March 8, 2023 • 49 mins
When a fire takes the lives of Ruby’s friends, Danelle realizes no one else will tell their stories. A reporting trip to New Orleans with Ruby presents Danelle with an opportunity to get closer, and get new answers. Members of hobo band Profane Sass help piece together events, journalist Chris Rose weighs in on New Orleans, and Danelle meets a survivor.
For biographies of the traveling kids and more on the squat fire, visit https://danellemorton.com/fire/
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Jessa heads up. This episode discusses death in a tragic fire.
Take care of yourselves, and if you're a new listener,
this is our ninth episode, make sure you start with
episode one. It had been more than a year since
I first started exploring the rails, but finally Ruby was
about to come home. Ruby called and told me she
(00:27):
was approaching San Francisco in the Jesus Metro, that car
that she and her boyfriend were given by a devout
Christian on their way through Washington. Along the way, they'd
picked up a few passengers and another dog. The image
of this vehicle crossing the Golden gate Bridge made me
grin every time it popped into my mind. But there
was no longer a home for Ruby to return to
(00:48):
now that I had downsized for my apartment in Oakland
was living in the barn, and I knew she wouldn't
call me first, but at some point she would. When
she did, Ruby said she already had a place to stay,
a house near the railroad tracks in Oakland, the Woe Mansion.
Her Rimmis were several women who had also gotten off
the rails, at least for a while. A few days later,
(01:10):
we went out to breakfast. She looked great, happy, healthy,
and full of energy to begin her new life. It
was almost unbelievable to be sitting with her at a
cafe near jack London Square, hearing about her plans and
how she needed to get a job, but she wanted
no help. She could do it all herself. But after
(01:30):
she'd been home two months, Ruby still hadn't answered a
single question about her life on the rails. I didn't
know anything more than what I'd been able to piece
together during our sporadic phone calls when she was away. Instead,
Ruby just patiently told me that I'd never understand, and
she didn't want to explain. But every day I wondered
if this was the morning I'd wake up to find
that she'd left again. Honestly, I didn't see much reason
(01:54):
she would stay. She had a soul destroying job that
offered meager wages. Ruby was working as a peachypuff Girl,
a freelance cigarette girl required to dress in a sexy
Halloween costume as she took a tray of cigarettes, candy,
and condoms around the nightclubs of San Francisco, being insulted
in proposition by tech bros. Until the last call if
(02:16):
this was the working world. I didn't see anything holding
her to this side of the tracks. And then late
in December we got the news. It was an unusually
cold night in New Orlands. Squatters were blamed for a
warehouse far that killed eight people. A couldaver dog searches
the remains of an abandoned warehouse. They didn't know how
many people were actually in the build, and were so
(02:36):
badly burned that officials couldn't immediately determine the sexes or
ages of the victims. We'd be called to tell me
about the fire. She knew where the warehouse was and
had met people staying there when she lived for a
while in New Orleans. I could hear from her voice
that Ruby was shaken. Eight of her peers had died,
and when we got off the phone, I shut my
eyes to absorb the news. When Ruby was out on
(02:59):
the rail, I was most afraid she'd die in a
squat fire. I'd had that nightmare too many times to count,
and I thought about the parents of the eight who died.
What were they going through? Instantly I wanted to go
to New Orleans. Well, the news stopped short of any
real specifics I knew better than to dismiss the ape
who died as merely homeless. I knew how they died,
(03:21):
but I didn't know how they had lived, what forces
had pushed them on to the rails, and what had
they left behind. If I could understand that, maybe I'd
be able to answer the questions Ruby hadn't about life
on the rails. But I'd never be allowed into this
world unless I had someone to vouch for me, and
the perfect person for that was Ruby. She'd stayed in
New Orleans twice when she was on the rails. I
(03:44):
called her back, explained that I wanted to report the
story of the squat fire, and offered to pay her
to be my research assistant. She surprised me with an
enthusiastic yes. The stories of the squatters needed to be told,
and this was a chance to be with her grieving community.
So two weeks after the fire, we boarded our flight
to New Orleans. I didn't want to hope for too much,
(04:06):
but then I knew how the rails break your heart,
and they've done it for many in New Orleans. I'm
Denil Morton, and this is City of the Rails. It's
cold combat down a new Orleans cont down a New Orleans.
You gotta keep close cont go on home. We got
(04:32):
said to go off home, cop said to go off home.
Down palaces, doesn't right on to them, falling a fallen
trails and if forgotten the song, did you guys have
(05:02):
a memorial service here? It's kind of been an ongoing thing.
People who stopped by and drop off things. I'm walking
with Ruby and her friend Izzie, deeper and deeper into
New Orleans ravaged Eighth Ward, one of the hardest hit
by Hurricane Katrina. We set up a skate park over
there five years after Katrina. The streets are still redded
(05:23):
in the neighborhood is a ghost town. We make our
way down North Pierre Street, pass boarded up houses next
to a few occupied ones with tidy fenced in front yards.
So yeah, everyone is graving really hard and in their
own ways. You know. He lives across the street from
where the warehouse used to be, and he wants to
show us the memorial to the eight who died there.
(05:44):
Right after the fire, the city bulldozed the wreck of
the warehouse, and Azzie told me he watched as day
by day groups of people came to the site to
pay their respects. We walked toward the handmade cross erected
in the empty field of ashes with flowers, candles, pieces
of jewelry and a bull, burnt, remnants of clothing and books,
and a few stuffed animals. Among the bits and pieces
(06:06):
included in the memorial is he points out cans of
alcohol left as tribute to those who died. That's notable
in this hard drinking community, naturally. Actually, we're surprised there's
so many beers and four locos and things left here
on opened for weeks. You know, it was pretty cool.
I mean, it looks like they're all gone now, but
(06:26):
it's cool. It'll lasted so long, you know. Yeah, yeah,
is he Ruby and I stand around the cross holding
hands to observe a moment of silence for those who
were lost in the fire. The dead, age seventeen to
twenty nine, were from Wisconsin, Texas, California, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Nebraska,
and New Orleans around us. The terrible loss of the
(06:48):
Squat Fire still hung in the cold winter air, but
not everyone was sympathetic to the tragedy, which was the
biggest fire in the city in thirty years. Some called
to tighten the vagrancy and busking laws discourage these people
from staying in New Orleans. Here at the memorial, as
we bowed our heads to the deceased, I was grateful
that my daughter was at my side and I was
(07:09):
holding her hand, although this is a bit burned this stuff.
After the visit to the memorial, I dropped Ruby off
at a friend's apartment in the Ninth Ward and drove
across town to my friend's place in the Upscale Garden District.
My plan with Ruby was we'd meet every day in
the French Quarter and go visit her friends in the
(07:30):
Eighth and ninth Wards. But time down here feels different.
Days in New Orleans didn't really get started until two pm,
a bit off kilter for someone like me who gets
up before sunrise, right around the time Ruby and her
friends were going to bed. So when we met for
breakfast the first time in the French Quarter, Ruby suggested
we have breakfast tachos. Nacho is made from tater tots.
(07:52):
It's two o'clock, I'm eating breakfast and it's tachos. New
Orleans was already flipping me on my head while I
was down here. I wanted to learn more about how
the Traveling Kids fit into the city of New Orleans,
so I looked up Chris Rose, former columnists for the
New Orleans Times Pickieyune. For a time, Chris had been
(08:14):
the face of New Orleans. His columns on the aftermath
of Hurricane Katrina became a best seller called One Dead
in the Attic. But two years ago, Chris left New
Orleans after thirty five years. He was another person who
deliberately detached himself from the city when the conventional world
got to be too much for him. So when I
tracked Chris down, he was living on a campsite in
(08:35):
a national forest in Mississippi. He's arranged a life were
the only two bills he pays are his cell phone
and his car insurance, a life led with very little money,
not unlike the hoboes I was going to ask him about.
And although Chris chose to leave the city behind, he
understood why the Traveling Kids are drawn to New Orleans.
You can still hear the languid pace of life in
(08:56):
his voice. Because it's easy, it's very comfortable place to live. It's,
you know, the most Caribbean, it's the northernmost Caribbean city, right,
and it is. Its pace of life is one that's
very comfortable. You can be ambitious, but you don't have
to be You can chase money, but you don't have
(09:17):
to to live a comfortable and successful life. There vious
rotten rails. I could see it'd be very easy to
stay there because the weather accommodates it, and the community
is large. You know, they've got their own microeconomy going on.
Is very favorable to staying in a city open to
(09:40):
the offbeat, the eccentric, and the unconventional. High season for
the Dirty Kids starts in the fall and October, writers
start heading south to New Orleans from crumbling industrial cities
in the Rest Belt. It's a pretty comfortable place to
spend the winter, and many set up in New Orleans
until spring. Everyone knows the parties start Halloween night. New
(10:00):
Orleans in the wintertime is just like you know, it's
like almost like you're at the Festival of Dirty Kids.
There's literally like hundreds of kids and people who travel
that Scott Michad the basis for Profane Sass, the band
that plays our theme song, Wayfaring Stranger. As it happened,
Scott his girlfriend Becky and the whole band. We're in
(10:22):
New Orleans in the weeks before the Squat fire. Originally
they intended to stay only a few days, but New
Orleans has a way of getting you to forget your intentions.
It's like even walking through the French Quarter or Decatur Street,
twenty minute walk, but you'd run it into other people
you had met, and you'd sit there and you talk
and you'd share. Even just like walking from the squat
(10:43):
down to play music back could be like a seven
hour thing, and we are all just so like follow
the wind and follow the signs and follow the omen
let the universe aside where we're going the day. And
for Scott and his bandmates, it wasn't just the pace
or the conviviality, it was the music. There was just
so many great street performers down there, so you kind
(11:04):
of like join forces with other musicians for a little while,
and sometimes by the end of the night you have
fourteen people all playing these songs that we kind of
all know. Morgan Nuselton, who we met in the episode
(11:25):
about Women on the Rails, had another name for New
Orleans party city, like this dark, mysterious city, like we
are a part of that culture. People that are coming
to visit loved the ship out of us. They loved
like the old tiny folk, like playing their music for musicians.
