Riding the Rails

Seen by The Brooklyn PD Family this morning at a coffee house in Great Barrington, Mass.

Who wishes they'd gone to Woodstock? Nobody Plottie knew at the time, and of the people he knew who actually went, nobody said they had a good time. You had to be up front to hear anything, and you were swamped in mud and soaked to the skin for several days. Traffic in and out was impossible. Of course, you were also so stoned you may not have been sweating the small stuff.

Writing about the Beatles concert the other day got Plottie thinking about the Righteous Brothers, who opened the show, and whose performance Plotnik actually got to see and hear every note of, because no teenage girls fainted for them, not until the second after the announcer shouted: "AND NOW, FROM LIVERPOOL ENGLAND, THE BE..."

SCREAMMMMMMMMMMMMM! Thud. Unconscious.

Plot had seen the Righteous Brothers once before, at a really small Orange County night club, the next night after he and his friend Hubbsie attempted to ride the rails home to LA from college in Berkeley.

That first jump onto a moving train was exhilarating -- there used to be (maybe still are) freight train tracks down by I-80, where the trains slowed down to switch whatever it was they switched. When they were going slow you could, so the story went for everyone who had been living Kerouac novels, hop into an open boxcar and then ride for free! Hallelujah! Except for one problem.

Plottie and Hubbsie crouched in the weeds by the side of the yard, waiting for the railroad bulls, familiar to all those who had been living Steinbeck novels, and eventually a train chugged down the line, and while there was no boxcar there was an empty flat car. It slowed down, as promised, and when they thought the coast was clear, Hubbsie and Plotnik rose from the bushes, ran like hell towards that flat car, got one foot up onto the coupling and jumped onto it!

The train really wasn't moving very fast. And we still haven't gotten to that one problem.

Now they were aboard. And now the train stopped. It must have been the end of the line. The two eighteen year olds stared at each other for awhile, and then, when they had tired of lying down and staring at the stars, and talking about where the train would probably take them, when it started up, if it started up, and then realizing the train wasn't actually going anywhere, they jumped down, walked out onto the freeway and stuck out their thumbs.

Plot doesn't remember much about that hitch, except that they ended up on Highway 99 (this was probably before I-5 was built) as the sun was coming up, and stayed in that one spot for quite a few hours, waiting for a truck to finally pick them up. After a few rides in semis, and one station wagon, they ended up close enough to home that they could get to the Righteous Brothers concert at that little club that next night, carrying their knapsacks, and Plottie had his well-worn copy of "On The Road" in his shirt pocket, still next to his heart.