Down and Out in Saint-Pierre and New London
Traversing Canada
“It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the rollercoaster or the jukebox. This is no simple longing for the hometown or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.”
— Carson McCullers, Vogue (1940)
“If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, ‘I’m a free man in here’— he tapped his forehead — ‘and you’re alright.’”
— George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
“…frseeeeeeeefronnnng train somewhere whistling the strength those engines have in them like big giants and the water rolling all over and out of them all sides like the end of Loves old sweeeetsonnnng the poor men that have to be out all the night from their wives and families in those roasting engines…”
— James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
Un: The 15:00 to Union
Victoria / Vancouver / Winnipeg / Toronto
It was nearing midnight in the deep gash of British Columbia carved between Hell’s Gate and Kamloops when dusk finally began to take hold. Train #002, The Canadian, was tacked high to the side of the valley on a set of protruding beams, sliding a little nervously around the bends of the Fraser River, which spilled over itself violently down below. The water looked as if it was in a hurry to reach the coast. Just ahead, with the light barely dim enough to capture its flicker, we’d pass a forest fire that was growing on the hilltops in Cornwall. Eventually the view outside the window was lost to a deep mountain blackness — the type that is far removed from city lights and choked highways — and the passengers slipped into sleep. This was night number one of four in the classic train’s journey from Vancouver to Toronto, and the beginning of my own ambitions of trying to travel overland from the vaulting western rim of Canada to its craggy, maritime east.
The route had begun the week prior at pier seventy in Seattle, a modest notch down on the city’s waterfront avenue, where a traveler can jump out of a car, cross the boardwalk, and set down their bags in a queue for Canadian customs. From that point it was a boat to Victoria, a bus to Swartz Bay, another boat to Tsawassenn, another bus to Bridgeport, and a tram to downtown Vancouver, all amounting to a multi-segment journey — perfectly doable with a little bit of planning — that hopscotches through the Puget Sound, the Salish Sea, and the Gulf Islands of British Columbia. From there, the railway voyage could begin.
The first 24 hours on the #002 were spent in a resplendent alpine frenzy, as the train (which was nearly thirty cars in length) punches south out of the city and immediately across the throat of the Fraser, looping around Golden Ears and Garibaldi and the other peak-filled provincial parks that cradle Vancouver before turning and chasing a few latitudes due north, eventually banking east at the hulking Mt. Robson, the tallest in B.C. (it was here, in the observation car, where a young boy’s father told him that the imposing mountain in sight was not as high as Everest, to which he replied with a ‘hmmm….,’ as if he didn’t entirely trust the answer); but beyond the peak our big metal machine was taken for a ride that sometimes felt much more like a rollercoaster than a passenger train as it climbed up and slid down and held onto curves and disappeared into tunnels, and occasionally those Canadian Rockies unfolded to reveal long chasms of undisturbed grandiosity for a brief moment but are mostly squished together like a relief map that has been crinkled up and thrown across the room; the landscape changed completely every few minutes — if you looked away you’d miss it — from perfect mountain lake to deep river gully to gushing waterfall to a group of high summits, all covered in a thickly-wooded immensity of maples, pines, junipers, aspens, and firs tumbling over one another to get the best seat; and all of this outdoor phantasmagoria climaxes in the little mountain town of Jasper, where the train stops for an hour and everyone can finally take a breath before strapping back in for more — but the coaches pull away and in a few more instants, it’s all gone.
This all takes place within the bounds of a day — probably one of the most scenic ways to spend a full day on a train anywhere — and has the effect of feeling a little like a dream. Waking up the next morning, the images were shattered by a bright, hot Saskatchewan sun beating down on an endless yellow prairie outside of the window, and the recollection of those mountains fizzled briefly away, like the last colorful vestiges of a firework.
The Rockies had disappeared not only in my mind’s eye but in reality as well. They flattened out into a sea of green trees, and then gave way to the great immutable expanse of the Canadian grasslands. The July scenery between Jasper and Winnipeg — a city which the train wouldn’t pull into for another 36 hours — is low and flat. For the next two days, we were stalked by the pale golden hues of high summer in the North American prairie.
