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4 7 OnJanuary1,1994,theZapatistascameoutoftheLancandonjungle and took over the town of San Cristobal de las Casas, where I had been visiting two weeks before. I wished I could be there, instead of where I was, facing the Southern Pacific’s implementation of the region/system board. Management had decided to utilize their surplus brakemen on the airline system and have a roster of extra crew memberswhocouldbedeployedanywherefortwentydaysatatime, then flown back home for ten days. This system sounds efficient in principle, but there are differences between crewing on a railroad versus an airline. In the air, the territory is the same. If you are serving coffee from Seattle to LA, it is just like serving coffee from New York to Boston. On the railroad, the entire track is unique and knowledge of the territory is 90 percent of the job. A typical large switching yard has hundreds of tracks whose numbers may or may notstillbeontheirrespectivetrackswitches.Trackmapsareusually outofdate.Localsdon’twanttoshareinformation,particularlywith boomers they regard as interlopers on the dole. After a minimum of fifteen years on the job, we were all good help, but the work was going to be frustrating and slow, not to mention dangerous, if we went to a different terminal each month. I had been a boomer before, my first years on the railroad when I was cut off in my home terminal every winter. But that travel was voluntary and on my own dime. Being forced to leave home was something else. And what about Boomer, my cat? What was she going to do for twenty days while I was gone? I complained to Kevin Klein, my uniongeneralchairman,thatthisnewsystemwaswoman-unfriendly . Men usually had someone keeping the home together for them while they went on the road. “It’s the same for everybody,” he said. “What railroad woman that you know has someone at home keeping things together?” “Well, that doesn’t prove anything,” he said. So I put my stuff in storage and moved into my friend Donna’s spare room. A coyote had carried off her cat and she was fond of Boomer. I bought a trundle bed that barely fit into the tiny space. It felt like a regression into childhood. But I had to streamline. I couldn’t leave town for all that time each month and have bills to pay, an animal to feed, and messages to retrieve. I would be grabbing a duffle and living out of a suitcase most of the month. It started in January in Roseville, a hump yard at the foot of the Sierra Nevada. The hotel room in Roseville had a TV in every room, including the bathroom. This was supposed to be upscale. Outside it was raining and cold. Roseville had an unfortunate climate—105 degrees in summer,coldashellinwinter.IhadworkedintoitbeforeasabrakemanfromDunsmuirtothenorthandOaklandtothesouth .Iatleast knewthelayoutoftheyard.AsintheLAyard,crewsinRosevilledid O R G A N I Z E D B O O M I N G 8 RailroadNoir.indb 47 12/17/09 2:01 PM R A I L R O A D N O I R 4 8 parts of moves. There were lots of crews working both ends at the same time. The winter Olympics were on TV most of the time I was there, and I tried to think of my stint as an athletic feat and not just trudging around lost in the mud. That idea vanished when I woke up the next morning with a fever and sinus infection. My first feeling was dread—how could I work feeling like this? Then the reflex of blaming myself kicked in. As if I could be a machine totally at the disposition of the railroad. How dare the machine break down? I was conditioned to feel this. The railroad really wanted machines doing the work, not people, and they treated us as machines. I knew the crew dispatcher was going to give me a hard time about laying off. Since I was on a twenty-day stand, I didn’t know if I even could lay off. I didn’t know a doctor there anyway. But sinus infections could last a month if I didn’t get on them right away. I called the crew dispatcher. “We don’t send you there to lay off,” he said. “No shit,” I said. Then I went looking for a doc in the box. Some serious antibiotics later, I fell asleep watching downhill racing and listening to it rain. Not an auspicious beginning to life on the road this time around. Still...

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