Boomer: Railroad Memoirs

Boomer: Railroad Memoirs

Boomer: Railroad Memoirs

Boomer: Railroad Memoirs

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Overview

“A fascinating mix of fact, history, self-confession, self-accusation, and self-forgiveness—a diary of both emotional relationships and travel.” —Pasatiempo

This classic account of self-discovery and railroad life describes Linda Grant Niemann’s travels as an itinerant brakeman on the Southern Pacific. Boomer combines travelogue, Wild West adventure, sexual memoir, and closely observed ethnography. A Berkeley Ph.D., Niemann turned her back on academia and set out to master the craft of railroad brakeman, beginning a journey of sexual and subcultural exploration and traveling down a path toward recovery from alcoholism. In honest, clean prose, Niemann treks off the beaten path and into the forgotten places along the rail lines, finding true American characters with colorful pasts—and her true self as well.

“Ma[kes] the railroad experience come alive with all its grit, danger, romance, and general outrageousness . . . Possibly the finest book I’ve ever read about the actual experience of working on the railroad.” —Trains Magazine

“Niemann has a taut, lyrically restrained but vividly descriptive style, with an observational vigilance befitting a brakeman’s mindset, and her narrative clips along like a boxcar rolling through the yard.” —Bloom Magazine

“A remarkable adventure tale, the occupational odyssey of the Ph.D. in literature who immerses herself in blue-collar America.” —Library Journal

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780253001351
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Publication date: 12/22/2021
Series: Railroads Past and Present
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 276
Sales rank: 265,894
File size: 2 MB
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Linda Grant Niemann teaches creative nonfiction at Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, Georgia. She is author of Railroad Noir: The American West at the End of the Twentieth Century (IUP, 2010).

Read an Excerpt

Boomer

Railroad Memoirs


By Linda Grant Niemann

Indiana University Press

Copyright © 1990 Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-00135-1



CHAPTER 1

BREAKING IN


THE FREIGHTYARD LAY TO the east of the town, surrounded by apple orchards and artichoke fields that swept in painterly rows down to the dunes and riptides waiting in the bay. It was cool for July, with that wet smell of salty fog and rotting produce in the packing sheds of the cold storage plants. I drove my fifty-six Chevy with its four bald tires into the parking lot behind the depot. There were rows and rows of pickups, RVs, Chevy Suburbans, and the beat-up "luxury car" heaps that the brakemen used as away-from-home cars. It was solid American steel.

The parking lot was in the center of tracks in the shape of a Y, used for turning engines. The engines seemed huge, covered with black grime, five or six hooked together roaring and screeching to stops. I could hear the sounds of crashes from the switching yard and could see solitary boxcars floating down the tracks.

I entered a door and found myself in a long room filled with lockers. At the end of the room was a table, a beat-up couch, and several overstuffed chairs black with diesel grime and the stuffing poking through. An older man with a sooty baseball cap wedged over his tilted face was snoring away on one of the chairs, oblivious to the racket from a computer printer spewing out yards of paper onto the floor. A big man in overalls came out of the men's washroom.

"Trainmaster's office is in there. Don't worry about the herder, he's had his shots."

"OK," I thought, "fine."

Trainmaster Mohan looked at me across a beat-up walnut desk stacked with computer printouts weighted down by a brass-plated railroad spike. A coffee cup sat there with a quarter inch of what looked like diesel fuel in it. I guessed that it was cold and that he would probably drink it anyway. There were bunches of cheerful older women in the office dressed in jeans and cowboy boots and without a lot of makeup. It felt more like a softball game than an office. It felt just fine.

Mohan had a robust handshake and a very red nose.

"So you want to go railroading, do you?"

"Yes," I said, not having any idea what "going railroading" meant. The way he said it had something of the flavor of going whaling. I was going to work in Watsonville, wasn't I? I handed him a business book I had written and explained the company I did it for had gone under. Mohan took it and hefted it thoughtfully. I was glad it was a heavy book.

"Well, we got all kinds of people out here railroadin', and you'll find most of 'em are good people. I guess we got room for a writer."

