long LATimes story of dead freight train rider
tarkania...@spamgourmet.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-rail-riders13-2009may13,0,7398725.story
From the Los Angeles Times
COLUMN ONE
On the run from everything but each other
On freight trains, Adam and Ashley found a gritty hide-out from
adulthood. Only one thing could separate the young lovers as they
crossed the country.
By Christopher Goffard
May 13, 2009
Before dawn that morning, they clambered onto an empty boxcar at the
Union Pacific yard and rode it out of Bakersfield into the Tehachapi
Mountains. There were six of them, a pack of drifters and runaways
taking snapshots of one another and sharing bottles of McCormick vodka
as the train climbed the chaparral slopes in the summer dark.
Traveling kids, they called themselves, a makeshift, ever-changing
family that shared the hard floor of an empty junk train or the windy
porch of a grain car before their journeys forked.
Adam Kuntz and Ashley Hughes, however, were inseparable. They had been
riding together for eight months. He was 22, tall and rangy, with a
goatee, wild black hair and a disarming smile. She was 18, with blue
eyes and dishwater-blond hair. Crudely inked across her fingers was
the word "sourpuss," advertising the side she liked to show people:
the rebel and sometime dope fiend who bristled with free-floating
anger.
But he saw another side of her too: the frightened runaway who, like
him, found a tramp's dangerous, hand-to-mouth life less terrifying
than the adult world.
They were curving through the Tehachapi Pass, seriously drunk, when a
feeling overcame him. The words were unplanned, like everything else
in their life.
Hey, you should be my wife, he said.
OK, she replied.
They slept through the night, curled side by side in their sleeping
bags, and awoke about noon as the boxcar was slowing into the West
Colton train yard. Everyone was thirsty and hung over. There was a Wal-
Mart nearby where they could fill their jugs. They huddled along the
edge of the boxcar, full of nervous excitement, the gravel moving
slowly underneath. The train wasn't stopping. To get off, they'd have
to jump while it rolled.
Naturally, it was Ashley who suggested they try it.
Trains run right through the heart of the American story, a symbol of
industrial prowess and physical vastness and unfettered movement. For
the broke and the discontent and the wanted, they are also a place to
disappear, a mobile refuge where nobody cares where you're going or
what your real name is.
Adam was a straight-F student at Ridgeview High School in Bakersfield
whose stepmother suspected he had a learning disability. In his junior
year, he was kicked out after downloading pages from "The Anarchist
Cookbook" about making bombs. Soon he was hitchhiking across the
country. In Denver, he worked up the courage to hop a freight.
"The first time I ever got on a train -- it's unexplainable," he says.
"It's a feeling of, like, where I belong. You know how when you walk
into a house where you're really comfortable?"
He came to relish the cat-and-mouse with the "bulls," or railroad
cops. His gear was a backpack, sleeping bag, socks, a jug of water,
Ramen noodles and a bandanna that he dampened and wrapped around his
face through the long tunnels for protection against the trains'
exhaust. The fastest ride, he discovered, was a cargo container, and
the best hiding place was a crawl space in the front of a Canadian
grain car.
Everywhere, he found kids like himself. In a new town, they could
point out the best trash bins and missions. "You don't need money out
there," he says. "You don't need anything. You have the greatest time
in the world, but when it gets down there, it's really down there."
Boarding the wrong train in winter might take you into cold that went
on forever. To prevent frostbite, you warmed your fingers over a piece
of lighted cardboard curled inside a soup can. Squatter camps in
cities like New York and Seattle were littered with junkies' castoff
needles, so you always wore your shoes. Tramps without backpacks were
best avoided, because they would hurt you to get yours. A last-resort
ride was called a "suicide" -- the metal crossbeams of a freight car
floor that put you so close to the rushing tracks you could reach down
and touch them.
Snapshots of Ashley's childhood are drenched with sunshine. There she
is, a smiling girl with blond bangs. Hugging Pluto. Kissing the family
dog. Blowing bubbles in the backyard in Eugene, Ore.
By her early teens, she was shuttling between divorced parents. She
told outrageous lies. She cut her wrists with pens and picture frames.
"She was not able to make friends," says her mother, Diane.
She kept slipping out her bedroom window. She'd be gone for weeks at a
time. In her journals, she repeatedly wrote out the lyrics to "Nowhere
Kids" by the band Smile Empty Soul, an anthem of family alienation.
