‘Why do you use this train?’ I asked.
Jörg was leaning back in his recliner with his laptop out and gestured towards his wine, as if to state the obvious.
‘My friends don’t understand why I don’t drive from Jasper to Prince George, but I love it. I sip my wine, enjoy my salmon salad, I look outside, it’s relaxing and easy – and it’s beautiful.’
‘Do you see a lot of grizzly bears around here?’ Jem asked. ‘We saw bear spray in the shops.’
‘Grizzlies? They arrive in Jasper in spring, normally when they’ve come out of hibernation and are looking for food – especially if they’ve come down from a high altitude and it’s still frozen up there. Also, black bears.’
‘And they roam the streets?’
‘Sometimes. Or you’ll hear them going through your trash. But if you come face to face with one, never run. It’s the worst thing you could do. You’re surprised, they’re surprised, but you should stay calm, talk to them so they know that you’re human. As long as you respect them and leave them their space, you’ll be fine.’
The idea of making small talk with a grizzly was less than appealing, and I prayed that, if we did spot one, it was through the glass of the train.
‘Tray tables down, it’s show time,’ Tracy announced over the tannoy, as Gill brought her trolley to a stop in the aisle, placing two lunches in front of us. They looked good.
‘Is this Alberta beef?’ Jem asked.
Gill gave me a sideways glance. ‘Suuuuuure,’ she said, eyes wide, her mouth twitching at the edges, ‘it can be any beef you want it to be. But as we’re in BC, I’d say it’s BC beef. Are you journaling?’ she asked me. ‘You have to do it every day, or at least before bed, because you forget the little things.’
‘Just making some notes about the train.’
‘Oh, you want to know about this train? She’s your girl,’ she replied, pointing down the carriage to Tracy. ‘She knows every tree, every house, every lake, all the history. You come up after lunch and have a little talk to her.’
For the first three hours of the day, I’d been glued to the window, but the dynamics of the scenery had plateaued and it was all starting to look the same. Taking Gill up on the offer, I waited until there was a lull, then wandered down to take a seat opposite Tracy, a comfy-looking blonde wearing blue mascara and a ponytail. She had a matron’s sternness, but eyes that twinkled with humour – a prerequisite for managing eighty passengers with only one colleague. Gill wore her dark hair in a bun and busied herself with her crossword while we chatted. On the north side, the usually green forests were knitted into a patchwork of red and brown where a pine-beetle infestation had destroyed the trees.
‘Tree huggers wouldn’t let ’em be sprayed,’ Tracy explained. ‘In the winter, it normally goes to minus twenty-five and it’s cold enough to kill the larvae, but this year it wasn’t cold enough and we ended up losing most of the pine in western Canada. Thanks to the tree huggers wanting to save ’em.’
‘Why are there single white trees?’
‘The white ones? They’re so dead you could push ’em over.’ Jumping up to grab her tannoy, Tracy announced: ‘Now it’s time to read the news, or take a snooze!’ She sat down and pulled her neckerchief back into place. ‘I got a few minutes’ break now.’
I glanced around at our fellow passengers, none of whom were Canadian. ‘Why is train travel so limited in Canada?’
Gill leant across the aisle. ‘It takes too long. It’s just so far to go. Listen, if you were to take a train from Vancouver to Winnipeg and you have, say, a two-week vacation, it’s going to take you two and a half days to go one way. That’s almost one week in travel. And it only leaves twice weekly, not on the days that are convenient for you. It’s not going to leave on Friday at 5 p.m. because that’s when you finish work. In Europe, trains are part of your life, everybody knows trains, and does trains, and needs trains. Here, you don’t grow up with trains as a mode of transportation so most of the people we get are European. The commuter rail service, from Toronto to Ottawa, is different. In their four-hour run they got wi-fi, so they do work. But this train? Or The Canadian? They’re strictly tourist trains.’ She looked at Tracy who was sitting with her arms folded, a rueful smile on her face.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Gill, ‘I just got carried away. You were talking to Tracy.’ She sat back and gestured for us to continue our conversation.
