Trains, The wonderful, Terrible
Discomfort and camaraderie across Canada
BRENDAN CATHCART
Canada is enormous. The National Geographic Map of the World tried to tell me that but I was too busy listening to the electrical hum of the cities to notice. Winnipeg — Toronto — Montreal — Quebec City — Gaspé — Fredericton — Halifax — Charlottetown — St. John’s; my chosen route East via Via Rail, (vis-a-vis, viva).
High season on the train, with an International Student Identification Card (ISIC), demanded only $798.18 to get me to all those places and back. Though flashing some sexy leg at the side of the road may provide exciting remunerative possibilities for the more adventurous (desperate) traveller, the 30-day Canrail Pass was by far the most economically viable safe-travel option for a young learner who’s had most of his life savings bound, gagged and tossed down a deep dark well by the university bookstore. The clerk at the ticket counter was careful to point out that within the 30-day travel window, 12 days max could be spent actually riding the train, so at least some planning was necessary to ensure that I wouldn’t have to take up a life of coal mining because I accidentally used my last day to end up in Finger, M.B..
Once the train pulled out of the Winnipeg station I was locked in, metaphorically, for at least 32 hours; the amount of time it takes to get to Toronto with a few short stops in between. Trains do not follow car routes; they go straight through the heart of wilderness immensity. I saw very quickly that there are more shimmering lakes, fecund marshes and lush grasslands in Manitoba and Ontario than beautiful people in all of TV Land. Hundreds of miles of exquisite, untouched nature flying endlessly past the window stretched my mind’s ability to sit still way beyond its normal limit, but after a while too much inchoate beauty gets to be like watching an Italian gameshow; the people are nice to look at but if you don’t change the channel soon you’ll scream from the senselessness of it. Fortunately, there is room to stretch out your legs on the train, and everybody else is guaranteed to be just as restless as you are.
For the misanthrope the train holds nothing but stiff joints, tedious hours and the worst sleep a person could have. “It’s like sitting in a sardine can,” said Jake, a retired railworker I talked to who gets to ride the train for free but hates every minute of it.
For the open-hearted the train is an entirely different experience. Up in the observation car I met a group of much more optimistic people, and this is where I discovered the magic of the train: people. Amy, traveling to Toronto for grad school in publishing, leaned over the seat in front of me to say “Hi,” and within 10 minutes we were in a story-swap with Fred from Montreal, Simon from Switzerland and Alan from Scotland. Fred talked about a Spanish fellow he’d met on the train in B.C. who couldn’t speak a word of English but was travelling around the world speaking Spanish to everyone he met, and when they couldn’t reply he’d just laugh heartily and keep going. Fred managed to find out that the buoyant conquistador was a married schoolteacher by looking through his photo album. “We had a discussion, but with pictures,” he said.
Over the next 24 hours Amy taught me how to complete one side of a Rubik’s cube, Alan taught me a card game confusingly similar to Crazy Eights, some hyper 15-year-olds annoyed the hell out of us, I met an actress from England hoping to see a play in Toronto that a friend of mine is in, and I played chess with Laura — it turns out that she actually taught me how to ride horses at a summer camp I went to as a child. Before I knew it, it was 2 a.m. and I was ready to attempt the dreaded sleep.
Worst sleep ever? Very likely. But sharing this worst sleep ever story the next day with my multicultural co-passengers somehow recast the infuriating inconvenience as a fond remembrance. They slept horribly, too! Oh train, you endearing foreign cousin of the motion-sickness-inducing steamship, your awkward eccentricity holds a special place in the hearts of many travellers. Both talking at once, Fred and Amy were enthusiastic about nightmare sleeps, late trains and missed connections. “I’ve been wearing this shirt for a week,” said Alan during a conversation about feeling disgusting and smelly in our clothes. “I can see the respect in your eyes.” We all laughed as heartily as the incoherent Spanish traveller. Sharing the unbearable made it seem like something we’d all be willing to go through again, with enthusiasm.
When we arrived at Toronto’s Union Station at midnight, three and a half hours late, all of us were very happy to be on stationary ground and headed toward comfortable beds, all except Fred and Alan who missed their check-in time at their hotel and were going to have to sleep on benches in the station overnight. But by this point in their trips across Canada they didn’t even care, because when you take the train you get what it gives you and the memories will make up for it later.
