When I first pulled into Berkeley five months ago (“C’mon Mick, it really hasn’t been five months already, has it? Oh. Yeah. Damn.�), I heard sounds I hadn’t heard for years and didn’t expect to hear here. The horns of freight trains. And I let it slip, there was still a part of me that wanted to sneak into a boxcar and let it take me where it would. For the hell of it.

I didn’t expect anybody to take me seriously. After all, I was too square to try it in youth, and now I’m supposed to be old enough to know better. Besides, a long-time colleague was once a train-hopper. I saw him limping at the marine biology field station when I first started graduate school, and asked him what ailed him. Artificial leg, he said. Out came the blurt: “What happened�? I’m sure he’s got tally marks on that leg for all the times he’s had the question asked, like the ones on the gunslinger’s gun or the nose of the ace fighter pilot’s plane. I was thinking cancer, or maybe Vietnam. Never thought he might have lost it hopping a freight as a kid. But that was the answer.

With that revelation, the little chance that I might actually try to clamber into a gondola took wings. Chicken wings. Decades before some bar in Buffalo doused them in hot sauce. Furthermore, they tell me, getting into one of those cars isn’t so easy any more; the doors are locked and the loads are covered. And you might get yourself smeared with the wet paint from the graffiti. What’s left is a pleasure of the imagination, a safe little fantasy for children of all ag…

Delete that.

Children are hopping freights, all over Latin America. On missions of life and death. And no, it ain’t safe.

It’s "just" another story roiling out of the horrific poverty that afflicts much of the Spanish-speaking part of our continent, and it tells the desperate measures, often involving flight to these United States, which many people take to escape it. That story, of el Tren de la Muerte, the Train of Death, is told in the book Enrique’s Journey by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sonia Nazario. Julie Foster reviewed the book for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Open the book and find despairing mothers who abandon their children and run to the U.S. in search of work and income. Of frantic children who seek some way, any way, to find their mothers. A way that doesn’t involve logging on to ~southwest.com and buying an e-ticket with your debit card. The way can involve seven freight trains covering 1,6000 miles over six months. Through the gauntlet of thirst and starvation and disease and thugs and con artists and police forces that make the antics of American cops look like those of Bert and Ernie on Sesame Street. It involves discovering, before it is too late, that a moving train sucks air. Air that can suck you under its wheels. And there’s no heroic U.S. medicine to put you back together. If you survive.

And if you make it through all this, then you have to cross the U.S. border. You might recall that there are people in these United States who are pissed off at the idea that “illegal immigrants� might be taking jobs from Americans. Jobs that pay so little and are so despised that Americans don’t want them. The American border with Mexico is one of the nastiest border crossings on earth. And that’s if your passport is blue and has an eagle on it.

That is still not the end. For the child, once in the U.S., still has to find Mom. And deal with the consequences of that finding.

C. S. Forester once wrote that, of the many creatures in the ocean of humanity, some are sharks. There are sharks all along this railroad. They bite…

The freight train sounding its horn in the middle of the night has always had a powerful lonesome. Now it’s worse. And I’m just lying here listening, and hoping to hell that those rumbling wheels aren’t carrying any starving lonesome kids.

  - O Ceallaigh

Copyright © 2006 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.

All opinions are mine as a private citizen.