She longed for love and seethed with rage and thought of suicide. "I
just get up and put a smile on my face every morning and pretend to be
okay," she wrote.
In the summer of 2004, after taking an overdose of antidepressants,
she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. She dropped
out of school and jumped freights. She left her antipsychotic pills
behind. She shot heroin.
In the company of ragged runaways, she found a surrogate family. At
17, she e-mailed home to say that she was the youngest in her pack of
traveling kids. Many of the others, she acknowledged, had no homes to
return to.
"There are some like me that are only out on the streets because they
are rebellious and don't want to follow rules (me)," she wrote. "I
hate sleeping outside. I hate sitting on the corner of the street
begging for food every day. I hate not having anything productive to
do with my time. I want to come home so I can graduate and take my
time being a teenager."
Her dad brought her home with a Greyhound ticket, but her new focus
was short-lived. Police picked her up for trespassing at a train
station in Santa Maria, Calif.; for hitchhiking in Redwood City,
Calif.; and for hitting a man -- she claimed he was harassing her --
back in Eugene.
She pleaded guilty to assault and received a 30-day sentence. Soon,
police booked her for heroin possession and for failing to check in
with her probation officer. Letters from jail reflected an aching for
innocence. She wrote that she missed her grandmother's blueberry
pancakes.
"I thought I was invincible out there on the road," she wrote. "I was
happy. But I know now that it wasn't a lasting happiness, only
temporary." When she got out, she said, she wanted to stay sober and
find a job. "I've thrown quite a few years down the drain."
Once released, she skipped town, blowing off a court-ordered drug
program. When she could find a computer, she reached out to traveling
friends and plotted meeting points. On her MySpace page, she
rhapsodized about tramps and trains and said her religion had become
"the countryside, the outdoors, the dirty folk."
In the grip of that vision, they weren't just lost, hungry kids but a
band of noble outlaws rolling through a heartland that law-abiding
Americans never saw.
"I don't want my life to go to hell," she wrote, "but the place I once
called home is no more than a ghost and I have nowhere else to go."
Their tracks converged in the fall of 2006. Adam was walking with a
buddy through the San Jose train yard. Ashley was sitting with a
girlfriend.
"We'll trade you whiskey for water," she said.
"We don't have water, but we'll drink your whiskey," he said.
Two days later, Adam recalls, he got drunk and put his fist through a
restaurant window. As the cops hauled him away, he handed her the
leash attached to his puppy, Bumjug, an Australian shepherd mix.
When he got out a week later, she was waiting for him with the dog.
He called her Smashley. She called him Stogie.
He got her off heroin, he says, telling her he wouldn't lose her the
way he'd lost so many other friends to the needle. Asked what he loved
about her, Adam wouldn't hesitate: "Her wildness."
They tramped up the Pacific, hitched down to the Florida Keys and rode
the rails across the Southwestern deserts. Against everything the
world demanded, they found a hide-out in the sooty cubbyholes of
diesel-electric behemoths.
Freedom to roam the country's 140,000 miles of freight track meant
being at the mercy of a fixed grid. Once, they gambled on the wrong
boxcar and found themselves stuck in Wichita, Kan., in winter, a place
so miserably cold they risked escape in a locomotive engine.
They ate from trash bins and begged on street corners. For shelter,
they threw their sleeping bags under bridges and pried the plywood
from the windows of abandoned houses. They shared three bottles of
cheap whiskey a day. They found a stray husky they named Captain
Morgan and a rabbit they called Dinner.
He says he didn't ask her about her family life or about the slash
marks on her wrist. He figured it was her business.
"She was more scared than angry about life. She wanted someone there
to tell her it was OK. She needed someone that told her they loved
her," he says. "She hid it a lot, but she had a pretty big sweet side.
She liked to cuddle and watch the scenery."
They were in Montgomery, Ala., when he called his dad and learned that
his biological mom had died. His father sent him a Greyhound ticket
home to Bakersfield. Ashley made her way to California by herself,
hoisting their two dogs onto freights state after state.
In Bakersfield, they stayed with Adam's folks. The house had tasteful
wall fixtures, a handsome brick fireplace and a big TV. This was the
place where he grew up, the place he'd always felt the urge to
flee.His dad offered him jobs repairing exercise machines. His
stepmother, a manager at a Johnny Rockets, offered to get her work
busing tables. The house felt claustrophobic and the city crushing,
full of strip malls. Within months they were crazy to get out.
