like four or
five in the morning. I've caught it three times. And
so here we are again. We're here pretty early, but
we have nothing else to do. Like everyone else in America,
I never paid much attention to the rails until someone
I love disappeared into them. And for the last fourteen years,
(01:09):
I've been in train yards with hoboes and talked to
hundreds of people like Mike. But the rails don't give
up their secrets easily. You might hear hobo and picture
an old bum in a box car. But there's more
to train hopping than that. Every night, in train yards
all over America, people wait in the shadows, crouched behind bushes,
scanning the tracks for freight cars to take them somewhere anywhere.
(01:32):
But here riders used alias is like Jobo the hobo.
Long haired Donnie and Tuck don't give a fuck to
make themselves untraceable, and there's a pretty good chance they're
lying to you when they tell you where they're going.
So getting to hang out with Mike Brodie, a guy
using his real name, was a big event, so we
(01:52):
can see it. I appreciate that impulse to escape. I've
thought about it every since she left, but I'm not
brave enough to do it. So Mike's agreed to let
me tag along and get a firsthand look at what
it's like to live on the rails. Tonight, Mike's getting
ready to hop out of town and he's looking for
a very specific kind of train car I want to
(02:14):
pick with wings. It's a bunch of train cars that
have truck chassis on top of them. So if you
look at trucks in the highways, you see these big,
long plastic wings or they're called skirts, but it's like
a modern day box car. You just get behind the
skirt or the wing and you can't be seen. So
you're under the trailer behind a wall. So pick with wings.
It's ideal. Do you sit up much? You could sit
(02:37):
up and lay down, but you can't stand, you know,
because you're under a truck truck trailer. Why would anyone decide, Oh, yeah,
that's what I'm going to do with the next twenty
four hours of my life. I'm gonna lay underneath the
truck chassis and piss into the wind. And that's how
I'm getting to Kansas City, even if I have no
reason to go there, but to Mike Brody and two
thousands of train hoppers, this is a great idea. Yeah,
(03:00):
so does your body get a little sore a little stick. Yeah,
you get really stiff and sore. It gets pretty old.
But every time the train stops or sometimes you just
hop down and stretch your legs. It's worth it because
you can just haul as cross country. It's kind of
shadowed under the car, so anyone looking for you can't
really see you because it's like bright outside. It's ideal.
(03:25):
We live our lives under surveillance, monitored data, harvested with algorithms,
scanning our phone calls, and yet here's a person flying
across the country undetected on a pig with wings. When
you go into a reporting assignment, you open a door,
and you better open your mind because you're going to
see a lot of things you didn't expect. And as
(03:46):
soon as I started looking into the railroads, I began
to see them as a secret city rumbling through all
of our lives. It's citizens are always on the move,
here and gone. They slide through the world on loco
would be so enormous. We rarely notice who hiding in
the cracks. But I'm getting way ahead of myself here.
I have to take you back to the very beginning,
(04:08):
the whole reason I ended up in this dangerous place.
It all started the day my daughter Ruby ran off
to hop trains. This is the story of what I
found when I followed Ruby into the city of the
rail I'm DEDELM Morton. Before I started sneaking into rail yards,
(04:57):
traveling to meet famous hoboes, tracking down rail cops. Before
I ever met Mike Brodie on that hillside, I was
a journalist. I supported my daughter Ruby and her brother
Ben working at newspapers and magazines. I'd raised them mostly
in Santa Monica, where I worked for People Magazine. But
I got tired of reporting on celebrities and we needed
a change. When I got a fat advance from my
(05:20):
first book, The Single Mom Effect, I moved back home
to Oakland and Triumph, happy to be where I grew
up and closer to Ben, who was in college at Berkeley.
When we moved, Ruby was a junior in high school,
and she was cool. But she's always been the coolest
person I knew. I tell my friends that even when
she was in elementary school, there was something rich and
deep going on behind her bright blue eyes, a hidden
(05:43):
aspect of her that always left you wanting more. When
we moved to Oakland, I rented the nicest apartment I've
ever had, a three bedroom with big windows overlooking the
gleaming blue of Lake Merritt. I had an open door policy.
Anyone could drop by the house for dinner, and I
was amazed by how quickly Ruby liked a social circle
in her new school. We started having guests the second
(06:03):
week of the semester. At first, her guests were school friends,
study buddies didn't take long for that to change. By spring,
she started a punk band with a friend, and soon
they were booking shows at Gilman at Berkeley Club, where
Green Day got its started. They began performing at shows
in backyards and local music festivals, and by the midpoint
(06:26):
of her senior year, her guests were older, scruffier, hungrier,
and a little feral, and some of them hopped trains.
Ruby's trained friends were great dinner guests, but entertaining as
they were, they left me with questions, ones that I'd
ask every writer I met. Why would you choose to
live this way? Why would you choose to get your
(06:46):
clue out of a dumpster? Why wouldn't choose to living
in the illegal place where you get arrested in the moment?
Because and we can. It goes way beyond that. I
think it's disgusting, But there's waste everywhere in that one
use it. I don't want to pay for it, I
don't want to have to work for it, and I
want to be free. That's Ruby's friend Aaron. Their description
(07:09):
of radical freedom intrigued me, but I also wanted to
hear stories of the beauty you can only see from
a train. Another friend, Momo, described it well. We were
traveling together. I went through a security where everybody we
encountered kept asking us why we're doing what we were doing.
Then we hoped to train and we were running through
(07:30):
Montana and you can see it. Every star in the sky.
Was like me and my boyfriend and our dogs ever
eating food and went jacking a beer and we're looking
at every single star in the sky and it's like
quiet and peaceful and open and beautiful. We're like, oh,
this is why we do it. I imagine myself alongside
(07:52):
Momo in that box car, waitless, and when my dinner
guests were telling train stories, I'd look across the table
will at Ruby, who was gazing at the lake. I
saw a young girl getting swept up in the same
romance I was. But she wasn't daydreaming. She was making plans.
(08:14):
But my journey into the City of the Rails was
still a long way off from those dinner table conversations.
The day my years long obsession with the rails really
begins as Ruby's high school graduation. Three weeks from graduation,
Ruby seems sullen and withdrawn in the car and the
way to school As we pulled up in front of
the entrance, she told me she was going to drop out.
(08:36):
High school meant nothing to her and she could always
get her g e d. I was having none of that.
I rose up in my full listen young lady fury
and told her, you're graduating if I have to drag
you across that stage. That seemed to work. We carried
on over the next three weeks. We stopped talking about
(08:58):
dropping out and so planning for graduation. Which was a
beautifully tailored sewing pattern for her graduation dress. At the
fabric store. We picked out a deep pink silk for it,
and Ruby got a great haircut. The whole time, she
was cheerful, cooperative, even a little excited. The big day
came and I was so proud Ruby's four years of
(09:19):
high school. While high schools she had been to six
different ones, had been rocky, but she was graduating in
a tiny academic setting. She thrived. Plus Ruby had a
scholarship to a great school, the California College of Arts.
The day was sunny and warm as we took our
seats in the courtyard of a church decorated with bunting
(09:40):
and flowers. The dozen graduates clustered together around the podium.
I waved to a bunch of Ruby's hobo friends sitting
in the back. They cleaned up nice, The men wore
for doors, and the women had on dresses. It was
great they'd come to celebrate with Ruby. The whole place
was buzzing as graduate as came to the podium to
(10:00):
thank their parents in the school. When Ruby approached the mic,
I saw she had her ukulelean hand. She never told
me she was going to sing, say no Montica, saying
Nomtica to turn fourteen as well be drinking. As I
(10:28):
looked around at the other parents as Ruby sang, so
many of them had tears in their eyes, just as
everyone in my family did. Look what you've done. Ruby
had done it. Whatever our weaknesses as a family, we
worked hard together to get to this moment. It all
(10:51):
to anyone because of God made a fool? What a
fool of everyone? What was this song about? Well? Ruby
(11:12):
got hugs from her friends. The family wandered to the
reception hall. We got our flutes of champagne and attacked
the appetizer spread. We stood eating at a tall table,
waiting for Ruby to join us. It seemed like she
was taking an awfully long time. Yeah, asked Ben to
look for her. He came back incredulous Ruby was gone.
