Traveling from Toronto to Vancouver by train might seem unnecessary, doing it in January might seem silly, and doing it in January for the second time in two years might seem idiotic -- and, to save time, yes, it is -- but it also complements the first trip. I was on the other side of the train, so saw the other half of the country. The right half (as you face west -- so, north, I guess).
The train left tentatively. Stopped, backed up, tried again. A cautious, probing start, like the whole thing was an experiment that might go horribly wrong. The first couple of hours are not spectacular. The suburbs north of downtown are the dullest monoculture imaginable until you hit the boreal forest twelve hours later, and after that there's a sprawling world of self-storage units and weird rural businesses whose illuminated signs flash past momentarily ("Tractor land!"). Living downtown, you don't appreciate just how much of the city consists of self-storage units. By acreage, they are possibly the greatest part of our civilization. Aliens or future archaeologists would know us as the self-storing culture.
Sleep was hard the first night. As the train sped up, it started to sound like a fractious all-kettle-drum orchestra playing fifty songs simultaneously. The motion of the train is mostly a gentle rocking, but every few minutes it wobbles more sharply and, when the forces reach you lying on your bunk, it's very like someone trying to wake you up by shaking you by the shoulder. The next night's much better, partly because I obsessively hunt down and muffle everything in the compartment that rattles or has the potential to rattle. The train, like all trains, is very gradually shivering itself to pieces, and I'm not sure Via's screw-tighteners are fighting back hard enough.
Meals on the train are a dubious social lottery. You turn up and they assign you at random to a table of other passengers. Many of these other passengers are lovely. There are people riding across the country in economy, who are totally without fear. There may not be a major war, or expeditions vying to reach various poles or the sources of tropical rivers, but there are still people to admire for courage and for patience in suffering. There was the Irish engineer who explained he was looking for "a better life" (is the potato blight still on? Or was he talking about going from Toronto to Vancouver?); and the 20 year old with half-lidded eyes who was going to visit family in Edmonton, having saved money from his job as a hotel room cleaner (a man with a gigantic stock of stories about people misusing hotel bathrooms, and a perfect willingness to tell them to strangers over lunch).
There are others who are less lovely. People who immediately lay out their complete medical history -- so that, by getting that background sketched in, they can get on to bragging about what a remarkable case they are, and about the witty things they said to their doctors. There are Americans who are careful to compliment your country, as though we're from rival tribes and these ritual exchanges are necessary to keep us from trying to kill each other and seize each other's possessions. There are octogenarians determined to use their remaining time relentlessly retelling stories from their lives, in random order, to cement their legends. And there are train nerds, who are just as determined to explain things about trains. Sometimes these last two run into each other, and the conversation becomes a kind of Dada cross-talk act, each politely giving the other a turn, but then carrying on with their own agenda.
One problem with the train nerds is that they had to be convinced that I wasn't one of them -- that you can be a nerd on a train without being a train nerd.
In northern Ontario, we see one wolf and a day of snow. In Winnipeg, it's -29, so I take a walk around the neighbourhood in my windbreaker and sneakers. With the wind chill, it's absolute zero, and the altered laws of physics are hard to cope with, and I also start to feel vaguely concerned that parts of me might start dropping off and shattering. So I come back to the station to kill some time in the railway museum, which turns out to be an unheated section of track fenced off with loose-fitting sheets of plywood. The very old, very nice men who ran the railway museum walked over to open the door when they saw me coming. I think I'm reaching an age when people stop trying to sell you hash and start trying to interest you in railway museums. I have to be careful coming out of the museum again, as a lot of hard work would have been undone if one of the train nerds had spotted me.
There are domed observation cars on the train, which are at their best before and just after dawn. It's beautiful to sulk up there with a cup of coffee and a pair of headphones. I love being awake at dawn, but less than I love sleeping until 9am; so, it only happens if I've just traveled at least three time zones West (or two time zones in winter at a high latitude). Only after breakfast do people come stumping up the stairs to laugh loud wheezy laughs and make small talk and point at things.
The prairies are bleak, cold, white, and flat. Lights from distant farmhouses are bright and fuzzy across miles of frozen air. The windows are freezing to the touch, and the vestibule between cars is iced over and has tiny drifts of snow. We're in Alberta around dawn on day three. Muscular cattle fan out into their pastures, blinking, gearing up for another day of being a cow. Outside Edmonton, we crawl past a dirty llama ranch. Dreadlocked llamas faced the trains with looks that say, "what am I doing in Edmonton?", "did you know I'm native to South America?", and "help! I fell asleep in Lima and I woke up here!"
We stop for a freight train that's having mechanical problems, leaving us parked, leaning like a ship on a reef, on an unscenic bend half an hour outside Jasper. We stop constantly for freight trains. The whole trip consists of sneaking in a few miles here and there between freight trains and then sitting on sidings or in rail yards. So, with the Rockies just ahead, I sit and watch the sun set on a telephone pole. Three hours pass. And then we roll through the mountains in the middle of the night.
