Ride a freight train

It’s sobering to read my first post in this thread from a few years ago, which says I hope to complete this goal within the lifetime of my grandfather. Well, my grandfather, god rest him, passed away this January, and I never talked to him about my intention, nor made any real steps toward it. I’m sad about this since I’ve been away from the site and from a real sense of what my goals are for quite a while now, and I didn’t remember that that was part of the original expression of my goal either. Even though I’m older now and I have a more developed sense of the real danger (physical and legal) in achieving this goal, I can’t delete it right now until I have a chance to re-assess early in the new year, when hopefully we have a long-term home again. At the same time, the idea of doing this means more to me now, since I feel the connection to him and to my heritage in Saskatchewan in the Depression through it. Til later this goal.

So I met a grafitti artist who has done this all over Canada and learned a lot about the country-ie the deforestation that’s hidden from passenger trains that is not from freight trains-and we’ve become pretty good friends. I wonder. I organized an event where he taught a big group of kids of various backgrounds to spray paint and he mentioned his earlier years riding the rails while he was learning. He is a big social activist now but not in the sense you would normally expect. He takes ideas and actually does them and it’s very impressive….so I wonder whether he’d be willing to take me to do this sometime!

ever since I spoke to my grandfather about his history and how he “rode the rails” when he first left home to get out of Saskatchewan during the Great Depression. It was a very common thing apparently since everyone was so poor and things were not going very well, especially on the prairies. He has stories about the Mounties on horses chasing people and what would happen to some and running after the last cars and jumping for it, getting soot in his face for miles. I’ve always wanted to see what it must have been like for him, and then again to get out to sign up to go overseas for the Second World War. I’d like to do this in his lifetime…he’s 85…and then speak to him about it.