Ride a freight train

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.