(11:36):
What did you mean gone? Then had looked in the
church around the courtyard. Ruby wasn't even in the parking lot.
So I called her, But I got her voicemail pretty
rude that she left graduation without saying goodbye. Maybe she
(11:57):
was at a friend's house and wasn't picking up her phone.
Boy was she going to hear about it when she
got home. The next day, I realized she wasn't coming home.
Maybe she really was gone and I had no idea
where she was. That whole time we were sewing her
dress and talking about what her college dorman would look like,
(12:19):
she was planning her escape on graduation day. She'd made
a real drop the mic departure. She had made a
fool of everyone, and I was first on that list.
M we we had made a fool of everyone. While
(12:44):
we were getting ready for her graduation. She was planning
to ditch us. She even wrote a song about it.
Then she stepped from the podium at her high school
graduation straight to the road with no clues about where
she was headed. I bet she didn't see it that way.
She just turned eighteen, and she didn't have to answer
to in of us anymore. But where was she? Where
had she run off to? I kept trying her phone.
(13:09):
Ruby wasn't answering, so I spent a few days trying
to get ahold of her friends. But the information I
got was hardly solid. Sam said Ruby was road tripping east.
Others said she was hitching north to Roseville, a town
with a major train yard a few hours away. My
money was on Roseville, so I began my search like
I was launching an investigation. I tacked a map of
(13:30):
the United States on my office wall and got colored
pushpins to charge her travels, and I kept a notebook
by the phone. Running away like she did was a
hostile act, but she'd call sooner or later. She would
miss her mom. But whatever I did to prepare, I
couldn't just sit there. The clues to where she was,
who she was with, and how she was surviving definitely
(13:52):
were not in my house. I knew I had to
get up from the dining room table and out into
the train yard to find train riders who would talk
to me. It was the only way to find out more.
The other thing that was bugging me was who is she?
Of all the things to do after graduation, she chose trains?
What was the allure? And my first phone call with
(14:16):
Mike Brodie before we ended up on that hillside looking
for a pig with wings, I asked him that question.
I was asking everyone, why live this way? It's about youth.
It's it's just absurd that that young people in this country,
like we live in a country with so much wealth
and privilege, and like essentially choose to live so subsistently
(14:37):
and like in poverty and explore the country that way
and sunk up your life sometimes and ride trains to
do that is it's fascinating. There is a self righteousness
where a lot of it ties into radical ideologies, and
people are just like it's like a protest, you know,
people riding trains out of protest. They're protesting, you know,
(14:59):
this American whale. There's a lot of a lot of
lost young people who think like rotting trains as the
answer did Ruby Phil lost? Has she been faking it?
Around our dinner table. Mike had been writing for years
chronicling the lives of young people who took to the rails,
his fellow travelers. If there was such a thing as
(15:19):
a well known hobo, Mike was it. I first came
across Mike in an art exhibit in San Francisco. The
gallery featured photos Mike had taken over a decade of
hopping trains. There was a book to a period of
juvenile prosperity, and I bought a copy. I poured over
it in the days after Ruby left. His work helped
(15:40):
me visualize the risks. She was taking images of young
people in box cars, sleeping on filthy mattresses, eating from
garbage dumps, or getting arrested, but also in motion, running
alongside a moving train, trying to hop on. After all
that time on the rails, Mike knew a lot. He
has an insider's college, but he saw that life for
(16:01):
what it was. Maybe Mike could help me see this
world clearly. And when he and I spoke, Mike put
Ruby and me in context. There were other parents like me,
So many people. They have assets and and parents that
love them, and homes, safe homes, you know, but they
don't care. They don't want the society. They don't want
(16:22):
this like they go off and find it on their own.
Mike is familiar with his impulse. He's lived many lives
on and off the rails. He's been married and owned
a home. He's even had a railroad job working as
a diesel mechanic, and when all that broke apart, Mike
started traveling again. Mike was on the road when we spoke,
and he said he'd swing by for a visit. This
(16:43):
was my chance to get more of my questions answered.
So I was eager and I was lucky Mike would
be passing by. Will be on me because I'll be
coming from you, kay it with all my ship. Tuesday
should work. It might end up being later in the day.
If so, we need to spend time together those to
kind of state your place that needs me or something. Okay,
but you know, I don't want to be like Hi
(17:04):
for an hour deep, you know, or I'll come back later.
So I'm really living where now. Mike and I had
a plan, but as any hobo will tell you, sh
it happens. Trains surprise you. So I didn't see him
that Tuesday, or the Tuesday after that, or the Tuesday
after that. In fact, I didn't see him for another
five months. But when he did finally arrive. He spent
(17:26):
two days with me. Mike answered every question I had,
and he let me tag along with him and a
friend as they hopped back out of town. We climbed
up to the top of the hill, with San Francisco
glittering in the distance across the bay. Mike pulled out
some beers from his pack and handed them around as
we settled in on the hillside. We should just Mike's
(17:52):
book made me think hopping a train was a frenzy.
One of his photos was of a guy trying to
catch up to a train, running with a heavy pack
and carrying a guitar. Often the distance behind him was
another guy really hoffing it. But on the hill, it's peaceful.
We're just relaxing while Mike waits for a pig with wings,
And despite being a season hobo, he doesn't look how
(18:13):
you might expect. No faded car hearts and thrift store boots,
and he certainly isn't dressed like someone about to hide
under a truck trailer. Describe your adfits so that we know,
because we all Gucci clothes and I'm about to hop
freight trains. These are like these Gucci dress boots that
are black leather with zippers on the side. These are
(18:35):
like wool pants with like zippers on the front, more
of like a fashionable detail. Got Gucci socks, it was
a Gucci coat, which really isn't that practical or warm?
A silk shirt that I have buttoned up my glasses
are Gucci. It's pretty much. I went all out. I
got as many Gucci items as I possibly could. Why.
(18:58):
I don't know, really. I I sick of being dirty
and filthy, and I had some money, and I got divorced,
and maybe I was going through some midlife fashion crisis,
and I was like, I'm gonna buy Gucci clothes and
help trains. I know, but like, don't you think that
a lot of train hoppers Mann be like, who the
fuck is this guy? But for the most part, people
have been into it. Which people did other hobos take
(19:18):
a look at Mike's three thousand dollar designer where and
think there's a guy who knows how to ride. I mean,
it's absurd to writing Gucci. It's uncomfortable. He's going to freeze.
But Mike says one of the things he likes about
train riding is how much he suffers. It makes you
really appreciate these other more mundane, simple aspects of life,
(19:38):
using a clean bathroom or sleeping in a nice hotel,
or just you know, having a nice more meal, or
it just helps you appreciate just the simple things in life.
When you're like stuck on this massive freight train going
through the elements, you know, as exciting it as it
as it is to catch that train that you want
or you think you want, it's just as exciting. You
get the funk off of it because you've been on
too long, so get for like twel of twenty four hours.
(20:01):
You're like, okay, we're there yet, I'm done. I'm ready
to get back to civilization. And by that time you're
usually out of water and food and you're just like,
I want to bathe. A couple of months ago, I
went from Reno, Tamarillo via Cheyenne, Wyoming, and I did
not know, but it was I went through a snowstorm.
When you have like windshield like whipping over your whole
sleeping bag for hours and hours and hours, like all
(20:22):
your body heat starts to go away and you start
like I had my boots on, I had all my gear,
my insulated coveralls, all my clothes, my boots, thick socks,
everything in the sleeping bag. And if your body is
stagnant for long enough on metal, it'll just suck all
that energy out of you. But that's like how it is. Uh,
I'd kind of just like to suffer. Okay, here's another way.