The train itself was old but extremely well-kept. Its classic-looking coaches were literally sparkling clean when we first boarded them at Pacific Central Station, and the windows in the observation cars got a wash at every major stop (compare this to the permanently hangdog nature of many Amtraks, which could always benefit from a rinse). They were painted with names like Dunsmuir Manor, Excelsior, and Queen Anne. The bathrooms were newly refurbished and fully cleaned every ninety minutes on the nose. Our conductors in coach class — an older Tunisian gentleman (Moon) and a twenty-something Quebecois girl (Maddisson) — were an exceedingly kind pair, and took their roles very seriously; they seemed to work for sixteen hours a day with no breaks, and their white-glove service (maintained at the same high standard whether delivering a bag of M&M’s or a bottle of Blanc de Noir) gave the whole affair a feeling of anachronistic elegance. Moon liked to speak a delicate French even when he knew that his guests weren’t fluent, a gesture which was usually very well-taken: the elderly woman seated across from me would flush red every time he bowed and arrived with a cold cut sandwich, “bonsoir madame, vous êtes ravissante aujord’hui…”
And it was probably around then that I wondered: what would the austere, fur-trapping explorers of colonial North America think about a machine full of senior citizens eating summer salads and drinking french wine on white tablecloths, heading from one coast to the other with no real effort at all, floating in perfect comfort above a pass that the pioneers had left behind — for their troubles — with the name “Hell’s Gate” ?
That next pair of afternoons in Canada’s central emptiness passed in quiet solitude, as the buzz and chatter of our earlier adventurous hours onboard melted away. Many of the tourists had departed in Jasper, and those who remained for the longer haul had mostly settled in to themselves. Even the social cars — usually salons of conversation — were muted, their air hanging heavy with unsaid words between passengers. The pace of the train was slow and often hindered by freight traffic going the other direction. The only real variety in color was provided by daylight reflecting off of the reds, blues, and greens of a passing set of shipping containers before strobing back into the coach windows, along with the pale pink sunsets of a northern summer, which came on late and lasted for hours. Cell service evaded us for hundreds of kilometers at a time. Our stops were mostly in small communities that existed solely because of this railway, and we moved through many of them without so much as an announcement. If we did come to a halt, most people would step off the coaches, have a quiet trackside cigarette and a look around, and then climb right back on. Even our appearances in the two larger cities on the itinerary — Edmonton and Saskatoon — were melancholy affairs, as the passenger stations were miles away from downtown; they hung forlornly apart from any high building or human activity, as if those types of urbane accoutrements were only a mirage on the edge of the shimmering plains.
Eventually the trees did come back, along with some hills and a little bit of energy — I think around the edges of Winnipeg. We finally made a stop that was bang in the midst of a city center and were given an hour to get off and walk. Mostly everyone treated themselves to some food that hadn’t been prepared in a microwave or wrapped in plastic, and some car-mates huddled into a bar across the rails for an afternoon cocktail. A fresh new group of people got onboard, heading to Toronto or even further east. Once outside of the city, the train began to push more consistently at full speed, smooth to the feel but clicking stridently down the track; the loud but muffled sound of the uneven beams below thumped like heartbeats, and a giant whistle blew every few seconds to clear away wildlife, which, from my view in the fourth car from the front, could be seen bounding away from our disruptive iron predator.
We slipped around the northern shores of the Great Lakes and over top of the Canadian Shield, that massive exposed slab of Precambrian rock that stretches from Wisconsin to Labrador and Baffin Bay. It is nearly as large as the entire U.S., and the tract that we get to see offers just a glimpse of its overwhelming magnificence, for as most of us spend a lot of our time in the crowded and dirty swallows of an urban city, up here it is just lake after perfect lake, with no human disturbance besides the rails, where the trees are riotous and plentiful. To be on a train is to trespass in those quiet wilds.
Eventually the great Canadian came creeping out of the hinterlands and took its place in the underbelly of Toronto’s Union Station. Originally I was a little worried about timing, as a kind Victorian woman explained to me a week prior that she had made this journey once, and the ostensibly four day trip had ended up taking her seven. But after a 92-hour expedition, we called at our terminus six minutes ahead of schedule. Moon bid me farewell with a bow on the platform: “Ah! Le monsieur au siege trois, bon voyage mon ami! Au revoir!”
