Canada - Those old tunnels were built to move freight, not women. An undergrad with a backpack did not belong in there, snaking through 15 claustrophobic kilometres and years of grime on a railway car under a high mountain pass in British Columbia's Selkirk range.
 
No one would have found our bodies for months if the tracks suddenly weakened. I didn't think about that. I had just spent five days riding the rails nearly 4,000 kilometres across Canada. I hadn't told my parents where I was going or how I would get there.
 
I breathed through a bandana, braced against the roar of steel on steel and the black airlessness of the tunnel. For 20 minutes there was no escape, although I don't remember being afraid. I had just turned 23.
 
My boyfriend at the time and I climbed into an empty intermodal shipping container in a CN yard near Sudbury in August, 2007. I wrote in a notebook:  "A very serious way to see Canada. Misty foggy morning made everything seem ancient and significant. Trees, calm water and no cars or people for miles and miles. Nowhere."
 
Freight trains move slowly in built-up areas. On long stretches, the hulking monsters make time, a hundred cars hurtling up to 90 kilometres per hour. I described the sound as we whipped along:  "screeches, shrieks, rumbling, thunder, whistling, rushing. Too bad it's not music to sleep to."
 
Train hopping is done all over the world. It's romantic but illegal, filthy and extremely dangerous. There is a lot of waiting and praying. Forty-four people died last year in "trespasser" accidents. Rail companies have a zero-tolerance policy for that reason. Fines can reach up to $10,000.
 
I paid $120 and got a stern warning. I was caught and unceremoniously dumped by the side of Highway 101 by police outside Foleyet, Ontario. I was forced to hitch a ride with a manic woodsman to a train yard near Lake Superior, and later spent the coldest night of my life rolling across Manitoba, shivering in a sleeping bag just inches above the tracks as 100 tonnes of cargo and metal clanged around me.
 
I crouched under a tarp not breathing while "bulls", railway police, prowled around with flashlights looking for riders, walkie talkies crackling. I hallucinated about water for 10 hours in a sweltering car stopped outside a grain elevator near Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. At dusk, we made a run for it.
 
I also rode clear through the Canadian Shield, flying past thousands of lakes on a sort of railroad balcony, ziplined across wheat fields unobstructed by Trans-Canada traffic, and celebrated with whisky after passing through the Winnipeg yard undetected. On the other side of the Mount Macdonald tunnel, the Columbia River glowed a deep, glacial blue.
 
Many have asked me how to do it and my advice is usually the same:  don't. Unless you have a summer vacation, some trail mix, a trackside guide, a guy with years of experience, and a lot of youthful recklessness.
 
For me, those things are gone now. Most of the photos have disappeared and I forgot about the notebook. But after reading "I was never so relieved to be lost, mapless, dehydrated, and totally FREE," I'm relieved that 23-year-old is still around someplace, even if I'm in Toronto while she is out in the middle of nowhere.

Zoe McKnight.

Editor's Note:  Just the sort of romantic story that could encourage other young idiots to try this. Get a job.