My Life in Three Train Rides: Powder, Rails, Arrests

photo by Tony Wallin-Sato

by Tony Wallin-Sato

Part 1

fukaku irite / kamiji no oku o / tazunureba / mata ue mo naki / mine no matsukazeFollowing the paths the gods passed over, I seek their innermost place; up and up to the highest of all: peak where wind passes through pines. – Saigyo

I was thirteen when I was first arrested. Detained. Humiliated. Treated as if I already hit puberty. At thirteen I still carried my baby fat. Just had my braces removed. Had a collection of Pokémon cards. At thirteen I was lost in different cultural identities. I knew my father was a drug addict. I knew my mother was from another country. I knew what it was like to play all-stars in the local baseball Junior League. I knew what it was like to be abandoned at a casino entrance because the neon lights were too strong of a temptation. I knew that both parents, at some point in their lives, understood the experience of a jail cell closing behind them. At thirteen, no one knows anything.

I was thirteen when I boarded my first train ride. During my eighth-grade school year my father was mis-diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease. He had a mental break. We spent most of the year living out of motel rooms in the central valley. My mother was stationed bedside to my grandfather dying from cancer 200 miles away off the coast of Monterey Bay. When she returned, my father disappeared. The summer before entering high school, my mother realized I needed a break (and she did too). So, I was to spend a few weeks with my aunt, uncle, and cousins just south of Salinas.

I have always been fascinated by trains. Railroads. Boxcars. Steam engines bleeding into the sky like strong tea in boiled water. Miles long freight cars gliding through the backcountry like a sleek bullet. Areas you would never see unless riding in a caboose. When I was a kid, my mother took me to Dennis the Menace Park in Monterey to play on an old locomotive that was donated as a jungle gym. I would run up and down the steel, climbing to the top and jumping below while my mother held her hand to her mouth in terror. They have since blocked off the train-turned jungle-gym due to injuries and probably lawsuits. Perhaps my fascination comes because people who looked like me and my family built the railroads. Disposable bodies earning next to nothing who were breaking their backs to connect the East and West. A subtle reclamation towards a country still learning how to treat the minority. A small thrill ride victory for my Asian ancestors.

Sacramento has the largest rail yard in the West, so it’s natural I would be enamored with locomotives and freight. I also struggled feeling at home anywhere, even within myself. Never comfortable just being, especially being me. Trains allure to limitless possibilities for escape. The French writer and activist Jean Genet hopped trains between European countries while he was living the vagabond lifestyle in the 1920s, attempting to escape the traumas of juvenile reformatories. The musician and poet Woody Guthrie rode the rails all across the United States while witnessing the suffering of both the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. The author Jack Kerouac travelled boxcars from New York to San Francisco to enter the mind of America. The famous anarchist Alexander Berkman traveled by steel up and down the east coast from labor protests to union strikes. Trains represent freedom and open mindedness. They are dragons coiling around river bends and barreling through mountain bases.

I boarded my first train in Sacramento southbound to Oakland. I was alone. Excited. Ready to ride forever. I hadn’t processed the experience of living out of motel rooms while still completing my science homework on signature hotel notepads. I hadn’t processed what it meant to look like my Japanese mother in this country, who moved across the Pacific at thirteen to Georgia just a few years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. I hadn’t processed the generational inheritance of my father. I hadn’t processed the effect a loving, but dysfunctional family has on a developing mind.

In the train car I listened to a Bob Dylan CD in my Walkman and entered William Burroughs’ world of William Lee’s New York City in Junkie. I had a corner section all to myself. Over the deep-blue Sacramento River. Pass ten-foot-tall Sunflowers south of Davis. Through graffiti tags of concrete ruins across San Pablo Bay. Cloudless sky. Double-crested Cormorants skimming high-tide waves. I was a ronin samurai cowboy searching for the meaning of home. Sigmund Freud said train departures in dream represent death. Perhaps this ride was my exodus, and I was splitting from a part of myself.

