But from my point of view, it's nineteen hours out of Toronto, and there' a lot of not very much along the way. It seems impossible to imagine that Canada would ever run out of wood or water, when you see these lands go by on the other side of the window. It engenders tremendous respect for those peoples, native and otherwise, who first came to this land. They had a hell of a job ahead of them, and they kept at it. This is so much not Southern Ontario. It's amazing that there is electricity here, but they also have running water, Internet and a Home Hardware store. The closest city is the Soo, which is six hours by car (Hornepayne has a road, unlike some of the other towns we have gone through).
And then we go through the night. An entire night of waiting for freights to pass, then speeding to make up time: why do the long (up to two miles long!) freights always have to have priority? The tracks are infrastructure and should be public property, not private.
Just before we leave Ontario, after thirty hours of travel, we pass what was a derailment two days ago. The crews are still cleaning it up, but there is a silence which comes with this. No one was hurt, but it reminds you that these long metal machines can go wrong, terribly. In this case, all the damage was limited to steel coils, trees and tracks. And it was all contained in about 200 metres. Our train staff knew enough to be wary. They knew that the speed we had been travelling up to then was an omen of things to come. Freight had been held up by the derailment. So once past it, we waited again for the freight to go past. And we waited so much our on-time train arrived in Winnipeg two hours late.
Winnipeg just opened the Museum of Human Rights, a public-private venture funded to help the Conservatives win in Manitoba, and give Izzy Asper a tax write off. I have to hurry, though, 'cause it opens at ten and my train boards at 11:30. I'm encouraged to learn that, if I take the ramp up and down, the total distance is two kilometers. So I do that, walking fast up the ramp, then coming down more slowly to at least get a sense of the place. It is a beautiful building and the exhibits show enormous thought and creativity. A certain irony that it is in Winnipeg, the city where they killed Louis Riel and where they now have a severe native "problem"—both of these human rights issues.
One of the things that the train teaches you is patience. You get put on a siding while freight trains up to two miles long go past; you have to deal with an under-funded train system which relies on sixty year old cars; and, in Winnipeg, you sit on the train in the station for six hours while they work to get a replacement locomotive for the one you have with the cracked wheel. Patience...!
But then you are on the Prairies. Not the dull landscape one is led to believe it is. Ice fog, hoar frost, hills and sloughs. Isolated farms (how difficult that must be in the winter). Signs of wildlife, but none seen, except the birds.
And then Edmonton, now running eight hours late. Out of the train for a while, enjoying the walking and the cold air (icy for the South African family on board, who left a home where it was 37 degrees). So we went through the Rockies in the dark: got to Jasper about 9:30 and left about midnight. Still a pretty town. The moon was full last night, so we could see some of it, but I was tired and went to bed. So being used to and living with disappointment is part of the lesson of this trip.
Waking this morning to a grey day in Kamloops, still dark. Breakfast and a stint in the observation car to watch the Thompson River where I had bicycled some years ago. It reminds you one again of the diversity of this country. This part of BC is almost desert. Sparse growth, few trees. Some eagles on dead trees (those that remain) and the typical mountain river, wide and shallow and fast.
And now we are doing what Stan Rogers talks about, "racing the roaring Fraser to the sea". After following the black waters of the Thompson, we joined the green waters of the Fraser, and are on our way to Hell's Gate and then to Vancouver. So one of the rewards of our patience is to see these things in daylight (usually the train goes through here at night).
Fascinating to watch the same-but-different vistas across the country, and the habitations and human interventions that have happened in the same-but-different ways to live in the various places.
We pass through the town of Hope. A strange name, perhaps you can have hope as you travel upriver and head into the mountains. But from this town down to Vancouver is all dirty urban and strip malls and Trans-Canada: not very hopeful as we see it.
And then Vancouver. Hard to believe that it's the same country as what we have passed through. Verdant, moist, bustling, urban-chic. Compare this to the upper Thompson, or mid-Prairie, or Northern Ontario, and you get stuck in a cognitive dissonance. And, even better for me, VIA has given us all a fifty per cent discount on our next trip, since they were more than four hours late (even though it wasn't their fault).
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