(20:48):
This world doesn't sound like Ruby in my eighteen years
with her, she is not someone who likes to suffer.
She likes it cozy, or so I thought, because suffering
was part of it. In this misery, you're definitely living
in the moment, very aware of every breath you take.
The risks that train hoppers take are what make the
rides so special. It costs a lot to get into
(21:09):
the city of the rails. That's why for riders, being
called a hobo isn't a slur or a synonym for homeless.
It's an honor. I think with anything you do, trades
or activities, you've got to kind of like do it
really hard for like ten years before you call yourself
like a carpenter or a mechanic or something the sounds
a master train. Yeah, it's the same thing with train riding.
(21:29):
Like I wouldn't consider say, oh, I'm a hobo or
a train rider or whatever, or a tramp. Until I
did it for a long time, so like it was
probably a year or two ago. I was like, oh
I am this, and that's okay. I went through all
these experiences, thousands of thousands of miles riding trains and
met all these people, did all this stuff. It's okay
(21:53):
to throw a label there and say, oh, I am this.
With Mike, I saw my idea of hobo's there's nothing
but drunks and criminals was wrong. The people RUBY was
traveling with chose this life. They had a culture and
a code of honor. I never expected. I thought that
(22:13):
this world would be brutal. It had to be, if
you're throwing your body on a train, But it was
more than that. It was also tender and reflective, a
different kind of cozy. Maybe it was the frogs. You know,
I hear the kind of sound in most of northern California,
like the cities where I lived, You never hear this
(22:33):
like chirping of the frogs. What's cool about waiting for trains?
Sometimes what passes the time is just like kind of
learning to be your own best friend, or just being
amused by simple things like listening to frogs, listening to
horns off in the distance, just appreciating those simple little pieces.
Mike's been working on being his own best friends since
he took to the rails at seventeen. He was a
(22:54):
board teenager in Pensacola, Florida, who came alive when he
started riding with a polaroid camera friend gave him. The
camera wasn't the point at first. He just needed to
get the hell out of Pensacola. That was just a board.
Like a board, young person, I knew the train would
take me somewhere that was more interesting than like rotting
(23:14):
in Pensacol, Florida, with no direction, with no guidance of
no you know, no interest, no skill. I had no
real skills, no trade skills. No dad, you're like, oh
you should you know, work on cars. Here's how you've
changed to fix a head gasket. You know who, dude,
go do this. There was no direction, so I had
to direct myself in A train was a symbol of that, like, oh,
it's going there over there, to that town and maybe
(23:35):
there'll be something there, even though there's not really ever
anything anywhere. You're just kind of going around in circles,
But Ruby had a direction when I thought worked for her.
Did she think our school was just going around in circles?
Or maybe she just didn't want to listen to anyone?
(23:57):
Was the Ruby who fled different than the way I
knew her? What did I know about this person who
had spent her whole life with me? When Mike talked
about how suffering was part of it, I had to
know more, even if it was going to scare the
hell out of me. I think most Americans agree that
(24:35):
it's our fundamental right, protected in the Constitution, to say,
you know what, I'm sick of this ship. I've acted
on those words of time or two myself. But to
leave out right, leave it all behind, to let everyone
else figure out why you changed your number, that takes guts.
So maybe it was inevitable that as I continued digging
for information about Ruby's world, I found myself reading about
(24:57):
hobos throughout history. I wanted to understand what she could
have been thinking, and I started to see she had company.
There's a long line of Americans who have used the
rails to escape the catastrophe of their lives. But catastrophe
and the railroads go hand in hand. So much of
our language for disasters has its roots in railroading, like
getting off track, a runaway train, or a project getting derailed.
(25:20):
The word for forcing something through without concern for others
is railroaded. My name is Richard White, and I'm historian.
I'm now an emeritus historian. I taught at Stanford University,
among other places, and I've concentrated on the American West.
He's being modest. Richard White won the MacArthur Genius Award
for his lifetime of original research into the forces that
(25:41):
shaped the American West. He used that grant money to
write a definitive history of the rails. White called his
book Railroaded, and that title attracted me in those weeks
after Ruby left, when I wanted to know everything I
could about this world she entered. Railroad had opened my
eyes to the real history of the rails. Most histories
(26:02):
tell the building of the railroads as a heroic tale,
men of vision and actions, haiming the West as they
tie the continent together with steel the railroad. It is
about the scoundrels and liars who built the rails, the
corrupt corporate culture they created, and how they got one
over on the American people. This history is nothing like
the history we were taught in school. I found that
(26:23):
out from my very first question when I sat down
to interview Richard White. I think it's hard for modern
people to imagine what the West was like. You know,
it was just a vast open space, was it not? No,
it's not a vast open space. It was Indian country,
as it was called at the top. All the West
is inhabited. It is inhabited by Native people. So the
(26:44):
land is being given away. Did I actually belonged to
the United States. There's not been treaties for much of
this land. The United States is subsidizing railroads by giving
away other people's country. Then they will have treaties with
the Indians, which will get titled to the land to
give to the railroads. But the United States is giving
away Indian country um to private corporations. And this sets
(27:05):
up what it makes the railroads into the one of
the greatest tools for eradicating Native lands in the Western
United States. It really has never covered as that story
very much, is it. No, No, it's it's usually covered
as the country's empty. The railroad populates that it doesn't
populated replaces one population with another. What railroaded men in
(27:26):
the eighteen hundreds was that the railroads laid track independent
of the consequences over sacred native lands, across private property,
without asking anyone's permission. Richard White estimates that if you
combined all the land the United States gave to the
railroads would be the size of Alaska. Everywhere you look
in history, you find people getting railroad in with a
(27:47):
little regulation from the government. The railroads got to play
by their own rules. They were willing to allow your
competitor lower rates than they were willing to allow you,
you were out of business. The railroads picked winners and losers,
and Americans nineteenth century hated it. The other thing Americans
hated was the huge influence railroads had on politicians take
(28:07):
lobbying invented by the railroads during the Civil War. In
eighteen sixty two, Lincoln signed the Transcontinental Railway Act. And
why would you do something like that when the country
was bankrupt. Most people don't know that Lincoln was a
railroad lawyer before he was a president, and he saw
the railroads as a way to unite the country from
(28:29):
coast to coast, so stuffs into the Railway Act and
many bills thereafter where massive construction subsidies, government backed bonds,
and miles and miles of free land. The railroads were
booming after the war ended, everybody wanted their own railroad.
And that's where the lobbyists come in. This is the
time you have to imagine the federal government is incredibly small.
(28:51):
Congressmen do not have staff, They very rarely have even
much office space. So a lot of their work is
going to be done in public. That's what lobbyists do
for their profit. Where did this public work happen? Wherever
the congressmen were When they traveled to Washington, d C.
They all stayed to the same hotel, the Willard. And
(29:12):
they're called lobbyists because they hang around the lobby. To
hang around the lobby of the Willard Hotel, and they
hang around the lobby in Congress. So the railroads sent
their men to the Willard Hotel carrying literal sacks of cash.
Their goal was to persuade Congressmen to pass the bills
that would subsidize railroad construction. You would see tons of
letters from congressmen, senators, even Supreme Court justices asking for
(29:33):
free passes on railroad so they could go back and forth.
The free pass became a kind of currency. They were
congressmen who would give receipts for bribes. It goes without
saying when you have to bribe people to offer them
a hundred two hundred five dollars for a vote, that
means the systems breaking down. Seems similarly, the system is
(29:54):
just getting started. And this kind of corruption wasn't limited
to congressional bribes. Railroad company needs created a lot of
the financial dodges and shell games that corporations employed to
this day. So railroads show you how it's done. They
show you how to raise capital, set up management, operate
things on a very very large scale, and also they
show you how to cheat. That system created by the
(30:18):
railroads is still shaping our day to day. When that
chooses winners and losers, it gives most of us very
few rewards for showing up and doing as we're told.