‘People don’t even know we exist,’ Tracy said. ‘In our old uniform, I would be waiting with my suitcase at the bus stop and so many times people thought I was the bus driver. To be honest with you, when I started in 1981 I didn’t know there was a passenger train either.’
‘Why’s this such a coveted route?’
‘This is the most scenic in Canada. It’s beautiful, and you don’t lose anything with night-time travel. It’s a whole different atmosphere up here.’
Gill put a conspiratorial hand next to her mouth. ‘Tell her about the Highway of Tears,’ she said in a stage whisper.
Tracy’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Oh … the Highway of Tears.’
Whatever that was, it didn’t sound good.
‘The Highway of Tears is the name given to a stretch of Highway 16 that runs alongside the train. There are a number of single young women – either white, or First Nations – who hitchhike between Smithers and Prince Rupert, and then they’re not found again. They make bad choices to hitchhike and the wrong person picks them up, usually eighteen-wheelers, and they’re never seen again. It’s been going on for about twenty years.’
‘Why do they hitchhike?’
‘Lack of public transportation, no buses, no money, can’t afford a car, need to get from A to B. If you are a young woman in northern BC and you choose to hitchhike on Highway 16 east or west out of Prince George, you might as well kiss your ass goodbye.’
Gill was nodding in the corner, her lips pursed together.
‘I don’t mean to sound cold or callous,’ said Tracy, ‘it’s reality. The bus goes once a day and it’s at a bad hour. It leaves Smithers at 3.45 a.m. and it gets into Prince Rupert at 8.15 a.m. and then turns around and goes back at 10.30 a.m. Like it or lump it, you take that bus or there is no bus. Even now indigenous people hop on and off this train to go to gatherings and events or there’s no other way.’
Jem let out a low whistle.
Tracy laughed. ‘You have to remember, you’re in northern BC, it’s very isolated, it’s so vast. From Prince George straight across the way and up to the Yukon border, and that section from Prince George north to the border, and then Prince George west to the Pacific Ocean is the least densely populated area in all of North America. So, when people ask me why we don’t have wi-fi on the train, I just tell them we’re in northern BC.’ She turned to the window. ‘Oh … that’s my favourite house, that guy logged all his own logs,’ she said.
I followed her finger to a tiny house with a swirl of smoke coming out of the chimney. The mountains and rivers had gone, and trembling aspen now lined the tracks, their round leaves shaking like tiny silver bells ringing in the breeze.
A tall engineer with a neat goatee, a waistcoat and a hat came through the carriage. Ed was from Smithers and had worked with Tracy and Gill since the mid-1990s in what was like a tightly knit family unit. Considering the Canadian penchant for road travel, I was curious about how long these trains were likely to stay in business and asked Ed, who took off his hat and held it in both hands as we spoke. I felt like I was in an episode of Little House on the Prairie.
‘This train first ran to Prince Rupert in 1955 but it won’t die out, for the simple reason that back in 1958 they signed an agreement with the federal government that it would always be here for posterity. It doesn’t matter how many times they try to cut this train, it won’t get cut.’
‘Why doesn’t it run overnight to Prince Rupert instead of stopping in Prince George? It would make such a great night train.’
‘This was an overnight service
, miss,’ Ed said. ‘We had a cook car on here, we had cooks on here, it was beautiful. I think they phased it out in 1993. The north was hurting bad, the downturn in the economy was so bad, and they got together with all the mayors and made an agreement with these communities to bring business to them. They agreed that this train would stop over in Prince George. If we put it straight through again, the ridership would shoot up. There are roomettes back there, with little private berths. It was nice. You should come up in the winter, it’s so beautiful, especially over Christmas.’
‘The train runs over Christmas?’
‘Oh yeah,’ said Gill. ‘There’s a lot of people on here on Christmas Day. Their kids are grown up or they live across the country or they can’t come home for Christmas, or don’t want to, or however that works in that particular family. There are a lot of empty-nesters, widows, widowers, they don’t have family around so they want to be with people. In fact, we’re really busy.’
‘I have to get back to work, miss,’ said Ed, doffing his hat. ‘It was a pleasure to meet you.’
I wanted to curtsey in response.
