Isaac rides a freight train to Michigan

Isaac’s freight-train ride to Michigan is a dangerous, disorienting stage in his flight from Buell, measured less by distance than by long delays, bodily discomfort, and the uncertain landscapes passing the car. The journey brings him to the surviving steelworks of Michigan and, unexpectedly, into renewed company with The Baron; by the time they reach Ecorse, Isaac is already looking for a way to leave him behind and continue toward California.

The Ride and Its Hazards

Isaac has no clear measure of how long he has been aboard. He watches power lines leap up and down until their motion makes him sick, while the train repeatedly waits on stub tracks for other trains to pass. The delays stretch for what feels like hours. Getting off is no real option: it had taken days to get aboard, and he has no reliable sense of where he is. His movement across the country is therefore also a condition of being stuck, carried onward while unable to choose when or where to stop.

When the train finally runs fast beside a highway, the sound and movement intensify rather than relieve the monotony. Isaac cannot separate the hammering tracks, clanging couplers, and rushing wind. Then the brakes grate, the car behind surges forward, and the jolt nearly throws him from the platform and beneath the wheels. The ride swings between apparently open passage and immediate physical danger: he can see cars being passed on the highway, but a sudden change in speed threatens to crush or dislodge him.

The landscape offers brief changes in the texture of the journey. From the platform, he sometimes sees far across open hills; elsewhere, the track cuts through trees that form a close wall of green. Tunnels are worst. In one, fumes grow until Isaac’s eyes burn, and sticking his head out over the platform makes the danger feel more acute, not less. When the train emerges, he leans out for clean air and vomits. The small can of Vienna sausages he has eaten returns as a measure of how little control he has over even his own body. He curls beside the porthole with his pack beneath his head, watching the trees as the light fades.

Time Aboard

The passage confuses rest with wakefulness. Isaac wakes sore in the cramped car, unable to stretch, and guesses that he has been aboard for an entire day; outside, the trees offer no dependable clue to his location. He imagines that the unfamiliar view might belong to England, France, or Germany, before settling on Ohio as a possibility. Michigan may already be close, but there is no way to know. The thought that everything is new gives the uncertainty a brief value of its own: the landscape will not remain unfamiliar forever.

At night, waiting on secondary tracks, Isaac moves between the platform and the hopper car, climbs to the coal, and looks at the stars. With no working watch or star chart, he estimates that it may be two in the morning and reconstructs time from the turning sky. He recognizes the Big Dipper, Polaris, Cancer, and Leo, and thinks of how the pole star changes over vast spans of time. The stars offer a scale beyond the stalled train, but even that knowledge is shadowed by loss: records have been destroyed, and more knowledge has vanished than he can know. He considers climbing down, then stays aboard because in the darkness he might not find the same car again or keep his pack. The journey makes even a short-lived decision—whether to descend—depend on the possibility of being stranded.

The narration’s shifts into direct self-address sharpen this unsettled experience: Isaac’s attention moves from instructions about where to sit or when to get off to a thought of Billy Poe, and then back to the practical dangers of the train. He recalls that Billy came into the river after him and accompanied him on the earlier caper, even as he wonders whether he would have been better off alone. The ride does not resolve that loyalty or resentment; instead, it carries both alongside him as he travels.

Recognizing Michigan

Morning brings another long stretch of riding, much of it spent outside until the cold drives Isaac back. The first decisive sign of arrival is not a town name but an industrial landscape. Beside a river much wider than the Mon, he sees a vast steel mill with long buildings and blast furnaces sending up steam. It appears modern, with buildings being repaired, and its sign identifies it as Great Lakes Works. The full parking lot and town behind it recall the way Buell used to look, making the mill’s continued operation a contrast to the industrial decline Isaac has left behind. The land is strikingly flat, another mark of how different this place is from home.

The train slows through an enormous trainyard. Knowing that the cars will be unloaded and that remaining aboard may get him noticed, Isaac packs quickly and prepares to jump before the train has fully stopped. He sees The Baron climb down several cars ahead, swings himself to the ground, and is caught up with by his fellow traveler. It is the first time Isaac has seen The Baron in daylight. Coal dust covers him; his face is red, swollen, and deeply creased, his nose bent and one eye lower than the other. His features bear the visible signs of bones broken and never properly repaired. The meeting makes the journey’s companionship concrete again: The Baron has been traveling on the same train, not simply left behind in the earlier stages of Isaac’s escape.

Ecorse and the Next Departure

Isaac had expected Detroit, but The Baron dismisses the difference as a matter of only ten miles. As they walk, industrial buildings give way to a town. They pass tall white storage tanks set in neatly clipped grass, then reach a residential street and a sign naming Ecorse. Its houses are larger than the mill houses in Buell, though most look just as rundown. The place is both progress and reminder: Isaac has advanced hundreds of miles toward California, but distance alone has not brought him to an untroubled life.

The Baron asks Isaac to pay for dinner if he finds them somewhere to stay. Isaac agrees, while privately deciding that he needs to get rid of him at the first opportunity and telling him that he must head south soon. The ride therefore ends not in arrival as a settled condition but in another provisional stop. Michigan confirms that Isaac has moved westward from Buell; Ecorse gives him a place to get off the train, while his stated destination remains farther away and his immediate problem is how to continue without The Baron.