Mostly it favors those who cheat. With a system this corrupt,
how can you ever think your hard work will be rewarded.
It's rigged against you unapologetically. If you look at America
this way, it's easy to understand why Mike Brodie says,
(30:40):
you're just kind of going around in circles. Listening to
him again, I felt the pointlessness of every day striving.
That's why this story of a young man in Texas
stuck with me, the story of a guy who went
on the rails because he got promoted when he quit
junior college. Pizza Hut hired him as a delivery guy.
When they are for him an assistant manager's job. His
(31:01):
family started celebrating he was on his way bright horizons.
They bought him a used car and rented him his
own place, But he didn't spend many nights at that
apartment and abandoned his car near the rail yard. The
idea of working his way up the chain at Pizza
Hut put him on the next train to New Orleans.
(31:23):
I think I'm starting to get it. There's got to
be something better than this. And when you get the
urge to go, you just gotta go. And like Ruby,
there's no time to say goodbye. Momo, who told me
about seeing all the stars in the sky from a
box car, described how determined she was to get out
of town when the woman who was going to teach
(31:44):
her how to ride trains didn't show. Mamma decided she'd
give it a try on her own, and the train
stops that was going on it, which is stupid. As
I read a suicide, it's like that, it's like containers,
but it's a big hole in the middle. Writing Suicide
his Home both speak for riding an empty frame that
normally holds a shipping container, and there's just like a
(32:04):
little corner that you can like stand off. Most of
those frames have floors, but when they don't, you're riding
in the corner of a big rectangle with tracks flying
by a few feet underneath. Riders sit with their backs
at the corner, left leg on one beam, right lego
and the other open track rushing below them. The entire
ride that seemed like the craziest fucking thing in the world.
(32:27):
Plus in the middle of this mayhem, MoMA took a nap,
or at least on the corner for my waiting me
and like hook my arm through the thing, and I
was like, and then I woke up him. I see
that was all flapping, and I was like, what if
MoMA had moved in her sleep, she would have fallen
into the tracks. Riding the rails was insane. It was violent, unpredictable,
(32:52):
and dangerous beyond belief. So what dr Ruby here? It
couldn't be Mike's need to suffer. It certainly isn't thrilled
seeking she would hate writing suicide. It had to be
something else. Bruby's fan Aaron showed me what that could be.
When everything is like a group decision, whether you're with
(33:14):
like two people that you don't know very well, or
like even someone even knowing for years, you will get
to know so much better when everything you're doing is
like for survival. I mean even just like a snowstorm,
like trying to keep each other alive, like going through
things like that. Those make you like bonded for life.
(33:35):
That's like absolute freedom, and that's like what we're all
striving for. Is nobody telling us what to do. We
could go where she wanted, whenever she wanted, with whomever
came along, and they'd figure out together where to sleep,
what to eat, and where to go next. This kind
of freedom and friendship could be what was drawing Ruby in.
(33:59):
I guess it was not all your mind to judge,
but I still wanted to find out. Mike showed me
being a hubbo was an actual goal to be truly free.
But Hubba was like, MoMA, are paying the price for
that freedom, paying the price for not being the pizza
hike manager. After her first ride, Mama ended up in
(34:19):
San Diego, where sub marines didn't like the way she
and her friends looked. I was on the pay phone
talking to my grandma and these days came out there
like you can't sit there, and public bench on the
sidewalk as they can, you know, and they're like, no,
get up, hippy, and they put me an armbar with
one guy ond me on the ground like face down.
(34:40):
He was choking me in This other dude had my
arm twisted, he was trying to break it with his hand,
and I was just like so pist off. I was
like spitting on his face. Somebody else like dropped their
knee and it broke my humorous and shattered my elbow
head of surgery. That was my introduction to the road.
It was like everything's gonna suck and everybody hates you.
(35:02):
But after getting out of the hospital with her arm
held together with pins, she and I right back on
the rails, I mean pressed on because I was into it.
I was into it at that point. I was like, cool,
we can do whatever we want whenever we want. And
people would always be like, why are you doing this?
Why are you doing what you're doing? Then? And I'm like,
so I don't have to do what you do. And
I'm like, oh, I do what I do, so I
(35:28):
don't have to do what you do. Okay, don't do
what I do. I don't want to do it anymore either.
All those years of showing up on time, taking late
meetings for what a lifetime of striving left me flat broke.
So why was I trying to make Ruby do what
I had done? Because it was what I knew. But
that was about to change. After Ruby left. I was
(35:51):
no longer such a good citizen. I didn't see the
point when my daughter's life was at risk. I spent
more and more of my time researching trains and reading
books about hoboes. It wasn't spending as much time as
I showed writing The Single Mom Effect. When I blew
past the deadline, I had already spent most of my advance.
I was putting everything on credit cards and watching my
debt grow, hearing stories of Momo writing suicide and Mike
(36:16):
Brodie suffering through a snowstorm made me understand that none
of the normal parenting moves would get Ruby home. I
couldn't take away her allowance or ground her. I couldn't
even get her on the phone. All I could do
was hope for a call and listen for clues about
where she was. I got the sense that I was
in a race against time. Anything could happen out there.
(36:38):
The longer Ruby was gone, the bigger the chance was
she'd never make it back. But it wasn't just about
where she was or what she faced, but who she was.
That's what kept me searching to find the person who
lived with me all her life and yet remained hidden
from me. This search for her led me to the
(36:58):
gang infested streets of cold in California, squats in New Orleans,
even mountains along the Mexican border, and along the way.
I started rethinking everything I thought I knew about being
a mom, about our shared history, and about the quote
unquote American dream. I heard Ruby might have gone to Rooseville,
which meant I knew exactly where I was going next.
(37:20):
Roosevelt is a real working yard where trains come in
and out every hour. That's where the dangers are and
that's what I wanted to see. It's it's dangerous if
you're just worn around and you can't hear what's going on,
you have nothing that you can go on. It's just
completely out of the blues. Things are just gonna happen.
Little did I know that when I tried to follow Ruby,
I'd become entangled in the story of the Rails. But
(37:43):
the fun thing about the railroad is that there's a
finger on the pulse of like the nation that we
have that a lot of people don't. You know. Cameras
aren't going to see Interneyre, drones aren't going to see
interneth here, and you can quickly jump onto a train
that sight. There's all this brotherhood talk, and it's easily
to get wrapped up into this whole fucking cowboy movie
that you're a part of. Every night. That's next time
(38:07):
on City of the Rails, sand Martika said them picka
(38:29):
to turn fourteen. That's while we drinking gasoline. Then this
Malapo sit on the beach is just turning. The glue
came out with the brand new drug and that sat
it to pull the plug and there said, look what
(38:52):
you've done. City of the Rails is hosted by me
tol Morton and developed in partnership between Flip Turns Studios
and I Heeart Podcasts. At I Heart, our team is
executive producer and showrunner Julian Weller, Senior producer and editing
master Abouza far and our excellent producers Emily Maronov, Sina
Ozaki and Zoey Denkla, who survived hours and hours coaching
(39:15):
me how to speak, with production support from Marci de Pina.
Original music every episode by Aaron Kaufman. Our theme music
is Wayfaring Stranger, performed by Profane Sass thanks to Scott
Machad at Flail Records. Our logo is by Lucy Quingtonia
and uses a photograph by Mike Brody. Mike, if you're listening,
text or email me your phone nument doesn't work anymore.
(39:38):
Our executive producer at Flip turn is Mark Healey, and
at I Heeart thanks to Nikki Etur and Bethan Machalooso.
We'll be back with Roseville, California on the City of
the Rails.
