Train Dreams

Robert Grainier arrives in the Bonners Ferry area as an orphaned child after traveling on the Great Northern Railway. He drops out of school and spends his youth without direction or purpose. This early start threads a solitary, drifting path through his life.

He meets Gladys Olding and they marry, beginning a life together. They build a log cabin along the Moyie River and soon welcome a daughter named Kate. This family becomes Robert's anchor amid his later years of work and wandering.

Robert takes to railroad construction for the Spokane International Railway. He witnesses a Chinese worker being thrown off a bridge by white workers, an act whose motive remains unclear. He is haunted by visions of the man and dreams of him being struck by a train.

Robert shifts to seasonal logging, taking him away from Gladys and Kate for long stretches. He meets many men who leave impressions on him, but the work brings its own tragedies. The isolation plants seeds for the episodes that haunt him later.

In the camps a worker is killed by a vigilante avenging his brother's murder, and several others die when a tree collapses. Their graves are marked by a pair of boots nailed to a tree, a stark symbol of the dangers around him. The losses deepen Robert's sense of life’s fragility.

Robert grows close to fellow logger Arn Peeples, who is killed by a falling branch. The accident underscores the ever-present peril of the work and the price paid by his companions. The event becomes another haunting memory in his lifetime.

Seeking stability after World War I, Robert and Gladys decide to farm and build a lumber mill so he can quit logging. The plan marks a shift toward domestic life and a potential return to the land. Yet the dream is disrupted by disaster and loss.

When Robert returns from his final logging season, he discovers their cabin burned by wildfire and that Gladys and Kate are missing. The loss shatters his world and leaves him desolate. With the help of a friend, Ignatius Jack, he begins to rebuild what remains.

Despondent Robert is consoled by his friend Ignatius Jack and begins rebuilding the cabin. He resumes living in the cabin and keeps faith that his family might someday return. This period marks tentative resilience after catastrophe.

Robert goes back to logging but feels out of place among younger, rougher men and advancing technology. The changes of the industry push him toward leaving the trade for good. He starts to seek quieter work away from the forest.

He takes a job as a carriage driver for townspeople and meets Claire Thompson of the United States Forest Service, who is in town to conduct a survey. She offers encouragement and a new perspective on his life. Their encounter provides a spark of purpose in his aging years.

Robert continues walking through the woods, feeling the presence of his wife and daughter. He believes the spirits visit him, and he hopes he is not driving them away. The boundary between memory and reality blurs as years pass.

As decades pass, the world changes and Robert rides the Great Northern into Spokane. He watches John Glenn's flight into space on a television, a moment that connects his lifetime to a new era. The scene emphasizes the scale of time and memory in his life.

On a spring day he decides to fly in a biplane, and memories of his life pass through his mind as the plane loops. The narrator reveals that he dies in his sleep in November 1968, leaving no heirs. Yet in that spring moment, he feels finally connected to it all.