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...In Tuxtla we stayed in a whorehouse. The other hotels were full. We were directed to this one. As we approached through the noisy streets filled with pulsing veins of neon, the hotel appeared like something out of a movie set, Bruce Lee vs. Godzilla. A glass-fronted entry topped by crumbling empty framing on the second floor. A young man leaned insolently against a crusty column above the door. Inside, mattresses were set along the hall; a cage of parrots squawked through an open door. Teenagers came in and out, talking with animation. We were shown a room. When the door was opened a kid ran out zipping his pants with a sheepish look. A crumpled Kleenex lay on one of the 3 double beds that almost filled the small room. When Pake went out later he was grabbed by a group of kids who tried to get him to ball the fifteen-year-old who was staying next door with her baby. They were taking turns with her. Pake said he'd be back at 11:00. When he went out again after 11:00 there were men passed out on the mattresses in the hall and sleazy-looking women were walking around buttoning their dresses. The unoccupied part of the hotel looked like a victim of the fire-bombing of Dresden.

...At the end of eight hours, just as Calixto had predicted, I stumbled to the top of Volcan Atitlan. The low clouds had enclosed the peak in an endless white plain. The sun was still high but glowed through a haze. The ground under my feet gave off the heat of the pure steam which poured from moss-and-flower-filled cracks all over the peak. As I turned south I witnessed the eruption of Volcan de Fuego some fifty miles away.

With incredible speed reddish brown clouds shot out of the peak, audible moments later in a thunderous rumbling. A dim trail of debris spread for hundreds of miles through the upper atmosphere. And as I looked north this spectacle was echoed by the accompanying eruption of Volcan Santa Maria, in a white outpouring that veiled the sun.
 		The Mexican Journal



1978

After my graduate work at Stanford, at the end of winter quarter, 1978, I rambled through southern Mexico, Guatemala, and the Yucatan for two months, carrying a backpack and a guitar. On my return, I caught freight trains up and down the Ohio Valley, and became embroiled in a tragedy involving my closest friends. This book-length memoir captures my youthful, romantic impressions of that period.

 ...A northbound train came, flooding the yard with that pure white light, giving me the look of a moving tombstone. I sidled up close to a stopped locomotive so as to pass unnoticed below the engineer who was reading a paper in its window. Then I walked out in the light of the Brighton yard and crossed within view of the office in front of a noisy locomotive and stopped when the engineer called out to me.

"What can I do for you, bo?" he hollered.

I looked up, close under the cab. "Would this be the Annie?"

"That's right. Where you bound?"

"Parkersburg."

Over the hiss and the pounding of the brakes and the engine he tried to explain he wasn't going there. Then he shut down the steam and came down to me. He was another large old man with a red nose. He told me to wait, he would find out. This train driver employed by the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad walked from his locomotive all across the yard into the office to find out when this poor bo with wild hair could catch a train to Parkersburg. It's like Steam Train said, that's why we ride.

The old man came back and we talked a while. He said when he got started with the railroad, back during the Depression, he pulled to a siding in West Virginia and the bo's came up out of the grass "like out of a regular pasture". But nowadays you don't see them much. This past winter he'd given an old man with asthma a ride in the engine. "I'd do the same for you if you was riding the Annie," he said. "You might ask the engineer on the Cucumber. Some of them won't, but I'll always help out a bo. You got something warm to wear? You got a jacket?"

He'd never been West, so I told him about the San Francisco - Los Angeles line. He shook his head in wonder. "I saw whales," I said. "I saw whales blowin', out the door of the box."