Just a heads up. This episode contains adult language and
some violence, so take care while listening. We're almost like
cliff Bluff thing looking over like kind of like the
(00:26):
east end of the train yard, train yard up on
the hill. Let's see, there's the other train line. That's
where Amtrak comes in. It's a warm night in northern
California and I'm drinking beers on a hill with a
hobo named Mike while he waits to hop a train
to Kansas City. This train has been leaving since the
seventies um and it hauls mail alway to Chicago and
(00:48):
like Kansas City to um So the same train has
leaves pretty much every day, like at like four or
five in the morning. I've caught it three times. And
so here we are again. We're here pretty early, but
we have nothing else to do. Like everyone else in America,
I never paid much attention to the rails until someone
I love disappeared into them. And for the last fourteen years,
(01:09):
I've been in train yards with hoboes and talked to
hundreds of people like Mike. But the rails don't give
up their secrets easily. You might hear hobo and picture
an old bum in a box car. But there's more
to train hopping than that. Every night, in train yards
all over America, people wait in the shadows, crouched behind bushes,
scanning the tracks for freight cars to take them somewhere anywhere.
(01:32):
But here riders used alias is like Jobo the hobo.
Long haired Donnie and Tuck don't give a fuck to
make themselves untraceable, and there's a pretty good chance they're
lying to you when they tell you where they're going.
So getting to hang out with Mike Brodie, a guy
using his real name, was a big event, so we
(01:52):
can see it. I appreciate that impulse to escape. I've
thought about it every since she left, but I'm not
brave enough to do it. So Mike's agreed to let
me tag along and get a firsthand look at what
it's like to live on the rails. Tonight, Mike's getting
ready to hop out of town and he's looking for
a very specific kind of train car I want to
(02:14):
pick with wings. It's a bunch of train cars that
have truck chassis on top of them. So if you
look at trucks in the highways, you see these big,
long plastic wings or they're called skirts, but it's like
a modern day box car. You just get behind the
skirt or the wing and you can't be seen. So
you're under the trailer behind a wall. So pick with wings.
It's ideal. Do you sit up much? You could sit
(02:37):
up and lay down, but you can't stand, you know,
because you're under a truck truck trailer. Why would anyone decide, Oh, yeah,
that's what I'm going to do with the next twenty
four hours of my life. I'm gonna lay underneath the
truck chassis and piss into the wind. And that's how
I'm getting to Kansas City, even if I have no
reason to go there, but to Mike Brody and two
thousands of train hoppers, this is a great idea. Yeah,
(03:00):
so does your body get a little sore a little stick. Yeah,
you get really stiff and sore. It gets pretty old.
But every time the train stops or sometimes you just
hop down and stretch your legs. It's worth it because
you can just haul as cross country. It's kind of
shadowed under the car, so anyone looking for you can't
really see you because it's like bright outside. It's ideal.
(03:25):
We live our lives under surveillance, monitored data, harvested with algorithms,
scanning our phone calls, and yet here's a person flying
across the country undetected on a pig with wings. When
you go into a reporting assignment, you open a door,
and you better open your mind because you're going to
see a lot of things you didn't expect. And as
(03:46):
soon as I started looking into the railroads, I began
to see them as a secret city rumbling through all
of our lives. It's citizens are always on the move,
here and gone. They slide through the world on loco
would be so enormous. We rarely notice who hiding in
the cracks. But I'm getting way ahead of myself here.
I have to take you back to the very beginning,
(04:08):
the whole reason I ended up in this dangerous place.
It all started the day my daughter Ruby ran off
to hop trains. This is the story of what I
found when I followed Ruby into the city of the
rail I'm DEDELM Morton. Before I started sneaking into rail yards,
(04:57):
traveling to meet famous hoboes, tracking down rail cops. Before
I ever met Mike Brodie on that hillside, I was
a journalist. I supported my daughter Ruby and her brother
Ben working at newspapers and magazines. I'd raised them mostly
in Santa Monica, where I worked for People Magazine. But
I got tired of reporting on celebrities and we needed
a change. When I got a fat advance from my
(05:20):
first book, The Single Mom Effect, I moved back home
to Oakland and Triumph, happy to be where I grew
up and closer to Ben, who was in college at Berkeley.
When we moved, Ruby was a junior in high school,
and she was cool. But she's always been the coolest
person I knew. I tell my friends that even when
she was in elementary school, there was something rich and
deep going on behind her bright blue eyes, a hidden
(05:43):
aspect of her that always left you wanting more. When
we moved to Oakland, I rented the nicest apartment I've
ever had, a three bedroom with big windows overlooking the
gleaming blue of Lake Merritt. I had an open door policy.
Anyone could drop by the house for dinner, and I
was amazed by how quickly Ruby liked a social circle
in her new school. We started having guests the second
(06:03):
week of the semester. At first, her guests were school friends,
study buddies didn't take long for that to change. By spring,
she started a punk band with a friend, and soon
they were booking shows at Gilman at Berkeley Club, where
Green Day got its started. They began performing at shows
in backyards and local music festivals, and by the midpoint
(06:26):
of her senior year, her guests were older, scruffier, hungrier,
and a little feral, and some of them hopped trains.
Ruby's trained friends were great dinner guests, but entertaining as
they were, they left me with questions, ones that I'd
ask every writer I met. Why would you choose to
live this way? Why would you choose to get your
(06:46):
clue out of a dumpster? Why wouldn't choose to living
in the illegal place where you get arrested in the moment?
Because and we can. It goes way beyond that. I
think it's disgusting, But there's waste everywhere in that one
use it. I don't want to pay for it, I
don't want to have to work for it, and I
want to be free. That's Ruby's friend Aaron. Their description
(07:09):
of radical freedom intrigued me, but I also wanted to
hear stories of the beauty you can only see from
a train. Another friend, Momo, described it well. We were
traveling together. I went through a security where everybody we
encountered kept asking us why we're doing what we were doing.
Then we hoped to train and we were running through
(07:30):
Montana and you can see it. Every star in the sky.
Was like me and my boyfriend and our dogs ever
eating food and went jacking a beer and we're looking
at every single star in the sky and it's like
quiet and peaceful and open and beautiful. We're like, oh,
this is why we do it. I imagine myself alongside
(07:52):
Momo in that box car, waitless, and when my dinner
guests were telling train stories, I'd look across the table
will at Ruby, who was gazing at the lake. I
saw a young girl getting swept up in the same
romance I was. But she wasn't daydreaming. She was making plans.
(08:14):
But my journey into the City of the Rails was
still a long way off from those dinner table conversations.
The day my years long obsession with the rails really
begins as Ruby's high school graduation. Three weeks from graduation,
Ruby seems sullen and withdrawn in the car and the
way to school As we pulled up in front of
the entrance, she told me she was going to drop out.
(08:36):
High school meant nothing to her and she could always
get her g e d. I was having none of that.
I rose up in my full listen young lady fury
and told her, you're graduating if I have to drag
you across that stage. That seemed to work. We carried
on over the next three weeks. We stopped talking about
(08:58):
dropping out and so planning for graduation. Which was a
beautifully tailored sewing pattern for her graduation dress. At the
fabric store. We picked out a deep pink silk for it,
and Ruby got a great haircut. The whole time, she
was cheerful, cooperative, even a little excited. The big day
came and I was so proud Ruby's four years of
(09:19):
high school. While high schools she had been to six
different ones, had been rocky, but she was graduating in
a tiny academic setting. She thrived. Plus Ruby had a
scholarship to a great school, the California College of Arts.
The day was sunny and warm as we took our
seats in the courtyard of a church decorated with bunting
(09:40):
and flowers. The dozen graduates clustered together around the podium.
