I Found a 15-Year-Old Boy Hiding in the Nose of My Locomotive, 200 Miles From Anywhere in the Rocky Mountains. He Said If I Stopped the Train, He’d Jump

The Green River depot is a little brick building in the middle of the Utah desert, next to the river, next to nothing.

At 9:40 a.m., our train came around the last curve.

There was an old man standing on the platform.

Navajo. Seventy-two years old. Straight-backed, a silver-and-turquoise belt buckle, a straw cowboy hat in his hands. Beside him, a deputy, a young woman with a folder and a thin man in a suit.

Eli was awake. He was standing at the cab window.

He saw the old man.

He didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then, very small, like a little boy: “Grandpa?”

I stopped the train. Exactly at the platform. Smoothest stop I’ve made in twenty-three years.

Eli climbed down the locomotive steps. He walked across the platform slowly, then faster, and then the old man dropped his hat and put both arms around him and held him so tight that I could see his hands shaking from the cab.

The deputy turned away to give them privacy.

So did I.

It took four months in family court in Colorado and Utah. The caseworker’s report, Gloria’s dispatch log, the school counselor’s notes and a photograph of a black eye, taken by a deputy on the Green River platform, were all entered into evidence. Raymond Tso’s lawyer, the thin man in the suit, worked for free. He said he had his own reasons.

In March, the judge gave Raymond full custody.

The railroad reviewed my “rule deviation” for two months. I got a written warning and a one-week suspension without pay.

The week I was suspended, I drove to Green River.

Eli was waiting on the depot platform when I pulled in. He’d grown two inches. The black eye was long gone. He was wearing a hat exactly like his grandfather’s.

“Grandpa made breakfast burritos,” he said. “He says you’re not allowed to leave until you eat three.”

We sat on the steps of the old depot and ate them, while an eastbound freight came around the curve, a hundred and twelve cars, a different engineer at the controls.

The engineer blew the horn twice as he went past.

Eli waved.

“Do they always do that?” he asked.

“Only for friends,” I said.