2022 Exposition: I am mostly leaving this verbatim from when I first wrote it 19 years ago. I am editing a little to mildly reformat, keeping anonymity for the dramatis personae, but otherwise leaving mostly as original. I’m simply abbreviating many names by their first letter, otherwise using handles and aliases. Some spelling mistakes I’m leaving as is because they are more cute than anything else. I grossly overused ellipsis and I have a bit of a potty-mouth. When these events took place I was 26 years old, and more than a little naive, although I regret almost none of these experiences. While this was originally emails sent to family and friends, I hosted it as a blog website until about 2005. Any new notes and exposition I have noted with a ‘2022 note’ tag, but I’m keeping these to a minimum.

This is just a thrown together site as of yet... This was a mass email journal that I updated whenever I could find a public computer. I apologize for the shaddyness of the page - everything on here is verbatim from my emails. Sorry about spelling mistakes and grammatical errors and such.

FC’s Journal #1 - April 15, 2003 - 10:01 am
Eeeek... I forgot a subject heading. I'll send this all to you again lest you think I was sending you spam. Sorry!

Howdy, hopefully this email finds you all safe and sound. Hopefully I have figured out how to use this hotmail CC stuff correctly... If not, I'll figure it out. Oh, and if there is anyone out there who does want to receive these messages, just let me know and I'll remove your name from the list. And if there's anyone that I forgot to include, well, you probably aren't gonna' see this anyway, but if you'd like to receive messages, just say so and I'll include you as well. Sorry about the mass emailing, but I only get so much time to use the library’s computers...

I headed out on Tuesday night. Axel drove me to the CP rail yard on Central in Minneapolis. We waited for just a few minutes to see what was going on. Like usual, the 6:30 train was being built up. We found a nice double-stack well car to ride and waited. We had some fun with the golfers that were playing nearby, but other than that little occurred until the train started out. Then Axel got off and I continued onward towards Chicago. It was a nice night, warm with little cloud cover. I got no rain for the entire trip. I stayed up watching the city and river go by as we headed out. After it got dark I got into my sleeping bag and promptly fell asleep. I woke when we (me and the train) went through La Crosse, but then quickly fell asleep again. It was kinda' fun seeing the BNSF yard in La Crosse from the perspective of the CP line... It cuts just past the yard. I had been there just a few weeks prior when Axel, Bart and I went down to La Crosse for the weekend. I slept some more, and then woke just before we got to Milwaukee. For some reason I got a little freaked out here and decided I should probably get my gear set lest I need to make a hasty exit should a bull patrol the train... But I fell back asleep before we got there, and I didn't wake until we were past the yard. Hehe... Yeah, silly me. I guess I didn't need to worry about it anyway. About seven in the morning the CP train arrived just outside Chicago O'Hare airport. The train slowed to a crawl to wait for clearance into the yard. That's when I jumped off and walked to the nearest gas station. I called Bart who promptly arrived two hours later (hehe...). I met Lindso, who we will be traveling with as well. She seems really nice. A little green, so to speak, but I was (and still am in many ways) that way once too. She'll learn about the road soon enough. We spent the day doing little more than just hanging out. Bart did drive us around to a few of the bigger train yards though... That was fun. Too bad it was raining most of the day so we couldn't really explore the yards much. We went to the BNSF Clyde yard in Cicero... I've been out of that yard half a dozen times already, but it was kinda' neat seeing the yard in daylight. Then we went to a NS yard, that you can go to the east coast from. The amount of trains that run in Chicago is amazing. You can hardly walk a block without stumbling across a train crossing. That evening we hung out with KC for a little while. He's just putting the finishing touches on closing on a house. Good luck, KC!

Last night, we couldn't find a place for me to stay, so I slept under a bridge. I've done so before, and this probably won't be the last time either. It was fine under there, away from the wind and rain, until about 1:30 in the morning... When I awoke at this time I realized that the bridge now had a double occupancy. I was a little freaked out about sharing my sleeping quarters with an unknown person, but he didn't seem to realize I was there, nor would he have cared much I imagine if he did. I secured my gear under my head so I'd know if anyone had gotten to nosy with my stuff in the night, and I also got my pepper spray in my right pocket... Just in case. But no need to worry... I awoke about 7:30 to find that he was still sleeping soundly and hadn't tried to rob me, so I decided to leave my new friend and go out to the library... Which brings me here.

