american remnants

This is for those who love the signposts more than the cities they promise. They are the tattered kids who trace their grief across the country, leave it on trains and in abandoned buildings, release it like prayer through burned tinfoil and the openings in veins. They are the friends that jump over fences and sprint down the train tracks after the moving behemoths of colonized land. They thrive on the hive-like motion that criss-crosses the continent and sustains the all consuming, all extracting emptiness of a culture that tries to flatten their dreams. They are those kids left alone in rail yards and industrial parks, those with dead friends and wandering gods. With dirt-caked bodies that scream into the night and love each other across thousands of miles and spare handfuls of bills. They fall asleep in motion and wake up somewhere else. The beautiful and dope sick drifting across the country like wind. The land slips away below their feet. Palm lines and train tracks, dirty lungs, bags under eyes or stuffed in pockets. Filters torn out of cigarettes on frigid mornings huddled against the cold, up all night to wait for the screeching song of leaving. They belong to the open spaces and wide skies just beyond the horizon. 

The rail system occupies a unique place in the American project: once key machinery of colonization and westward expansion, now an essential tool for the shipment of coal, oil, grain, consumer goods, and many of the products that sustain the US economy. Trains are both an embodiment of ruthless economic drivers and an incarnation of the mythos of freedom that shaped the American cultural psyche. Now that myth lays crumpled, exposing the tragic, violent reality that has always been true for the exploited. 

Often, those who live along the train lines are on the frontlines of this collapse: living in one of the few places where exploration of the myth of American freedom is still possible while the promises of this country fail them. This is a world of the forgotten and ignored, a place where the American Dream refracts and collapses; an arena of ultimate freedom and deep loneliness.