An open boxcar is a very exciting thing, for it speaks worlds of opportunities poetic and deviant, and when I say deviant I mean that in wonderful adventuresome ways, youthful, fearless, and unflinching. And when I say poetic I mean poetic. My experience riding the rails is very limited - a twenty minute ride east into the Columbia Gorge necessitating an hour back into Portland on foot and by bus . So much for unflinching, but that time honored hobby (a way of life for real unflinchers) has long graced my dreams and adoration. At a young age, I was regaled by my father about his adventures hopping trains as a young boy. His best friend was Herbie, and they were little military brat hobos together, and once or twice Herbie was too scared to deboard and so had to call his mother from God-Knows-Where, Texas to come pick him up and probably tug at his ear and smack him a good one in the face. Sometimes I wondered if my father was making Herbie up because Herbie seemed like too perfect a name for an inept hobo child. However, what does someone call a Herbie when said Herbie grows up? How awful. Talk about going from unbearably cool and youthful to unbearably crotchety by default.
The majority of my time inside boxcars has been spent playing music with the cars parked down in the Brooklyn train yard, not New York Brooklyn, but Portland Brooklyn, a part industrial part residential neighborhood in the southeast part of town where one can walk (if one can find reason) from the Rose City Gymnastics Academy to the Portland Granite Company to Pinball Publishing to the Portland Opera Company in under twenty minutes. And now, thanks to the miracles of modern reality, home to my new apartment!
From my bedroom window I can watch the trains roll by in the morning, and at night it's a two minute walk to the aforementioned Brooklyn train yard, where my guitar and I can find an open, empty boxcar to fill with whatever music we can muster, mostly songs about Love and Revolution and how we'd like to go there and maybe stay.
The train yard is its own universe of intersecting lines, multitudinous textures, and materials so strange and beautiful they could only have been designed to build trains and the paths they so innately rely upon. When was the last time you sat on a giant stack of railroad ties with a bottle of wine, alone with the moon and the ghosts of a singular human evening? When was the last time you walked for miles down the tracks, not caring who was watching or why? Saturday afternoons in the modern world were made for such adventures, not for obsequious nonsense and setting yor watch by the newspaper headlines.
I stand at my bedroom window watching a train going past, on its way, I think to San Francisco, and then Los Angeles. I think about my dear friends in both cities, and then about the angels, and then about Saint Francis, who was an Italian street thug and then a Saint who preached to birds, or maybe for birds, depending on how you look at it and who you are and what day it is. I think about how we are all angels and all full of the ghost of Saint Francis, at least a little. I think about a film I saw where a Japanese rockabilly hipster is looking out a hotel window, watching the streets of Memphis happen.
It's cool to be 27.
It's cool to be any age.
You will never again be as young as you are right now.
So maybe do something with that.
Love,
Rozzell