The plan, as it stands now, is to get a ride to Champaign on Sunday morning, and from there get on the IC/CN mainline down to New Orleans. Wish me luck... You'll be hearing from me soon, I hope. ---FC

FC’s Journal #2 - April 16, 2003 - 1:50 pm
Yesturday we hung out most of the day with KC. That was fun. We went to an old abandoned graveyard and explored in the woods some. I did something kinda' gross (sorry... I can't give away all my secrets... My father reads these emails too.) to earn me a free burrito. Bart, Lindso, and I played football some. Other than that, we pretty much just hung out. Last night I met up with my oldskool buddy, FBR. He and his wife now live on the 'South Side'... It was good to see them, and they let me stay at their place for the night. Today I have just been wandering around Pilsen neighborhood some. I'm starting to get a little anxious to get out of this city. I don't like Chicago a lot... It's just way too big for my mind to comprehend. Soon enough we'll be on our way to New Orleans.

Okay, yeah, I'm sorry for the short, uninteresting journal entry, but some days I do more than others. Besides, once we get 'on the road' it may be a few days, or more before you get updates from me... So I gotta' talk some now. Yeap, so, I hope all is well. ---FC

FC’s Journal #3 - April 17, 2003 - 11:18 am
Howdy all. Yesturday was a bit more of an adventure. I had spent the night at FBR’s place. When I got up, I went to the library and then explored Pilsen neighborhood. FBR told me that along with another nearby neighborhood, Pilsen has the largest concentration of Mexican/Chicano folks in the Midwest. It's a nice place. I know I'm playing my part of the suburban white kid, but I would have expected it to be a bit more ghetto. It's not. The people are nice, and the neighborhood is clean. After that I took a bus to ‘Boy's Town’ - the gay district. That was kinda' fun too, although there really isn't anything to do there if you don't have any money. It's all stores and bars... So I decided to go and hang out by the lake... Lake Michigan of course. Yep, so I headed down the road a mile or so, but I couldn't figure out how to cross a free-way that someone decided to place just next to the lake. I talked to people who told me about tunnels that ran underneath the highway, but I couldn't find them. After about an hour of wandering around I stumbled across an underpass... It's not a tunnel! I was expecting one of those stairways that disappear into the sidewalk like the kind for the subway... Not so. Yeah, so I finally got to the lake. It wasn't long before I met up with some home-guard bums that were hanging out in the park. We hung out and talked for a while. They were pretty nice guys... Sexist, racist, and homophobic... but pretty nice. At least they look out for each other. So after that I took the bus back to FBR’s place as I head no where else to stay. On the way back we passed through a Greek neighborhood. It's funny how all the neighborhoods are set up by ethnicities and such in Chicago. There's China-town, Boy's town, Pilsen, a Greek neighborhood, a Lithuanian (er, somewhere Eastern European anyway...) neighborhood, an art district, and probably a few dozen more that I don't know of. Tonight I'm gonna' meet Bart near the airport, and then we'll head over to the place of the guy we are getting a ride to Champaign with. I can't wait to take the IC now... I read some about the old IC line here at the library while I waited to use a computer. Okay, well, I hope all is well. ---FC

FC’s Journal #4 - April 21, 2003 - 12:07 pm
I'm in New Orleans. It was a crazy trip. I'll have to keep this email hella' short though as I have little time on the computer... The last day in Chicago I went downtown to a Hempfest that was going on. I couldn't find it though, so I just sat and watched folks play soccer instead. One guy did one of those crazy bicycle things, but he missed the goal. Nutty. Then I met up with Bart and Lindso, and a nice guy named Greg drove us to the Champaign yard about two hours south of Chicago. When we got there, I talked to a worker who scoffed at intermodal (IM) traffic coming through there, but was really nice and helpful. We ended up staying the night, and the next day decided on taking general manifest (GM) instead. We found a boxcar with two open doors and took that. IC/CN has a weird arrangement where on many of there trains, the first dozen cars with be IM, but the rest is GM. It sucks 'cause every time you think you've found the train you want, you get disappointed. We rode the boxcar to Centralia, IL. Two workers managed to see us where we were hiding and helped us out. One of them said he envies us and wished that he could ride trains instead of working on them. We had to cross a bunch of lines to find the train we wanted, and then had to wait for hours. I jammed my index finger and it hurt like a sonofabitch for about a day, but it's alright now. We ended up waiting in a boxcar that had some how had the door broken off and left inside. We found an empty boxcar and took that to Fulton, KY. The workers in Fulton are really nice and helpful. I refilled my water bottle at the crew shack. We found another nice boxcar with cardboard in it and headed to Memphis, TN. There I encountered one of the very few not-so-nice workers. Still, he did tell me that our train was being built up and that we'd head out to Jackson, MS soon enough, which we did. At night we entered the ghetto of Jackson. I talked to two nice workers who told me that we were being built up and then we would head to Baton Rouge. After thinking about it some, we decided to take the train there, as the workers said that there wouldn't be anything leaving for New Orleans for a while... When we got into Baton Rouge we tried to talk to workers... Bart got lucky and found a nice one, but other than that, they aren't so nice there.