New Orleans held a special appeal. They felt the love
from some of the city and its visitors. But it
(11:47):
was a different story with the police who tried to
push hoboes to the edge of town. Because when you
go to the French Quarter, you got about three days.
The cops basically say like, we're going to continue to
give you tickets, but if you go to the ninth
four or the eighth ward we walk, that's with you.
So it pushes us over there so that we can
(12:07):
get the hell out of the nice part in town.
So New Orleans could be easy living with hard looks
from some of the locals. While Profane and SaaS was
in town, Scott and Becky experienced the aggression of people
who didn't embrace the dirty kids. I remember specifically this
moment the Profane Sasas was playing on the street and
(12:27):
I was taking care of the dogs, and this man
in his late forties, you know, kind of business dress,
walked by and so like full of anger and hate,
leans down over us and throws down like ten or
twenty dollars, and it's like in our face and says
(12:48):
this is for the dogs so they can eat, not
for you, and walks off. So even in New Orleans
it was hobo's versus society, and resentment from the locals
meant that if you wanted to stay in town and
housed up, you had to find the right neighborhood. So
Ruby and I left the French Quarter and headed back
(13:09):
to the eighth and ninth wards. Here, on the edge
of the city, forty three thousand homes stood abandoned since
the hurricane, a quarter of New Orleans housing stock, which
made the neighborhood a perfect destination for squatters. We betook
me to a squat on the far edge of the
eighth Ward, where her friends Aaron and Momo lived. After
a few days of squat shopping, breaking into ten or
(13:29):
fifteen empty houses, they found the right wine and they
were living in. We didn't do anything to do it
except we sweat, and then I started finding furniture. Aaron
and Momo didn't need much to survive. Mamo pointed to
three dollars sitting on the crate next to her bed. Yeah,
(13:49):
three dollars and chains that I've had for a week
and a half. With just three bucks, anyone could furnish
a life here and just as quickly abandon it. But
in this squat, Aaron and Momo had settled in for
a while, even decorating it on the cheap in a
way that I loved. They'd gone to second hand stories
and bought pairs of sparkly stiletto heels and balanced a
(14:10):
shoe over each doorway in the house. This was a
remarkable turnaround for Momo to find a home in New Orleans.
Last time she was here with her boyfriend. They swear
they'd never return. How Come it was so hard last
time because we were doing two main drugs all the time,
and his dog got hit by a car and almost died,
and I went to jail. Just a lot of stuff
(14:36):
is cursed. We're never going back. But I've been telling
them about everything I've been doing here, and I was like,
I'm not gonna let New Orleans win. You know. We
sat on the floor of Aaron and Momo's squat, me
on a mattress and Ruby in a tilted dining room chair.
I was surprised how comfortable we were in this odd
situation with me peppering them with so many questions, how
did they survive when they got housed up, how did
(14:58):
they structure their days? And what kept them here? I
was asking them everything I'd wanted to know about Ruby,
and Ruby never interrupted, only spoke up when she wanted
to draw a boundary around what I could ask her. Friends.
Questions about specific yards and how to hop a train
were off limits. We talked until the sun went down
at five, but my New Orleans education was only beginning.
(15:24):
Later that night, we all met up again to go
to a birthday party at the Saint Rock Tavern. The
party was for Ugly John, who appeared to have been
on the party bus since the day before. He was
swaying around drunk off his ass with about thirty dollars
and one dollar bills pinned to his shirt front and back,
a New Orleans birthday tradition. Was a little bummed on
(15:46):
his birthday, though, because he just broke in the bar's
toilet and couldn't remember how all he knew was most
of his birthday money would now go to paying off
the bar owner. I was right in the middle of
the rolling party, ordering pictures of beer, which was making
table pretty popular. In return, I was constantly being offered
free drinks, free drugs, and free homemade tattoos. Close to midnight,
(16:08):
the girls wanted to teach me how to twerk. Why,
because we all headed to a club that was hosting
Booty Night. Tworking was practically a part of the cover charge.
When we got there, the club was packed in this
pre pandemic ecstasy. The saxe player left the stage and
(16:32):
walked among the crowd, eyes shut, with people touching his
arms as he played. Everything I do is going to
be funky from now on, And yes there was twerking,
and I'm glad there were no cameras there to record
this moment. It was around two when I pulled myself
(16:54):
away from the club, even though my new friends begged
me to stay. I drove across town through the fog
to my friend's place. When I got there, I drunkenly
fumbled with my keys and opened the apartment door. There
in the doorway to an empty apartment, the intoxication of
Booty Nights suddenly faded and everything from the day started
(17:15):
to hit me. I was thinking about standing by the
memorial holding hands with Izzy and Ruby, about the parents
who'd lost their kids, and the way Momo and Alana lived,
and about ugly John, and the fun I had with
my daughter and her friends. With these highs and lows,
all in one day, I sat on the couch with
a television on Catatonic. I was fully seeing the life
(17:39):
of a traveling kid, not having someone describe it to me.
What was I supposed to make of this town? It
ended up being Chris Rose who characterized it best. Like Momo,
he'd struggled trying to leave the city. Well, that's the thing.
There's a lot of shadows in Nuance. There's this huge
carnival of life there in the presence for everybody to
(18:02):
see and to participate in. But all around them, all
around the bright lights and carnival of the French quarner,
on all sides of it are the shadows, dark streets,
empty buildings, open fields, blocks and blocks of areas that
are unpeopled and unpoliced. And the train yards, of course
(18:29):
are right there. And it's easy to move in those shadows.
If you just float along the sidewalks not bugging anybody,
nobody will notice you. There's a lot of invisible people
in New Orleans Let's put it this way, if you
were wanted by the law, where would you go to
go off the grid? I mean it's been this way
for not decades, but for centuries. In New Orleans, it's
(18:52):
it's where people go to go off the grid. You know,
there's always the joke that the guy passing on the
streets a serial or who knows people just go there
to disappear. They always have. Chris was describing a dark
kind of New Orleans magic. The city had an air
of mystery mixed in with the fog. When they could
(19:14):
envelop you like a cloak. Was the perfect city for
the traveling community. As I tried to sleep, my ears
still ringing with the saxophone music, I knew that tomorrow
I'd need to get down to business. I'd meet up
with Ruby and start figuring out what happened that night
in the warehouse. Ruby would lead me to people who'd
seen the fire. I was starting to get my grounding
(19:47):
in New Orleans. I could see how the warehouse, squat
and its residence fit into the fabric of the city.
I wanted to understand as much as I could about
the warehouse and the day's leading up to the fire,
and for what I gathered, the squat was a special play.
The people who helped me understand why were the members
of Profane SaaS, the band who performs our theme song.
They were among the last people to stay in the warehouse.
(20:11):
For years. The band had traveled from show to show
by hopping trains, so a whole group of them rode
down from Pittsburgh. When they arrived, they heard about the
perfect place to stay, right by the railroad tracks and
within walking distance of the French border. People would sleep
in the field nearby just to be near it. What
made this squat so special? For one thing, it was huge. Kiwi,
(20:33):
Profane Sasa's banjo player told me there was plenty of
room for the band and their friends. Yeah, it had
these huge doors that we'd all hang out on. It
was like right by the train yard, and they're like, yeah,
this is perfect. Probably thirty by fifty or sixty foot
wood warehouse. There was a big room in the middle,
(20:53):
and it was clear this place was known to the
riding community. Becky told me you only needed to look
at the walls to see if your friends had passed through.
Murals tags everyone would leave their mark, and so it
was almost like just this history of who was here,
A lot of good messages. He got what are you doing?
(21:16):
Profane's has set me a video they took of the
whole setup Ye family right now and it slung over
a roof. Being was a twenty foot swing that swept
slowly across the main room through the open warehouse doores.
You could see the trains in the yard. It was
(21:37):
super fun to swing on that, and while you were swinging,
the big open doors were there so people would be
gathering and talking. Yeah, it was really nice here in
the edge of ten. They partied into the night, playing music,
swinging and dancing. It was a squatter's paradise without any
fear of getting busted. It was definitely one of tho
(21:58):
neighborhoods where people don't call police, you know, so like
we didn't even worry about that. Having seventy or eighty
people out there at the warehouse, you know, we didn't worry.
Everyone has such vivid memories of the warehouse. But it
wasn't an easy place to stay warm. The band had
traveled south in search of warm weather, but ki We
said it was surprisingly cold when they got there, with
(22:20):
the moisture of like how what New Orleans was. The
nights are super cold, so we all had sleeping bags
and stuff, and we'd probably, you know, we all cuddled
together and we had dogs and kept us warm. This
weather made New Orleans a lot less welcoming than past winters.
For Becky, who was on the rails for the first time,
(22:42):
the cold was unlike anything she'd felt before. Even though
New Orleans pulled so many of us because it definitely
was not as cold as the northern cities. Still, when
you are constantly outside, it's hard for your whole body
to maintain heat. It just feels colder. The draft, the
trains going by. There's no insulation in the room, there's
(23:05):
no insulation in the floor. You felt it in your bones.
This weather made New Orleans a lot less welcoming than
past winters. For Becky, who was on the rails for
the first time, the cold was unlike anything she'd felt before.
