Riding The Rails

Last night we watched an wonderful documentary on DVD: Riding The Rails: Teenagers On The Move During the Great Depression.
In its extraordinarily tender account of the lives of teenage freight-train riders, Riding the Rails offers a visionary perspective on the presumed romanticism of the road and cautionary legacy of the Great Depression. From “middle class gentility to scrabble-ass poor,” the undiscriminating Great Depression forced 4,000,000 Americans away from their homes and onto the tracks in search of food and lodging. Of this number, a disturbing 250,000 of the transients were children. Through painstaking research and with tremendous sensitivity, the filmmakers relay the experiences and painful recollections of these now-elderly survivors of the rails. After sifting through three thousand letters in response to their call for memoirs from the former teenagers, Michael Uys and Lexy Lovell have compiled a deserving tribute to the memories and experiences of their unforgettable subjects.
We meet the actual teenagers then and now and hear their stories in their own words.
I was struck by some of the similarities between these times and those of the Great Depression. But (thank goodness) I was more struck by the differences. In many, many ways we are in far better shape today than we were then. Still, I'm not sure people care for one another or feel the same sense of camaraderie today that they did then. We seem to have lost something deep inside us; we're more cynical, less trusting, more suspicious, hardened.
Riding The Rails presents a portrait of growth, struggle, heartbreak, loss and maturity. It also illuminates that wanderlust that lurks somewhere in nearly all of us.
This is a rare, sensitive, informative. deeply moving documentary.
Get your hands on it ASAP!