For a moment, I was in a room fronting the Sahara. The Legionnaire Captain shoves a paper across his pitted desk.

"Make your mark. You are now lost to the world you knew."

"Now, you're going to hear bad language out here," Mohan went on. "It's always been that way, always will be. And railroading gets in your blood. That's the only way to describe it."

He leaned forward then and looked straight into my eyes.

"And now I got to ask you another thing. Do you drink?"

"Well, yes, I drink — I mean, I'm a social drinker."

Mohan smiled. "Well, we're all social drinkers. But remember that drinking and railroading don't mix."

On that note the interview ended.

On my way back to Santa Cruz I stopped at a liquor store for two club cocktails for the road. It was a habit of mine, and I didn't think anything about it. Being a drug user, I thought of drinking as basically legal. My whole scale of judgment was based on what happened to you if you got caught. Drinking and driving was pretty bad, but not as bad as if you got caught with dope in the ashtray or lids of pot in the trunk. I had no intention of ever drinking on the job. To my mind, the railroad was an opportunity to dry out a little.

I had been hanging around for a few years with a very party-time crowd, and my life was on a downward slide. I had gotten a Ph.D. and a divorce simultaneously. The fancy academic job never materialized, and I hung around Santa Cruz getting to know my neighbors. Soon I was playing flute in a street band, eating donated sandwiches, and spending every night in clubs dancing the night away. My living room was full of strippers, poets, musicians, and drug dealers. Gradually there was less music and more drugs, and in a few years I was living in the mountains in a shack, my lover had moved out, my dogs had heartworm, my Chevy was a wreck, and though I thought of myself as a musician, the money, such as it was, came from dealing, and none of my friends worked.

When I saw the ad in the Sunday paper — BRAKEMEN WANTED — I thought of it as a chance to clean up my act and get away. In a strategy of extreme imitation, I felt that by doing work this dangerous, I would have to make a decision to live, to protect myself. I would have to choose to stay alive every day, to hang on to the sides of those freightcars for dear life. The railroad transformed the metaphor of my life. Nine thousand tons moving at sixty miles an hour into the fearful night. I now would ride that image, trying to stay alive within it. I know that later when I sat behind the moving train in the darkness of the caboose, window open and the unknown fragrances of the landing filling the space, the blackness of the night was my friend. It felt good to be powerless and carried along by the destiny of that motion. I felt happy and at peace. I was where I belonged.

The railroad didn't believe in lengthy formal training. They offered a two-week class that covered the book of rules, a three-hundred-page document with a dual purpose — to keep trains from running into one another and to prevent any situation in which the company might get sued. Rules of the road that you had to learn were mixed in with rules that you had to ignore in order to get the work done. But you had to know that you were ignoring a rule so that in the winter, when company officials had time to sneak around testing, you could work by the book.

The rulebook was also in a continuous state of revision. Revisions appeared in the timetable that you carried with you at all times. Further revisions appeared in regular timetable bulletins that were posted at work. Soon your rulebook resembled a scrapbook, with paragraphs crossed out, pages pasted in, and notes on changes that were then crossed out and changed weeks later. It drove you crazy. You always had to be on the lookout for a company official hiding in the bushes while you did your work. This individual would pop out and ask you questions about the latest rule revisions. A notation of failure would then appear in your personal file. These notations were referred to as "Brownies," named after the official who devised the railroad demerit system. As trainmen were fond of pointing out, however, there was no merit system to go with it.

Out of seventeen student brakemen three of us were women. This was a large percentage, comparatively. The first women had been hired two years before, and they were around to give us advice. The point was to get through the class, ignore the sexist remarks and the scare tactics, and get over the probationary period known as the "derail." Then you were in the union and a railroader for life. Getting over the derail took sixty days, and if either the crews you worked with or the company officers had a complaint, you were out. At the end of two weeks of classroom instruction, you bought a railroad watch, they gave you switch keys and a two-dollar lantern, and you marked up as an extra board brakeman. It was going to be sink or swim in this business. We drew numbers to determine our seniority dates — the most important factor in our careers. One or two numbers could mean that you worked or didn't.