It's different when you are living on the street and
the only time you get into a heated space is
when you have enough money to buy a cup of
(23:26):
coffee and go into a coffee shop. You know, because
you cannot take regular showers because you're not cleaning your
clothes regularly. Society doesn't want you in public spaces. So
in the open field next to the warehouse, the band
built huge bonfires every night and felt a deep chill
when they had to return to the warehouse to sleep,
(23:47):
and just the feeling of the fire and then away
from the fire like that distinct temperature difference is a
real but the cold didn't get profanees asked down. The
band spent over month there hanging out, meeting people, playing music,
and of course they couldn't leave Party City without one
final celebration. So the night before the band was leaving
(24:09):
to go to a gig in Texas, they had a
big send off. Right before we'd left. We had this
huge party because we had been there for you know,
some months or weeks, and so we had this big
party where like sixty or seventy people came. We had
a big old bonfire in the sand. You know. It
was a huge party with lots of travelers gathered around
the bonfire, and almost everyone carried an instrument. So the
(24:32):
whole thing with the traveling community is acoustic instruments, because
you can travel with an acoustic instrument, you can bust
with an acoustic instrument, so they'll be usually like, you know,
acoustic guitar, maybe an acoustic bass, banjo, washed board, fiddle, jugs,
a lot of musical saws, a lot of accordions, spoons, spoon, trump, harmonica.
(24:59):
So probably half of the traveling kids carried instruments kind
of what you do. And it was part of the
community so much, and so at the end of the night,
everybody will do like a big jam session, maybe five
people or fifteen people or twenty people. So everyone was
(25:27):
playing music, dancing around the bonfire. But as the night
went on, temperatures started to drop. Scott told me he
and their lead singer Thomas, notice some people in the
warehouse trying to find a way to bring the fire inside.
I remember somebody's like, yeah, we should bring it in there,
and yeah, I remember both me and Thomas where it's
just like, do not do that. That is a wooden floor,
(25:49):
it'll burn down. And I remember hearing Thomas and Scott
try and advice in the sand pit, this is the
safe place for it to be, you know, and trying
to provide that guidance to the other community members and
friends that that was the safer place to have it,
(26:10):
so no fire came inside while Profane's Ass was staying
at the warehouse, but they left the day after the party.
The band said goodbye to the people they'd gotten close
to in the squat, especially Nikki and Sammy. Nikki had
come south with them from Pittsburgh and fallen in love
with Sammy, who brought them to the warehouse. Profane's ask
promised they'd be back before winter was done, but they
(26:31):
never saw them again. And when Scott first heard about
the tragedy, he thought back to that conversation about the bonfire.
I remember very vividly thinking about that a lot. That's
where my mind would always take me, like, oh, how
to happen? Like I didn't have a doubt that that's
what happened. A week after Profane's Ass left, the Knights
(26:52):
were still freezing in New Orleans, so people continued trying
to figure out how to bring the fire inside. That
was the key decision and one I wanted to know
more about. Most of those who died in the warehouse
were experienced travelers. Two in particular, Katie Simmoner and her
boyfriend Jeff Gertz, had a lot of outdoor skills, so
how was this decision made with all the time I'd
(27:16):
spent trying to convince travelers to speak with me. In
New Orleans, things were different With Ruby at my side.
Everyone was talking and she was introducing me to people
who knew more about the fire. One night we went
to a cook out of the squat in the eighth Ward,
where hoboes were jousting on tall bikes, like six to
ten feet tall, made of two bicycle frames welded together.
(27:37):
The knights of the Road squared off on the street
fifty feet apart, circling until someone guild go. Then they
took off toward each other full speed, broom handles blazing,
trying to knock the other guy off. It was brutal.
One guy needed first aid After the battle. The warriors
grabbed chicken legs from the grille and licked their hands
(27:58):
when they were done. But when dinner was served it
was a different story. As a visiting mom, I got
a lot of respect from the travelers. Some one produced
a chair from one of the squats just for me,
and another brought the only plate and actual silverware. All
of these months I'd been trying to get these people
to talk to me, to understand their world, and here
I was in the middle of it all, treated like
(28:19):
a queen. This evening was chaotic. Joy I was having
a great time in these unstructured days, one hundred and
eighty degrees from my regular life, and it was the
first time since Ruby left that I felt truly free.
As dusk settled in, the streets were dark without street lights.
The only light we had came from the porchlights of
(28:40):
nearby houses. Ruby came over to tell me she'd found
one of the survivors of the fire. This woman had
been living at the warehouse, but she happened to be
out the night of the fire, and she was willing
to talk to me. This woman didn't want to be named,
but she told me she'd lived at the warehouse for
a full month before the fire. The survivor remembered how
the squad he was prepared to bring the fire inside.
(29:03):
It was a giant steel barbecue pet that we upset up,
and we had nailed cargated middle siding underneath it and
a perimeter around it to make sure that he didn't
dry out the boards and then catch on fire. You know,
we took precautions, he said, clear Just how many train
hoppers were in the house that night or exactly when
and how the fire started, but it spread through the
(29:24):
main room fast. Her friend Byron, was passed out on
the main floor and woke up when he saw the
flames crawling up the walls. Meanwhile, the survivor was walking home,
turned the corner and saw the warehouse ablaze. The door
burst open and Byron ran out. He came to and
could barely even find his way out. He couldn't even
get in stall. Yeah, very said he heard a few
(29:46):
people in bang me and trying to get out somewhere,
non responsive. He was pretty hysterical at the time, So
I just, you know, I like ran up and was
like he was in there, and he's in there, and
he was just like everyone you know, standing outside the fire.
They were powerless to help their friends screaming inside the warehouse.
(30:09):
As we stood on the steps of the building, the
survivor showed me her palm. She tried to open the
door to the warehouse to save her friends, but it
was so hot that it burned her hand. As the
survivor told this story, the barbecue was escalating. There was
a wrestling match on the asphalt and I heard some
beer bottles shattering on the sidewalk. Then I heard the sirens.
(30:32):
Someone must have called the cops. Everyone was scattering. I
saw Ruby running toward me, waving her arms. We needed
to go. She grabbed my hand and we sprinted toward
the rental car. Ruby told me to take a left
and I floored it. We zig zagged through the eighth ward,
with Ruby calling out evasive action, laughing and cursing like
girlfriends on a spree. I dropped her off at a
(30:54):
friend's house with a hug, and started on my confused
way home. I was disoriented and ended up driving all
over the city, round and round, trying to make sense
of everything I was learning. The next day, Ruby was
flying back to Oakland. How would I navigate this world
without her? When she left a graduation, I thought she
(31:16):
split because she didn't love me or trust me, But
in New Orleans she showed me I was wrong about that.
It was clear she trusted me when she introduced me
to her friends, and while I was sorry to see
her go, I was sticking around for a few more days.
I wanted to find out more about those who died
and start tracking down their families. A few of whom
(31:36):
were in New Orleans. Plus, I was meeting with the
New Orleans Fire inspectors, the people who'd walked through the
smoking ruins of the warehouse. What could they tell me
about the origins of this tragedy. On a Sunday afternoon
(32:07):
in the French Quarter, I walked down Royal Street past
Jackson Square on my way to New Orleans Fire Department headquarters.
At last, I'd tracked down the man who was first
on the scene investigating the fire, and got him to
agree to an interview. The week before, i'd reported with Ruby,
But this interview I was doing solo. She was back
in Oakland, and I was already missing the comfort of
(32:28):
having her beside me. So the whole walk Ruby was
all I could think about. I imagined her on each
street corner and wished she'd pop out of the place.
We got tachos. Then I heard it was that Ruby's
song window sill. I changed course and followed my ears.
(32:50):
Could she still be here? That's not possible, but then
it's New Orleans. I turned the last corner and found
two young women, one singing and playing the ukulele, and
her friend on the saw. Not Ruby. I was proud.
(33:13):
Ruby had only traveled for a year and a half,
but in her two stints in New Orleans, she left
behind this song, a bit of beauty that endured, and
what was true when Ruby was a little girl was
still true here. Joey's left me wanting more. I wanted
to ask the musicians if they knew her, but I
couldn't keep the fire department waiting. Wow Bey. I arrived
(33:40):
at the central fire station to speak with Wayne Regis
and his boss to Vision Chief Albert Thomas, to learn
what they knew about what caused the fire. They showed
me to the back conference room, where Deputy Chief Regis
described investigating the scene, setting up lights around the steaming
hulk of the warehouse, and navigating his way atop the
dripping embers. The floor had already been burned through, there
(34:02):
was no roof, there, wonderwalls, and the only thing that
was really left standing was quote unquote the office area
where most of identified decease people were. Regis is a
careful man who quibbles over the meaning of words and
(34:24):
doesn't agree easily with someone else's assumptions. So I read
the report and it said that the fire had started
from what was like a cooking pit or some kind
of a metal I didn't say that, the news said that. No.
I think that is possible and it is highly likely.
The thing was there were other people who had escaped
the warehouse who Regis wasn't able to interview, so he
(34:44):
never signed off on the cause of the fire. Something
that struck me while talking to these guys was the
very things that made the squad attractive to the travelers
agitated the firefighters. Everything about this lifestyle and care and
endangerous everything about to have buildings that blue utilities. No
one's living there. It's been abandoned since Katrina all before.
(35:08):
The inspectors couldn't be sure what caused the fire. There
were so many other hazards in the warehouse. Maybe someone
forgot to put out the fire before bed. The embers
threw off sparks and the floorboards of the warehouse ignited,
starting the blaze. Or could it have been arson Someone
who didn't like the dirty kids hanging around New Orleans
could have set the fire. Two unknown people ran out
(35:29):
of the warehouse as the fire grew. But in some way,
the cause of the fire didn't matter. It was the
conditions in the warehouse, all the dangers that lurked in
the shadows beyond the swing, the mural on the wall,
and the bonfire. I asked Thomas and Regis if they
could speak to the traveling community about this, what would
they say? There is inherent dangers involved with every aspect
(35:53):
of this lifestyle in a structure you have no legal
right to be there. Make them, you know, really aware
of that. I know they're all connected to someone, They're people.
I asked Regions if he had anything to add. His
starchiness and exactitude faded as he searched for what to say.
(36:14):
Clearly our conversation had taken him back to that dark
morning in the warehouse. At first, he was unable to
look at me as he answered, I mean, I necesarily
have anything to state, but I have questions as as
in other places that you come from so terrible, so
diversion off of what you considered to be utopian life,
(36:35):
that you would rather exist on the Friends of Society
squad and doing stuff like this as opposed to being
in a very company of the people who love you,
care about you, and I want to see you sute.
