I took the train from Montréal to Edmonton and back for a research trip and for a friend’s wedding this past September. The following impressions are numbered in the order they were written, and ordered in the way they seemed most logical.
1. There is a problem with my ticket at the machine in Montréal: it won’t print out. I have it in an e-mail, Montréal to Toronto to Edmonton; but the attendant needs a ticket, and I am briefly stranded under the halogen lights in the great granite hall. The light from the business lounge winks at me. The man at the counter tuts at my problem and then does something I have never experienced: he tells me it should all be fine, it’ll only take a minute, why don’t I help myself to some tea and a newspaper while I wait for boarding? Thoroughly rattled, I do. There is soft classical music playing. I am the youngest person in here by about fifty years. When the call comes for boarding, I am gently herded up, and the attendant pats my arm—genuinely pats it—as he says that a service fee has been waived. I start to realize that I’m taking a journey where people are used to a more irate, older form of customer.
5. Northern Ontario is tree bog tree bog lake bog tree. The further we climb in latitude the later in time we crawl: it is fall here, the summer trees are gone. When we stop for freight I see cattails, pussywillows. The sun is warm through the windows. Every time I see a lake I wish I had a canoe and a week’s provisions.
4. I promise myself to climb as many trees as I can when the train stops. In Capreol the aspen chalks up my jeans, sways me twelve feet over the train station. Under and around, tourists knot sweaters around their necks, pull out cameras at the little lake by the dirt road, take long-suffering dogs for trots: we’re all desperate for escape, but leashed to the threat of the departing train. In Sioux Lookout there’s a birch by a fence that gifts me the view of the oncoming hills just before one of the staff people tells me to climb down. The train company would be liable if I fall, he says. I swallow a comment about the smokers off to the side and whether VIA Rail will appear in any cancer-related lawsuits twenty years from now. The birch waves goodbye when we pull out, flicking its top, its yellow leaves.
6. There are two groups of forty seniors on the train when I make my way up to Edmonton: they call themselves Road Scholars. “But not R-H-O-D-E-S”, one of them winks at me, as though she somehow knows this part of my past. “We’re not part of the ELITE,” she laughs. I make a sudden, impulsive vow to reveal absolutely no part of my past to anyone on this train, and spend the rest of the time feeling like an undercover reporter.
9. For the first three days I outline a paper and sit down and write - It’s a terrible draft, but a draft nevertheless. I have four hours every morning when I work and don’t talk to anyone and it’s a blissed-out moment of terrible-but-nevertheless writing. This is the time I want to give myself all the time, I think when I stop for lunch. In three days’ worth of afternoons I read five books I’ve been meaning to read. The Internet has taken my life and flung it off its tracks.
12. The truth that this is luxury comes to me lying down as the train curves round a bend, looking out and seeing the bowl of stars rotate slowly on its centre in the endless dark of Manitoba.
11. ”Why wouldn’t you fly?” is a question I get a lot. The real answer is: because my guilt about my carbon emissions is debilitating. The false answers I give, which are also true, go along the lines of: because I like trains; because I had the time and the funds; because I need to write, and when do you have the time and lack of e-mail to write these days? I smile a lot when I say these, because I’ve discovered I’d rather not be asked the question.
7. Later at dinner, I ask what the R-O-A-D scholars are all about. “We travel to different cities and have lectures on their history,” the recalcitrant physicist says. “Then we do some shopping.” Oh, how wonderful, I say. Did the lectures in Montreal talk about the Mohawk nations that lived there, and how the SCHOLARS were on an ancestral meeting place? “No,” the physicist snaps. “They were complete enough.” The beef is suddenly very interesting to him.
10. I ask for more food with my meal and the stewardess smiles and says, of course. I feel like I’ve betrayed something - think of the last time I did this, with a seat in Economy and a grocery bag full of food! I slept fitfully and made it to Kamloops with half a jar of peanut butter. Now everyone around me is old and moneyed and I am an aberration, a class traitor. I should be flipping tables all the way up the train, calling out: solidarity forever.
3. My seatmate, I learn, manages pipeline crews, and has laid pipe across Northern BC and Alberta. I learn this over dinner with the recalcitrant physicist and his wife. “What a mess it is up there,” they say about the Keystone pipleine. My seatmate is polite and kind, and all dinner I pull at myself to ask him how he feels about fossil fuels infrastructure being a stranded asset that must be dismantled, to introduce myself as a climate scientist and talk just transitions; to have the kind of conversation we should be having. Instead he and the physicist talk materials, and I eat my lentil salad, and look out the window, every passing power line calling out coward, coward, coward.
8. We cross Alberta and the stewardess interrupts dinner to point out a potash mine; a material which was, she says, discovered by the first people to come here on their voyage to see if there was anything useful. The blood-red heaps of slag are full of iron oxide and other nontoxic minerals, she says, now are there any other questions. I look out at the cleared fields, the hay just baled, and ask if she knows which nation’s territory we’re crossing and what Treaty lands we’re on. I feel like an asshole asking it, and I feel more like an asshole when she stutters that, no, but I should ask Coral about that, Coral knows about those kinds of things. I don’t know why I feel this way.
13.My cabin is a small miracle of engineering, a seat that flips out into a mattress and cover and pillows, another seat that hides a toilet. I spend my time in my most delightful writing position - PJd in bed, reclining on pillows, stretching and napping when I need to. When I have to pee I leave the window unscreened and moon the fox population in Northern Ontario. But I am working, I truly am: stopping for food and movement when I am needing, but endlessly writing words and editing them, leaving the mountains and the lakes behind, a trail of ink on the tracks.
2. We have been waiting on a side track for half an hour when the intercom crackles and lets us know that we’ll be here twenty minutes more: two freight trains need to pass. I sit on my bed by the window and count the trees: black spruce, willow, red pine. A creek burbles past, flecks of brilliance in the shade. I have nowhere to go and I am not going and I am very happy.