This was the start of a bad day. We decided to escape the yard and wait in some tall grasses outside the yard. After waiting for a while a train started creeping out of the yard, and we ran to get on. We got on grainers, which aren't so good for hiding on. When the train backed up into the yard, I told Bart to stay on 'cause we were probably just adding on to the train before leaving. Wrong. They broke the train apart. Bart and Lindso got caught, but they somehow missed me. I had to escape the yard a second time now in broad daylight with the yard somewhat allerted to the fact there were trespassers. I now did one of the craziest things of my life. Instead of walking through the yard, I decided I would walk around the yard through the rough brush. Rough brush in the south is different from the north... This was thorns, vines, and kudzu that sometimes was ten feet tall. It took me half an hour to go ten feet... Two hours later I had managed to get about two hundred yards down to where the scrub opened up and I escaped. My arms are totally hacked up. It sucked. I'll have to tell you more later... I got back to where we were waiting. I was exhausted and fell asleep. I awoke to hear some dude calling to his dog, only this wasn't ‘Here boy’, it was all this kind of stuff that a real dog caller would do: whistles and guttural yells and such. I was like, ‘Holy shit, they sent dogs after me.’ So I just waited and low and behold the dog appeared he came up and sniffed me, but then just walked off. It must have just been some dude and his dog.

No IC's came through that day and I decided to walk into the city to see if Bart and Lindso were in jail. That night I was depressed 'cause I blamed my self for getting them caught. Baton Rouge is a shit-hole anyway. I tried hitch-hiking, but that didn't work. I walked to the Greyhound station and bought a ticket to New Orleans. For some odd reason I'll never know the reason to, I didn't get on the bus when it came. Instead, I contemplated getting a bus home. As I was thinking, I heard a train whistle and decided, 'What the hell'. I walked down the way. It was a KCS backing out of the yard... I knew KCS also headed to New Orleans. I got on, but we went back into the yard. I was about to get off when we cruised back out. I got on and off the damn thing at least three times while they built it up (at the time I thought they were breaking it up). I decided to walk the line to the units and ask them if they were called for anywhere. On my way there, a voice asked me where I was going. I thought I was caught. Turns out it was some other dude on the train already. He told me that it would go to New Orleans, so I got on and fell asleep. It did. That's an insane story I'll have to tell again for you all to understand just how unlucky it all was. I'm in New Orleans now. I'm gonna' try and meet up with my traveling partner today. I gotta' run though. I've got about two minutes left on this computer. Hope all is well. ---FC

FC's Journal #6? - April 24, 2003 - 10:42 am
[2022 note: Sigh, leaving this as original, clearly I was a little sweet on her.]
Shit! I totally don't have enough time to write my journal today. I'll have to keep this super short... I'll write more soon, as soon as I get a chance. First things first: I finally met up with my traveling partner. She's a 19 year-old girl from Florida. We met up in New Orleans. She's super cute, intelligent, interesting, mature, and has a personality similar to mine. Besides, she has this crazy Ari-luck that has saved our ass a couple times now... I'm starting to be a believer. Okay, we hung out in New Orleans for a few days, but the cops are insane there. We got picked up, and had our id's run one morning, but fortunately Atlanta didn't want to extradite me on my warrant so we were let go. I'll have to keep my nose a little cleaner here in Alabama where we are just a state over from Georgia. The street life in NO is crazy... Lots of crazy street performers running around, cops busting folks left and right, cool soup kitchens and fun punks to hang out with... But no wet t-shirt contests or anything like that, I'm afraid. We decided to get the hell out of NO as soon as possible. So two days ago we went to the NS train yard and waited... We found a nice place to catch out of, but nothing left all night long. In the morning, a construction team starting working about twenty feet from where we were sitting... So we hopped a fence into someone's backyard and left via that. We went to another part of the yard where we promptly caught two northbound grainers (one for me and one for her)... The train crossed this crazy ten-mile long bridge over some lake. And then we got to Birmingham early this morning. So, that's the recap... Sorry again I can't go into more detail. It will have to wait. Hope all is well. ---FC

