"I first read Denis Johnson's novella Train Dreams outside, leaning against a tree. It was 2019, and my Forest Service trail crew was camped out in a quiet corner of Washington's Alpine Lakes Wilderness, clearing the Jack Creek trail through a two-year-old burn. In the evenings, after I'd rinsed the grime off in a shallow creek, I savored Johnson's descriptions of the rough and lonely life of his protagonist, Robert Grainier, a logging-crew laborer in Washington's forests a hundred years ago."
"Like Grainier, I, too, "relished the work, the straining, the heady exhaustion, the deep rest at the end of the day." To clear trails in federally designated wilderness areas where the Forest Service prohibits the use of motorized equipment, my crew relied on many of the same tools the old-time loggers used: two-person crosscut saws, axes, pulaskis. In those days, there was not much I missed about the world beyond the woods."
Reading Denis Johnson's Train Dreams outside while working on a Forest Service trail crew connected the narrator's experience to early-20th-century logging life of Robert Grainier. The crew cleared Jack Creek trail using traditional hand tools and embraced exhausting, restorative labor and wilderness solitude. After seven seasons, graduate school, the pandemic, and changing circumstances widened the narrator's perspective and led to departure from the Forest Service in early 2025. Lines and images from Train Dreams stayed vivid and prompted anticipation for Clint Bentley's screen translation. The Netflix version is gorgeously dreamlike but less surreal, altering minor plot points and smoothing character moral complexity.
Read at High Country News
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