I understood why, Deputy Chief you just had those questions.
(36:57):
But I knew to the parents of the aid the
why of the fire didn't matter much anymore. As there
any tragedy, The news covers the story for a week,
and then everyone moves on, everyone except the families and
the friends who loved them. Piecing together the lives of
the writers kept me busy long after I was back
home in California. I spent a year tracking down the
(37:19):
families of those who died, as well as their friends.
Photographs too often of them on incredible train rides or
playing music in the streets. If you'd stuck to the headlines,
the deceased were faceless, but they were artists, the musicians,
and people who were loved. As I got to speak
(37:39):
with the families of those who died, I got to
know more about how other parents handled it all. So
I was glad to find Marty Harameo on Facebook. Marty's
daughter was Katie Siminar, aged twenty one, from Nebraska. When
Marty and I spoke, I could hear the brightness in
her love for Katie. Ah. We always had a very
close relationship, very close in fact, right before she took off,
(38:04):
she said, you know what, Mom, you are my best friend,
and I go, thanks, Katie, so are you. Katie was
one of eight kids, but Marty told me her outgoing
personality always stood out. She was one of those people
that if you met her, you never forgot. She just
got right inside your heart. She was just so friendly
(38:24):
and bubbly and fun. I'd seen photos of Katie a
button nosed beauty with a hint of mischief in her eyes,
and like many of her fellow writers, Katie's journey onto
the rails started by surprise. In college, Katie had a
near death experience that changed her entire outlook on life.
I don't know what happened. I don't know. She wos,
(38:45):
maybe had a seizure, maybe she hit her head, but
she has been known to have a seizure from time
to time. Did that caizure change her in any way?
I think on the inside, I don't think she was
very forthcoming in that to me. I think to her
(39:07):
friends she had mentioned, you know, I'm not long for
this world. I'm not going to live till I'm old.
After Katie dropped out of college, she went to work
for an aunt in Alaska, but she didn't stay long.
Then Katie went to live with another aunt in Portland,
where she was first introduced to train hopping. At first,
(39:28):
Katie didn't tell her mom about riding trains, just like Ruby.
She missed her mom enough to call home, but she
didn't want to answer too many questions. Yeah, I'm like
when she would call me, and I could hear the
trains in the background. I mean, obviously they where they
were staying at the warehouse or warehouses, they were right
(39:49):
next to the track, And I'm talking next to the track,
and so I'm like, Katie, I can hear the trains
in the background. What are you on a train? No?
Stop asking questions like that. I don't have time to
answer those kind of questions. But Katie was on the
rails now, and there was nothing Marty could say to
(40:10):
convince her to come home. Just a year after leaving Portland,
in the fall of twenty ten, Katie made her way
to New Orleans. She had been planning to leave with
her new boyfriend, Jeff Gertz and their dogs to Wisconsin,
but ended up staying in New Orleans for six weeks.
On a cold day in late December, Marty got a
call from her daughter, and what mood was she in
(40:31):
when she called, Oh, I'm just calling to say I
hope you guys are still enjoying your holiday. I'll call
back again to This was two days before the squat fire,
when Katie and Jeff were trapped inside. Marty initially heard
about a squat fire in New Orleans on Facebook. She
didn't know at the time exactly where Katie was staying,
(40:52):
but she had a sinking feeling in my heart. I
thought I knowed she was there. I know, well how
I know, but I know she was there, she was
part of this. Well, then I get a call. One
of the hubbos who knew Katie called Marty with the
news and he said it was Katie that you know
(41:14):
Katie and others. And I go, well, how do you
know it was my Katie? And he goes, it was
your Katie. Oh, Marty, that must have hit you so hard. Well,
I think I went in shock. You know, She's like what.
(41:35):
Soon after the fire, Marty was sent Katie's journal, which
was miraculously safe in a nearby abandoned building untouched by
the flames. I got a phone call from this lady
from New Orleans and she said she and her husband
owned abandoned building down there, and after the fire they
went down and she said, they came across these packs,
(41:58):
and she said, along with them was this journal laying there,
and she picked it up. She goes, I wonder if
this belonged any of those kids that were in that fire,
and she opened up the cover and it said if
I'm dead or really hurt, please call my mom, and
it had this phone number. I tried to place myself
(42:24):
in Marty's position, thinking how precious that journal would be,
one of the last things her daughter had touched. From it,
she got a sense of the way Katie saw her life.
Marty read me a passage from Katie's journal about a
squat she shared in Portland. We were on the fifth
floor of a very nice apartment complex, making it easy
(42:45):
to keep our filth and debauchery hidden from the society
and police. The fancy apartments across the way could see
straight in. I wonder what they thought of us. Maybe
some and beat us, some disgusted. I'm not sure. I
know that I felt a little sorry for them. Most
(43:08):
of them must have been so trapped in work and
paying bills. These are the types of people that take
twenty pills a day and ignore their children. I wanted
to tell them it didn't have to be that way,
but who was I to say what they should do.
(43:28):
Maybe they are happy that way. I loved Katie's kindness
and humility and her not wanting to judge. I know
Marty valued that too. She had a passage from Katie's
journal made into a funeral card. This memory of beauty
and adventure was what Marty held on too. She liked
to think of Katie on a rainbow bus with other
(43:49):
young people just like her, off to see the country.
Like Marty said of Katie, a lot of life in
a short time. Like Ruby, Katie was only on the
rail else for a year and a half. By the
time we spoke, Marty had made her peace with Katy's adventure.
She knew her daughter wanted to live life to the
fullest for as long as she had left on this earth.
(44:13):
I spoke to seven of the eight families about the
loss they felt when they found out about the fire.
What I learned about the deceased is more than I
can do justice to in this episode. But I wanted
to honor the lives of those who died. There was
Melissa Martinez seventeen, a resident of New Orleans who was
staying with her boyfriend Jonathan Guerrero twenty on the night
of the fire. Katie Simonar twenty one, and Jeff Gertz
(44:36):
twenty two had planned to leave New Orleans in the
new year. Justin Luttz twenty nine, had just arrived in Nola.
He had a fight with his girlfriend, who ordered him
out of the car in the French Quarter, and he
found his way to the warehouse to crash for the night.
Nicky pack aged twenty three from Pittsburgh and Sammy aged
twenty five from New Orleans had just fallen in love
(44:57):
and had big plans for the warehouse. And there was
Anthony Zeletta twenty three, a Lakota sue from South Dakota.
His mother, Sheila's grief was so deep she couldn't talk
to me, but she wrote eloquently of her loss such
young talent whose lives were cut short, but they were
needed elsewhere. Sheila wrote, my sister believes that Tony began
(45:17):
his journey to save him from a more terrible way
of dying. Truth be told. I think Tony was always
close to the great mysterious and he knew it as
a child. And though Sheila never agreed to speak with me,
she emails from time to time to express how much
she still mourns his passing, also by thinking of it
as fate. Many of his pictures have him with this
(45:40):
mysterious wink, she wrote in one message, as if he
knew something that we didn't. Katie's dad, Scott Siminar, who
refused to speak with me about Katie, wrote to make
sure I knew that Katie was different from the others.
Katie was on an adventure to learn and experience life.
This was simply one of her adventures that went horribly
(46:02):
wrong and she died. She was not a train hopper,
as you state. She was not a homeless person. She
was not a lost soul. She had a family who
loved her, and she loved her family. It wasn't just
Katie's dad. Every other parent I spoke with said that
these were not lost souls. They had families who loved them.
(46:23):
But for many of them, home had become a place
where they couldn't seem to do anything right, couldn't handle
school or work, and couldn't interact smoothly with their families.
Part of the pull of the rails was a chance
to shake off the scows with a blind act of daring.
Even if these kids had homes, they had found a
different sense of home on the rails, a place where
they didn't need to know each other's real names. To them,
(46:46):
safety was something they built together and it might only
last a moment. That part of what they believed. I
did understand. It had been nearly two years since Ruby
split down to join this community on the rails. At time,
i'd plunge into the train yard to try to understand
what drew her into this violent place. After my time
(47:07):
in New Orleans, I now felt like I understood the
life where we had chosen and some of its appeal.
But it was time to stop trying to figure out
who she was and why she left, And I said,
examine what kind of a mother I was. I had
to reckon with the fact that there was something I
had done that helped push her onto the rails. Oh,
(47:27):
wek now done helping help you and I have been
leading Rader. You're a little alive. Actually, I lost the
kid to the rails and wrote them for almost a decade.
We just had, sadly, a very different ending. I look
at the trains every day. I'm like, oh yeah, I
could just hop on that and be out of here.
(47:49):
There's a type of person that's just like there's always
somewhere else to go. That's next episode on City of
the Rails. Save the Moticka seven Omaticka, I touster fourteen,
(48:20):
I s will be drinking gasoline. Damn this mallapou sit
on the beach is just turning the blue came out
with the brand new drug and then sat it to
pull the plug in Loson. Oh look what you've done.
(48:46):
City of the Rails is hosted and written by me
Denil Morton and developed in partnership with iHeartRadio and Flip
Turn Studios. Call us you only have one episode left.
The number is seven oh seven six five three three
three nine. If you'd like to read full profiles of
seven of the eight people who perish in the squat fire,
I've posted them on my website. The link is in
(49:06):
the show notes. Our executive producer and showrunner is Julian Weller,
and our executive producer at Flip Turn is Mark Hiey.
Senior producer Abu Zafar producer She knows Zaki and Zoe Dankla,
Patrisha Mukherjee, Jackie Huntington, and Jessica Krinchich, with production support
from Marci Dupina. Original music every episode by Aaron Kaufman.
(49:27):
Our theme music for this episode is twelve to twenty
eight by Profane Sass. Thank you for helping us tell
this story in so many ways, with your words and
with your music. Thank you to Chris Rose for hosting
me all the way out in the Homachito National Forests.