Because of the delay, though, we see the interior of BC in daylight. We follow Kamloops Lake, a long, oil-black body of water surrounded by stubbly clear-cut mountainsides, and then river canyons towards the coast. An eagle's nest on a telephone pole: The only trees are on islands in the river it wasn't economic to devastate. Dawn comes incredibly slowly, with no change in colour. Until the sun burns off the mist, the white mountains are divided from the white sky only by a thin white line. The scale of things is hard to grasp; when a train comes into sight on the tracks across the lake, it looks like a toy.
In the dome car, country music plays in the background and the chief of the train nerds tells an epic story of redemption. Specifically, it's a story of credit card points redemption, and it's epic in the sense of being long. He also has a sad and intricately detailed story about how the vodka he'd been storing in a Sprite bottle in his garbage can had been hauled away as garbage, which led into some pretty frank comments about the train staff and about how tips need to be earned. For some train nerds, the real appeal isn't trains, but situations in which people are unable to escape them. They look about a train car like a diner looks at a tank of lobsters.
There's a lot of wildlife. A pair of otters nosing in the snow by the river bank, a couple of bighorn sheep standing around on an impossible little mountain ledge like it's no big deal, partridges, and bald eagles by the dozen. Human settlements are sparse and poor. Over the river, crazy old cabins perch suicidally on little outcrops. There are rough little communities of trailers and wrecked cars and old satellite dishes -- founded in the gold rush 150 years ago and still somehow clinging on (they'll be well-placed if there's another one, I guess). A couple of people come out of their houses to give the train a cheery wave.
In Vancouver, I walked to the beach in a sweater, in the same silly country where I'd been out in the howling arctic of Winnipeg two days earlier. I slept for nine hours the first night, in a wide bed that wasn't rocking back and forth, walked for more than twenty feet at a time, ate relaxed meals by myself. Shrugged off the slight claustrophobia and motion sickness of the train. Ate breakfast burritos. Stuffed my ratty hoodie, which I hope not to need in midsummer in New Zealand and Australia, into a clothes donation box.
Tonight, I fly to Auckland to start a long and financially devastating trip around the Pacific. My next breakfast burrito will be in a completely different hemisphere. It may be a breakfast burrito with exotic antipodean ingredients, or a burrito folded in an entirely different way, because of the Coriolis effect. I'll cope with it whatever it turns out to be, because that's the kind of fearless adventurer I am.
The train left tentatively. Stopped, backed up, tried again. A cautious, probing start, like the whole thing was an experiment that might go horribly wrong. The first couple of hours are not spectacular. The suburbs north of downtown are the dullest monoculture imaginable until you hit the boreal forest twelve hours later, and after that there's a sprawling world of self-storage units and weird rural businesses whose illuminated signs flash past momentarily ("Tractor land!"). Living downtown, you don't appreciate just how much of the city consists of self-storage units. By acreage, they are possibly the greatest part of our civilization. Aliens or future archaeologists would know us as the self-storing culture.
Sleep was hard the first night. As the train sped up, it started to sound like a fractious all-kettle-drum orchestra playing fifty songs simultaneously. The motion of the train is mostly a gentle rocking, but every few minutes it wobbles more sharply and, when the forces reach you lying on your bunk, it's very like someone trying to wake you up by shaking you by the shoulder. The next night's much better, partly because I obsessively hunt down and muffle everything in the compartment that rattles or has the potential to rattle. The train, like all trains, is very gradually shivering itself to pieces, and I'm not sure Via's screw-tighteners are fighting back hard enough.
Meals on the train are a dubious social lottery. You turn up and they assign you at random to a table of other passengers. Many of these other passengers are lovely. There are people riding across the country in economy, who are totally without fear. There may not be a major war, or expeditions vying to reach various poles or the sources of tropical rivers, but there are still people to admire for courage and for patience in suffering. There was the Irish engineer who explained he was looking for "a better life" (is the potato blight still on? Or was he talking about going from Toronto to Vancouver?); and the 20 year old with half-lidded eyes who was going to visit family in Edmonton, having saved money from his job as a hotel room cleaner (a man with a gigantic stock of stories about people misusing hotel bathrooms, and a perfect willingness to tell them to strangers over lunch).
There are others who are less lovely. People who immediately lay out their complete medical history -- so that, by getting that background sketched in, they can get on to bragging about what a remarkable case they are, and about the witty things they said to their doctors. There are Americans who are careful to compliment your country, as though we're from rival tribes and these ritual exchanges are necessary to keep us from trying to kill each other and seize each other's possessions. There are octogenarians determined to use their remaining time relentlessly retelling stories from their lives, in random order, to cement their legends. And there are train nerds, who are just as determined to explain things about trains. Sometimes these last two run into each other, and the conversation becomes a kind of Dada cross-talk act, each politely giving the other a turn, but then carrying on with their own agenda.