On the last day of class, they took us down to the freightyard to grapple with the equipment. We practiced getting on and off moving cars, climbing the ladders and cranking down the handbrakes, lacing up the airhoses and cutting in the air, changing the eighty-five-pound knuckles that joined the cars together, and hand and lantern signals. These signals were the way members of the crew talked to each other, and they were an art form. An old head could practically order an anchovy pizza from a half mile away. You would see lights, arcs and circles, stabs of light. It would repeat. You would stand there confused. Finally you would walk down the track and find the foreman in a deep state of disgust.

"I told you to hang three cars, let two go to the runaround, one to the main, go through the crossovers, and line behind. Now can't you read a signal, dummy?"

The day after our practice session, I got into my car and tried to roll the window down. My arms didn't work. This was my first moment of doubt about being able to do the job. It was hard to get the upper-body strength required to hang on and ride for long distances on the side of cars. Terror at falling beneath the wheels was a big motivator, however. Terror and ridicule. There was a lot of both during the probationary period and the student trips. On student trips we tagged along with a regular crew and tried to learn something. To me, what we were doing made no sense whatsoever. Just getting used to the equipment had me so disoriented that I had no idea where we had gone or how the crew did anything. One of the crew suggested to me that I go to a toy store and look at the model trains, to see how switches work. They say, though, that whatever you start out doing railroading, it gets imprinted, and that's what you are most comfortable doing from then on. I couldn't have picked a better place to break in than Watsonville Junction. It was old-time, local-freight, full-crew switching. Kicking cars and passing signs. The basic stuff that you have to learn at first or you never get no matter how long you're out here.


The small switching yard at Watsonville classified all the perishable freight from the Salinas Valley and Hollister/Gilroy — the "salad bowl" of America. A break in the coastal range at Salinas allowed the fog to pour into the valley, cooling it, and allowing cool weather crops like artichokes, brussels sprouts, and lettuce to grow. Strawberry fields and apple orchards skirted the low hillsides. There were cool fresh days in midsummer. The packing houses and canneries were running around the clock, with rows of mostly women working the graveyard assembly lines. Clusters of yellow schoolbuses bordered the fields, and farmworkers moved slowly through the orderly rows, bundled up against the fog and pesticides.

This map of canneries, packing houses, cold storage sheds, and assembly warehouses made up the maze of tracks in Salinas known as "the districts." In railroading, knowledge of the track system is most of the job. You have to know how many cars can fit, the slope, where the road crossings are, where runaround tracks are that you can use in switching. The Salinas districts were named for cities of the freight's destination: New York, Portland, Boston, Chicago. After a few days, the crew expected me to know how to get there from here. I had no idea. Just the idea that there were only two directions to go on a switch engine (forward and backward) hadn't sunk in yet.

"OK, pinpuller; line us up for Boston, off the Portland Main."

I looked out at this web of tracks; I knew the red switch targets were mainline and that bad things would happen if you threw one of them when you weren't supposed to. The book of rules had me paralyzed. There were six things you were supposed to look for in order to throw a mainline switch. What were they?

"Are you going to throw that damn switch or are you going to have a nervous breakdown?"

"Are you sure that we can throw it?"

"Oh Lord, student brakies. They should be paying us extra for this."

Watsonville switching crews worked fast, like a soccer team playing with boxcars. They moved in position like a team, climbing aboard and peeling off moving cars to keep in sight of one another and the engineer. On Saturday night they worked twice as fast in order to go home early. It was called "running for a quit." On other nights they worked fast so that they could "go on spot" in a little switchman's shanty tucked in beside the packing warehouses. There was a switchlock on the door and a long table inside where some serious cardplaying went on.