Thanks to Nikki Etre and beth N Macaluso. From iHeart
and condolences to the parents of the people who died
in the Squat fire and for all the people who
(49:49):
are still mourning this loss. We'll be back next week,
one last time on City of the Rails.
Jessa heads up. This episode discusses death in a tragic fire.
Take care of yourselves, and if you're a new listener,
this is our ninth episode, make sure you start with
episode one. It had been more than a year since
I first started exploring the rails, but finally Ruby was
about to come home. Ruby called and told me she
(00:27):
was approaching San Francisco in the Jesus Metro, that car
that she and her boyfriend were given by a devout
Christian on their way through Washington. Along the way, they'd
picked up a few passengers and another dog. The image
of this vehicle crossing the Golden gate Bridge made me
grin every time it popped into my mind. But there
was no longer a home for Ruby to return to
(00:48):
now that I had downsized for my apartment in Oakland
was living in the barn, and I knew she wouldn't
call me first, but at some point she would. When
she did, Ruby said she already had a place to stay,
a house near the railroad tracks in Oakland, the Woe Mansion.
Her Rimmis were several women who had also gotten off
the rails, at least for a while. A few days later,
(01:10):
we went out to breakfast. She looked great, happy, healthy,
and full of energy to begin her new life. It
was almost unbelievable to be sitting with her at a
cafe near jack London Square, hearing about her plans and
how she needed to get a job, but she wanted
no help. She could do it all herself. But after
(01:30):
she'd been home two months, Ruby still hadn't answered a
single question about her life on the rails. I didn't
know anything more than what I'd been able to piece
together during our sporadic phone calls when she was away. Instead,
Ruby just patiently told me that I'd never understand, and
she didn't want to explain. But every day I wondered
if this was the morning I'd wake up to find
that she'd left again. Honestly, I didn't see much reason
(01:54):
she would stay. She had a soul destroying job that
offered meager wages. Ruby was working as a peachypuff Girl,
a freelance cigarette girl required to dress in a sexy
Halloween costume as she took a tray of cigarettes, candy,
and condoms around the nightclubs of San Francisco, being insulted
in proposition by tech bros. Until the last call if
(02:16):
this was the working world. I didn't see anything holding
her to this side of the tracks. And then late
in December we got the news. It was an unusually
cold night in New Orlands. Squatters were blamed for a
warehouse far that killed eight people. A couldaver dog searches
the remains of an abandoned warehouse. They didn't know how
many people were actually in the build, and were so
(02:36):
badly burned that officials couldn't immediately determine the sexes or
ages of the victims. We'd be called to tell me
about the fire. She knew where the warehouse was and
had met people staying there when she lived for a
while in New Orleans. I could hear from her voice
that Ruby was shaken. Eight of her peers had died,
and when we got off the phone, I shut my
eyes to absorb the news. When Ruby was out on
(02:59):
the rail, I was most afraid she'd die in a
squat fire. I'd had that nightmare too many times to count,
and I thought about the parents of the eight who died.
What were they going through? Instantly I wanted to go
to New Orleans. Well, the news stopped short of any
real specifics I knew better than to dismiss the ape
who died as merely homeless. I knew how they died,
(03:21):
but I didn't know how they had lived, what forces
had pushed them on to the rails, and what had
they left behind. If I could understand that, maybe I'd
be able to answer the questions Ruby hadn't about life
on the rails. But I'd never be allowed into this
world unless I had someone to vouch for me, and
the perfect person for that was Ruby. She'd stayed in
New Orleans twice when she was on the rails. I
(03:44):
called her back, explained that I wanted to report the
story of the squat fire, and offered to pay her
to be my research assistant. She surprised me with an
enthusiastic yes. The stories of the squatters needed to be told,
and this was a chance to be with her grieving community.
So two weeks after the fire, we boarded our flight
to New Orleans. I didn't want to hope for too much,
(04:06):
but then I knew how the rails break your heart,
and they've done it for many in New Orleans. I'm
Denil Morton, and this is City of the Rails. It's
cold combat down a new Orleans cont down a New Orleans.
You gotta keep close cont go on home. We got
(04:32):
said to go off home, cop said to go off home.
Down palaces, doesn't right on to them, falling a fallen
trails and if forgotten the song, did you guys have
(05:02):
a memorial service here? It's kind of been an ongoing thing.
People who stopped by and drop off things. I'm walking
with Ruby and her friend Izzie, deeper and deeper into
New Orleans ravaged Eighth Ward, one of the hardest hit
by Hurricane Katrina. We set up a skate park over
there five years after Katrina. The streets are still redded
(05:23):
in the neighborhood is a ghost town. We make our
way down North Pierre Street, pass boarded up houses next
to a few occupied ones with tidy fenced in front yards.
So yeah, everyone is graving really hard and in their
own ways. You know. He lives across the street from
where the warehouse used to be, and he wants to
show us the memorial to the eight who died there.
(05:44):
Right after the fire, the city bulldozed the wreck of
the warehouse, and Azzie told me he watched as day
by day groups of people came to the site to
pay their respects. We walked toward the handmade cross erected
in the empty field of ashes with flowers, candles, pieces
of jewelry and a bull, burnt, remnants of clothing and books,
and a few stuffed animals. Among the bits and pieces
(06:06):
included in the memorial is he points out cans of
alcohol left as tribute to those who died. That's notable
in this hard drinking community, naturally. Actually, we're surprised there's
so many beers and four locos and things left here
on opened for weeks. You know, it was pretty cool.
I mean, it looks like they're all gone now, but
(06:26):
it's cool. It'll lasted so long, you know. Yeah, yeah,
is he Ruby and I stand around the cross holding
hands to observe a moment of silence for those who
were lost in the fire. The dead, age seventeen to
twenty nine, were from Wisconsin, Texas, California, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Nebraska,
and New Orleans around us. The terrible loss of the
(06:48):
Squat Fire still hung in the cold winter air, but
not everyone was sympathetic to the tragedy, which was the
biggest fire in the city in thirty years. Some called
to tighten the vagrancy and busking laws discourage these people
from staying in New Orleans. Here at the memorial, as
we bowed our heads to the deceased, I was grateful
that my daughter was at my side and I was
(07:09):
holding her hand, although this is a bit burned this stuff.
After the visit to the memorial, I dropped Ruby off
at a friend's apartment in the Ninth Ward and drove
across town to my friend's place in the Upscale Garden District.
My plan with Ruby was we'd meet every day in
the French Quarter and go visit her friends in the
(07:30):
Eighth and ninth Wards. But time down here feels different.
Days in New Orleans didn't really get started until two pm,
a bit off kilter for someone like me who gets
up before sunrise, right around the time Ruby and her
friends were going to bed. So when we met for
breakfast the first time in the French Quarter, Ruby suggested
we have breakfast tachos. Nacho is made from tater tots.
(07:52):
It's two o'clock, I'm eating breakfast and it's tachos. New
Orleans was already flipping me on my head while I
was down here. I wanted to learn more about how
the Traveling Kids fit into the city of New Orleans,
so I looked up Chris Rose, former columnists for the
New Orleans Times Pickieyune. For a time, Chris had been
(08:14):
the face of New Orleans. His columns on the aftermath
of Hurricane Katrina became a best seller called One Dead
in the Attic. But two years ago, Chris left New
Orleans after thirty five years. He was another person who
deliberately detached himself from the city when the conventional world
got to be too much for him. So when I
tracked Chris down, he was living on a campsite in
(08:35):
a national forest in Mississippi. He's arranged a life were
the only two bills he pays are his cell phone
and his car insurance, a life led with very little money,
not unlike the hoboes I was going to ask him about.
And although Chris chose to leave the city behind, he
understood why the Traveling Kids are drawn to New Orleans.
You can still hear the languid pace of life in
(08:56):
his voice. Because it's easy, it's very comfortable place to live. It's,
you know, the most Caribbean, it's the northernmost Caribbean city, right,
and it is. Its pace of life is one that's
very comfortable. You can be ambitious, but you don't have
to be You can chase money, but you don't have
(09:17):
to to live a comfortable and successful life. There vious
rotten rails. I could see it'd be very easy to
stay there because the weather accommodates it, and the community
is large. You know, they've got their own microeconomy going on.
Is very favorable to staying in a city open to
(09:40):
the offbeat, the eccentric, and the unconventional. High season for
the Dirty Kids starts in the fall and October, writers
start heading south to New Orleans from crumbling industrial cities
in the Rest Belt. It's a pretty comfortable place to
spend the winter, and many set up in New Orleans
until spring. Everyone knows the parties start Halloween night. New
(10:00):
Orleans in the wintertime is just like you know, it's
like almost like you're at the Festival of Dirty Kids.
There's literally like hundreds of kids and people who travel
that Scott Michad the basis for Profane Sass, the band
that plays our theme song, Wayfaring Stranger. As it happened,
Scott his girlfriend Becky and the whole band. We're in
(10:22):
New Orleans in the weeks before the Squat fire. Originally
they intended to stay only a few days, but New
Orleans has a way of getting you to forget your intentions.
It's like even walking through the French Quarter or Decatur Street,
twenty minute walk, but you'd run it into other people
you had met, and you'd sit there and you talk
and you'd share. Even just like walking from the squat
(10:43):
down to play music back could be like a seven
hour thing, and we are all just so like follow
the wind and follow the signs and follow the omen
let the universe aside where we're going the day. And
for Scott and his bandmates, it wasn't just the pace
or the conviviality, it was the music. There was just
so many great street performers down there, so you kind
(11:04):
of like join forces with other musicians for a little while,
and sometimes by the end of the night you have
fourteen people all playing these songs that we kind of
all know. Morgan Nuselton, who we met in the episode
(11:25):
about Women on the Rails, had another name for New
Orleans party city, like this dark, mysterious city, like we
are a part of that culture. People that are coming
to visit loved the ship out of us. They loved
like the old tiny folk, like playing their music for musicians.
