Oh yeah, one more thing about Texas.
Probably the last thing for now. I wanted to add that I accomplished everything on my
"wish list" except for the day trip to J-town and the train watching. The night we tried to go to Music Under the Stars it was rained out, but I'm counting it anyway. I skipped the trip to J-town mainly because, um, it was hot. Ridiculous, I know, but every time I go I end up feeling like I've spent hours on my feet in the sun, and I just couldn't face it.
I also never went train watching. Train watching started with my fellow volunteer Chas, and it's funny because I talked to him on the phone while I was down there and apparently he is more or less over the whole train thing now. He lives too close to the tracks and the noise is bothersome. However, when he was a volunteer he liked to watch trains, and train watching kind of became a thing for a while among a few volunteers.
Trains do come to capture a part of your imagination when you're living on the border and working with immigrants. Most of the Central American immigrants who arrived at our house arrived there after weeks traveling through Mexico clinging to the sides of freight trains. Many other guests, regardless of how they arrived, left via train. They would ask for dark clothes and a backpack from the clothing bank and steal out right before bed check. Where they go from there I don't exactly know, except that it involves the risky proposition of running really fast and somehow jumping onto a moving freight train.
I did not develop the same fascination with trains and train hopping that Chas had, and I'm sure I don't fully understand where he was coming from. Nonetheless there is something about train watching as a forlorn, solitary, esoteric activity that appealed to me. Somehow there is something romantic about the idea of jumping trains, riding the rails. Obviously it would be dirty and uncomfortable, and hobos aren't exactly the romantic heros of American folklore. Somehow, though, the idea represents a certain freedom. It is the abandonment of the work-a-day and the conventional in order to live as one pleases, going where one chooses.
Train hopping for immigrants represents a different reality. For them train hopping is not a lifestyle, but something they do for a lack of other options. It is a free way to travel, and a way to hopefully make it past the Border Patrol checkpoints outside the city to a place where you can make a decent wage. Dangerous? Absolutely. Any time a guest would leave to train hop I would get a horrible feeling in my stomach. Yes, most of the people who try it are young, strong, physically fit, and capable of "making it" safely. I guess the majority do. If anyone has problems usually it's the women or the older men, but in my imagination, at least, anyone could slip, could misstep and face the consequences. Some die. More wind up in the hospital having lost limbs or severely broken bones. They receive emergency treatment and occasionally follow up care such as physical therapy. Usually they are referred back to the shelter, which in some cases is where they already came from.
I'm told that, although the trains move slower in Mexico and for that reason are easier to climb up on, the obvious tragedies still sometimes occur. For one thing, migrants cling to those trains for longer periods of time, which increases their risk of getting tired or falling asleep. If that should happen they will most likely fall off and that fall will probably be disastrous. Besides the dangers posed by the trains themselves, money is not safe while train hopping - if you have it someone will almost certainly relieve you of it. That journey that leaves you constantly exposed to the elements and the world around you is especially dangerous for women, who are raped nearly 100% of the time.
You think about all this when you're train watching, and it becomes more interesting than you would think it would be. There were a few spots where we watched trains. There was Chas' favorite spot on the other side of downtown, and some "secret" spot of Heidi and Mike's that was never revealed to me. At some point I realized that you could walk two or three blocks north of the shelter and get to the massive conglomeration of train tracks that run through downtown. There was no fence, either; I'm pretty sure you could walk right up to the tracks. This is, of course, how I ran afoul of the railroad rent-a-cop.
One evening Heidi and I wanted to go for a walk, so I suggested that we start by walking the few blocks to this spot to see if there were any trains going by. There weren't, but we decided to wait a while to see if one came. As we waited we were talking, and as we talked at some point we sat down on the ground, and as we sat we decided to lay on our backs and look at the stars.
Suddenly there was a car behind us, closer then I would have thought it could get without me hearing it sooner. We scrambled to our feet, eyes wide, as a man in a security uniform got out of the SUV. He asked us what we were doing and I'm not even really sure what our response was. He pointed out that we had passed the no trespassing signs and were on private property. I actually felt the need to argue with him about this because we had specifically made a point of reading all the signs in the vicinity to be sure that we weren't on the "wrong side" of any of them. He shined his flashlight on a sign and said, "It's right there," but the sign actually said something else entirely. "Er...well...the next one. Down there." He shined his flashlight into the darkness. He wrote our names and the address of the shelter down in a little notebook from his pocket and told us, "You get one warning." Heidi and I and everyone we told the story to wanted to know what happens after the first warning, but we did not stay around to ask or find out. We rushed back the the shelter giggling, and decided to forgo the rest of our walk.