Deux: Earning Newfoundland
Montreal / Quebec / Halifax / St. John’s
The high confines and swarming avenues of Toronto felt like wide open spaces compared to the previous day’s living quarters — it was good to be in a city again after four nights on a train.
I spent a night downtown and hopped on another ride to Montreal the next day. It was there — in the City of A Hundred Steeples, our francophone outpost in North America, where the English announcements are made second — that I would board the second of Canada’s most epic routes: The Ocean. Train #014 hugs the St. Lawrence River until pivoting Southeast out of Quebec and through the rural shoulder of New Brunswick, glancing past chateaus and pockets of hilltop spires that might have been picked out of rural France. The train finds new life in Nova Scotia, where it stalks the sea throughout the course of an evening and finally calls in Halifax.
The 22-hour trip undertaken by The Ocean is a long one in standard terms, and in the sleeper-class pre-boarding lounge in Montreal, this was evident: most passengers seemed to be families young or old, who were either excitedly flipping through the VIA Rail promotional materials or taking inventory of their snacks and bedtime bring-a-longs, and I heard no less than three separate comments about oh just what a journey it was all about to be, a summer weekend spent on the famous East Coast train. But I must have been a little jaded on account of the thousands and thousands of miles of railway under my belt in the past couple of weeks, and certainly wasn’t in a mood to engage, so I routinely shuffled down towards the boarding line to get my ticket punched.
It was rare to even be in such company and such a first-class lounge, because I had on that occasion paid up for sleeping-class accommodations rather than my standard seat in coach. After spending four nights in a row resting like a pretzel across a pair of seats, and this being the very last train portion on a very long journey, it seemed like a good time to give it a go.
But some of these travelers were a different folk, for certain. One chatterbox was holding court with a few groups of wide-eyed first-timers, pontificating about her adventure all the way from Winnipeg (it’s just so ungodly far from home, but I’ve managed to make the trip many times) — and so was a bit of an expert on all this. Once, she even took the harrowing journey from London to Paris (the chunnel isn’t as scary as you think it is, take my word). She was dishing out knowledge and trade secrets and best practices on long-distance travel (minding your hygiene on a full day’s trip is the most important thing here). What would she think, if just in the middle of her platform soliloquy, I interjected to mention that I had come to Montreal overland from Pittsburgh, via Southern California and British Columbia? But I bit my tongue, realizing that I was being cranky on account of recent peregrinations, which were starting to chew up my general enthusiasm and demeanor. Anyone who has spent some time traveling will know the type (usually American) and that it’s best to stay as far away as possible… so I put on some headphones and stepped aboard.
Despite my annoyance towards some of the more entitled travelers enjoying the service, I had to relent that there are some true, un-arguable benefits of shelling out the extra money for sleeping class. One of these is the meal service — a real echo of the sophistication delivered in earlier days of train travel. There may be long delays in schedule, and old equipment, and scant reason to ride rather than fly when the destination is long distance — but on the train, you can still enjoy a three course meal, three times a day. For dinner a week prior, I had scarfed down sandwiches to the sound of a flushing toilet four nights in a row, but on that first night on The Ocean, I had lobster pâté with summer squash ravioli and a glass of local red, on an elegant table in a dim room that was floating along the banks of the St. Lawrence, as light from a full moon scintillated across the river’s gentle evening current, and it was quiet, and a bed was being made for me two cars away, with a chocolat à la menthe on the pillow.
Halifax is a kind and quirky pocket of eastern maritime Canada, where the old schooners still bob along the piers and the people do what they please. “Weird Harbour,” I hear it called a few times. On the city bus from the rail station to the hotel, a local tells me that the two places that I need to make sure to eat here are called “Bike Thief” and “The Economy Shoe Shop” — two establishments that definitely don’t sound like restaurants. A tattoo parlor downtown — called “Death Rises Ink Shop” — had a flyer on the front door advertising its Sunday bible study sessions. Sports mascots in the municipal area have included the Mooseheads, the Rainmen, the Wanderers, and the Windjammers. So Halifax is full of characters, but everyone is unbelievably kind. Kindness, I’d say, is the common thread of everyone’s varied pursuits here. When I was thirty cents short on bus fare, three different people in earshot offered to pay my fill (there was no need — the driver took care of it). Most motorists will stop anywhere on the street to let a pedestrian or a cyclist have the right of way. Interactions between strangers — whether asking for directions, buying something, or giving a passing “hello” — makes it sound like literally everyone is old friends, and this manner of warmhearted speaking becomes infectious after a little while.