We were nearing Prince George by the time we returned to our seats, and the sun had already slid down the skies and was sailing alongside the train. In all my time on the rails, it had never occurred to me that my fellow passengers might be travelling only to escape the loneliness of their own lives, or to ensure their own safety. Trains provided a ready-made, rolling community where you were free to be as involved or as aloof as you wanted. Conversation and good food were almost always within arm’s reach, and even if you didn’t want to be the centre of attention, the sense of belonging was innate. The white noise of other people’s laughter, guitar-strumming and movies, provided a cloak of comfort, and the reassurance that as long as you stayed on board, you would never be alone.
Traveller privilege had hit its peak when British Columbia’s sunshine, lakes and blue skies posed as nothing more than the backdrop to a day spent reading, but the second leg of the trip from Prince George to Prince Rupert went by in a blur of cups of tea and Cormac McCarthy. Throughout the day there were numerous delays owing to the freight trains that took precedence, thundering past for fifteen minutes at a time with more than two hundred containers marked ‘China Shipping’, and I began to develop last-mile itch in my desperation to reach Prince Rupert.
When we finally arrived, it was cold, dark and raining. Huddled together in a people carrier, wet bags on our laps, we were taxied through the empty streets to a lodge that functioned like a Canadian kibbutz. Housing at least fifteen people who were either weeding the yard, painting the roof or cooking in exchange for a bed, the lodge was a warm and welcoming sanctuary from the rain. The residents approached with open arms until we said we were there for only two nights at which point they went back to stirring pots of quinoa and listening to Fela Kuti. There was nothing to do in town but our laundry: dropping it off in the morning, we whiled away our time eating crab and prawns, and drinking ‘cowpuccinos’ on Cow Bay Road, leaving with a stack of clean pants as we retraced our route back to Jasper. Much to my delight, it was in the last hour of the journey when I was staring deep into the woods at a cabin where the Three Bears might have lived, that I saw one small black bear, bounding away from the train.
After the trauma of our first night in Jasper, we decided to splurge and stay at the Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge where the air conditioners harboured no homicidal tendencies. Toasting Jörg over a dinner of sweet bison steak and chilled honey beer, we watched elk skulk around the edge of Lac Beauvert and spotted a buck so magnificent we could have hung at least twenty coats on his antlers. Unknown to us, Jörg had put a call through to his husband, who was the head of sales at the hotel, and we were now the proud occupants of a lakeside suite and a basket of cheese and wine that we ferreted into various pockets before rejoining The Canadian the following afternoon. It felt good to be back on board and in one place for the next three nights. I only hoped our new set of companions were a touch friendlier than the last.
Over the course of the journey we played chess, filled in blanks in our diaries, and spent hours at the foot of the bed watching golden prairies curve and slope. The majesty of the Rockies was far behind and it was safe to say that the best of the views were back in British Columbia. Not that there was anything wrong with Saskatchewan’s herds of bison and bales of hay, but the canary-yellow canola fields were much like the views from the train through Arles and Avignon, and they didn’t make my heart pound as hard. Still, they provided a mellow backdrop to our on-board activities. With no wi-fi or network on our phones, we were freed from the clutches of Apple, and in the absence of emails, texts, Facebook and Twitter, my mind felt clean and uncluttered. On the penultimate day, we found ourselves at lunch with Tatiana, Ukraine’s answer to Zsa Zsa Gabor. She was travelling with a good-looking man at least half her age, and swept through the carriage with an air I could only dream of, her freckled cleavage wobbling with menace at her drab, Crocs-wearing counterparts. It turned out that her toy boy was actually her son, Alexei, who leapt up as we sat down and shook hands with us both. Originally from Ukraine, Tatiana and her husband had fled the collapse of the Soviet Union and settled in Manhattan in 1991, where she and Alexei still lived. She wore purple Bulgari glasses and a gold cross that would put the pope’s to shame.
‘I much prefer taking trains,’ she said, offering me a glass of their wine, ‘especially after Malaysia Airlines.’ She put down the bottle and pointed a heavily ringed finger right between my eyes. ‘That was the Russians. They’re crazy.’
