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Show RFVER Our luck finally changed when we caught a ride with a van that took us through the badlands of South Dakota and up into the Black Hills. At a campground on the Missouri River packed with young crazies on cross-country odysseys much like our own, the Aurora Borealis crept out of the north, painting the night sky with apocalyptic colors. We pushed on to the Greasy Grass where the Lakotas and Cheyenne rubbed out George Armstrong Custer and his men. In Butte, Montana, we picked up an old hitchhiking hobo, and the driver of the van gave us a ride out to the train yards. The hobo showed Rosie and me which train to catch and we began railroading on the Great Divide. We spent four or five days riding on the green boxcars of the Great Northern, the railroad that used a mountain goat as its symbol. We lurched through Helena and Missoula, on up to the blue majesty of Coeur d'Alene. We slowly climbed up across the Rocky Mountains, over empty stony ranges of peaks, through smoke-choked tunnels that were miles long, and down the wide rolling waters of Clark's Fork. We met old hoboes who told us tales of escaped convict cannibals who used these mountains as their hideout, and we saw the jungle camps that these hoboes called home. We learned why they called these trains "Old Dirty Face," and we got firsthand experience riding an uncushioned bound-for-glory boxcar at sixty miles an hour: it was a unique form of motion, something akin to riding an avalanche. Sometimes we would be stranded on a siding for a night or half a day. Eventually the long train would jolt into motion, the first heave of the engines relaying down the line like a string of firecrackers till at last it hit our car with a jerk that could knock you off your feet. Then, slowly at first, building with a steady rhythm, the hundred cars of the freight train orchestra began to play, the steel wheels groaning, squeaking impossibly high and low notes, the wood -116- |