I waved to a bunch of Ruby's hobo friends sitting
in the back. They cleaned up nice, The men wore
for doors, and the women had on dresses. It was
great they'd come to celebrate with Ruby. The whole place
was buzzing as graduate as came to the podium to
(10:00):
thank their parents in the school. When Ruby approached the mic,
I saw she had her ukulelean hand. She never told
me she was going to sing, say no Montica, saying
Nomtica to turn fourteen as well be drinking. As I
(10:28):
looked around at the other parents as Ruby sang, so
many of them had tears in their eyes, just as
everyone in my family did. Look what you've done. Ruby
had done it. Whatever our weaknesses as a family, we
worked hard together to get to this moment. It all
(10:51):
to anyone because of God made a fool? What a
fool of everyone? What was this song about? Well? Ruby
(11:12):
got hugs from her friends. The family wandered to the
reception hall. We got our flutes of champagne and attacked
the appetizer spread. We stood eating at a tall table,
waiting for Ruby to join us. It seemed like she
was taking an awfully long time. Yeah, asked Ben to
look for her. He came back incredulous Ruby was gone.
(11:36):
What did you mean gone? Then had looked in the
church around the courtyard. Ruby wasn't even in the parking lot.
So I called her, But I got her voicemail pretty
rude that she left graduation without saying goodbye. Maybe she
(11:57):
was at a friend's house and wasn't picking up her phone.
Boy was she going to hear about it when she
got home. The next day, I realized she wasn't coming home.
Maybe she really was gone and I had no idea
where she was. That whole time we were sewing her
dress and talking about what her college dorman would look like,
(12:19):
she was planning her escape on graduation day. She'd made
a real drop the mic departure. She had made a
fool of everyone, and I was first on that list.
M we we had made a fool of everyone. While
(12:44):
we were getting ready for her graduation. She was planning
to ditch us. She even wrote a song about it.
Then she stepped from the podium at her high school
graduation straight to the road with no clues about where
she was headed. I bet she didn't see it that way.
She just turned eighteen, and she didn't have to answer
to in of us anymore. But where was she? Where
had she run off to? I kept trying her phone.
(13:09):
Ruby wasn't answering, so I spent a few days trying
to get ahold of her friends. But the information I
got was hardly solid. Sam said Ruby was road tripping east.
Others said she was hitching north to Roseville, a town
with a major train yard a few hours away. My
money was on Roseville, so I began my search like
I was launching an investigation. I tacked a map of
(13:30):
the United States on my office wall and got colored
pushpins to charge her travels, and I kept a notebook
by the phone. Running away like she did was a
hostile act, but she'd call sooner or later. She would
miss her mom. But whatever I did to prepare, I
couldn't just sit there. The clues to where she was,
who she was with, and how she was surviving definitely
(13:52):
were not in my house. I knew I had to
get up from the dining room table and out into
the train yard to find train riders who would talk
to me. It was the only way to find out more.
The other thing that was bugging me was who is she?
Of all the things to do after graduation, she chose trains?
What was the allure? And my first phone call with
(14:16):
Mike Brodie before we ended up on that hillside looking
for a pig with wings, I asked him that question.
I was asking everyone, why live this way? It's about youth.
It's it's just absurd that that young people in this country,
like we live in a country with so much wealth
and privilege, and like essentially choose to live so subsistently
(14:37):
and like in poverty and explore the country that way
and sunk up your life sometimes and ride trains to
do that is it's fascinating. There is a self righteousness
where a lot of it ties into radical ideologies, and
people are just like it's like a protest, you know,
people riding trains out of protest. They're protesting, you know,
(14:59):
this American whale. There's a lot of a lot of
lost young people who think like rotting trains as the
answer did Ruby Phil lost? Has she been faking it?
Around our dinner table. Mike had been writing for years
chronicling the lives of young people who took to the rails,
his fellow travelers. If there was such a thing as
(15:19):
a well known hobo, Mike was it. I first came
across Mike in an art exhibit in San Francisco. The
gallery featured photos Mike had taken over a decade of
hopping trains. There was a book to a period of
juvenile prosperity, and I bought a copy. I poured over
it in the days after Ruby left. His work helped
(15:40):
me visualize the risks. She was taking images of young
people in box cars, sleeping on filthy mattresses, eating from
garbage dumps, or getting arrested, but also in motion, running
alongside a moving train, trying to hop on. After all
that time on the rails, Mike knew a lot. He
has an insider's college, but he saw that life for
(16:01):
what it was. Maybe Mike could help me see this
world clearly. And when he and I spoke, Mike put
Ruby and me in context. There were other parents like me,
So many people. They have assets and and parents that
love them, and homes, safe homes, you know, but they
don't care. They don't want the society. They don't want
(16:22):
this like they go off and find it on their own.
Mike is familiar with his impulse. He's lived many lives
on and off the rails. He's been married and owned
a home. He's even had a railroad job working as
a diesel mechanic, and when all that broke apart, Mike
started traveling again. Mike was on the road when we spoke,
and he said he'd swing by for a visit. This
(16:43):
was my chance to get more of my questions answered.
So I was eager and I was lucky Mike would
be passing by. Will be on me because I'll be
coming from you, kay it with all my ship. Tuesday
should work. It might end up being later in the day.
If so, we need to spend time together those to
kind of state your place that needs me or something. Okay,
but you know, I don't want to be like Hi
(17:04):
for an hour deep, you know, or I'll come back later.
So I'm really living where now. Mike and I had
a plan, but as any hobo will tell you, sh
it happens. Trains surprise you. So I didn't see him
that Tuesday, or the Tuesday after that, or the Tuesday
after that. In fact, I didn't see him for another
five months. But when he did finally arrive. He spent
(17:26):
two days with me. Mike answered every question I had,
and he let me tag along with him and a
friend as they hopped back out of town. We climbed
up to the top of the hill, with San Francisco
glittering in the distance across the bay. Mike pulled out
some beers from his pack and handed them around as
we settled in on the hillside. We should just Mike's
(17:52):
book made me think hopping a train was a frenzy.
One of his photos was of a guy trying to
catch up to a train, running with a heavy pack
and carrying a guitar. Often the distance behind him was
another guy really hoffing it. But on the hill, it's peaceful.
We're just relaxing while Mike waits for a pig with wings,
And despite being a season hobo, he doesn't look how
(18:13):
you might expect. No faded car hearts and thrift store boots,
and he certainly isn't dressed like someone about to hide
under a truck trailer. Describe your adfits so that we know,
because we all Gucci clothes and I'm about to hop
freight trains. These are like these Gucci dress boots that
are black leather with zippers on the side. These are
(18:35):
like wool pants with like zippers on the front, more
of like a fashionable detail. Got Gucci socks, it was
a Gucci coat, which really isn't that practical or warm?
A silk shirt that I have buttoned up my glasses
are Gucci. It's pretty much. I went all out. I
got as many Gucci items as I possibly could. Why.
(18:58):
I don't know, really. I I sick of being dirty
and filthy, and I had some money, and I got divorced,
and maybe I was going through some midlife fashion crisis,
and I was like, I'm gonna buy Gucci clothes and
help trains. I know, but like, don't you think that
a lot of train hoppers Mann be like, who the
fuck is this guy? But for the most part, people
have been into it. Which people did other hobos take
(19:18):
a look at Mike's three thousand dollar designer where and
think there's a guy who knows how to ride. I mean,
it's absurd to writing Gucci. It's uncomfortable. He's going to freeze.
But Mike says one of the things he likes about
train riding is how much he suffers. It makes you
really appreciate these other more mundane, simple aspects of life,
(19:38):
using a clean bathroom or sleeping in a nice hotel,
or just you know, having a nice more meal, or
it just helps you appreciate just the simple things in life.
When you're like stuck on this massive freight train going
through the elements, you know, as exciting it as it
as it is to catch that train that you want
or you think you want, it's just as exciting. You
get the funk off of it because you've been on
too long, so get for like twel of twenty four hours.
(20:01):
You're like, okay, we're there yet, I'm done. I'm ready
to get back to civilization. And by that time you're
usually out of water and food and you're just like,
I want to bathe. A couple of months ago, I
went from Reno, Tamarillo via Cheyenne, Wyoming, and I did
not know, but it was I went through a snowstorm.
