1. "The Canadian"
I took a cab to Union, and the driver was thunderstruck to learn that you can take a train to Vancouver. When we got to the station, he shook my hand like I was going to war.The trip covers 4466km in 83 hours. This is an average speed of 54 km/hr - faster than some horses. I have a 'cabin for one', which is like exposure therapy for claustrophobes: A cubicle 6'5" long and something under 4' wide. It has a Murphy bed that clips into a little fastener when down, to prevent it from snapping you up like a crocodile and pinning you hilariously against the back wall.
An attendant drops by to show me the toy mallet I'll be using to smash my way out of the train in an emergency. She also picks me to learn how to operate the other emergency exits. There's a switch to flip open the door, something to stomp on to lower the steps, and something else, something important, which I hope will be obvious if the time comes. We pull out through the rail-yards, surrounded on all sides by new condos of green glass and polished metal. It's a rat's-eye view of an Ikea model kitchen. We pass a pickup hockey game and long stretches of townhouses. I stay up for a while to see what's immediately North of the city, but that turns out to be Vaughan, and I go to bed.
Other passengers are retirees, with a few European tourists, an Australian couple on their honeymoon, a vet going home to Saskatoon with her mastiff (who doesn't fly well), a greenhouse worker from Brandon going to visit family in Edmonton, four chronically hung-over varsity jocks en route to Whistler, and, after Jasper, an elderly English tour group. I know all this because the train operates a system of fixed seatings for lunch and dinner, and they slot you in wherever there's room; so you have the choice of making small talk or eating in an awkward silence (I tried both). Actually, I don't think it's as simple as that. They seem to try to group people who might have something in common. It's sometimes interesting to try to guess what affinities they think there might be. At my tables, it usually just seems to be that we're all under 70, or, after Jasper, 80.
The eating system doesn't fit very well with my plans. I had the idea that I'd just dart out, grab something, and retreat to my compartment. I'd describe my dining style as "moray eel". But Via wants meals to be occasions. The up-side to this is that they're surprisingly good. High-quality and nicely-plated meals served up in a pally way by guys whose duties also include ticket-checking and light maintenance.
There's a disappointing lack of intrigue on this train. No one is stabbed with an oriental dagger during a blackout; no one vanishes; no one wants to swap murders. In the dome car, people knit, read Kindles, crack weak jokes, and talk about taking pictures like they're planning a military campaign: "If you're positioned here, you might get a few snaps when the freight train comes through."
2. Toronto to Sioux Lookout
The first morning, the bleary woman I've been seated with for breakfast asks where we are. Well, the waiter says brightly, we're a couple of hours North of Capreol. You could have just said 'middle of nowhere', she mutters.Outside, it's mostly forest and bog, with the odd narrow lake gouged by a retreating glacier. There are stretches of oddly identical trees. What apparently happens is that fire, or some other disaster, periodically wipes out patches of forest, and the next generation of saplings sprout together, producing stands of trees that are all the same height and age. This is nature's way of preventing the boreal forest from having any sort of variety or interest.
There are stretches of muskeg, part of the network of frozen bogs that stretches from here to Hudson Bay: Flat areas where bulrushes poke through the snow amid a sparse bonsai forest of stunted pines. Muskeg is one of the hundred or so outstandingly good reasons that most of Ontario is uninhabited. If you want to build something here and not have it sink into the bog, you need to first scrape out the bog. If you want to build a road and have things that cross it not sink into the bog, you need to lay logs on top of the bog, dump other material on top of the logs, then build a road on top of that (a "corduroy road") and hope for the best. On the other hand, if you have things you do want to sink into a bog, northern Ontario should be the centre of your world.
Earlier generations found the muskeg frustrating. Ours celebrates it as a wild and natural space, and as an ideal habitat for a rich and diverse ecosystem of green and slimy organisms. Ontario is no longer cursed with bogs; it's rich in them. They're also a resource for the future, in the sense that the material lying undecayed in this sprawl of cold and anoxic swamps may, in a few million years, form coal deposits for strange, post-human civilizations to turn into electric power and smog.
In Foleyet, because we're making good time, the train makes an unscheduled 5 minute stop to give us a treat. They open one set of doors; getting to them means passing through the economy section, which is up at the front, in the train's crumple zone.