New Orleans held a special appeal. They felt the love
from some of the city and its visitors. But it
(11:47):
was a different story with the police who tried to
push hoboes to the edge of town. Because when you
go to the French Quarter, you got about three days.
The cops basically say like, we're going to continue to
give you tickets, but if you go to the ninth
four or the eighth ward we walk, that's with you.
So it pushes us over there so that we can
(12:07):
get the hell out of the nice part in town.
So New Orleans could be easy living with hard looks
from some of the locals. While Profane and SaaS was
in town, Scott and Becky experienced the aggression of people
who didn't embrace the dirty kids. I remember specifically this
moment the Profane Sasas was playing on the street and
(12:27):
I was taking care of the dogs, and this man
in his late forties, you know, kind of business dress,
walked by and so like full of anger and hate,
leans down over us and throws down like ten or
twenty dollars, and it's like in our face and says
(12:48):
this is for the dogs so they can eat, not
for you, and walks off. So even in New Orleans
it was hobo's versus society, and resentment from the locals
meant that if you wanted to stay in town and
housed up, you had to find the right neighborhood. So
Ruby and I left the French Quarter and headed back
(13:09):
to the eighth and ninth wards. Here, on the edge
of the city, forty three thousand homes stood abandoned since
the hurricane, a quarter of New Orleans housing stock, which
made the neighborhood a perfect destination for squatters. We betook
me to a squat on the far edge of the
eighth Ward, where her friends Aaron and Momo lived. After
a few days of squat shopping, breaking into ten or
(13:29):
fifteen empty houses, they found the right wine and they
were living in. We didn't do anything to do it
except we sweat, and then I started finding furniture. Aaron
and Momo didn't need much to survive. Mamo pointed to
three dollars sitting on the crate next to her bed. Yeah,
(13:49):
three dollars and chains that I've had for a week
and a half. With just three bucks, anyone could furnish
a life here and just as quickly abandon it. But
in this squat, Aaron and Momo had settled in for
a while, even decorating it on the cheap in a
way that I loved. They'd gone to second hand stories
and bought pairs of sparkly stiletto heels and balanced a
(14:10):
shoe over each doorway in the house. This was a
remarkable turnaround for Momo to find a home in New Orleans.
Last time she was here with her boyfriend. They swear
they'd never return. How Come it was so hard last
time because we were doing two main drugs all the time,
and his dog got hit by a car and almost died,
and I went to jail. Just a lot of stuff
(14:36):
is cursed. We're never going back. But I've been telling
them about everything I've been doing here, and I was like,
I'm not gonna let New Orleans win. You know. We
sat on the floor of Aaron and Momo's squat, me
on a mattress and Ruby in a tilted dining room chair.
I was surprised how comfortable we were in this odd
situation with me peppering them with so many questions, how
did they survive when they got housed up, how did
(14:58):
they structure their days? And what kept them here? I
was asking them everything I'd wanted to know about Ruby,
and Ruby never interrupted, only spoke up when she wanted
to draw a boundary around what I could ask her. Friends.
Questions about specific yards and how to hop a train
were off limits. We talked until the sun went down
at five, but my New Orleans education was only beginning.
(15:24):
Later that night, we all met up again to go
to a birthday party at the Saint Rock Tavern. The
party was for Ugly John, who appeared to have been
on the party bus since the day before. He was
swaying around drunk off his ass with about thirty dollars
and one dollar bills pinned to his shirt front and back,
a New Orleans birthday tradition. Was a little bummed on
(15:46):
his birthday, though, because he just broke in the bar's
toilet and couldn't remember how all he knew was most
of his birthday money would now go to paying off
the bar owner. I was right in the middle of
the rolling party, ordering pictures of beer, which was making
table pretty popular. In return, I was constantly being offered
free drinks, free drugs, and free homemade tattoos. Close to midnight,
(16:08):
the girls wanted to teach me how to twerk. Why,
because we all headed to a club that was hosting
Booty Night. Tworking was practically a part of the cover charge.
When we got there, the club was packed in this
pre pandemic ecstasy. The saxe player left the stage and
(16:32):
walked among the crowd, eyes shut, with people touching his
arms as he played. Everything I do is going to
be funky from now on, And yes there was twerking,
and I'm glad there were no cameras there to record
this moment. It was around two when I pulled myself
(16:54):
away from the club, even though my new friends begged
me to stay. I drove across town through the fog
to my friend's place. When I got there, I drunkenly
fumbled with my keys and opened the apartment door. There
in the doorway to an empty apartment, the intoxication of
Booty Nights suddenly faded and everything from the day started
(17:15):
to hit me. I was thinking about standing by the
memorial holding hands with Izzy and Ruby, about the parents
who'd lost their kids, and the way Momo and Alana lived,
and about ugly John, and the fun I had with
my daughter and her friends. With these highs and lows,
all in one day, I sat on the couch with
a television on Catatonic. I was fully seeing the life
(17:39):
of a traveling kid, not having someone describe it to me.
What was I supposed to make of this town? It
ended up being Chris Rose who characterized it best. Like Momo,
he'd struggled trying to leave the city. Well, that's the thing.
There's a lot of shadows in Nuance. There's this huge
carnival of life there in the presence for everybody to
(18:02):
see and to participate in. But all around them, all
around the bright lights and carnival of the French quarner,
on all sides of it are the shadows, dark streets,
empty buildings, open fields, blocks and blocks of areas that
are unpeopled and unpoliced. And the train yards, of course
(18:29):
are right there. And it's easy to move in those shadows.
If you just float along the sidewalks not bugging anybody,
nobody will notice you. There's a lot of invisible people
in New Orleans Let's put it this way, if you
were wanted by the law, where would you go to
go off the grid? I mean it's been this way
for not decades, but for centuries. In New Orleans, it's
(18:52):
it's where people go to go off the grid. You know,
there's always the joke that the guy passing on the
streets a serial or who knows people just go there
to disappear. They always have. Chris was describing a dark
kind of New Orleans magic. The city had an air
of mystery mixed in with the fog. When they could
(19:14):
envelop you like a cloak. Was the perfect city for
the traveling community. As I tried to sleep, my ears
still ringing with the saxophone music, I knew that tomorrow
I'd need to get down to business. I'd meet up
with Ruby and start figuring out what happened that night
in the warehouse. Ruby would lead me to people who'd
seen the fire. I was starting to get my grounding
(19:47):
in New Orleans. I could see how the warehouse, squat
and its residence fit into the fabric of the city.
I wanted to understand as much as I could about
the warehouse and the day's leading up to the fire,
and for what I gathered, the squat was a special play.
The people who helped me understand why were the members
of Profane SaaS, the band who performs our theme song.
They were among the last people to stay in the warehouse.
(20:11):
For years. The band had traveled from show to show
by hopping trains, so a whole group of them rode
down from Pittsburgh. When they arrived, they heard about the
perfect place to stay, right by the railroad tracks and
within walking distance of the French border. People would sleep
in the field nearby just to be near it. What
made this squat so special? For one thing, it was huge. Kiwi,
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Profane Sasa's banjo player told me there was plenty of
room for the band and their friends. Yeah, it had
these huge doors that we'd all hang out on. It
was like right by the train yard, and they're like, yeah,
this is perfect. Probably thirty by fifty or sixty foot
wood warehouse. There was a big room in the middle,
(20:53):
and it was clear this place was known to the
riding community. Becky told me you only needed to look
at the walls to see if your friends had passed through.
Murals tags everyone would leave their mark, and so it
was almost like just this history of who was here,
A lot of good messages. He got what are you doing?
(21:16):
Profane's has set me a video they took of the
whole setup Ye family right now and it slung over
a roof. Being was a twenty foot swing that swept
slowly across the main room through the open warehouse doores.
You could see the trains in the yard. It was
(21:37):
super fun to swing on that, and while you were swinging,
the big open doors were there so people would be
gathering and talking. Yeah, it was really nice here in
the edge of ten. They partied into the night, playing music,
swinging and dancing. It was a squatter's paradise without any
fear of getting busted. It was definitely one of tho
(21:58):
neighborhoods where people don't call police, you know, so like
we didn't even worry about that. Having seventy or eighty
people out there at the warehouse, you know, we didn't worry.
Everyone has such vivid memories of the warehouse. But it
wasn't an easy place to stay warm. The band had
traveled south in search of warm weather, but ki We
said it was surprisingly cold when they got there, with
(22:20):
the moisture of like how what New Orleans was. The
nights are super cold, so we all had sleeping bags
and stuff, and we'd probably, you know, we all cuddled
together and we had dogs and kept us warm. This
weather made New Orleans a lot less welcoming than past winters.
For Becky, who was on the rails for the first time,
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the cold was unlike anything she'd felt before. Even though
New Orleans pulled so many of us because it definitely
was not as cold as the northern cities. Still, when
you are constantly outside, it's hard for your whole body
to maintain heat. It just feels colder. The draft, the
trains going by. There's no insulation in the room, there's
(23:05):
no insulation in the floor. You felt it in your bones.
This weather made New Orleans a lot less welcoming than
past winters. For Becky, who was on the rails for
the first time, the cold was unlike anything she'd felt before.
It's different when you are living on the street and
the only time you get into a heated space is
when you have enough money to buy a cup of
(23:26):
coffee and go into a coffee shop. You know, because
you cannot take regular showers because you're not cleaning your
clothes regularly. Society doesn't want you in public spaces. So
in the open field next to the warehouse, the band
built huge bonfires every night and felt a deep chill
when they had to return to the warehouse to sleep,
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and just the feeling of the fire and then away
from the fire like that distinct temperature difference is a
real but the cold didn't get profanees asked down. The
band spent over month there hanging out, meeting people, playing music,
and of course they couldn't leave Party City without one
final celebration. So the night before the band was leaving
(24:09):
to go to a gig in Texas, they had a
big send off. Right before we'd left. We had this
huge party because we had been there for you know,
some months or weeks, and so we had this big
party where like sixty or seventy people came. We had
a big old bonfire in the sand. You know. It
was a huge party with lots of travelers gathered around
the bonfire, and almost everyone carried an instrument. So the
(24:32):
whole thing with the traveling community is acoustic instruments, because
you can travel with an acoustic instrument, you can bust
with an acoustic instrument, so they'll be usually like, you know,
acoustic guitar, maybe an acoustic bass, banjo, washed board, fiddle, jugs,
a lot of musical saws, a lot of accordions, spoons, spoon, trump, harmonica.