Alexei winced, glancing around with a grin to see if anyone else was listening. He was in his mid-thirties, at least six foot, and had poured himself into an eight-year-old’s T-shirt. Tickled by our journey, his mouth dropped open like a child’s on Christmas morning. ‘My mother would love to do what you’re doing,’ he lisped, taking a bite of his burger.
‘My husband and I always hoped that when we retired we would spend six months in Canada and six months in Ukraine,’ Tatiana said.
‘Why Canada?’ I asked.
‘Oh, my husband was an internationally renowned physicist from Quebec,’ she said, pride in her voice. ‘We always wanted to take this train.’ She rubbed her hands together then flung them out to the sides, her diamonds knocking the table. ‘But then that never happened because I lost him.’
It felt suddenly cold, the sound of scraping forks filling the silence. Alexei nudged her with his shoulder, and she rubbed his arm and sighed.
‘I’m sixty-seven,’ she said. ‘In Ukraine, I’d be told to retire at my age, but in New York I don’t have to. I teach elementary school and they come running off the bus in the morning. They run at you, and hug you, and tell you that they love you. What else do you need in your day? I don’t do it for the money. I do it to stay alive.’
Over dinner, I fell just a tiny bit in love with Alexei. Here was this grown man among retired couples, accompanying his mother so she wouldn’t be lonely on a journey that she should have been taking with his father.
After pudding, we went our separate ways, Alexei and Tatiana to the panoramic car, while Jem and I sat at the back of the train, watching Ontario’s lakes close in on all sides.
‘I meant to tell you,’ Jem said, ‘I met this oddball on the Skeena while you were reading.’
‘When?’
‘After we went past McBride. He was sitting in that living-room carriage at the back with his feet up on the chairs, and I thought he was on his own, but it turned out he was travelling with his wife who was sitting in another carriage.’
‘What is with these retirees and their personal space?’
‘Well, get this. He overheard you having a go at me for asking Gill for extra pudding, and he told me that his wife is really controlling about what he eats. He said he waits for her to go to sleep and then he creeps out of bed, goes to McDonald’s, and buys chips that he eats in the car before coming back up to bed.’
‘That’s hilarious.’
‘I know.’
‘Wait, is this the guy with the baseball cap and biro sticking out of his top pocket?’
‘Yes, the one with the yellow jacket.’
‘He and I had a weird chat in the doorway, too. He told me that you had to be mentally prepared for retirement, but only to retire when your mortgage is clear, your car paid off, and your kids booted out of the house. And that tiny lady in the knitted cardigan was his wife? They barely spoke to each other the entire trip. I assumed she was on her own.’
‘Do you think we’re going to be like that in thirty years’ time?’
‘I don’t think I’d be marrying you if I did.’
Jem looked relieved. ‘Anyway, it’s a good thing we’re doing our world trip now while we can still sit in the same carriage as each other.’
A lady with black Dame Edna glasses and a blunt brown bob came into the car with a copy of National Geographic under one arm, and sat on the sofa opposite Jem, who immediately struck up conversation. Karen was a retired railroader now working as a professor at the University of Manitoba. She had boarded the previous evening at Winnipeg.
‘Where are you heading?’ Jem asked her, offering her his bag of crisps.
‘Oh, thank you,’ Karen replied, taking a handful onto her lap. ‘You know what goes well with chips? Wine. We should get some.’
I liked Karen immediately.
‘I’m going to Nice.’
‘Nice? As in …’
‘South of France? Yeah, Nice. I don’t fly. It’s claustrophobic. I get anxiety. I get angry. With these trains if they bump and jolt, I don’t mind at all. On a plane, if it jolts, now, I don’t like that.’
‘Me neither,’ Jem said. ‘I’m fairly terrified of flying.’
‘I’m in a minority now, but people really used the trains until the 1978 deregulation of the airlines when air travel became really cheap and everyone abandoned the trains. Everyone but me. I’m taking the train to Toronto, then the Maple Leaf to New York. From New York I’ll take the Queen Mary 2 to Southampton, then the train to London, then the Eurostar to Paris, and the train from Paris to Nice. My daughter’s getting married in mid-October and I told my husband and daughters that I’d see ’em at the altar.’
Around the World in 80 Trains Page 14