I hadn’t yet tried heroin at this time. Just weed, liquor, and PCP (not knowing). Also, miscellaneous psychiatric medication (not willing). My father is/was addicted to intravenously using methamphetamine. He hates/hated opiates in any form. I now know, or at least partly why, this fueled my curiosity: I wanted to be the opposite of my father. If he was into uppers, I was into downers. He is yin. I am yang. He is white. I am black. I do not in any way blame him for my heroin addiction, I am just reflecting on my first thoughts on the drug because I correlate my intravenous drug use with my train traveling over the years. I was enamored with heroin and opium even before I used them. I knew opium was associated with Asian communities immigrating over here and later forced upon by British colonization. I read Jean Cocteau’s’ Opium: Diary of a Cure, Burroughs’ Junkie, and anything related to the history of the plant or the junky lifestyle. I felt a kin sense of identity to this plant. Like trains, heroin seemed like a vehicle for an escape into freedom. I mention this now because this first train ride was the beginning of a ten-year run. Metaphorically, when I boarded this train at thirteen, I stayed on until my last incarceration and treatment center residency a decade later (there were many train rides and many arrests in between). This was a planted seed of trauma and humiliation that strengthened and reinforced an identity of otherness.

Somewhere between Queen Jane Approximately and Desolation Row, and William Lee internally wrestling with the idea of submitting to a cure, the southbound train I was on halted in Richmond. After a while, a SWAT team with two K-9s appeared on the platform beneath the high noon sun. I distinctly remember thinking to myself, it sure sucks for whoever they’re here for. I never imagined they were here for me, so I continued reading my book. As soon as I opened the pages, a heavy hand gripped my shoulder. A towering figure in all black, wearing a heavy weighted vest, mouthed my name and asked if I was me. Everything was silent. My muscles tensed and nerves rattled like an earthquake beneath my skin. I replied I was who he asked, and the agent yelled get your shit, and follow me.

There are moments in my life I have subconsciously forgotten. As if my unseen mind is trying to protect me from certain traumas and experiences. This moment is not one of them. It is engraved in my mind like the signature on a Japanese nihonto. I can still see this man’s face. I still know the terror he instilled in my thirteen-year-old self. I still understand the control those in power possess over those without power. Sadly, I am not unique, and this vile experience is merely a dew drop in a vast field of marigolds. The French philosopher Michel Foucault said, “power is not an institution or a structure” but the name given to “a complex strategical situation in a particular society.” Those who hold the authority in a society use this dominance as a means of control. This is how mass incarceration, the war on drugs, and the term “super predator” come into fruition.

As I walked through the train car, down the stairs to the luggage car, and out onto the platform, an overwhelming blanket of shame and embarrassment wrapped around me like battery acid. Every passenger was glued to the window, attempting to make sense of the circus spectacle. At this time, I was still in the dark for why I was dragged off the train. The K-9s were fiercely barking and every member of the SWAT team towered above me, blocking out the sun with their arms crossed and a menacing smirk laid across their faces. They were nearly exact clones of each other. Nothing set them apart. All buzzed cut. Dark wrap-around sunglasses. A hatred for unknown variables (me, in this case) that most law enforcement possess. They glared at me as if I were at their level, yet here I was two feet shorter and hairless.

The leader of the pack finally broke the silence, what’s in your bag? I, still quite stunned and frozen, just stared through the landscape. On the other side of the platform, BART was moving northbound. A small scraggly squirrel ran up a light pole. A single cloud floated overhead, in the shape of a horse’s head. The leader yelled at me again and I snapped out of my trance. Do you have kilos of cocaine in your bag you shit? Before I was able to even formulate a thought, the K9s were at my bag sniffing and barking and pawing. For a second, I really thought I was transporting kilos of cocaine. This is how interrogations work. They scare a confession out of you. They use fear as a means to control. This anxiety played tricks with my reality; maybe I was smuggling and just forgot. I asked myself what would Burroughs do in this situation? Probably respond with a non-chalant pretentious remark. But I was 13. Terrified and parentless.

