> In 2006, Santore enrolled in a few classes at a community college in San Francisco. He left shortly after. On a whim that same year, he was hired on by the Union Pacific railroad, working as a brakeman, and later, an engineer. For the next 13 years, Santore studied the geology of railroad cuts as the trains traveled through them and stocked his railroad bag with botany research papers from the website Sci-Hub.