It's ugly in economy. There's a grubby snack car where two kids, one about 8, one a sinister, pimply youth of 15, glower silently at each other. In the next car, people who look half-crazed with fatigue are sprawled uncomfortably across the seats. A family huddles around a laptop that's blaring a Disney movie. My tiny 'cabin' is good practice for the sort of condo I can afford in Toronto, but here I feel uncomfortably like a duke walking through the slums of 19th century London. The economy car would be ripe for revolution, if everyone wasn't so tired.
If you buy an economy ticket during a sale, you can travel to Vancouver by train for about $200. But you can also throw yourself in front of it for free. Via's web site markets these tickets by burbling cretinously at you about the fabulous adventure you're going to have and showing you pictures of tourists grinning out of windows. If there were truth in advertising, it would show at least one of them dead of deep-vein thrombosis, and the survivors feasting on the corpse. Maybe 'truth' in advertising isn't what I'm thinking of, but rather 'dramatic exaggeration to communicate deeper truths' in advertising. The point is, economy class on a cross-country train isn't for tourists; it's for people who have really, really good reasons for going where they're going.
Foleyet's a loose cluster of low, snow-covered buildings with a web of power lines overhead. There's no one around. Smokers fumble for lighters and the rest of us walk along the train and take pictures of it. After five minutes, a woman starts waving her hands and yelling All Aboard. There will, she sighs, be another chance to take pictures later on. Hornepayne, she says, will be the 'big stop'. On the way back in, the service manager, or whatever he is, is being quizzed on the train's 'on-time performance' by a man with an expensive camera hanging around his neck. The manager breaks off as people pass to hand out quips surely passed down through generations of porters. Polar bears didn't get ya?, he asks. No; no, the polar bears did not get me. The two kids in the snack car are still locked in telepathic combat. It's good to get back to the sleeper cars.
We pass a town by a lake, little houses without basements, a cross sticking into the ground, saplings bent double by the weight of snow, weathered antlers nailed to a post. Hand-lettered signs with the names of vacation cabins. Shacks, some splintery and windowless, some either still in use or more recently abandoned. It's like a foreign country to me.
We have 40 minutes to explore Hornepayne, a town northeast of Lake Superior. Hornepayne's mostly a lumber town. For 40 minutes 3 times a week, it also becomes a minor tourist centre. A dozen of us get off the train and walk around the town taking pictures of stores and signs and buildings.
Hornepayne's named after a man called Horne-Payne, and not, it turns out, after a Middle English word for venereal disease. The snow around parking lots is piled 10' high. Parked along the main street are a dozen pickup trucks and a snowmobile. There's a tiny United Church, a grocery store where senior citizens go to have leisurely chats with cashiers, a 'Packsack Deli' in a weathered barn, and a community centre with a banner celebrating the town's 75th anniversary, which happened in 2003. Across the street from the grocery store is a yellow house flying three flags: The Canadian flag; the flag of the Confederate States of America; and the Jolly Roger. A building near the tracks houses the volunteer fire department, the city hall, and the 'Seniors' Sunshine Centre'. There's a job advertisement posted on the door: A project manager position with the Nuclear Waste Community Liaison Committee (NWCLC). The successful candidate will be the NWCLC's only employee.
The NWCLC exists because Hornepayne's thinking about putting itself forward as a candidate site for a nuclear waste storage facility. It's been mulling this over for twenty or thirty years. The appeal is probably that nuclear waste storage is a steadier business than forestry. If there are maps a thousand years from now, Hornepayne would be on them - marked with the nuclear trefoil, maybe, but on them. The time it will take for all the waste products to decay into mildly radioactive lead would push worries about the town's basic viability out into the long term - new glacial periods, movement of the continents, the warming and expansion of the sun, the heat death of the universe.
After Hornepayne come little towns we don't stop in, or even see, separated by stretches of frozen wilderness you could lose a nation in. Stalin, on this trip, would spend a lot of time stroking his chin thoughtfully. The names listed as stops are "unorganized areas", "unincorporated areas", and "unincorporated places". Towns waiting for the fur trade to make a comeback. Now and then, we pass mysterious industrial installations - huge sheds of corrugated metal, silos, pipes, and slides. Then a tiny town with a snow-covered baseball diamond. A hand-painted sign that says 'WE DID IT!' flashes past. It's gone before I can even start to wonder what the town's called and what it's boasting about or confessing to.