(24:59):
So probably half of the traveling kids carried instruments kind
of what you do. And it was part of the
community so much, and so at the end of the night,
everybody will do like a big jam session, maybe five
people or fifteen people or twenty people. So everyone was
(25:27):
playing music, dancing around the bonfire. But as the night
went on, temperatures started to drop. Scott told me he
and their lead singer Thomas, notice some people in the
warehouse trying to find a way to bring the fire inside.
I remember somebody's like, yeah, we should bring it in there,
and yeah, I remember both me and Thomas where it's
just like, do not do that. That is a wooden floor,
(25:49):
it'll burn down. And I remember hearing Thomas and Scott
try and advice in the sand pit, this is the
safe place for it to be, you know, and trying
to provide that guidance to the other community members and
friends that that was the safer place to have it,
(26:10):
so no fire came inside while Profane's Ass was staying
at the warehouse, but they left the day after the party.
The band said goodbye to the people they'd gotten close
to in the squat, especially Nikki and Sammy. Nikki had
come south with them from Pittsburgh and fallen in love
with Sammy, who brought them to the warehouse. Profane's ask
promised they'd be back before winter was done, but they
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never saw them again. And when Scott first heard about
the tragedy, he thought back to that conversation about the bonfire.
I remember very vividly thinking about that a lot. That's
where my mind would always take me, like, oh, how
to happen? Like I didn't have a doubt that that's
what happened. A week after Profane's Ass left, the Knights
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were still freezing in New Orleans, so people continued trying
to figure out how to bring the fire inside. That
was the key decision and one I wanted to know
more about. Most of those who died in the warehouse
were experienced travelers. Two in particular, Katie Simmoner and her
boyfriend Jeff Gertz, had a lot of outdoor skills, so
how was this decision made with all the time I'd
(27:16):
spent trying to convince travelers to speak with me. In
New Orleans, things were different With Ruby at my side.
Everyone was talking and she was introducing me to people
who knew more about the fire. One night we went
to a cook out of the squat in the eighth Ward,
where hoboes were jousting on tall bikes, like six to
ten feet tall, made of two bicycle frames welded together.
(27:37):
The knights of the Road squared off on the street
fifty feet apart, circling until someone guild go. Then they
took off toward each other full speed, broom handles blazing,
trying to knock the other guy off. It was brutal.
One guy needed first aid After the battle. The warriors
grabbed chicken legs from the grille and licked their hands
(27:58):
when they were done. But when dinner was served it
was a different story. As a visiting mom, I got
a lot of respect from the travelers. Some one produced
a chair from one of the squats just for me,
and another brought the only plate and actual silverware. All
of these months I'd been trying to get these people
to talk to me, to understand their world, and here
I was in the middle of it all, treated like
(28:19):
a queen. This evening was chaotic. Joy I was having
a great time in these unstructured days, one hundred and
eighty degrees from my regular life, and it was the
first time since Ruby left that I felt truly free.
As dusk settled in, the streets were dark without street lights.
The only light we had came from the porchlights of
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nearby houses. Ruby came over to tell me she'd found
one of the survivors of the fire. This woman had
been living at the warehouse, but she happened to be
out the night of the fire, and she was willing
to talk to me. This woman didn't want to be named,
but she told me she'd lived at the warehouse for
a full month before the fire. The survivor remembered how
the squad he was prepared to bring the fire inside.
(29:03):
It was a giant steel barbecue pet that we upset up,
and we had nailed cargated middle siding underneath it and
a perimeter around it to make sure that he didn't
dry out the boards and then catch on fire. You know,
we took precautions, he said, clear Just how many train
hoppers were in the house that night or exactly when
and how the fire started, but it spread through the
(29:24):
main room fast. Her friend Byron, was passed out on
the main floor and woke up when he saw the
flames crawling up the walls. Meanwhile, the survivor was walking home,
turned the corner and saw the warehouse ablaze. The door
burst open and Byron ran out. He came to and
could barely even find his way out. He couldn't even
get in stall. Yeah, very said he heard a few
(29:46):
people in bang me and trying to get out somewhere,
non responsive. He was pretty hysterical at the time, So
I just, you know, I like ran up and was
like he was in there, and he's in there, and
he was just like everyone you know, standing outside the fire.
They were powerless to help their friends screaming inside the warehouse.
(30:09):
As we stood on the steps of the building, the
survivor showed me her palm. She tried to open the
door to the warehouse to save her friends, but it
was so hot that it burned her hand. As the
survivor told this story, the barbecue was escalating. There was
a wrestling match on the asphalt and I heard some
beer bottles shattering on the sidewalk. Then I heard the sirens.
(30:32):
Someone must have called the cops. Everyone was scattering. I
saw Ruby running toward me, waving her arms. We needed
to go. She grabbed my hand and we sprinted toward
the rental car. Ruby told me to take a left
and I floored it. We zig zagged through the eighth ward,
with Ruby calling out evasive action, laughing and cursing like
girlfriends on a spree. I dropped her off at a
(30:54):
friend's house with a hug, and started on my confused
way home. I was disoriented and ended up driving all
over the city, round and round, trying to make sense
of everything I was learning. The next day, Ruby was
flying back to Oakland. How would I navigate this world
without her? When she left a graduation, I thought she
(31:16):
split because she didn't love me or trust me, But
in New Orleans she showed me I was wrong about that.
It was clear she trusted me when she introduced me
to her friends, and while I was sorry to see
her go, I was sticking around for a few more days.
I wanted to find out more about those who died
and start tracking down their families. A few of whom
(31:36):
were in New Orleans. Plus, I was meeting with the
New Orleans Fire inspectors, the people who'd walked through the
smoking ruins of the warehouse. What could they tell me
about the origins of this tragedy. On a Sunday afternoon
(32:07):
in the French Quarter, I walked down Royal Street past
Jackson Square on my way to New Orleans Fire Department headquarters.
At last, I'd tracked down the man who was first
on the scene investigating the fire, and got him to
agree to an interview. The week before, i'd reported with Ruby,
But this interview I was doing solo. She was back
in Oakland, and I was already missing the comfort of
(32:28):
having her beside me. So the whole walk Ruby was
all I could think about. I imagined her on each
street corner and wished she'd pop out of the place.
We got tachos. Then I heard it was that Ruby's
song window sill. I changed course and followed my ears.
(32:50):
Could she still be here? That's not possible, but then
it's New Orleans. I turned the last corner and found
two young women, one singing and playing the ukulele, and
her friend on the saw. Not Ruby. I was proud.
(33:13):
Ruby had only traveled for a year and a half,
but in her two stints in New Orleans, she left
behind this song, a bit of beauty that endured, and
what was true when Ruby was a little girl was
still true here. Joey's left me wanting more. I wanted
to ask the musicians if they knew her, but I
couldn't keep the fire department waiting. Wow Bey. I arrived
(33:40):
at the central fire station to speak with Wayne Regis
and his boss to Vision Chief Albert Thomas, to learn
what they knew about what caused the fire. They showed
me to the back conference room, where Deputy Chief Regis
described investigating the scene, setting up lights around the steaming
hulk of the warehouse, and navigating his way atop the
dripping embers. The floor had already been burned through, there
(34:02):
was no roof, there, wonderwalls, and the only thing that
was really left standing was quote unquote the office area
where most of identified decease people were. Regis is a
careful man who quibbles over the meaning of words and
(34:24):
doesn't agree easily with someone else's assumptions. So I read
the report and it said that the fire had started
from what was like a cooking pit or some kind
of a metal I didn't say that, the news said that. No.
I think that is possible and it is highly likely.
The thing was there were other people who had escaped
the warehouse who Regis wasn't able to interview, so he
(34:44):
never signed off on the cause of the fire. Something
that struck me while talking to these guys was the
very things that made the squad attractive to the travelers
agitated the firefighters. Everything about this lifestyle and care and
endangerous everything about to have buildings that blue utilities. No
one's living there. It's been abandoned since Katrina all before.
(35:08):
The inspectors couldn't be sure what caused the fire. There
were so many other hazards in the warehouse. Maybe someone
forgot to put out the fire before bed. The embers
threw off sparks and the floorboards of the warehouse ignited,
starting the blaze. Or could it have been arson Someone
who didn't like the dirty kids hanging around New Orleans
could have set the fire. Two unknown people ran out
(35:29):
of the warehouse as the fire grew. But in some way,
the cause of the fire didn't matter. It was the
conditions in the warehouse, all the dangers that lurked in
the shadows beyond the swing, the mural on the wall,
and the bonfire. I asked Thomas and Regis if they
could speak to the traveling community about this, what would
they say? There is inherent dangers involved with every aspect
(35:53):
of this lifestyle in a structure you have no legal
right to be there. Make them, you know, really aware
of that. I know they're all connected to someone, They're people.
I asked Regions if he had anything to add. His
starchiness and exactitude faded as he searched for what to say.
(36:14):
Clearly our conversation had taken him back to that dark
morning in the warehouse. At first, he was unable to
look at me as he answered, I mean, I necesarily
have anything to state, but I have questions as as
in other places that you come from so terrible, so
diversion off of what you considered to be utopian life,
(36:35):
that you would rather exist on the Friends of Society
squad and doing stuff like this as opposed to being
in a very company of the people who love you,
care about you, and I want to see you sute.
I understood why, Deputy Chief you just had those questions.
