I'm twenty two years old and I've just had a spontaneous pneumothorax ("doctorese" for a lung which spontaneously decided to collapse). Yeah, I may be complaining, but I should be dead. I was blacklisted by my chromosomes. Charles Darwin gave me the thumbs down; Natural Selection gave me the finger.
Why have we slowed down to 5 miles per hour? I don't mean society, I mean the train. I'm on a train -- the "VIA-1 Canadian" train from Toronto to Vancouver. Oh good, it's speeding up again. I've been on it for about six hours now, and I'll be on it for another 77 hours. Maybe I should carve out the hours on my bathroom wall... Maybe they'd leave me to rot in Winnipeg with my surgical scars and my Powerbook.
I suppose any risk of the lung re-collapsing is not a risk worth taking. Dr. Ergina sandpapered the outside of my lung, then sandpapered the inside of my chest wall, then slapped them together like bologna and mustard on rye (ooh, I think it's dinner time soon). He thinks the changes in air pressure inside of an airplane might rip them apart before they get a chance to bond like crazy glue. I certainly wouldn't want to have to press the call-button on my aisle seat and ask the stewardess if she happened to have a scalpel and a chest-tube on board the aircraft. I can't help thinking about that M*A*S*H episode where Radar has to do a tracheotomy with a pocket knife and a fountain pen. I suppose I'd have to use the tubing from the pneumatic headphones -- that is, if they haven't switched to electronic ones yet.
Yes, I think it's dinner time now. Maybe I'll meet some interesting and amiable people in the dining car and have a friendly, comfortable conversation about recently cherished events. Maybe I'll sit in front of vile, smelly yobs who blow cigar smoke in my face and jeer about the waves in my hair. Maybe I'll sit alone and stare out the window. That may be the most interesting option.
Yum. I think I'll just eat the cheesecake from now on. The halibut was bland. I think they have some sort of rule about clustering people together at tables -- preventing people from sitting alone. I sat with a woman and her adult son (Betty and Bill) and this guy from Brockville, Ontario. Betty and Bill are from Vermont. She seemed sweet, he seemed like an overgrown hippie. They're going to Vancouver, and then to Portland; they say that the equivalent Amtrak route through the US sucks big-time, that it's boring and the train is in terrible condition. It made me proud for a second that two Americans would come to Canada to make their trans-continental journey.
After dinner I went back to my "bedroom" berth. It reminds me of a hotel room I had in Japan last summer. The hotel room was bigger -- but not by much. Here, at least the view changes. There's a sign above the faucets by the sink that says "Undrinkable Water." I wonder what's in it? The light switch for the light in the closet that houses the toilet says "Annex Light." Annex? At least the French below it is honest enough to say "Toilette." There's a sign above the toilette that says "Please Do Not Flush When Train Is In Station." I saw the sign just after I flushed...and then realized we were in a station. Oops. I sat in my room with the door locked waiting for very angry, very smelly station workers to come knock down my door.
I remember dreading this trip, being trapped on a train for 3 days, but now it's kind of nice to be able to just sit here, staring out the window, letting my mind wander, without worrying about where I have to be or what I should be doing. The view doesn't really change that much from minute to minute, it's all just trees and snow right now, but it doesn't feel boring or repetitive.
The bed is barely too short. I can fit on my side with my knees bent, but on my back, my toes are smushed against the wall. I had trouble falling asleep and I kept waking up. Whenever the train goes along curved track it rolls you back and forth and up and down in your bed. I guess this is what it feels like to be a Bingo ball.
I think we're somewhere in western Ontario now. I had no idea that the province of Ontario is so wide. We've been chugging along for almost 24 hours now and we still haven't reached Manitoba! Winnipeg is the next major stop -- a lot of people are leaving the train there. The "Map" control panel on my Powerbook says Toronto to Winnipeg is 940 miles, and Winnipeg to Vancouver is 1160 miles, so I guess Winnipeg is technically the half-way stop. We'll probably arrive sometime this evening. Maybe I'll get off the train and call home. I hope the train won't leave without me.
I sat in the "Domed Observatory" (the bubble-car) this morning as we chugged through the forest. In this part of the country the landscape is mostly short trees and underbrush. It's not mountainous, but not flat like the prairies -- rolling hills, I suppose. It must be ideal country for summer camps and family camping grounds. There are streams and rivers every few miles, some frozen over, some not. Sometimes you can make out a layer of brownish, yellowish, frothing filth collecting in a side pool or along the shore. A quick scan of the treetops will usually reveal a factory, or maybe just its smokestack, spitting stuff up into the air.
