Lane, Tim

Tim Lane about those "Spirit" pages:
“This collection depicts my first experience freight train hopping, and are from the story SPIRIT in ABANDONED CARS. They are my favorite pages in the book, mainly because they represent a past experience that changed my life. Since I drew them a decade after the initial experience, they required a great deal of research to depict accurately, since the details of the locations were no longer fresh in my mind. To make sure that those details were accurate, I traveled back to all the relevant locations in an attempt to insure the authenticity of the story. To my great relief, things hadn’t changed much since 1995, and it turned out that geography and architecture proved that my memory was in pretty good working order – my recollections hadn’t become embellished too much over time.
This is the only story in ABANDONED CARS that is completely autobiographical, a form with which I don’t feel very comfortable, and for that reason SPIRIT is atypical. But I think it serves an important purpose in the greater context of ABANDONED CARS because it places me among the cast of characters portrayed in the other short story selections.
This picture [see pt.1, pg.8, additional image] was taken in 1995, around the same time SPIRIT took place. Here I was in the Mission in San Francisco on Florida Street. At the time, I had been casing the West Oakland Yards (jumped only once but the train aborted to a sidetrack, where I spent a very cold night sleeping on the floor of a metal boxcar). Around this time I gave up freight hopping after reading and article in the San Francisco Chronicle about Robert Silveria, Jr, the hobo serial killer, who had recently been caught in the Bay area. He’d killed something like fourteen people along the rails, and murdered their dogs, if they had them, as well. One bad dude, no question.”