Back then, said Pittsburgh Ed, they didn’t give a shit if you rode the trains or not. But then BN and SF merged. They got the SF dicks, and they’re mean. Now what’s that town? Indio? Near San Bernardino? Maybe it’s San Bernardino. I caught the north swing out of there. I heard that dick beats the shit out of you.
Meanwhile, Hemingway wrote: But there was still much forest left then, virgin forest.
And I thought: If only I’d started catching out back then, when I was younger. Think how far I could have gone! That slender punk girl Jayna caught out from Sacramento all the way to Québec City. Well, she’s hardly twenty. I could have done that, too, back then.
What if Cold Mountain exists nowhere except back then?
Once upon a time the Chicago Great Western called itself the Corn Belt Route, and the Illinois Central was nothing less than the Main Line of Mid-America! Oh, those were the days, all right! Imagine what blue-eyed corn goddesses I could have caught out to back then; just think what important places I could have visited on the Main Line!
And back then, before the old open-racked automobile carriers had to get walled off thanks to vandalism, a trainhopper could climb into a brand new car, turn on the heater and radio, recline in the driver’s seat and even turn on the windshield wipers just for laughs, getting drunk and gazing out at aspens at evening, grey ruffled lakes peering through a wall of slender-trunked trees at the cruel old mountains like strange blades cutting the greystone sky, snow-streaked below as he clitteryclattered across rich green and yellow delicate meadows, raising his fifth of whiskey to toast the gorgeous swellings of the trees that crawled up the bellies of three mountains—