Before dawn that morning, they clambered onto an empty boxcar at the Union Pacific yard and rode it out of Bakersfield into the Tehachapi Mountains. There were six of them, a pack of drifters and runaways taking snapshots of one another and sharing bottles of McCormick vodka as the train climbed the chaparral slopes in the summer dark.
Traveling kids, they called themselves, a makeshift, ever-changing family that shared the hard floor of an empty junk train or the windy porch of a grain car before their journeys forked.
Adam Kuntz and Ashley Hughes, however, were inseparable. They had been riding together for eight months. He was 22, tall and rangy, with a goatee, wild black hair and a disarming smile. She was 18, with blue eyes and dishwater-blond hair. Crudely inked across her fingers was the word "sourpuss," advertising the side she liked to show people: the rebel and sometime dope fiend who bristled with free-floating anger.
But he saw another side of her too: the frightened runaway who, like him, found a tramp's dangerous, hand-to-mouth life less terrifying than the adult world.
They were curving through the Tehachapi Pass, seriously drunk, when a feeling overcame him. The words were unplanned, like everything else in their life.
Hey, you should be my wife, he said.
OK, she replied.
They slept through the night, curled side by side in their sleeping bags, and awoke about noon as the boxcar was slowing into the West Colton train yard. Everyone was thirsty and hung over. There was a Wal-Mart nearby where they could fill their jugs. They huddled along the edge of the boxcar, full of nervous excitement, the gravel moving slowly underneath. The train wasn't stopping. To get off, they'd have to jump while it rolled.
Naturally, it was Ashley who suggested they try it.
Trains run right through the heart of the American story, a symbol of industrial prowess and physical vastness and unfettered movement. For the broke and the discontent and the wanted, they are also a place to disappear, a mobile refuge where nobody cares where you're going or what your real name is.
Adam was a straight-F student at Ridgeview High School in Bakersfield whose stepmother suspected he had a learning disability. In his junior year, he was kicked out after downloading pages from "The Anarchist Cookbook" about making bombs. Soon he was hitchhiking across the country. In Denver, he worked up the courage to hop a freight.