I have an eighth of shake and two joints, I stuttered, hands profusely sweating. The leader asked me again and I replied the same. As if we were in a time-loop, forever to repeat ourselves. A pair of crows floated over us. A light squawk echoed through the blue sky. The leader motioned me to my bag. He followed and ripped the bag open, then stepped back to the rest of the SWAT crew. I emptied the contents onto the concrete, my kid’s small shirts and shorts, underwear and socks, all fell like rocks. Lastly, the small Ziplock bag of weed shake and poorly rolled joints fell out. No kilos of cocaine. The entire SWAT team burst out in laughter, hands on their knees, tears rolling down their cheeks.

This isn’t funny I yelled. Shut the fuck up, one replied, do you want to get on the train or go to Richmond jail? I chose the former and was told to stomp out the weed in front of everybody, like a monkey dancing in a zoo. Afterwards, I filled my bag and got back on the train. No apologies. No explanation. I slumped down in the same seat. As the train began to pull out from the platform, I could see the SWAT team still laughing, until finally they were tiny specks of dust. The train’s last stop was Jack London Square, where those transferring further waited for the bus to arrive. I approached the ticket window and realized my transferring ticket was nowhere to be found. It had blown away when I was forced to empty out all of my personal belongings. I had no money. No ticket. No weed.

As I was sitting with my face in my hands, a young couple approached me. The man had an incoming unkempt beard, and the woman was wearing a blue and yellow sundress with long straight blonde hair. They sat down across from me and asked what happened. I told them and they both sighed. We thought they were stopping the train for us, the man said. I replied with a confused expression, still unable to speak. They leaned in closer, as if someone, somewhere, was listening in on our conversation. We are traveling with ten pounds of weed. We’re coming from Humboldt to my parents’ house in Mississippi, the beautiful blonde said. We were all silent, thinking of how things could have gone differently if they were the ones dragged off the train instead.

The man reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out two blue pills and two joints. The woman went to the ticket window and bought me a transferring bus ticket. I took the ticket. Swallowed the pills. Placed a joint behind my ear. They disappeared towards the city and I ventured opposite to smoke a joint near the waterfront, staring at the San Francisco skyline with each exhale. The pills kicked in right as I boarded the bus. My body covered in warmth and my adrenaline slowly faded. When the city was no longer visible, I slipped into a dreamless sleep.

Part 2

fukaki yama ni / sumikeru tsuki o / mizariseba / omoide mo naki / waga mi naramashi Deep in the mountains: had I not seen the moon that resides there so clear, I would have become someone without memories. – Saigyo

To withdraw is an excruciating act. You face demons you never wanted to surface. You face demons you didn’t even know you were hiding. You face a demon that is part you, part other. To withdraw on a three-day train ride is to experience the realm of Goya’s dark period of painting. It is to be stuck in a melting clock of Dali’s Persistence. To be a junky is to be persistent. We move against opposition moment by moment because it is an unnatural act. We are out of balance. I am not advocating against drug use, I am speaking of obsessive drug intake, which are two very different things. Drugs have been around longer than you and I, we are the issue. What is your relationship with “pick anything”?

I was recently out of two different jails in two different counties and in a bad state. After my release from the second, I went partying in Monterey with stolen credit card information. I then created new credit cards. The idea was to wipe out my memory of everything, to the point even Proust’s Madeleine cookie couldn’t unsurface a trace of nostalgia. I was born in Monterey and there is a gravitational force that always pulls me to its dunes and cracked sidewalks when I begin to lose sense of self. After a few days of destroying top room suites and getting kicked out of fancy hotels under pseudonyms, I found myself dead locked in front of a mirror. I began floating within a dreamscape of someone else’s dream. A cloud of paranoia blanketed my peripherals like early morning fog unable to break. The type of fog you enter in low valley forests or around Pacheco Pass. All pathways obscured. No exits remain.

