NONFICTION

Sneaking into train yards, slipping into boxcars, and riding the rails toward the unknown is one of those romantic, daredevil American activities that now seems like a waste of time -- an act of nostalgia with little contemporary relevance, especially in today's security-saturated America.

The novelist and essayist William T. Vollmann, however, must have missed the memo. "Riding Toward Everywhere," a collection of essays about the act of and the culture surrounding train hopping ("catching out"), reads like a desperate attempt to cling to an era with little meaning for most 21st-century readers.

Opening with a witty legal disclaimer (train hopping is illegal, boys and girls), Vollmann immediately pines for the days of yore when people set out to seek spiritual transcendence and hobos formed primitive social groups with their own laws and morals. With his friend Steve (and the occasional aid of other friends and sweethearts), Vollmann rides the rails up and down the West Coast, offering social insights that would dazzle were they not drenched in so much reminiscing.

As a piece of reportage, "Riding Toward Everywhere" covers some interesting ground. Vollmann searches for evidence of a racist railroad gang, provides a visual analysis of pornographic boxcar graffiti, retells mundane and apocryphal stories about seasoned hobos and train hoppers and explains the delicate art of hopping on and off a moving train without dying.

All too quickly, though, the work becomes focused more on Back Then than Here and Now. A curious juxtaposition between the relative insecurity of train yards and the hypersensitive security of airport terminals is tossed midway through the book, replaced with repeated references to Jack London, Mark Twain's travels down the Mississippi, Ernest Hemingway novels, Henry David Thoreau, and (naturally) Jack Kerouac's "On the Road."

It's Kerouac's classic (and overrated) novel about transcendence through travel to which Vollmann seems most indebted. Everywhere (that ambiguous nirvana for the lost and lonely American soul) takes a different form in each essay, appearing as destinations such as Cold Mountain, Switzerland, and Dunsmuir, Calif.

Vollmann's travels are filled with beautiful descriptions that capture the physical experience of train hopping ("porpoises leaping under the moon," the feeling of "riding through a river of stars"). The comfort of Everywhere, however, is always one boxcar away.

Then again, would Everywhere carry the emotional and spiritual weight it does if Vollmann -- or any of us -- ever actually reached it?
Zak M. Salih is a freelance writer who lives in Arlington County.