Ferland, a former village demoted to hamlet status in 1988. Mud River. Armstrong, the community of the Whitesand First Nation (Ojibwa). Collins, an unincorporated area, home of the Namaygoosisagagun First Nation. Allanwater Bridge, a railway station named after a bridge named after the Allan Water, named after Allan. Flindt Landing, an "unincorporated place" in the "unorganized Thunder Bay District". Savant Lake, another UP in the same UD. Should we be organizing or incorporating some of these places? I guess there's simply no hurry?
Armstrong was part of the Pinetree Line, a row of radar stations once strung out across the country like bells on a tripline to detect Soviet bombers coming over the pole. Most of the Pinetree towns now detect perturbations in the global lumber market. The cruel thing about life in this part of the country isn't the weather; it's the economics. The market dips, the mill closes, and your home town becomes a place where you can own a house for the price of a crowbar. The cold war helped at the time, but turned out to be just another industry that's failed the North. (Actually, it's the weather, too. The economics and the weather.)
It gets dark. There are mysterious lights off in the woods. Just before midnight, we stop for half an hour in Sioux Lookout. I fall asleep. I wanted to see Sioux Lookout; but you sleep through large parts of the country on this trip. Some of these places are probably best experienced by snoring past them in the middle of the night; but I'd still rather be able to see them.
3. Richan to Saskatoon
Raise the blind and see that we're rolling into Winnipeg: A bridge, a grain elevator, a city skyline. In the early morning, Via claims, we passed through Richan, Red Lake Road, Canyon, Farlane, Redditt, Minaki, Ottermere, Malachi, Copeland's Landing, Rice Lake, Winnitoba, Ophir, Brereton Lake, and Elma. Between Rice Lake and Winnitoba, we crossed into Manitoba.I've never been to Winnipeg before. You may not catch it at its best early on a Saturday morning in late January. It's dark when we arrive, and dawn comes as a gradual lightening through shades of gray. There's a strange emptiness to Winnipeg, a weird absence of street-level businesses, trees, benches, and whatever else usually fills the space in cities. Tall buildings are connected by glass hamster tubes, and an underground mall, like Toronto's PATH, links them underground. When the technology exists, Winnipeg will be first in line to become a domed city. It's psychologically ready.
It's cold, between -10 and -15. It feels colder. The knowledge that you're in Winnipeg is worth a few degrees, the general desolation a few more. I can feel ice crystals forming in my bone marrow. But I pass a man whose bare pot belly is hanging out of his jacket. Science tells us that, at these temperatures, an exposed pot belly should freeze in minutes; but he's in no hurry, and seems quite jolly. Maybe the city acts on him in the opposite way. It's also possible that he's incredibly drunk.
I stop to buy a defective SD card at a dollar store. The cashier grudgingly lends me a pair of scissors to open the package, then hovers nearby in case I try to steal them. The day turns sunny, and I decide to wander around a bit; the stop is for 4 hours. When I get lost, I start to panic slightly. This is irrational: I have two hours left. But what if I've gotten confused about the time change? What if I got the departure time wrong? I get directions from a man in camo pants waiting for a bus and speed-walk back to the station, not relaxing until I'm back in my compartment, not even stopping to stomp the snow and gravel from my boots. The prospect of getting left in Winnipeg really scared me.
The station is at the edge of The Forks, the confluence of rivers that ultimately explains Winnipeg's existence: It was a convenient meeting-place for people traveling by canoe. Later, railroads also intersected here. But river and rail transport are less important than they used to be. Most large cities that have lost their original geographical appeal have other things going for them. Winnipeg's in the middle of a flood plain, as far from the ocean as you can get in this country, and has a hideous climate. But it's actually growing. The train is stopped alongside a major construction site. It's the new Canadian Museum for Human Rights, a high-concept, tentacled mess of glass and concrete.
I try the train shower for the first time. It's like showering in a phone booth that pranksters are trying to tip over. Later, in the dome car, an announcement tells us that we're approaching Portage La Prairie and that we should watch for the world's largest Coca-Cola can. Wikipedia says that Portage la Prairie is "the world strawberry capital [citation needed] and North American potato processing capital [citation needed]". The name dates from the time of the fur trade, when beaver pelts were in heavy demand for the manufacture of felt hats - this part of the country, along with most points east, having been shaped by that most titanic of historical forces, European fashions in silly hats. Grisly little wars were fought to control the trade. Then, English toffs decided that silk hats were more stylish, and the economy of a big part of the continent cratered, to revive as shaky new one-industry towns arose to supply lumber and ore.