The crowd I was with along the coastline disappeared, which meant everyone was ducking low. That was the only memo given. I took it as a good time to split. Anytime more felonies are involved is a good time for departures. I boarded a train to Oklahoma City as soon as I found myself alone. Another city with a gravitational force, but different. As a teenager my father found himself in the same predicament that I was in at the age of this train ride. He too had to escape. He fled the west coast, including my brother, my mother, and myself, and joined a new family while withdrawing from speed, gambling debt, and the emptying of my mother’s bank account.

Trains have always been a place of safe shelter. A place you can roam cabin to cabin without worrying about being behind the wheel. Someone else is transporting you and whatever you are bringing from one place to another. You also meet fascinating people. I’ve met circus folks and coked out CEOs and war veteran published authors and famous jazz performers. Sometimes if you’re lucky you meet the opposite sex. This was not one of those train rides.

My pockets were empty of content, but I had cash from the last credit card usage before they were all flagged. Before we even passed Puta Creek Riparian Reserve, I saw someone I knew in one of the middle train cars. Coincidentally, he too was escaping. But he wasn’t evading the law, which meant he was in true danger. Luckily, he was holding speed, not my first choice, but it was something. Unfortunately, after I injected all the speed he too was nowhere to be seen. Had I actually seen this friend on the train? Did he disappear along the coast like the others? Had I been awake for too long?

The Californian portion of my train ride was profligate. The speed was some bathtub concoction and barely lasted until Los Angeles. The rapidity of the crystal also kept me in my head, too busy to enjoy the landscape buzzing by. I thought of the anthropology midterm I missed because I was arrested. I thought of my friend’s mother who impromptu put her house up for one of my bails. I thought of how I wasn’t going to get that editor position on the college newspaper. Throughout all my arrests, hotel living and drug dealing, I was on and off again enrolled as a journalist student. I figured that position would afford my lifestyle to keep afloat, yet here I was back on a train. The Gonzo legend once famously said “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.” But he blew his brains out and was a terrible father. If your lifestyle isn’t working for everyone, then it isn’t really working for you. Of course, I didn’t know this at the time and barely do now. At the time, those words were liberating and a sense of comfort for those like me who were ill-fitted in society (if I’m going to be honest, they still are comforting).

There’s a Denny’s across from Union Station. A place for downtown dwellers and commuters. A place to find reprieve from the gritty downtown streets. A place a stone’s throw away from Little Tokyo, Chinatown and Skid Row. I’ve spent a lot of time at this Denny’s on my many trips from Northern California to the Midwest. I’ve napped in booths here. I’ve injected drugs in the bathroom here. I’ve eaten a stack of pancakes here. Once midnight rolls around, diners are always a place to be yourself. By this time, I hadn’t used any heroin for over 24 hours and the peak of the speed was gone, only the fidgety side effects remained. I began to feel the sickness of withdrawal. Now, I was able to check off the list of vomiting and heavy sweat inside this Denny’s.

When we hit Barstow, I was in the bottom cabin with all the luggage. Easy access to the bathroom. A river of constellations flowed above the desert like spilt rice milk. The barren landscape was lit like a movie set. I imagined a samurai in a Stetson hat galloping alongside the silver bullet with a katana rattling against his shoulders. There’s nothing like the illusions and visions that occur during withdrawal. They compete with any mescaline trip I’ve ever been on. A proof the body without drugs can produce equally measurable outcomes as a body consuming drugs.

