Train Squatting

There’s no freedom like stolen freedom. Just ask Henri Charriere (“Papillon”).

Or the dude from “Shawshank Redemption.”

Talk to anyone who’s spent time in county jail. At the risk of tripping over the obvious: The world on the outside is different than the world from within.

Of course, the world itself doesn’t give a damn one way or the other who’s In and who’s Out, who’s Free or Imprisoned and doesn’t alter itself in service of either. The distinction is among the imprisoned and the free. The difference between Objective Truth and Subjective truth (small “t”).

The smell of the air on the outside. The look of the sky. The shape of the trees, leaves quaking. The color of paint on the dusty cars in the parking lot on a hot August day, the brown sheriff sedans resting beside the dull, silver minivans and red Corollas during Visiting Hours. The sound of a dog barking. Mouth watering smell of a gas station breakfast sandwich.

“I’m never going back in there.”

Papillon said that, too. But he went back. A lot. Until he didn’t. Until he stole his escape.

The dude from “Shawshank Redemption” never went back, of course. B’cuz that was fiction. Andy’s experience doesn’t count.

… some friends of mine jump trains for fun and the hell of it. They’re grown-ups. A couple of ‘em older than me, even. And smarter. Over the Christmas break, I joined them. We met in Brainerd — a midpoint for all of us — and a nice selection of rides. And, most importantly, nearest the home of the one of us whose wife agreed to eventually pick us up if we got busted or couldn’t figure out a reasonable way back. The rest of the wives said some version of a four-letter “Forget It.”

Getting on was simps. As a guy with two torn biceps, a ruined shoulder and 15 unnecessary pounds, climbing aboard a slow-moving boxcar wearing enough clothes to keep me warm and carrying a backpack filled with a couple thousand calories, a bottle and a flashlight, I was skeptical of my chances. But adrenaline is amazing. I was up and in like Tarzan.

Inside the boxcar was like you dream about as a kid. Dark. Cold. Loud. Slightly scary. But, after 20 minutes, I was rocking myself to sleep, listening to the sound of the other guys’ voices and forcing my eyelids open to watch the increasingly heavy snow pour diagonally across the boxcar’s open door as the trees and swamps crowded the grade, just feet from the open door.

At some point, there was a high trestle. The river below black and terrifying as an infinity of snowflakes drove downward like a zillion angel suicides, beautiful in their dying. Dying, nonetheless, the black river swallowing.

And snow-swooped meadows, farm fields and towns. We stopped in Staples where I was sure we’d be caught and we huddled, four 50-somethings, clutched together like kids skipping school, or trying not to laugh in church, one of us warning about farting. But the train lurched forward, like they do in Westerns and we were off, toward wherever and, for the first time, I worried a little about where the hell we were going. One of the guys — a veteran of this nonsense — read my mind.

“Just enjoy the freedom of not knowing.”

“Huh?”

“Enjoy not knowing where you’re going for a change.”

“Pffft … I haven’t known where I’m going since the day I realized going somewhere was an option.”

“Quit it.”

I did. And then I fell asleep with my eyes open, my shoulders comfortably pinched into the far, dark side of the boxcar, perfect full view of the passing landscape.

While the world glided by to the sound of heavy tonnage and the irresistible feeling of being pulled, like a kid in a wagon, drowsy on a cotton candy Fourth of July, I felt a sense of stolen freedom, not entirely without anxiety and fear, even, but stabbed through with the knowing that at that moment, for the next several moments to come — all strung together as long as I could string them — I had nothing to do but be pulled and be free. Not strive for it, long for it, dream of it or imagine it. Just be it. Like a trying-hard-to-be-recovering addict with Day 42 under his belt and sleeping, dreaming toward 43. Like a prisoner, freshly beaten or fed, scratching another day’s tally in the wall of his cell. Like a father, brother, husband, lying his head down with the stolen freedom of knowing all his, this night, are OK.

Devil’s Island couldn’t hold Papillon. The S.O.B. was a thief and stole his freedom, even from the Devil.

Squatting there in the darkness of that boxcar, ready to make the leap into the dark, toward the snowy bank that would hopefully cushion me, the others having already leaped, I wondered if I could make the jump.

I did. And didn’t even die trying.

Yet.

Parnell Thill is a Cloquet-based author and marketing executive. Winner of a Minnesota Newspaper Association Better Newspaper Contest “Columnist of the Year” award in 2017, his book “Killing the Devil and Other Excellent Tricks” is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, local booksellers, the Pine Knot News office and at killingthedevil.com.