In order to get to Newfoundland from Nova Scotia without flying, you have to first find the ferry terminal in Sydney, a port at the far north edge of the province. I took a bus headed in that direction from downtown Halifax, which pulled out of the transportation center at the exact same time as the train that had dropped us off the day before, which was now turning back around towards Montreal. That was the last train leg of the trip — it was finally time to surrender my recent attachments to long-distance locomotive masochism.
Both the local accents and the cloud cover thickened as we traveled up the coast. Our charter bus weaved its way through a garden of little towns named mostly for their sisters in Scotland— New Glasgow, Inverness, Trafalgar, Lower Caledonia. At one point, a passenger got left behind after running into Tim Horton’s for a coffee, but of course we turned around to get them. The final stop was the ferry terminal, which was already boarding for its midnight departure as the driver dropped us off outside. In keeping with the theme of the preceding week’s travels, it was off one vehicle and into another, in this case a transition from street to sea — I grabbed my bags from the undercarriage of the bus and walked onboard the boat.
Like many longer-distance ferries, plenty of people didn’t quite feel like paying extra for a cabin with a bed, so the fully-booked Marine Atlantique had hundreds of passengers sprawled all over its seats, couches, windowpanes, and floors. I found a relatively quiet corner to lay down some clothes and fabricate a pillow, which made for decent sleeping arrangements — slightly more congenial than the train seats in coach, slightly less than the bed in first-class. A few short hours later, the lounge was stirring. By 5am the coffee bar was doing full business, and people began putting away their sleeping bags and eye masks. A quick walk out to the deck revealed to me the fact that we were no longer in the northern shadow of America — high winds were pounding the defenses of our boat; pellets of water zipped by and left stinging welts on any exposed skin. A rain-whipped sea swirled below, looking cold and steel gray, it was hardly distinguishable from the thick fog that blanketed it.
“First time to Newfoundland?” An older member of the crew had apparated from the mist next to me. His figure was pale and somewhat blurry, distorted by the damp weather in between us.
“Yes,” I said back, a little startled. “First time.”
“Welcome to The Rock,” he replied, with a strong jaw and small nod of the head, possibly the ghost of some North Atlantic sailor or cod fisherman from an earlier era, he took a sip of coffee before disappearing again.
It was from the pier at Port-aux-Basques, far on the southwest heel of the island, that we’d depart by bus on a full day’s journey across Newfoundland. A single thin road connects this part of the province to the other, and it winds overtop greys and greens; through the sights and smells of salt, stone, and raw earth; around fjords and inaccessible alpine hinterlands; past poor fishing towns and the entrances to unbelievable national parks; lashed by high winds all the way to the provincial capital in the east.
Just past midnight, the sun barely set, we arrived in that colorful pocket of rocks that is St. John’s. It was a long day. Utterly beautiful, no doubt — but at this point, a 14-hour bus ride was not like to lift my spirits. I was feeling pretty drained — too tired to write anything or do much exploring, and somewhat malnourished on account of all the fast food and cheap coffee from mobile kitchens or petrol stations along the way. For every single leg of transportation undertaken in this great and giant country, I had gotten on at its starting point and not gotten off until its terminus, and now I couldn’t go any further without traveling to a new continent, across the sea and a world away.
Two weeks prior, while wandering through the sunny summer iridescence of a park in downtown Victoria, five thousand miles away, I noticed a small monument across the lawn with the words “MILE ZERO” written across its top. It turned out to be the eastbound starting point for the Trans Canada Highway, which connects the far reaches of the country, point to point.
And just then, standing in a small park along the harbour of St. Johns on the journey’s final dawn (one of the first set of eyes in North America to see it that day), with a cod sandwich in hand and finally a flight on the day’s schedule instead of a train, closer to Greenland than home, only three and a half hours behind Greenwich Mean Time, looking out across the inlet to the easternmost point of the continent — I turned to the left and caught sight of a small stone plaque. “MILE ZERO,” it said, “The road to Victoria.”
This time, I didn’t feel like turning around.
/S
Washington, September 2022