Since I was still learning the most basic moves, it was impossible to keep up with the pace. But how do you manage to learn? My strategy was to follow a crew member around like a baby duck, getting in the way. He then would yell at me and tell me what to do. So I'd learn something. I also wore this silly hat — a baseball cap with silver wings on it. The hat meant several things to me: one, I figured they would see the hat and not run over me, and also I wanted to bring something of my old identity into this new situation, which was threatening to dissolve my sense of who I was. The hat became the cutting edge of nonconformity in the freight-yard. It separated those who could take a joke from those who couldn't and clearly marked those people who had an attitude about women being on the job.

"I wouldn't wear that hat if I were you. I mean you don't know shit about railroading and you're wearing that hat."

I guess I wanted the hat to take the flack, and not all the other things about me that weren't going to fit in here. I wore the hat.

Summer was the busy season, and we all worked steadily as brakemen, switching out the perishable freight in Salinas, Monterey, and Hollister. The locker room would always be full of boxes overflowing with broccoli, green onions, lettuce, apples, cauliflower. It smelled wonderful and you felt included in the bounty of this part of the world. It gave me a sense of how this work fit in with the essentials of life. We moved stuff people used to build their houses, get from place to place, and to put on their table. I felt a part of it all, whatever "it all" was — something I had never felt before. I also knew I earned my pay, because at the end of the day I felt like I had been hit by a truck.

When the sugar beets stopped running in the fall most of us new brakemen were cut back to working in the freightyard as switchmen. There were three shifts a day, and when things were busy you could work a shift, be off eight hours, and come back at time and a half to work another eight hours, and so on until you had to lay off to get some rest. Around the middle of October it started to rain all the time, and the worst job in the Watsonville freightyard — the midnight lead job, went up for bid. The three women rookies, me, Maureen, and Gretchen, won it. This was big news on the railroad hotline; everyone was watching to see just how badly we messed up. It was considered extremely arrogant for a new person to bid in a foreman's job, as Gretchen did.

The midnight lead job did all the work that the other shifts had avoided all day; it was under pressure to make up the morning trains which had to be set by a certain time. We went to work at midnight, in the pouring rain, and switched out a four-page list. This could take two or three hours. Then we got to come inside for ten minutes on a coffee break. Then another two lists, followed by twenty minutes to eat dinner. Dinner usually happened around 4:30 A.M. There we were in the switchmen's locker room sprawled around a long table, not even noticing the springs in the grimycouch or the stuffing leaking out of the chairs. Wet from sweating in raingear and from water running down our arms as we held onto side ladders, feeling like deep sea divers as we tried to walk in boots encased in rubber overshoes caked with mud, gloves sopping wet, completely exhausted, we fell asleep with our mouths open — just like the old heads sawing wood on their dinner break.

We all lived in Santa Cruz and would meet at a local espresso house to fortify ourselves for the night. It was an odd feeling to be getting ready to go to work when everybody else was ending their evenings, relaxed, dressed up, and, I began to see, privileged. They were going to put up their umbrellas, go home, and sleep. We were going to put rubber clothes on and play soccer with boxcars, and on top of that, we were going to have to figure out how to do it with no old heads on the crew. Gretchen didn't seem worried; it apparently was a lot less scary than her last job, which was being a topless dancer at the Bandbox in Castroville — a tough Mexican workers' bar. Maureen was less sure. Before the railroad, she had never even owned a pair of jeans. Her first move in the yard had been to fall off a side ladder from about nine feet up, but she picked herself up and got right back on.

Tonight we were going to get some coaching from Wide Load, a switchman delegated to making sure we didn't kill ourselves the first night. We sat around the table in the shanty looking at the computer lists of the track. It told us what was in each track and where each car was supposed to go. It was our job to get them there.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from Boomer by Linda Grant Niemann. Copyright © 1990 Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction to the Indiana edition by Leslie Marmon Silko
1. Breaking In
2. Under the Freeways
3. Boomer in a Boom Town
4. Brakettes Invade Tucson
5. Pasadena Gothic
6. The Monterey Local
7. This is the Place
8. Cadillac Ranch
9. The Pass to the North
10. Down the Line
11. Versions of Home
12. A Road to Ride
13. Northline
14. Shasta
15. End of Track
Glossary

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