[24 July, 2024]

His eyes seem weary and concerned, but when James looks at his sons, I see a small sparkle. After years of fleeing the grief over losing his mother, Robin, James decided one night that his lonely existence had to come to an end. “I’d become a workaholic and didn’t want to live out of a suitcase anymore. I decided to come home, take a giant pay cut and start a family.”

“Look what I got!” Austyn, his eldest, yells. He shows me his homemade scoop net—a plastic water bottle cut in half, with a string tied through one end. The rain has created a stream along the railroad tracks. “I’m trying to catch fish,” he says. Meanwhile Austyn’s little brother, Ryder, fires colorful staples everywhere with his stapler, which he calls “a fun little toy.”

Night falls, and the hardness of the day becomes a soft blanket that embraces us gently. A train approaches. The train driver honks his horn loudly and waves at the boys with a big smile. For minutes, dozens of carriages pass by. The squeaking, crunching steel is in stark contrast to the still-young, small bodies of the boys. Ryder aims his little stapler at the train, glancing past an imaginary barrel, and fires. He knows his feet are not allowed past the stop line, but his whole body leans just a bit further. Austyn is unfazed by the rumbling train, focusing instead on his fishies. When the seemingly endless train has finally passed, it leaves me with a lump in my throat.

Their temporary home—something in between an apartment and a barn—is directly adjacent to the railroad tracks.“We are allowed to live here temporarily because of a friend, the owner of the [neighboring] recycling center. This way we can save some money,” James says. “Hopefully, we can eventually find a nice, and more permanent, place to live.”

That same night, when the boys’ mother, Tiffany, comes home, they run up to her enthusiastically and take Tanner, their youngest brother, out of the car. I get to join in on the chaos of the big family, full of little men, for a very short time. Ryder pushes an old, trembling, nearly bald hamster into my hands, while Austyn drags his little brother around the house upside down. “You are making me nervous,” Tiffany cries out, but her voice is barely audible as yet another passing train shakes the house.

When little Tanner gets his bottle and begins to calm down, I decide to leave them alone. Their time together is precious, as Tiffany takes James, who now works as a welder, to his workplace every night at 3:30 AM.

She then drives back and spends the day with their children. At his previous job, James sometimes had to work all night, and Tiffany didn’t feel safe at home by herself and the kids. “So we’d all sleep in the car until Dad got off work,” she says. James looks at the kids and laughs: “This bunch of rats keep me happy.”