When you have like windshield like whipping over your whole
sleeping bag for hours and hours and hours, like all
(20:22):
your body heat starts to go away and you start
like I had my boots on, I had all my gear,
my insulated coveralls, all my clothes, my boots, thick socks,
everything in the sleeping bag. And if your body is
stagnant for long enough on metal, it'll just suck all
that energy out of you. But that's like how it is. Uh,
I'd kind of just like to suffer. Okay, here's another way.
(20:48):
This world doesn't sound like Ruby in my eighteen years
with her, she is not someone who likes to suffer.
She likes it cozy, or so I thought, because suffering
was part of it. In this misery, you're definitely living
in the moment, very aware of every breath you take.
The risks that train hoppers take are what make the
rides so special. It costs a lot to get into
(21:09):
the city of the rails. That's why for riders, being
called a hobo isn't a slur or a synonym for homeless.
It's an honor. I think with anything you do, trades
or activities, you've got to kind of like do it
really hard for like ten years before you call yourself
like a carpenter or a mechanic or something the sounds
a master train. Yeah, it's the same thing with train riding.
(21:29):
Like I wouldn't consider say, oh, I'm a hobo or
a train rider or whatever, or a tramp. Until I
did it for a long time, so like it was
probably a year or two ago. I was like, oh
I am this, and that's okay. I went through all
these experiences, thousands of thousands of miles riding trains and
met all these people, did all this stuff. It's okay
(21:53):
to throw a label there and say, oh, I am this.
With Mike, I saw my idea of hobo's there's nothing
but drunks and criminals was wrong. The people RUBY was
traveling with chose this life. They had a culture and
a code of honor. I never expected. I thought that
(22:13):
this world would be brutal. It had to be, if
you're throwing your body on a train, But it was
more than that. It was also tender and reflective, a
different kind of cozy. Maybe it was the frogs. You know,
I hear the kind of sound in most of northern California,
like the cities where I lived, You never hear this
(22:33):
like chirping of the frogs. What's cool about waiting for trains?
Sometimes what passes the time is just like kind of
learning to be your own best friend, or just being
amused by simple things like listening to frogs, listening to
horns off in the distance, just appreciating those simple little pieces.
Mike's been working on being his own best friends since
he took to the rails at seventeen. He was a
(22:54):
board teenager in Pensacola, Florida, who came alive when he
started riding with a polaroid camera friend gave him. The
camera wasn't the point at first. He just needed to
get the hell out of Pensacola. That was just a board.
Like a board, young person, I knew the train would
take me somewhere that was more interesting than like rotting
(23:14):
in Pensacol, Florida, with no direction, with no guidance of
no you know, no interest, no skill. I had no
real skills, no trade skills. No dad, you're like, oh
you should you know, work on cars. Here's how you've
changed to fix a head gasket. You know who, dude,
go do this. There was no direction, so I had
to direct myself in A train was a symbol of that, like, oh,
it's going there over there, to that town and maybe
(23:35):
there'll be something there, even though there's not really ever
anything anywhere. You're just kind of going around in circles,
But Ruby had a direction when I thought worked for her.
Did she think our school was just going around in circles?
Or maybe she just didn't want to listen to anyone?
(23:57):
Was the Ruby who fled different than the way I
knew her? What did I know about this person who
had spent her whole life with me? When Mike talked
about how suffering was part of it, I had to
know more, even if it was going to scare the
hell out of me. I think most Americans agree that
(24:35):
it's our fundamental right, protected in the Constitution, to say,
you know what, I'm sick of this ship. I've acted
on those words of time or two myself. But to
leave out right, leave it all behind, to let everyone
else figure out why you changed your number, that takes guts.
So maybe it was inevitable that as I continued digging
for information about Ruby's world, I found myself reading about
(24:57):
hobos throughout history. I wanted to understand what she could
have been thinking, and I started to see she had company.
There's a long line of Americans who have used the
rails to escape the catastrophe of their lives. But catastrophe
and the railroads go hand in hand. So much of
our language for disasters has its roots in railroading, like
getting off track, a runaway train, or a project getting derailed.
(25:20):
The word for forcing something through without concern for others
is railroaded. My name is Richard White, and I'm historian.
I'm now an emeritus historian. I taught at Stanford University,
among other places, and I've concentrated on the American West.
He's being modest. Richard White won the MacArthur Genius Award
for his lifetime of original research into the forces that
(25:41):
shaped the American West. He used that grant money to
write a definitive history of the rails. White called his
book Railroaded, and that title attracted me in those weeks
after Ruby left, when I wanted to know everything I
could about this world she entered. Railroad had opened my
eyes to the real history of the rails. Most histories
(26:02):
tell the building of the railroads as a heroic tale,
men of vision and actions, haiming the West as they
tie the continent together with steel the railroad. It is
about the scoundrels and liars who built the rails, the
corrupt corporate culture they created, and how they got one
over on the American people. This history is nothing like
the history we were taught in school. I found that
(26:23):
out from my very first question when I sat down
to interview Richard White. I think it's hard for modern
people to imagine what the West was like. You know,
it was just a vast open space, was it not? No,
it's not a vast open space. It was Indian country,
as it was called at the top. All the West
is inhabited. It is inhabited by Native people. So the
(26:44):
land is being given away. Did I actually belonged to
the United States. There's not been treaties for much of
this land. The United States is subsidizing railroads by giving
away other people's country. Then they will have treaties with
the Indians, which will get titled to the land to
give to the railroads. But the United States is giving
away Indian country um to private corporations. And this sets
(27:05):
up what it makes the railroads into the one of
the greatest tools for eradicating Native lands in the Western
United States. It really has never covered as that story
very much, is it. No, No, it's it's usually covered
as the country's empty. The railroad populates that it doesn't
populated replaces one population with another. What railroaded men in
(27:26):
the eighteen hundreds was that the railroads laid track independent
of the consequences over sacred native lands, across private property,
without asking anyone's permission. Richard White estimates that if you
combined all the land the United States gave to the
railroads would be the size of Alaska. Everywhere you look
in history, you find people getting railroad in with a
(27:47):
little regulation from the government. The railroads got to play
by their own rules. They were willing to allow your
competitor lower rates than they were willing to allow you,
you were out of business. The railroads picked winners and losers,
and Americans nineteenth century hated it. The other thing Americans
hated was the huge influence railroads had on politicians take
(28:07):
lobbying invented by the railroads during the Civil War. In
eighteen sixty two, Lincoln signed the Transcontinental Railway Act. And
why would you do something like that when the country
was bankrupt. Most people don't know that Lincoln was a
railroad lawyer before he was a president, and he saw
the railroads as a way to unite the country from
(28:29):
coast to coast, so stuffs into the Railway Act and
many bills thereafter where massive construction subsidies, government backed bonds,
and miles and miles of free land. The railroads were
booming after the war ended, everybody wanted their own railroad.
And that's where the lobbyists come in. This is the
time you have to imagine the federal government is incredibly small.
(28:51):
Congressmen do not have staff, They very rarely have even
much office space. So a lot of their work is
going to be done in public. That's what lobbyists do
for their profit. Where did this public work happen? Wherever
the congressmen were When they traveled to Washington, d C.
They all stayed to the same hotel, the Willard. And
(29:12):
they're called lobbyists because they hang around the lobby. To
hang around the lobby of the Willard Hotel, and they
hang around the lobby in Congress. So the railroads sent
their men to the Willard Hotel carrying literal sacks of cash.
Their goal was to persuade Congressmen to pass the bills
that would subsidize railroad construction. You would see tons of
letters from congressmen, senators, even Supreme Court justices asking for
(29:33):
free passes on railroad so they could go back and forth.
The free pass became a kind of currency. They were
congressmen who would give receipts for bribes. It goes without
saying when you have to bribe people to offer them
a hundred two hundred five dollars for a vote, that
means the systems breaking down. Seems similarly, the system is
(29:54):
just getting started. And this kind of corruption wasn't limited
to congressional bribes. Railroad company needs created a lot of
the financial dodges and shell games that corporations employed to
this day. So railroads show you how it's done. They
show you how to raise capital, set up management, operate
things on a very very large scale, and also they
show you how to cheat. That system created by the
(30:18):
railroads is still shaping our day to day. When that
chooses winners and losers, it gives most of us very
few rewards for showing up and doing as we're told.