"Being in this house has really taken a toll on Stogie and I's
relationship. Not saying that we're 'falling apart' or whatever but we
do argue a lot more frequently. I'm so happy to be hitting the road
again. Then things will go back to how they used to be," she wrote on
MySpace. "It's almost intoxicatingly gross how in love we are."
June 3, 2007. After the nine-hour trip from Bakersfield -- after the
sloppy-drunk marriage proposal and the climb over the Tehachapi Pass
-- their boxcar was rolling west on the northern tracks of the West
Colton yard, close to Interstate 10.
On a parallel track, the Amtrak Sunset Limited, carrying passengers on
a three-day trip from New Orleans to Los Angeles, was barreling
quietly around a blind corner at 60 mph.
The traveling kids were hung over and thirsty. Wal-Mart had water.
They lowered their dogs to the gravel.
Adam jumped and scrambled to safety across the tracks.
Ashley jumped. She seemed to hesitate as she glimpsed the Amtrak, then
tried to beat it across the tracks.
Adam heard her yell "Train!" and saw her body fly through the air into
a ditch.
He found her on her back, her eyes open but cloudy. She was bleeding
from a gash on her head, a bone protruding from her right arm.
Paramedics rushed her to Arrowhead Regional Medical Center. She had no
ID. She died in the emergency room, with a wristband that said
"Nomdeplume, Nancy 2316."
Adam felt numb on the long Greyhound ride to central Oregon, where he
stood at her grave with a handful of street kids in T-shirts, studded
leather belts and bandannas. Ashley's mother asked church friends not
to bring flowers but rather socks and sleeping bags to hand out.
Ashley's grandparents ordered a red granite gravestone etched with a
train. Adam had a railroad crossing and the word "Smashley" inked on
his arm. Within weeks he was riding again with his dogs. He thought it
might be the only way to get her dying expression out of his mind.
"I would have lost two things that I love that day if I never got back
on a train," he said.
Steven Kuntz, 46, reaches for a stack of envelopes piled on his desk:
his son's citations, unpaid fines and outstanding warrants stretching
from San Luis Obispo to Liberal, Kan. He's been making calls, trying
to take care of them.
For years he felt guilty about Adam, wondering if he should have been
less tolerant of bad grades, less a pal, more a parent. But he says
Adam's younger siblings, raised under the same roof, loved just the
same, are out earning paychecks and starting families.
Steven used to blow right past panhandling kids on the street. These
days, he looks for signs they are travelers -- filthy clothes, dogs
and backpacks -- and stops to give them food. He admires his son's
ability to get across the country with a smile and $2 in his pocket,
but is pained at the thought of him begging.
After Ashley's death, Steven told Adam not to come home if he got on
the rails again. Adam cried and said, "I can't have you not like me."
Steven figured he would have to make peace with what his son did. He
suspects that roaming the rails might be his son's way of coping with
"tucked away" emotions.
When Adam is home a few months a year, as he is now, Steven, who
repairs photocopiers, throws some work his way. He encourages him to
look for jobs.
Adam, with no degree and little experience, is quickly frustrated. He
loves his parents, but home feels like a cage. He hears the train
whistling by the house, hears it before others do. "It's like it's
calling."
His new girlfriend, Kaley Chapin, is a 22-year-old video store clerk,
sweet-faced, eager to see things. Adam has been telling her stories of
the rails, and she can't stop talking about it, even though she knows
what happened to Ashley.
"In June, me and him are gonna take off," she tells Steven on a recent
evening. They'll hop trains and scrounge change all the way to New
York.
"You know how many people die on trains?" Steven says. "They're just
as smart as you."
"You only live once," she says. "I think Adam will take care of me."
Adam isn't sure Kaley knows what's in store. How incredibly dirty
she'll get. How it feels in a winter boxcar.
"It's so cold you can't even touch the metal," Adam says.
"That's a fun way to live?" Steven says.
"At least I can say that I've done that," Adam says.
"Believe it or not, life is pretty much the same everywhere you go,"
Steven says. "You get up and go to work and come home."
He keeps telling his son to think about the day when he can no longer
drift on a young man's charm, when his dad's no longer around to bail
him out.
But Steven Kuntz has given the lecture before. He knows that life in a
squalid boxcar strikes his son as less intimidating than an adult
existence of obligations and bills. He knows that nothing he can say
will prevent his son from vanishing again soon, leaving home for the
tracks that lead anywhere else.