The world's largest Coca Cola can is everything I expect it to be.
Frozen dirt, broken stalks of wheat, snow, and hedgerows, which mostly block the endless prairie views. The Via promotional video has a one-second shot of a grain elevator, and then cuts to a chef chopping peppers. This telescopes the time you actually spend crossing the prairies by a factor of 86,000. While eating lunch, we pass long, frozen dumps of hay bales. An attendant explains that the mill adjacent had just gone broke, as it did every few years; the straw had been set to be turned into strawboard, and was now being left to rot. When the weather is nice, locals occasionally come and set it on fire, because it attracts rats, but the fire department always turns up and puts it out. It sounds like the kernel of a wonderful local tradition.
There are other listed stations, some of them just signs, some of them too far from the tracks to see. We make a 5-minute stop in Melville, Saskatchewan, named after a Melville celebrated for dying in the sinking of the Titanic. By the railway station, there are rusted-out old cars. Car graveyards are common along the tracks everywhere in the prairies. Most farmhouses have a few rusted-out wrecks scattered around. Now and then there are whole fields of them, sometimes arranged as neatly as squares on a chessboard.
After Melville, Watrous. After Watrous comes Saskatoon, one of Canada's most violent cities. What strawberries and potato processing are to Elma, murder is to Saskatoon. The guide gives Saskatoon's nicknames as 'Paris of the Prairies' and 'the City of Bridges'. I've been to the other Paris ('Saskatoon on the Seine'), and it would have been interesting to compare them, but the station is outside the city, and it's almost midnight anyway. 'City of Bridges' because it has seven of them - inspiring, of course, the famous math problem that asks whether it's possible to cross each of Saskatoon's seven bridges exactly once without getting murdered.
The train picks up speed in an effort to not let the sun rise on Saskatchewan. The jostling made it hard to sleep at times earlier in the trip, but on the dash across the prairies it's like trying to sleep in a crib that's being attacked by monkeys. Every few minutes, we pass a grain elevator, then plunge back into darkness. Freight trains go by like a series of UFO encounters: Total darkness, then sudden bright lights, rushing wind, and shaking.
4. Biggar to Kamloops
In the early morning, we pass through Biggar, Unity, Wainright, and Viking. Wherever Biggar is mentioned, so is its official motto: "New York is big, but this is Biggar". Biggar has a population of 2,033 cut-ups. Unity is noteworthy as the home of two hockey players and a salt mine. Wainright has 5000 people and the country's third-largest (and therefore third-worst) stampede.
Wainwright's also the site, I think, of the Wainwright Bridge, a 60M high trestle. A week before I left, CN drove a freight train off the Wainwright Bridge, smashing 13 grain cars on the ground below and damaging the bridge supports. CN speculated that it might have had something to do with the weather - cold weather in northern Alberta in January being unprecedented and unforeseeable. The line was closed for three or four days. Via posted a terse statement on their web site saying that, due to a derailment, passengers were being flown between Winnipeg and Edmonton. I was sure that my train would be cancelled. It was only the day before it left that CN finally issued an official "it's probably OK now, eh". We might have been the first passenger train to pass over the Wainwright Bridge since the accident. I was sleeping when we did, which was probably for the best.
When I wake up, we're moving through rail-yards and car lots and industrial installations on the outskirts of Edmonton. We stop alongside an obstacle course for dogs. We're a long way outside the city centre, and we're only here for an hour. Instead of getting out, I eat breakfast in the dining car and listen as two members of a tour group talk about their cameras and about obstacle courses for dogs.
Outside Edmonton, there are refineries, bobbing pumpjacks, and a rail-yard clogged with lumber-stacked freight cars. We move out into cottage country, passing a frozen lake with three ice fishing huts; pickup trucks are parked way out on the ice, which I guess must be a reasonable thing to do, and tiny, dark figures are moving between them. A boarding school for dogs. 'Gun & Ammo' stores. A pair of snow-covered plastic lawn chairs set out facing the tracks at the edge of a forest. A series of mysterious silver domes, with antennae, ovoid metal tanks, and other equipment I don't understand, all surrounded by chain-link fences. Through the trees, distant pillars of fire.