Eventually, I gained the strength and equilibrium to wander towards the market car for liquor. Swaying left. Swaying right. Slow step metronome to my dry heaves. Before making it to my end destination I passed through a car where a group of older men were playing cards. They were drinking, laughing, telling war stories of Iraq. As I stumbled past them, they motioned me to come sit and have a drink. Naturally I obliged and listened in on their conversation. They were all going to different cities and were no longer in the military. All but one had served two terms overseas and by their accounts, they were pretty fucked up both mentally and physically. I took that comment as my doorway and immediately asked if anyone had any kind of pain medication. I talked about my back issues, but then decided to be honest and tell them I was sick as a dog. The tallest one of the group took me off to the side and asked what I wanted. The strongest thing you have was my reply. He walked over to his bag and shuffled inside. When he came back, he held a prescription of Dilaudid. Sometimes doorways appear and even if you don’t deserve them, one must always pass through them. I trusted this vet’s doorway, maybe it was because he disclosed to me his ex-wife was Filipino and his kids were mixed like me, or maybe it was simply because he had a cure to my current ailments.

Dilaudid are two edge swords. They give an immediate rush equal to heroin (void the griminess that I am fond of) but the high only lasts a few minutes. The pills are easily dissolvable in water which makes them a great asset in times of a pinch, like when one has nothing else and is getting sick. I didn’t tell the veteran I was going to shoot them up, but I’m sure he wouldn’t have judged, but you never can be too careful when talking to someone about needles. Most people are hypocrites; they use drugs but once they find out you mainline them, they create a dividing line between us and other.

Half-way through Arizona I began to feel normal. I had enough water-soluble pills to keep me well through the southwest to near the border up into the panhandle and into the prairie and rolling hills of Oklahoma. When I reached OKC, who knows what was going to perspire, I hadn’t thought that far ahead. Was my father still using and drinking? Was I going to reach out to him once I stepped off the train? Was I going to call that woman I had on and off again relationships with whenever I travelled to the Midwest? Was I going to go to the Zen center (there is one believe it or not) and face my demons? We can never run away from ourselves no matter the watersheds and desert plateaus we roam through. Even though 1600 miles is a long distance to separate oneself from whatever problems or mess that is made, it’ll never be enough to escape consciousness.

The train rolled over the Texas border into Oklahoma at dusk. Two nights and three days had gone by since I was consumed with the vanishing point of the Pacific Ocean. I was now land locked on a river of steel and wooden tracks. I was dodging arrest, college responsibilities, and just trying to make sure I had a fix in the moment. I only had a few Dilaudid left and after dissolving some in water in the bathroom, I comfortably slumped in my chair and watched the sun slowly set below a vast open space of vivid green fields.

Part 3

nagamu tote / hana ni mo itaku / narenureba / chiru wakere koso / kanshikarikere Thinking to gaze at them, I grew extremely close to the cherry blossoms, making the scattered parting ever so painful. – Saigyo

The midnight train ride from San Francisco to Portland during spring is majestic. If you’re lucky, on a cloudless sky you can gaze at both Lassen Peak and Mt Shasta beneath a full moon. As you cross the state border the sun begins to rise and a blanket of snow covers the Pacific Northwest. The train stops in Klamath Falls with just enough time for a cigarette as you wake from the nightly excursion. The train proceeds to traverse seven switchbacks north of Diamond Peak that are unseen other than on railroad tracks (there’s even a fallen train car from decades ago). Perhaps the ride was so spectacular because it was my first time riding clear minded and not loaded. Or was it because I was madly in love with someone for the first time in my life who happened to be traveling with me? Or was it because I wasn’t running away, escaping or searching for a falsified concept. It was because I can simply remember the entire ride.

A year and a half prior to this ride I was sitting in a correctional facility facing a seven-year prison sentence. At least that’s what the district attorney was offering pre-trial. I could hear the train whistles at night within those barbed wire walls, echoing through the low-level valley with infinite room to blow. The surrounding land was once a thriving Japanese farming community prior to WWII, but soon they too were incarcerated in places that were replications where I was at. I overdosed a week before this arrest in a Safeway bathroom stall and the downtown beat cop who was called for my near demise was the same officer who arrested me a week later solely because he recognized me. My life is full of those coincidences, or better, residual effects from poorly thought-out causes. I had plenty of time to withdraw from heroin and years of prescribed and non-prescribed benzos to make me begin thinking of a different path of living. But drugs are just as abundant while one is incarcerated, and one becomes a smarter criminal with each incarceration experience. If I had been getting arrested since I was 13, you’d think I was ascending to an Einstein level intelligence, but street smarts acquired through anti-governmental activity are different from traditional smarts. There’s a certain level of risks attached that always leads to steel cuffs. What can I say, adrenaline is one hell of an experience.