FC's Journal #5 - April 25, 2003 - 4:36 pm
Oops, I guess I skipped over journal number five before going on to six, so I'll have it here instead. A little out of order, but no matter. Yesturday was rather boring... We went to the 16th Street Baptist Church where a bomb killed four girls in the civil rights days of Birmingham. After that we went to 'Five Points' which is sorta' like an uptown area. We hung out at a park for a while and finally met a few rail bums... These guys are the real deal. One of them is 54 and has been riding for nearly forty years. Anyway, we hung out with them for a few hours, swapping stories and such. Later we spent the night at a friend of theirs place. Really nice guys... Tonight we have an invitation to stay at a friend of theirs camper trailer. We might hang out here for a couple more days and see if my buddy Bart and his girlfriend, Lindso, are going to come through... They've been sorta' following our trail the last few days... Otherwise, we might head up to the Carolinas. After that we don't really know. So we'll see what happens. Sorry about this being rather short, but nothing too crazy has happened in the last day or so. Hope all is well. ---FC

FC's Journal #7 - April 27, 2003 - 9:58 am
Birmingham is a really nice city. The people are nice, the cops are fairly easy-going, there are plenty of roof-tops and parks to sleep in, and there's a few decent food kitchens too. Also, there is a nice scene of punks and such that take care of one another in the 'Five Points' area. There's a church that has told the cops that as long as homeless folks are on their property and not causing trouble, then they (the homeless folk) are free to stay as long as they like. Anyway, it's nice knowing there's a place I can hang out and not worry about getting harassed by the cops. I looks like Bart and Lindso are on their way home now... So, I'm not sure what Ari and I will do. Probably we will just continue onward to North Carolina. Let's see... A couple stories I don't want to tell right now, but I want to write down to remind myself of when I get home: the car tire & and the crazy ride home from the park. We hung out with a guy named D and his family some. He's a really nice guy. Yesturday we left their place and hung out at the park most of the day. We haven't seen Wolf or Pops (the two older tramps) around lately. They are probably still at D's place... Last night I slept on the roof of a bakery. It was a little cold, but I did alright. Cold for Alabama anyway... Oh, I almost forgot... I finally have a real tramp name. Ari and I both got named by Wolf. I now am known as Yankee, but I'll probably use the name Yankee FC or something like that as there are probably other tramps that go by Yankee. Ari got the name Stick. I'm not really sure of the story there, but whatever... Obviously, I got the name Yankee due to the fact that I'm a northerner... These Southern bums thought it was rather hilarious to be from the north... Anyway, I'm almost out of time here. I hope ya'll are well. ---FC

FC's Journal #8 - April 28, 2003 - 9:50 am
Hey ya'll. Not too much happening in the last few days... Bart and Lindso are indeed on their way home and therefore won't be traveling with us. That really sux. Bart is the best guy I've ever traveled with, so I was looking forward to meeting up with him. Also, I should clarify one little detail from one of my past journal entries: when I said that Bart and Lindso got caught in Baton Rouge, I was wrong. What happened was, a train was leaving the yard and I wanted to be on it. When it started back into the yard I figured that it was simply backing up to pick up another string. Bart asked me if we should get off. I told him that I was staying, at which point I went back to my grainer and got on. At this point I presumed that they were still onboard, but I guess they got off. When the train backed into the yard, they broke it up. At one point they stopped breaking it up and a car (as opposed to the usual worker's truck, special agents sometimes drive cars) drove past to the end of the train. I looked back and there were a bunch of workers and the car sitting by where Bart and Lindso's grainer was... So I presumed that they had gotten caught. They hadn't, of course, 'cause they weren't on the train. So, I was totally wrong. They had no troubles and we just managed to miss each other... I just wanted clarify. Um, hmmm... What else? Ari and I are thinking of maybe going up to North Carolina today or tonight... I slept last night near the train line we came in on... A ton of freights use these lines to enter and leave the Birmingham area. I saw NS, CSX, and BNSF (ex-Conrail) trains trafficking through... The volume is rather amazing too. A train passes by every half-hour or so all night long. So this might be a decent place to catch out of, considering the trains crawl through it, and it's in a deserted area of downtown. Anyway, I've got to meet up with Ari and decide what our plans are... Hope all is well. ---FC

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