We get to Hinton, and, for a minute or two, roll past a low-rise town of car dealerships, Holiday Inns, chain stores, and family restaurants constructed in a sort of chalet style, with peaked roofs and rough logs. Hinton's the site of Canada's last major passenger rail disaster. We get through without anything bad, or interesting, happening, and then we're in the woods again. Evansburg, Alberta is a hamlet, and, like Ferland, a fallen village. If the world has noticed anything else interesting about Evansburg, it hasn't edited Wikipedia to reflect it.
In the foothills of the Rockies, we pass rail-side signs for CN Solomon, CN Home, and CN Yellowhead. Frozen lakes and mountains, sometimes with tiny clouds in the valleys. An oil-black creek winding through a frozen swamp. Then we pause in Jasper (the town), which is in a very beautiful spot and is commensurately silly. The main stretch is full of places to eat fast food, window-shop for geodes, and buy t-shirts that list reasons hockey is better than women. Outside a family restaurant, a tiny dog barks furiously at a fibreglass sheep. A few people stop to watch, some laughing, some, like me, frowning over the puzzle of why this kind of dog exists. Someone would have had to select through many generations for nervousness and confusability. It would have been the work of a dog breeder who had grown to hate the world.
Jasper station is full of gray heads - an English tour group waiting to board the train. The TV is showing tennis. There's a newspaper box, which is interesting, because there's no internet access on the train, and I'd started to wonder what might have happened in the outside world since I left. The box is for the Edmonton Journal. The headline is: Is your dog named Buddy? I figure I probably haven't missed anything epochal.
Deeper in the park, we enter a quiet river valley. Stretches of open water like sheets of black glass, sloping fields with an untouched crust of snow, and stands of trees like growths of black coral. Behind all that, gauzy mist and dimly-visible mountains. It would be the most deranged vandalism to leave a footprint or make a noise.
A rare announcement tells us we're passing Moose Lake, "so deep it's considered bottomless, with an average depth of 300 feet." After dinner, we come out of the mountains. A sign says CN Von Zuben. The main industry of Von Zuben is being nominally kept alive by Via's booking service, probably because it would be a hassle to change the list of stops. The next town that really exists is, I think, Valemount, a stretch of hotels and portable houses. In front of an abandoned-looking building is a huge, hand-lettered sign. It says SUSHI.
At night, the horizon is lit up orange. There are small fires in the distance. It's foggy, or smoky, and we pass through zones of different smells, all vaguely chemical. In the inky blackness miles from anywhere else, there's an illuminated marquee-type sign with moveable letters; I can't read it. Then a few long, low sheds, a sign that just says 'Motel', and then total darkness.
Late at night, we pass through Clearwater, one of the few places I can put a name to. One of the continent's dozens of places called Clearwater, it was named by unimaginative gold miners who rafted down the river in 1862, during the Cariboo Gold Rush. They're also responsible for nearby 'Raft Mountain'. I hope they didn't find anything.
5. Ashcroft to Vancouver
In the morning, it's wet and snowless outside. I check a schedule and decide we're probably in Chilliwack, or maybe Hope. It looks to be a strip along a highway with a bunch of the chain businesses that have made it impossible to tell one small town from another. It's 6AM Pacific Time. We've passed through three time zones. I'm train-lagged.I close the blind for a while, and when I raise it again we're in the middle of a quarry. Someone has built a tiny inukshuk out of rubble, facing the train. Then we're a few feet away from rock-cuts covered in moss and streaming with water. Beyond that is a damp and disorderly forest, very different from the monotonous woods of northern Ontario. Fallen trees are covered in moss, and the moss is covered in vines. There are hillsides of ferns and trees with crazily thrown-out branches, like flash-frozen sea anemones.
The next rail-yard is crammed with wheat cars belonging to the government of Canada and the government of Alberta. The Alberta ones say 'Take an Alberta break, visit...' and then the name of some hardscrabble oil town eight hours north of Edmonton. Then megalithic industrial works, and then we're crossing a bridge into Vancouver.
It's raining in Vancouver. I walk around the city, check into the hotel, and wake up in the middle of the night wondering why we're not moving. In the morning, I go to the Vancouver Aquarium, which is a kind of dog park for toddlers: Parents bring them here to let them run, meet other toddlers, and have a good scream. Staff members with microphones try to lecture them about environmental threats and to organize them into teams for trivia contests.
The flight home is twenty times faster than the trip out, but has about the same amount of total discomfort.