Smarter criminal is not the right terminology. Smarter as in greater networked, connected with similar objectives and an abundance of more trauma. And criminal as in the majority of us who have experienced the criminal justice system have been wounded in one way or another and haven’t had the right positive influences or resources. Of the people in the California prison system, something like 80% have gone through the foster care system. That statistic alone should open the eyes of those who believe we are lost causes who deserve punishment. We deserve compassion and an opportunity to live better lives. I can certainly go on about personal traumas, but this essay isn’t about woes, it’s about my relations to trains, in a roundabout way.

Luckily, I beat this case on a technicality and was convicted with an 8-month sentence. I served my time and was released. I boarded a bus back to the city and was told I could take the city train for free to my mom’s apartment. When I received my box of belongings, my prescription pills of opiates and benzos were included. I didn’t stand a chance. As soon as I boarded that train wearing clothes that no longer fit me (think Bruce Banner transforming into the Hulk), I swallowed all I could and fell into the blurred buildings and pine trees passing by.

Another overdose. The needle always follows an empty container. This would make nearly a dozen accidentals in my life coupled with a few suicidal purposeful ones. The difference with this last overdose (I’m coming up on 8 years since then), is I awoke in the hospital with my mother sitting in the corner. Never had I awoken in a hospital emergency room before with anybody else. Always alone. I had a sudden and deep realization of interdependence as soon as I witnessed my mother crying while I was strapped to machines. I didn’t know it was interdependence at the time though. It was more like I could clearly see my self-centered, selfconscious, self-seeking behavior was affecting others. I was ignorant to the fact that we are all connected and everything we do will always affect someone else. Everyone else.

The next day I voluntarily checked into a treatment center in a different town two hours away. This was the beginning of my new life. I moved into a half-way house after a month of rehab and the day before my 24th birthday I walked into a coffee shop where the most beautiful barista with perfectly cut platinum blonde bangs and facial features like Nico was pulling shots behind the Marzocco (spoiler, she is the one I am on the train ride with to Portland and we are happily married today).

During this time, I thought I would never ride trains again since they were always connected to stressful and traumatic moments of my life (there’s that word trauma again). But in less than a year into my sobriety and living in the half-way house, I hitched a ride to Los Angeles, hopped a freight train to Phoenix, boarded a bus to Albuquerque, tried to hitchhike to Texas but was put up in an Earth House for a few days instead, then hitchhiked back to Albuquerque then rode a train to Oklahoma City to confront my father, make amends, clean my side of the street, and attempt to dump the weighted bag of resentments that only made my life worse and no one else’s. But that train excursion is a whole other story and a whole other train ride.

Back to the Portland trip. I had never been in a relationship before I met Audrey. That isn’t entirely true, more like I had never been in a healthy relationship in which I could remember, and I wasn’t in a self-centered and self-seeking mindset. Living the junky lifestyle since a teenager never afforded me with maturity or growth that would allow me to be present with a partner. I also had no real role models of what a healthy relationship looked like. I wasn’t only a drug dealer, drug addict, and engaged in criminal activities, but also an existential mess ever since I was able to differentiate myself in the universe as a separate entity. Existing as a mixed ethnic human being with a parent from another country and the other who is still going to rehab in their 60s, left me a confused, frightened and self-conscious trainwreck. I couldn’t love or accept myself let alone another person.

This brings us to my first train ride with another human being that became a ride to another chapter of my life. If my first train ride at 13 was an exodus and splitting of myself, then this train ride was the coming together of the multifaceted selves I had been running from my entire life. The idea that I couldn’t be a Japanese American with Swedish and Eastern European heritage who happened to be drug addicted Buddhist dissipated. We are all multilayered and all of our layers complete our surface. We tend to label everything so detailed and yet those labels ultimately mean nothing. Like Walt Whitman said Do I contradict myself? /Very well then I contradict myself, /(I am large, I contain multitudes.).

