A couple of weeks ago I recorded a documentary on PBS called something like Attack of the Strobe Hobo. It's about a 30 or so jobless young man who's living in his father's basement and decides to go coast to coast by jumping on freight trains.

He's a character and has some interesting things to say. A lot of the film is scenery as seen from freight trains, and the part of it that I saw started in what he referred to as 'Minne-crapolis' and I enjoyed seeing parts of the west that I am familiar with, including the Columbia River valley and Wyoming.

We all know riding on freight trains is illegal, and dodging the railroad bulls was a big part of the adventure. The timing was a little off for this area because a couple of days before it aired some college students tried to jump a train and the young lady fell under it and her legs were amputated instantly, one just above the knee, the other just below.

She didn't die because people waiting for the train jumped out of their cars and applied pressure to her legs to prevent her from bleeding to death before the ambulance could get there. One of them was a lab technician at the local hospital who had worked as an EMT. You should have heard her on the 9-1-1 tapes: very calm, very competent.

Something we all learned from it was tourniquets were not to be used in that type of accident, just apply firm pressure to control the bleeding.