(36:57):
But I knew to the parents of the aid the
why of the fire didn't matter much anymore. As there
any tragedy, The news covers the story for a week,
and then everyone moves on, everyone except the families and
the friends who loved them. Piecing together the lives of
the writers kept me busy long after I was back
home in California. I spent a year tracking down the
(37:19):
families of those who died, as well as their friends.
Photographs too often of them on incredible train rides or
playing music in the streets. If you'd stuck to the headlines,
the deceased were faceless, but they were artists, the musicians,
and people who were loved. As I got to speak
(37:39):
with the families of those who died, I got to
know more about how other parents handled it all. So
I was glad to find Marty Harameo on Facebook. Marty's
daughter was Katie Siminar, aged twenty one, from Nebraska. When
Marty and I spoke, I could hear the brightness in
her love for Katie. Ah. We always had a very
close relationship, very close in fact, right before she took off,
(38:04):
she said, you know what, Mom, you are my best friend,
and I go, thanks, Katie, so are you. Katie was
one of eight kids, but Marty told me her outgoing
personality always stood out. She was one of those people
that if you met her, you never forgot. She just
got right inside your heart. She was just so friendly
(38:24):
and bubbly and fun. I'd seen photos of Katie a
button nosed beauty with a hint of mischief in her eyes,
and like many of her fellow writers, Katie's journey onto
the rails started by surprise. In college, Katie had a
near death experience that changed her entire outlook on life.
I don't know what happened. I don't know. She wos,
(38:45):
maybe had a seizure, maybe she hit her head, but
she has been known to have a seizure from time
to time. Did that caizure change her in any way?
I think on the inside, I don't think she was
very forthcoming in that to me. I think to her
(39:07):
friends she had mentioned, you know, I'm not long for
this world. I'm not going to live till I'm old.
After Katie dropped out of college, she went to work
for an aunt in Alaska, but she didn't stay long.
Then Katie went to live with another aunt in Portland,
where she was first introduced to train hopping. At first,
(39:28):
Katie didn't tell her mom about riding trains, just like Ruby.
She missed her mom enough to call home, but she
didn't want to answer too many questions. Yeah, I'm like
when she would call me, and I could hear the
trains in the background. I mean, obviously they where they
were staying at the warehouse or warehouses, they were right
(39:49):
next to the track, And I'm talking next to the track,
and so I'm like, Katie, I can hear the trains
in the background. What are you on a train? No?
Stop asking questions like that. I don't have time to
answer those kind of questions. But Katie was on the
rails now, and there was nothing Marty could say to
(40:10):
convince her to come home. Just a year after leaving Portland,
in the fall of twenty ten, Katie made her way
to New Orleans. She had been planning to leave with
her new boyfriend, Jeff Gertz and their dogs to Wisconsin,
but ended up staying in New Orleans for six weeks.
On a cold day in late December, Marty got a
call from her daughter, and what mood was she in
(40:31):
when she called, Oh, I'm just calling to say I
hope you guys are still enjoying your holiday. I'll call
back again to This was two days before the squat fire,
when Katie and Jeff were trapped inside. Marty initially heard
about a squat fire in New Orleans on Facebook. She
didn't know at the time exactly where Katie was staying,
(40:52):
but she had a sinking feeling in my heart. I
thought I knowed she was there. I know, well how
I know, but I know she was there, she was
part of this. Well, then I get a call. One
of the hubbos who knew Katie called Marty with the
news and he said it was Katie that you know
(41:14):
Katie and others. And I go, well, how do you
know it was my Katie? And he goes, it was
your Katie. Oh, Marty, that must have hit you so hard. Well,
I think I went in shock. You know, She's like what.
(41:35):
Soon after the fire, Marty was sent Katie's journal, which
was miraculously safe in a nearby abandoned building untouched by
the flames. I got a phone call from this lady
from New Orleans and she said she and her husband
owned abandoned building down there, and after the fire they
went down and she said, they came across these packs,
(41:58):
and she said, along with them was this journal laying there,
and she picked it up. She goes, I wonder if
this belonged any of those kids that were in that fire,
and she opened up the cover and it said if
I'm dead or really hurt, please call my mom, and
it had this phone number. I tried to place myself
(42:24):
in Marty's position, thinking how precious that journal would be,
one of the last things her daughter had touched. From it,
she got a sense of the way Katie saw her life.
Marty read me a passage from Katie's journal about a
squat she shared in Portland. We were on the fifth
floor of a very nice apartment complex, making it easy
(42:45):
to keep our filth and debauchery hidden from the society
and police. The fancy apartments across the way could see
straight in. I wonder what they thought of us. Maybe
some and beat us, some disgusted. I'm not sure. I
know that I felt a little sorry for them. Most
(43:08):
of them must have been so trapped in work and
paying bills. These are the types of people that take
twenty pills a day and ignore their children. I wanted
to tell them it didn't have to be that way,
but who was I to say what they should do.
(43:28):
Maybe they are happy that way. I loved Katie's kindness
and humility and her not wanting to judge. I know
Marty valued that too. She had a passage from Katie's
journal made into a funeral card. This memory of beauty
and adventure was what Marty held on too. She liked
to think of Katie on a rainbow bus with other
(43:49):
young people just like her, off to see the country.
Like Marty said of Katie, a lot of life in
a short time. Like Ruby, Katie was only on the
rail else for a year and a half. By the
time we spoke, Marty had made her peace with Katy's adventure.
She knew her daughter wanted to live life to the
fullest for as long as she had left on this earth.
(44:13):
I spoke to seven of the eight families about the
loss they felt when they found out about the fire.
What I learned about the deceased is more than I
can do justice to in this episode. But I wanted
to honor the lives of those who died. There was
Melissa Martinez seventeen, a resident of New Orleans who was
staying with her boyfriend Jonathan Guerrero twenty on the night
of the fire. Katie Simonar twenty one, and Jeff Gertz
(44:36):
twenty two had planned to leave New Orleans in the
new year. Justin Luttz twenty nine, had just arrived in Nola.
He had a fight with his girlfriend, who ordered him
out of the car in the French Quarter, and he
found his way to the warehouse to crash for the night.
Nicky pack aged twenty three from Pittsburgh and Sammy aged
twenty five from New Orleans had just fallen in love
(44:57):
and had big plans for the warehouse. And there was
Anthony Zeletta twenty three, a Lakota sue from South Dakota.
His mother, Sheila's grief was so deep she couldn't talk
to me, but she wrote eloquently of her loss such
young talent whose lives were cut short, but they were
needed elsewhere. Sheila wrote, my sister believes that Tony began
(45:17):
his journey to save him from a more terrible way
of dying. Truth be told. I think Tony was always
close to the great mysterious and he knew it as
a child. And though Sheila never agreed to speak with me,
she emails from time to time to express how much
she still mourns his passing, also by thinking of it
as fate. Many of his pictures have him with this
(45:40):
mysterious wink, she wrote in one message, as if he
knew something that we didn't. Katie's dad, Scott Siminar, who
refused to speak with me about Katie, wrote to make
sure I knew that Katie was different from the others.
Katie was on an adventure to learn and experience life.
This was simply one of her adventures that went horribly
(46:02):
wrong and she died. She was not a train hopper,
as you state. She was not a homeless person. She
was not a lost soul. She had a family who
loved her, and she loved her family. It wasn't just
Katie's dad. Every other parent I spoke with said that
these were not lost souls. They had families who loved them.
(46:23):
But for many of them, home had become a place
where they couldn't seem to do anything right, couldn't handle
school or work, and couldn't interact smoothly with their families.
Part of the pull of the rails was a chance
to shake off the scows with a blind act of daring.
Even if these kids had homes, they had found a
different sense of home on the rails, a place where
they didn't need to know each other's real names. To them,
(46:46):
safety was something they built together and it might only
last a moment. That part of what they believed. I
did understand. It had been nearly two years since Ruby
split down to join this community on the rails. At time,
i'd plunge into the train yard to try to understand
what drew her into this violent place. After my time
(47:07):
in New Orleans, I now felt like I understood the
life where we had chosen and some of its appeal.
But it was time to stop trying to figure out
who she was and why she left, And I said,
examine what kind of a mother I was. I had
to reckon with the fact that there was something I
had done that helped push her onto the rails. Oh,
(47:27):
wek now done helping help you and I have been
leading Rader. You're a little alive. Actually, I lost the
kid to the rails and wrote them for almost a decade.
We just had, sadly, a very different ending. I look
at the trains every day. I'm like, oh yeah, I
could just hop on that and be out of here.
(47:49):
There's a type of person that's just like there's always
somewhere else to go. That's next episode on City of
the Rails. Save the Moticka seven Omaticka, I touster fourteen,
(48:20):
I s will be drinking gasoline. Damn this mallapou sit
on the beach is just turning the blue came out
with the brand new drug and then sat it to
pull the plug in Loson. Oh look what you've done.
(48:46):
City of the Rails is hosted and written by me
Denil Morton and developed in partnership with iHeartRadio and Flip
Turn Studios. Call us you only have one episode left.
The number is seven oh seven six five three three
three nine. If you'd like to read full profiles of
seven of the eight people who perish in the squat fire,
I've posted them on my website. The link is in
(49:06):
the show notes. Our executive producer and showrunner is Julian Weller,
and our executive producer at Flip Turn is Mark Hiey.
Senior producer Abu Zafar producer She knows Zaki and Zoe Dankla,
Patrisha Mukherjee, Jackie Huntington, and Jessica Krinchich, with production support
from Marci Dupina. Original music every episode by Aaron Kaufman.
(49:27):
Our theme music for this episode is twelve to twenty
eight by Profane Sass. Thank you for helping us tell
this story in so many ways, with your words and
with your music. Thank you to Chris Rose for hosting
me all the way out in the Homachito National Forests.
Thanks to Nikki Etre and beth N Macaluso. From iHeart
and condolences to the parents of the people who died
in the Squat fire and for all the people who
(49:49):
are still mourning this loss. We'll be back next week,
one last time on City of the Rails.
Host
Danelle Morton
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