I grew up with trips to Portland because my dad’s first cousin lived there with her partner. She was more like an aunt because she was my father’s age. When she was released from a federal prison sentence she decided to stay in the Pacific Northwest and those trips were my first introduction to the natural landscape outside of the Sierra Nevada. Audrey grew up visiting the Pacific Northwest too because her uncle and aunt lived on an island off the Puget Sound. This familiarity was the reason for us deciding Portland as the place of taking our first trip together.

The funny element is neither of us reached out to our family to meet while we were in the city. This trip was purely for us. Audrey had just escaped out of an abusive relationship, and I was escaping an abusive relationship with myself – she was half-way out of her previous home while I was living in a half-way home. We were like wounded birds mending each other’s feathers. We were in such vulnerable states that we had no energy left for insecurities. No masks left to hide behind. Truly and utterly naked in front of each other from the very beginning.

After we awoke in Klamath Falls to snowfall and a virgin sheet of snow across the Cascadian Range, we made our way to the observatory car for better views as we passed Umpqua National Forest with the iconic Three Sister volcanic peaks to the north. As we drank our morning coffee, volunteers with the Friends of the Portland Library gave an interactive educational history tour of the landscape from Fremont-Winema to Willamette National Forests and all the peaks in between. I had never had such a calm and serene experience during a train excursion. There were no blackouts, threats of a knife-fight, loss of time or suicidal thoughts. The police weren’t after me nor was I after something or someone. It was almost borderline suspicious; all familiarity was left at the station but being in the presence of Audrey made me realize we could create our own new familiarities.

One of the main elements that allowed for an opening of space in my life that would allow another human being to enter was my engagement with Buddhist practice and community. Even when I was actively using, I was aware of Buddhism and its relation on my mother’s side of the family. I was reading up on Buddhism as a teenager but never disciplined myself in the practice. It was merely a cultural element I could anchor onto – since Zen was Japanese, I felt an affinity to its identification. The only time I meditated though was when I was on the nod, and I would justify my heroin usage by telling myself I was taking on the suffering of the world like a bodhisattva. I was in bad shape with that logic. When I was incarcerated at Rio Cosumnes Correctional Facility I began sitting with a Native American friend and mentor of mine in the little yard space we had. After getting out I began sitting with a Buddhist group regularly and actively engaging in multi-day sits, study sessions, special classes, and ceremonious gatherings. This was where my true healing and new path emerged in life and I began to study myself – the baggage, behaviors, patterns, generational seeds and both negative and positive elements of my character.

The studying of my own mind allowed for an open space so another person could enter. A place where I actively work on being the best version of myself so I can be the best version for others. Japanese Soto Zen priest and abbot of the Sanshin Zen Community in Indiana Shohaku Okumura said the three main factors of zazen are posture, breath, and letting go of thought. This cultivates a pure mind which is an open sky that allows clouds to freely come and go. This is the experience I expected when entering my first train ride, before the arrest from a SWAT team. Since then, my countless train rides were an attempt to find that pure unadulterated experience, but I was in a constant state of escape. There is no escape from anything. Life is full of suffering and life is full of difficulties. The practice offers a pathway where the suffering and difficulties can be assets and actual moments for an improved life. I no longer am constantly rejecting or fighting these experiences.

After the volunteers of the Friends of the Portland Library were finished with their historical discourse, Audrey and I made our way back to our private seats and watched the snow turn to vibrant green fields and valleys with Mount Hood in the backdrop. We zig zagged over the Willamette River a few times until we could finally see the infamous neon White Stag Sign at the base of Burnside bridge. We crossed over the steel constructed bridge into Union Station and a heavy downpour of rain began. I took this as a sign Audrey, and I were already making our new familiarities.

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