Isaac's wandering state

Isaac’s homelessness begins not with the loss of a house but with his decision to leave one. At twenty, after taking four thousand dollars from his father, Henry English, he sets out from Buell with a backpack and a plan to reach California. His flight becomes an itinerant life of walking, waiting for freight trains, and finding temporary places to sleep. It gives him distance from home, but no security: shelter, food, warmth, and the next stretch of track remain daily concerns.

Departure from Buell

Isaac leaves the family home in daylight, moving quickly through the woods and trying to stay out of sight. He corrects his own description of the money as taken: it is stolen. His awareness of the difference makes the departure more than a simple journey; he knows he has broken trust even as he tries to make a life beyond the household. His mother has been dead for five years, and he has continued to think about her. At home he lives with Henry, whose accident has changed Isaac’s memory of him: the father who once lifted his young son at the mill is now remembered as an old man.

The route is planned rather than improvised. Isaac intends to reach Pittsburgh by following the railroad tracks beside the river, board a coal train, and continue west by another train toward California. He has been considering the trip for a month. He wonders whether Billy Poe might accompany him, but does not expect it. For part of the journey, however, Poe is with him as they walk north along the river. The possibility of companionship is present, but Isaac’s plans depend on his own movement and judgment, not on a settled home or a secure traveling party.

Buell makes that departure legible as both personal escape and movement through a damaged regional landscape. From an overlook, Isaac sees the town and the former steel mill, once large enough to resemble a small city. The mill closed in 1987 and was partly dismantled a decade later; its remaining buildings are overgrown, and deer and coyotes cross the grounds. The town retains its rows of houses, church steeples, and historic stone buildings, but much of downtown is boarded up or abandoned. The contrast between the remembered mill at shift change and the quiet tracks underlines how much has changed since Isaac’s childhood.

Life along the tracks

Once away from Buell, the railway becomes both route and provisional refuge. Isaac walks the railbed through woods and industrial land, watching for trains and keeping to the shadows. The journey’s pace is governed by practical risks: a short train moves too fast to catch safely, while a long one would be easier to board. When a train finally approaches, Isaac and a traveling companion run across the tracks. Isaac throws his backpack onto a hopper car’s rear platform, climbs the ladder, and sits on a small, filthy metal platform. The train’s movement offers a brief release from the labor of walking, but the speed, wind, and cold immediately pose new problems. He considers sheltering in an opening in the car rather than risking his sleeping bag in the wind.

His places of rest are temporary and exposed. After walking for an extended period, he finds heavy brush along the river, spreads his sleeping bag, and sleeps through much of the day. When he wakes near dark, he continues on foot. In Fayette City, he passes small houses and empty shops, then leaves the tracks to look for food; the stores have moved to shopping centers outside town, and he finds nothing in the town center. The episode makes the journey’s deprivation concrete without turning it into a settled routine: he is hungry, but keeps moving and returns to the tracks.

At another point, Isaac sleeps in a small office inside a largely scavenged warehouse. The doors are mostly locked; the room he finds is cleaner than the surrounding building, with old desks and filing cabinets. He lays his sleeping bag on a desk or workbench. Later, after being hurt, he wakes in tall grass behind the warehouse, with dried blood and dirt on his face and his sleeping bag muddy. The building has seemed remote at night, but by daylight it is only about two hundred yards from the main road. Shelter offers concealment and a place to recover, not safety from the conditions of the road.

The Valley as route and inheritance

Isaac’s wandering follows the Mon River through the industrial geography that once sustained the region. The Valley had been a center of steel production for a century, but had lost 150,000 jobs in the period since Isaac and Poe were born. Many towns could no longer afford basic services, and some had no police. Steelmaking had supported a web of smaller industries, including tool and die work, specialty coating, and mining equipment; when the mills closed, the surrounding system also contracted. The tracks thus carry Isaac through more than abandoned worksites: they trace the former connections between employment, towns, and family life.

The route holds the visible remains of industry beside signs of continuing activity. Isaac passes old plants, towboats, storage tanks, coal facilities, and brightly lit power stations. In other stretches, he walks beside old shipping containers, a house sagging into the water, and trucks whose tires have flattened. Across the river, towns may be lit while the wooded trackside offers him darkness and a sense of cover. This contrast makes the railway useful to him precisely because it runs through places that are neither wholly inhabited nor wholly empty.

The landscape also complicates the idea that his departure is a clean break. The abandoned mill grounds and rail corridors are being reclaimed by vegetation, while animal tracks cross former industrial space. Isaac imagines the Valley eventually rusting away and returning to a more primitive state, though he recognizes that stone will last. His route west passes through the material aftermath of the work that shaped his family and community. He is leaving home, but the landscape along the way keeps making the history of that home visible.

A precarious freedom

Isaac sometimes turns his vulnerable circumstances into a private story of self-sufficiency. As he walks away from Buell, he imagines himself as a solitary traveler who can endure the road; the language of the kid and the duke of hoboes gives the journey a heroic cast. That self-mythologizing sits beside practical reminders that he is tired, short of food, and dependent on finding shelter. The distance between the imagined adventurer and the young man sleeping outdoors is central to the state: the journey affords him movement and temporary independence, not control over what happens next.

His decision to keep moving is also repeatedly tested by ordinary comforts. After resting beside the river in the sun, he recognizes that he might not survive the coming night and allows himself to enjoy the warmth rather than immediately press on. He thinks about reaching Berkeley and about the possibility that Poe may eventually speak about what happened in Buell. For the moment, he cannot resolve the danger he left behind; he can only continue the journey. The money in an envelope, the sleeping bag, the tracks, and the next place to rest are the limited means by which he sustains that choice.

Isaac’s homelessness therefore remains a condition of flight rather than a fully formed destination. California is the aim, but the supplied episodes show the difficult passage toward it: railbeds instead of roads, improvised shelter instead of a home, and brief periods of rest broken by hunger, exposure, and uncertainty. His movement opens distance from Henry and Buell while carrying him through the very industrial decline that has narrowed possibilities for those who stay. The tracks promise a way out, but they do not promise that escape will be easy or complete.