“Champagne and hors d’oeuvres will be served shortly after departure.” The Via Rail ticket agent directs me toward the “exclusive” pre-boarding lounge. I wander outside to the terrace where a bald-headed musician sings Chattanooga Choo Choo while playing an electric keyboard. The Canadian lay in wait – slick and silver on the tracks. I grip the handle of my luggage, looking from the train, to the musician, to the other passengers with whom I’ll share this 3½-day journey from Vancouver to Toronto. Something I haven’t felt in a while wells up inside me, so rare these days I’ve forgotten what to call it: All I know is I feel like dancing. The other passengers, mostly senior citizens, seem calm in the face of our imminent adventure. They sip complimentary cups of tea and chew Peek Freans biscuits.
I scan the list of scheduled stops – noting intriguing-sounding names like Viking, Unity and Nakina. I note we’ll enter Ontario at 1:17 a.m. on day three but won’t arrive in Toronto until nearly 30 hours later. We’ll cross three time zones. We’ll traverse mountain, prairie, Canadian Shield.
Just when King of the Road winds up, the conductor yells, “All aboard!” And a whistle even blows.
As I sip champagne in the skyline car – a panoramic dome with 360-degree views – I wonder why I’ve never done this before. The answer? Probably the same as most of my late-30s age group: time. Time equals money, as the saying goes. And who but retirees and self-employed writers can afford to take time off work and see Canada by train?
I read Via Rail’s latest brochure. Like everything these days, it’s laced with “greentalk.” It promises a small ecological footprint and low greenhouse gas emissions. But it occurs to me while perusing the schedule, with 66 stops, that having time on your hands is what green really means. It seems anything touted as green – from sorting recycling, to growing organic veggies, to biking to work – takes time. Is having time on your hands the new green? What happens when everyone is scurrying from A to B, texting and Tweeting, desperate for a spare moment to breathe? And I begin to wonder: Why save the planet if no one has time to live there?
It’s on The Canadian I learn that time is alive and well. It meanders through the industrial wastelands of Vancouver and across the Fraser River. It makes a sound: clickety-clack, clickety-clack. On The Canadian, I learn we have plenty of time. No television screen (and spotty cellphone or Internet service) distracts me from a landscape shifting slowly from farmer’s field, to valley, to mountain, from dusk to night. These things, I realize, don’t just happen the moment I notice them. They take time.
With time, human beings make similar shifts, from solitude to companionship. It happens in the bright light of a B.C. morning between Clearwater at 8:46 and Blue River at 10:50: Strangers begin to talk to one another. I meet a woman from Vancouver travelling with her mother, Gail, who has survived three strokes and breast cancer and moves between the moving cars with a cane. Together we look for mountain goats and glaciers. We ooh and we ahh. We bring each other packets of digestives and cups of English breakfast tea. There are long moments of silence. It’s as though we know we have a whole country ahead of us to let stories unfurl.
