I first read Denis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams outside, leaning against a tree. It was 2019, and my Forest Service trail crew was camped out in a quiet corner of Washington’s Alpine Lakes Wilderness, clearing the Jack Creek trail through a two-year-old burn. In the evenings, after I’d rinsed the grime off in a shallow creek, I savored Johnson’s descriptions of the rough and lonely life of his protagonist, Robert Grainier, a logging-crew laborer in Washington’s forests a hundred years ago.
Like Grainier, I, too, “relished the work, the straining, the heady exhaustion, the deep rest at the end of the day.” To clear trails in federally designated wilderness areas where the Forest Service prohibits the use of motorized equipment, my crew relied on many of the same tools the old-time loggers used: two-person crosscut saws, axes, pulaskis. In those days, there was not much I missed about the world beyond the woods. I embraced “the feeling of being lost and far away … cut off from anything else that might trouble (me).”
That was my seventh season of trail work, before the job began to take a heavier mental and physical toll, when I was still more enchanted than worn down. The summer I read Train Dreams I turned 30 and started attending grad school in the winters. The next year, the pandemic happened. Something shifted — in me or the world or both — and I started to see my work in an ever-widening context, one that made everything feel less simple. At the beginning of 2025, thanks to DOGE, my Forest Service career ended for good.
Lines and images from Train Dreams have remained lodged in my mind ever since I read it on Jack Creek and I was eager to see how director Clint Bentley would translate Johnson’s early-20th-century rural Northwest to the screen.
The Netflix version of Train Dreams is gorgeously dreamlike, but not as surreal or strange as the book. It takes liberties with some minor plot points, smoothing over the characters’ moral complexities. In the book, for example, Grainier helps drag a Chinese laborer to the top of a railroad trestle to be thrown to his death; in the film, he is merely a bystander, even calling out weakly in the man’s defense. While a major theme of the book is Grainier’s quest for personal redemption, in the film it’s the collective sins of society — the larger industrializing world of which Grainier is a part — that follow him like a curse.
These tweaks fundamentally shift the spirit of Train Dreams in ways that may disappoint fans of Johnson’s book. But where the novella’s supernatural elements make it feel almost like folklore, the film’s relative realism gives Johnson’s story a different kind of power, equally moving in both its bleakness and beauty.
Bentley dwells on the exploitation of land and human labor and its ripple effects. It’s an approach that feels particularly apt for this collective moment, with our public lands under threat and landscapes newly vulnerable to extraction, while the people who devoted their lives to working those lands are driven out or fired, considered expendable. Meanwhile, wildfires — Train Dream’s central event — have become an increasingly familiar reality.
Watching the film felt less like viewing historical fiction than like seeing my own present-day anguish reflected back at me. The strained conversations with my partner about how to balance such poorly paid, all-consuming work with our desire for stability; the addictiveness of the work’s “heady exhaustion,” even as it wore our bodies down; the search for meaning in a world that moves too fast. The tensions inherent in seasonal outdoor labor have changed little in a hundred years, and recognizing this left me with an existential ache.
Train Dreams was shot in Washington, and the film is drenched in beautiful visuals — verdant tableaus of logging crews sprawled among massive moss-covered stumps, shaded by the lichen-draped limbs of the trees they’re there to fell — that emphasize the reverence its central characters feel for the nonhuman world, even as they’re irrevocably changing it.
“In the forest every least thing is important. It’s all threaded together so you can’t tell where one thing ends and another begins.”
Two characters in the film utter lines, not found in the book, that echo one of John Muir’s most famous sayings: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” William H. Macy, perfectly cast as an eccentric aging logger named Arn Peeples, pontificates, “This world is intricately stitched together, boys. Every thread we pull we know not how it effects the design of things.” And, later, a widow named Claire Thompson (no relation), who, in the film, has taken a job as a fire lookout for “the newly created U.S. Forest Service,” picks up the metaphor: “In the forest every least thing is important. It’s all threaded together so you can’t tell where one thing ends and another begins.”
Train Dreams depicts with brutal clarity how so much of the work that undergirds cultural ideals of the West renders human labor invisible and replaceable, considering the nonhuman just a “resource.”
The years I spent clearing trails gave me an up-close view of the threaded-together forest, and how I was connected to it. I clung to the idea that by maintaining trails, I helped facilitate access for the public to that same sense of connection — no small thing in this anxiety-ridden, digitally dependent world. Losing that sense of purpose has been hard, but what’s harder is living under systems of power that try to deny the interdependence of every life, human and non, alike.
Train Dreams depicts with brutal clarity how so much of the work that undergirds cultural ideals of the West — from logging and wildland firefighting to trail work and farming — renders human labor invisible and replaceable, considering the nonhuman just a “resource.” The film offers no easy answers to our, or Grainier’s, search for salvation from this culture of disregard. But in circling around the theme of connection, it suggests that there is redemption in reciprocity — that our fundamental interdependence gives us both a reason and the power to fight back.
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