The WildClickers take the train to the Rainforest. Track 61

t's day two of the journey from Toronto to Vancouver by rail, and we seem to have entered another dimension. It's not just the scenery ?- the endless landscape of muskeg and black spruce, the beavers and loons on the myriad lakes of northern Ontario. Gravity itself has altered somehow with the relentless rumble underfoot. There's the off-rhythm lurching of the coaches of course, but also a constant forward pull, as if the locomotive up ahead in the distance was straining for the Rockies. Time and space are bent here, too. Gazing out the window, moments slip effortlessly into hours, and when the stars arrive, they roll from side to side over the tips of the trees as if they were floating in a fluid sky.

Then there are the inhabitants of this world on wheels. It seems to take only about half a day for plain passengers, to become compelling characters. As we rolled into my hometown of Parry Sound yesterday, the faces around the dining car had gained something of an aura. Across from me sat a German couple, Herwig and Shahida, earthy retirees seeking a springtime renewal in the endless greens of Canada and a vacation on the Sunshine Coast. We talked meditation and moose, lamenting the fact that a passenger train could roll through a railway town like Parry Sound and find no station to stop at. Across the aisle, clusters of American tourists enjoying an active golden age were easily identified by their Elder Hostel name tags. North Carolina, Oregon, Missouri… so many states, so many stories to tell, and just one story to bind us all together.

Last night in the lounge car, a kindly bearded gentleman who turned out to be a priest politely insisted that I fetch my guitar. I obliged, and strummed some Lightfoot, Dylan, Cohen, and all the train songs I could remember. He repaid me with tales of summers spent riding these same rails from Winnipeg to pay his way through seminary school in Toronto. Father James Gray was the son of a railway man, and lives now in a house on the shore of Lake Winnipeg that his dad bought for $400 half a century ago. That was when CN used to encourage employees to purchase getaways along the railway line. It was a corporate effort to create paying passengers, in those days, and while the old lines that used to run on both sides of the lake are long gone, cottagers, canoeists and campers still hop off and on at whistle stops through the northland to Winnipeg.

It seems that anytime anyone talks about trains, they wind up shaking their heads and saying "it's such a shame." This morning I met a soft-spoken gentleman from Arkansas who had journeyed to Toronto with his wife from Memphis to make this trip. They had taken the train they call the City of New Orleans to Chicago before switching to the modern Amtrak run to Toronto. I was thrilled: The City of New Orleans is the title and subject of my favourite train song, written by the late Steve Goodman and made famous by Arlo Guthrie, and later Willie Nelson. I've been singing that song for twenty years, and the line "this train's got the disappearing railroad blues" always made my heart ache for every train I ever knew. The train still runs, apparently, but the story, as always, is part lament, for the passenger trains of the USA are still a disappearing breed.

Riding the rails across Canada is like living in a myth. It seems odd and out of place to be porting cases of digital devices, rolling tape over every good-looking trestle, and desperately trying to eke out a signal to post stories from the middle of nowhere over the web. I lost my coverage in Capreol, north of Sudbury, and despite my best efforts using an old porter's cart outside the station as a makeshift desk, I couldn't file my story. In the end I managed only to post a few text messages and photos from my cell phone in the weak bandwidth. Then it was into the analog abyss.

There's nothing more modern on the overnight ride between Capreol and Sioux Lookout than the train itself, and even the cars we're riding in date from the heyday of romantic rail travel in the fifties. The night is unlit except by stars. The vista in the morning is green and blue like the night before, and on the streets of Sioux Lookout the scene is the same as it ever was. The tourists amble aimlessly past the Northern store, peering cautiously at the local Native folk going about their business on a sunny spring day. We're all happily lost in another dimension, somewhere in time, somewhere in the northland, somewhere along the way on Canada's Greatest Ride.

Teenyboone, I just spotted you back there among the photos. Come on over here and sit with me. We can look out the window and chat as the fields run past.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This is the old train station in Rimouski, Quebec. I spent most of a night sleeping on a bench in this station in late summer 1972. I'd been living in Rimouski for most of the summer, taking a total immersion French language program.

Our class was going home by train, but first the train was delayed and then it was over-booked. Our teacher had already started home by car as I recall, so we slept in the station til the next train came in from the Maritimes to go to Quebec City at about 4:00 a.m.




<now to see if I can find the pic of me leaping off the train when we got home>