Train Dreams

Robert Grainier is a railroad laborer. In the summer of 1917, a Chinese laborer has been accused of stealing from the company stores of the Spokane International Railway in the Idaho Panhandle. Grainier and the other white laborers attempt to throw him over the bridge they are constructing, but he escapes. While hiking back home, Grainier stops in Meadow Creek and buys a bottle of sarsaparilla for his wife, Gladys, and their four-month-old daughter, Kate. All through his walk home he believes he sees the Chinaman and when he gets home to his cabin he believes the Chinaman has cursed him and that something bad will happen.

In 1920, after the bridge is completed, Grainier leaves for northwestern Washington to help repair the Robinson Gorge Bridge. He then works on cutting down and transporting timber for the Simpson Company. Grainier, then thirty-five years old, begins missing his wife and daughter. He meets a fellow worker Arn Peeples, an older man who was originally a miner from Arizona. Arn is a fearless man, dangerously excavating tunnels with dynamite, but he is also a superstitious man. He dies later by being hit across the back of his head by a falling dead branch. The men hold a funeral for Arn, who they respected as an honest man. In 1962 or 1963, an older Grainier watches young ironworkers build a new highway and considers how much he has seen the world around him change. In the mid-1950s, he sees the World's Fattest Man. Grainier confuses the chronology of his memories, but remembers seeing Elvis Presley's private train in Troy, Montana. He also remembers flying in a biplane in 1927.

Grainier was born in 1886 in either Utah or Canada. In 1893, he arrived by himself as an orphan in Fry, Idaho on a train on the Great Northern Railway. He is taken in by a family. His first memory is witnessing the mass deportation of Chinese families from the town. In 1899, the towns of Fry and Eatonville were combined to form Bonners Ferry, Idaho, on the Kootenai River. Grainier quit school in his early teens and began fishing for himself. One day he comes across a dying man named William Coswell Haley. He brings him a drink of water from his boot and leaves him to die alone.

Affected by the man's death, Grainier begins working frequently for the railroad and entrepreneurial families from the area. He worked in town through his twenties. At thirty-one years of age, he met Gladys Olding at the Methodist church and later married her. In the summer of 1920, Grainier returns to Idaho from working on the Robinson Gorge to find a massive wildfire has consumed the valley. His house has been lost and his wife and daughter are nowhere to be found. Ten days later he takes the train to Creston, British Columbia, but he learns no survivors from the fire had escaped there. He continues to search for them to no avail. In September, he attempts to return to his land but returns to live in town. In the following spring, he returns to their cabin and believes he feels Gladys' spirit. One night when he is sleeping by the river he believes he sees her white bonnet above, "just sailing past." He lived there through the summer, eventually taking in a red dog as company and buying a goat, four hens and a rooster. In September he killed the goat and later he killed the hens and rooster, which he and the dog ate. He left for Meadow Creek, with the dog vanishing and Grainier taking a train to Bonners Ferry, where he stayed through the winter. He returned to his land in the Moyea Valley in March and eventually rebuilds his cabin. The red dog returned in June, this time with four puppies. Grainier befriends a Kootenai Indian named Bob, who later dies after drunkenly laying on train tracks and being run over by trains.[8][9]

Four years into living in his cabin and beginning to feel the effects of aging, Grainier realizes he cannot continue to move out of his cabin every summer to Washington and every winter to Bonners Ferry. By April 1925, he stayed and worked in town instead of leaving for Washington. In one job, he loads sacks of cornmeal aboard the wagon of the Pinkhams, who run a machine shop. He works with their grandson Henry, who dies while they are working together. He is the first person Grainier himself ever saw die. Shortly after he buys the Pinkham's horses and wagon to run errands for others. Around this time, Grainier hears rumors of a wolf-girl.

Grainier is visited by a figure of his wife Gladys, who tells him she died after she fell and broke her back on rocks down at the river. Before she drowned, she unknotted her boddice to allow Kate to crawl away and escape. He asked Gladys how Kate could have escaped unbeknownst to anybody, but he no longer sensed Gladys.

Thereafter, Grainier lived in his cabin, even through the winters. To pay for lodging for his horses during the winter, he worked in the Washington woods one summer, his last time doing so. Later, he travels on the Great Northern to Spokane, Washington and takes a ride on the plane of two men from Alberta. He then meets his childhood friend Eddie Sauer and the two travel to Meadow Creek, where Eddie begins working on a "rail-and-ties" crew. A month later, Eddie pays Grainier to help him move a widow named Claire Thompson from Noxon, Montana to Sandpoint, Idaho.

Grainier continues to live in his cabin, despite having arthritis and rheumatism. In mid-November, he can hear the wolves and coyotes howling at night. When a pack of wolves comes upon his cabin one night, Grainier sees a wolf-girl and is convinced it is his lost daughter Kate. She growls and barks at him, but lets him splint her broken leg. The wolf-girl slept through the night and, upon morning, quickly leaped out the window. Grainier never saw her again.

Robert Grainier dies in his sleep in November 1968, over the age of 80. His body is only discovered next year, during the spring by a pair of hikers. In a memory from 1935, Grainier attends a sideshow to see a "wolf-boy". The audience initially laughs at him but are shocked when they hear his roar. The novella concludes, "And suddenly it all went black. And that time was gone forever."

Train Dreams was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on August 30, 2011.[2] It was originally published, in slightly different form, in the Summer 2002 issue of The Paris Review.[3]

The novella appeared at number 28 on The New York Times Hardcover Fiction best-sellers list on October 9, 2011.[10]

Publishers Weekly called the novella "the synthesis of Johnson's epic sensibilities rendered in miniature in the clipped tone of Jesus' Son."[4]

Writing for The New York Times Book Review, author Anthony Doerr praised the novella, writing, "What Johnson builds from the ashes of Grainier's life is a tender, lonesome and riveting story, an American epic writ small."[11]