Mostly it favors those who cheat. With a system this corrupt,
how can you ever think your hard work will be rewarded.
It's rigged against you unapologetically. If you look at America
this way, it's easy to understand why Mike Brodie says,
(30:40):
you're just kind of going around in circles. Listening to
him again, I felt the pointlessness of every day striving.
That's why this story of a young man in Texas
stuck with me, the story of a guy who went
on the rails because he got promoted when he quit
junior college. Pizza Hut hired him as a delivery guy.
When they are for him an assistant manager's job. His
(31:01):
family started celebrating he was on his way bright horizons.
They bought him a used car and rented him his
own place, But he didn't spend many nights at that
apartment and abandoned his car near the rail yard. The
idea of working his way up the chain at Pizza
Hut put him on the next train to New Orleans.
(31:23):
I think I'm starting to get it. There's got to
be something better than this. And when you get the
urge to go, you just gotta go. And like Ruby,
there's no time to say goodbye. Momo, who told me
about seeing all the stars in the sky from a
box car, described how determined she was to get out
of town when the woman who was going to teach
(31:44):
her how to ride trains didn't show. Mamma decided she'd
give it a try on her own, and the train
stops that was going on it, which is stupid. As
I read a suicide, it's like that, it's like containers,
but it's a big hole in the middle. Writing Suicide
his Home both speak for riding an empty frame that
normally holds a shipping container, and there's just like a
(32:04):
little corner that you can like stand off. Most of
those frames have floors, but when they don't, you're riding
in the corner of a big rectangle with tracks flying
by a few feet underneath. Riders sit with their backs
at the corner, left leg on one beam, right lego
and the other open track rushing below them. The entire
ride that seemed like the craziest fucking thing in the world.
(32:27):
Plus in the middle of this mayhem, MoMA took a nap,
or at least on the corner for my waiting me
and like hook my arm through the thing, and I
was like, and then I woke up him. I see
that was all flapping, and I was like, what if
MoMA had moved in her sleep, she would have fallen
into the tracks. Riding the rails was insane. It was violent, unpredictable,
(32:52):
and dangerous beyond belief. So what dr Ruby here? It
couldn't be Mike's need to suffer. It certainly isn't thrilled
seeking she would hate writing suicide. It had to be
something else. Bruby's fan Aaron showed me what that could be.
When everything is like a group decision, whether you're with
(33:14):
like two people that you don't know very well, or
like even someone even knowing for years, you will get
to know so much better when everything you're doing is
like for survival. I mean even just like a snowstorm,
like trying to keep each other alive, like going through
things like that. Those make you like bonded for life.
(33:35):
That's like absolute freedom, and that's like what we're all
striving for. Is nobody telling us what to do. We
could go where she wanted, whenever she wanted, with whomever
came along, and they'd figure out together where to sleep,
what to eat, and where to go next. This kind
of freedom and friendship could be what was drawing Ruby in.
(33:59):
I guess it was not all your mind to judge,
but I still wanted to find out. Mike showed me
being a hubbo was an actual goal to be truly free.
But Hubba was like, MoMA, are paying the price for
that freedom, paying the price for not being the pizza
hike manager. After her first ride, Mama ended up in
(34:19):
San Diego, where sub marines didn't like the way she
and her friends looked. I was on the pay phone
talking to my grandma and these days came out there
like you can't sit there, and public bench on the
sidewalk as they can, you know, and they're like, no,
get up, hippy, and they put me an armbar with
one guy ond me on the ground like face down.
(34:40):
He was choking me in This other dude had my
arm twisted, he was trying to break it with his hand,
and I was just like so pist off. I was
like spitting on his face. Somebody else like dropped their
knee and it broke my humorous and shattered my elbow
head of surgery. That was my introduction to the road.
It was like everything's gonna suck and everybody hates you.
(35:02):
But after getting out of the hospital with her arm
held together with pins, she and I right back on
the rails, I mean pressed on because I was into it.
I was into it at that point. I was like, cool,
we can do whatever we want whenever we want. And
people would always be like, why are you doing this?
Why are you doing what you're doing? Then? And I'm like,
so I don't have to do what you do. And
I'm like, oh, I do what I do, so I
(35:28):
don't have to do what you do. Okay, don't do
what I do. I don't want to do it anymore either.
All those years of showing up on time, taking late
meetings for what a lifetime of striving left me flat broke.
So why was I trying to make Ruby do what
I had done? Because it was what I knew. But
that was about to change. After Ruby left. I was
(35:51):
no longer such a good citizen. I didn't see the
point when my daughter's life was at risk. I spent
more and more of my time researching trains and reading
books about hoboes. It wasn't spending as much time as
I showed writing The Single Mom Effect. When I blew
past the deadline, I had already spent most of my advance.
I was putting everything on credit cards and watching my
debt grow, hearing stories of Momo writing suicide and Mike
(36:16):
Brodie suffering through a snowstorm made me understand that none
of the normal parenting moves would get Ruby home. I
couldn't take away her allowance or ground her. I couldn't
even get her on the phone. All I could do
was hope for a call and listen for clues about
where she was. I got the sense that I was
in a race against time. Anything could happen out there.
(36:38):
The longer Ruby was gone, the bigger the chance was
she'd never make it back. But it wasn't just about
where she was or what she faced, but who she was.
That's what kept me searching to find the person who
lived with me all her life and yet remained hidden
from me. This search for her led me to the
(36:58):
gang infested streets of cold in California, squats in New Orleans,
even mountains along the Mexican border, and along the way.
I started rethinking everything I thought I knew about being
a mom, about our shared history, and about the quote
unquote American dream. I heard Ruby might have gone to Rooseville,
which meant I knew exactly where I was going next.
(37:20):
Roosevelt is a real working yard where trains come in
and out every hour. That's where the dangers are and
that's what I wanted to see. It's it's dangerous if
you're just worn around and you can't hear what's going on,
you have nothing that you can go on. It's just
completely out of the blues. Things are just gonna happen.
Little did I know that when I tried to follow Ruby,
I'd become entangled in the story of the Rails. But
(37:43):
the fun thing about the railroad is that there's a
finger on the pulse of like the nation that we
have that a lot of people don't. You know. Cameras
aren't going to see Interneyre, drones aren't going to see
interneth here, and you can quickly jump onto a train
that sight. There's all this brotherhood talk, and it's easily
to get wrapped up into this whole fucking cowboy movie
that you're a part of. Every night. That's next time
(38:07):
on City of the Rails, sand Martika said them picka
(38:29):
to turn fourteen. That's while we drinking gasoline. Then this
Malapo sit on the beach is just turning. The glue
came out with the brand new drug and that sat
it to pull the plug and there said, look what
(38:52):
you've done. City of the Rails is hosted by me
tol Morton and developed in partnership between Flip Turns Studios
and I Heeart Podcasts. At I Heart, our team is
executive producer and showrunner Julian Weller, Senior producer and editing
master Abouza far and our excellent producers Emily Maronov, Sina
Ozaki and Zoey Denkla, who survived hours and hours coaching
(39:15):
me how to speak, with production support from Marci de Pina.
Original music every episode by Aaron Kaufman. Our theme music
is Wayfaring Stranger, performed by Profane Sass thanks to Scott
Machad at Flail Records. Our logo is by Lucy Quingtonia
and uses a photograph by Mike Brody. Mike, if you're listening,
text or email me your phone nument doesn't work anymore.
(39:38):
Our executive producer at Flip turn is Mark Healey, and
at I Heeart thanks to Nikki Etur and Bethan Machalooso.
We'll be back with Roseville, California on the City of
the Rails.
Host
Danelle Morton
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