One problem with the train nerds is that they had to be convinced that I wasn't one of them -- that you can be a nerd on a train without being a train nerd.
In northern Ontario, we see one wolf and a day of snow. In Winnipeg, it's -29, so I take a walk around the neighbourhood in my windbreaker and sneakers. With the wind chill, it's absolute zero, and the altered laws of physics are hard to cope with, and I also start to feel vaguely concerned that parts of me might start dropping off and shattering. So I come back to the station to kill some time in the railway museum, which turns out to be an unheated section of track fenced off with loose-fitting sheets of plywood. The very old, very nice men who ran the railway museum walked over to open the door when they saw me coming. I think I'm reaching an age when people stop trying to sell you hash and start trying to interest you in railway museums. I have to be careful coming out of the museum again, as a lot of hard work would have been undone if one of the train nerds had spotted me.
There are domed observation cars on the train, which are at their best before and just after dawn. It's beautiful to sulk up there with a cup of coffee and a pair of headphones. I love being awake at dawn, but less than I love sleeping until 9am; so, it only happens if I've just traveled at least three time zones West (or two time zones in winter at a high latitude). Only after breakfast do people come stumping up the stairs to laugh loud wheezy laughs and make small talk and point at things.
The prairies are bleak, cold, white, and flat. Lights from distant farmhouses are bright and fuzzy across miles of frozen air. The windows are freezing to the touch, and the vestibule between cars is iced over and has tiny drifts of snow. We're in Alberta around dawn on day three. Muscular cattle fan out into their pastures, blinking, gearing up for another day of being a cow. Outside Edmonton, we crawl past a dirty llama ranch. Dreadlocked llamas faced the trains with looks that say, "what am I doing in Edmonton?", "did you know I'm native to South America?", and "help! I fell asleep in Lima and I woke up here!"
We stop for a freight train that's having mechanical problems, leaving us parked, leaning like a ship on a reef, on an unscenic bend half an hour outside Jasper. We stop constantly for freight trains. The whole trip consists of sneaking in a few miles here and there between freight trains and then sitting on sidings or in rail yards. So, with the Rockies just ahead, I sit and watch the sun set on a telephone pole. Three hours pass. And then we roll through the mountains in the middle of the night.
Because of the delay, though, we see the interior of BC in daylight. We follow Kamloops Lake, a long, oil-black body of water surrounded by stubbly clear-cut mountainsides, and then river canyons towards the coast. An eagle's nest on a telephone pole: The only trees are on islands in the river it wasn't economic to devastate. Dawn comes incredibly slowly, with no change in colour. Until the sun burns off the mist, the white mountains are divided from the white sky only by a thin white line. The scale of things is hard to grasp; when a train comes into sight on the tracks across the lake, it looks like a toy.
In the dome car, country music plays in the background and the chief of the train nerds tells an epic story of redemption. Specifically, it's a story of credit card points redemption, and it's epic in the sense of being long. He also has a sad and intricately detailed story about how the vodka he'd been storing in a Sprite bottle in his garbage can had been hauled away as garbage, which led into some pretty frank comments about the train staff and about how tips need to be earned. For some train nerds, the real appeal isn't trains, but situations in which people are unable to escape them. They look about a train car like a diner looks at a tank of lobsters.
There's a lot of wildlife. A pair of otters nosing in the snow by the river bank, a couple of bighorn sheep standing around on an impossible little mountain ledge like it's no big deal, partridges, and bald eagles by the dozen. Human settlements are sparse and poor. Over the river, crazy old cabins perch suicidally on little outcrops. There are rough little communities of trailers and wrecked cars and old satellite dishes -- founded in the gold rush 150 years ago and still somehow clinging on (they'll be well-placed if there's another one, I guess). A couple of people come out of their houses to give the train a cheery wave.
In Vancouver, I walked to the beach in a sweater, in the same silly country where I'd been out in the howling arctic of Winnipeg two days earlier. I slept for nine hours the first night, in a wide bed that wasn't rocking back and forth, walked for more than twenty feet at a time, ate relaxed meals by myself. Shrugged off the slight claustrophobia and motion sickness of the train. Ate breakfast burritos. Stuffed my ratty hoodie, which I hope not to need in midsummer in New Zealand and Australia, into a clothes donation box.
Tonight, I fly to Auckland to start a long and financially devastating trip around the Pacific. My next breakfast burrito will be in a completely different hemisphere. It may be a breakfast burrito with exotic antipodean ingredients, or a burrito folded in an entirely different way, because of the Coriolis effect. I'll cope with it whatever it turns out to be, because that's the kind of fearless adventurer I am.