Every now and then we pass a lake, completely frozen over, flat and white, smooth as a skating rink. We passed one lake that was absolutely huge -- it looked like it went on forever. I've never seen such a simple display of nature's beauty. I'd love to walk to the center of a big frozen lake like that and just sit there for a while. I'd feel like the first blot of paint on a fresh silk canvas.
Well, I seemed to have missed the prairies completely. Yesterday evening around supper-time we left Winnipeg, and when I woke up this morning we were in Edmonton, Alberta; I think we passed through Saskatoon, Saskatchewan sometime around 3am last night. So much for endless fields of sunflowers and wheat. I'm actually quite disappointed. I was looking forward to seeing the prairies for the first time. I suppose it would have looked like tundra this time of year, anyway.
After passing through the entrance to Jasper National Park (10 878 square kilometers, collectively declared a "World Heritage Site" by UNESCO in 1984) and Disaster Point (a stark mass of rock that drops almost straight down into the Athabasca River, except where it was blasted for the railbed), we arrived in the town of Jasper, Alberta (pop. 4 000) this afternoon. Now these are mountains! I'm instantly jealous of the people who live here. My favourite peaks are the jagged ones, with long, sharp ridges and snow-covered sides. They look triumphant. They stand tall and proud, smug in their knowledge that humans will never create anything as large, beautiful, and permanent. They even rise above the clouds. I suppose our only rebuttal is to climb them and hoot from atop their peaks.
The smaller, rounder mountains look less victorious. They don't seem to have as much energy as the jagged peaks, and most of them look patchy and torn from clear-cut logging. They look tired and glum. How did trees ever start to grow on rocky mountaintops? Will they ever return there in my lifetime?
Everything here is covered in snow and ice. Some trees are bent over from the weight of it, kissing the ground. There are little footprints in the snow atop frozen creeks and rivers, but I haven't seen anything smaller than a moose walking around in the light of day. They look very disturbed when you catch sight of them from the train; kind of like you'd look if a bunch of strangers suddenly came barreling through your home in a long steel noisemaker. I wonder if the animals frolic and have fun in the snow, or if they're cold and miserable. Every couple of hours we pass through a tiny little settlement, with a few log houses and a road or two. I wonder if they live off of the land or off of 7-11 and J. Crew.
Tonight we will pass over the Alberta-BC border, losing an hour as we change from Mountain to Pacific Standard Time. During the night we'll pass through Clearwater, Kamloops (doesn't that sound like some kind of kid's cereal? Hmmmm...maybe I need a snack), Ashcroft, Boston Bar (yeah, and maybe a drink too), Hope, and by first light we will be in Chilliwack. Wasn't there a hit single by a band called Chilliwack in the early eighties? What was it called? I've been listening to too much U2 on this trip.
I wonder what these towns like "Boston Bar" and "Ashcroft" are like that they'd schedule the train to go through the Rockies in daylight, and these places at night:
Ashcroft, BC (pop. 1,900) gets only 18 centimetres of precipitation a year, earning it the title of "the driest town in Canada." The landscape is desert-like, and both cactus and sage grow in abundance. Erosion has created odd formations from the reddish bluffs, such as hoodoos, isolated pinnacles of rock that remain after a hill has worn away. (From "Enchanting Horizons: VIA Rail's Log to Western Canada")
Oh.
I guess in the high-school of the wilderness, hoodoos aren't as popular as towering jagged snow-covered mountaintops. Hoodoos probably sit in the library during lunch hour, or alone outside, just watching the world go by. Snow-capped jagged peaks get all the attention.
It's pitch dark now as we chug towards Clearwater. I hope that's not an inaccurate name for the place. When I wake up I will have spent more than 77 hours on the train, crossing most of our country by land. I usually make the same trip by plane in about 5 hours. On the train I was in constant contact with Canada, feeling bumps and hills and curves even as I slept: my body on the train, the train on the tracks, the tracks pinned to the land by spikes sunk deep into the ground. On the plane I look down nervously towards the ground, and the view from 30,000 feet up is airplane wing and clouds as we speed impatiently over the countryside. On the plane I feel like one of a herd of nervous, hurried sheep, with no privacy and no personal space. Stewards and stewardesses constantly demanding things of me - my boarding pass, my attention, my cooperation, my choice of dinner entree. My nerves are constantly frazzled by sudden, unexpected air pockets and turbulence. I arrive stressed out and jet-lagged, luggage optional, Toronto to Vancouver.
Tomorrow we will roll into Vancouver awake and refreshed, with an eternal appreciation of the rich and diverse texture of the lands we share, but also with a nagging disappointment that our lands seem to have been soiled by the society which enabled us to make the journey.
