Train travel: it evokes such memories
At least this trip does. I’m two hours into a five hour ride to Montreal, and I’m already in that booze-induced state that results from their need to keep you hydrated on VIA1. I haven’t yet had a drop of water: they seem to favour vodka and white wine here, libations that allow the free-flowing laughter and tears from the book I’m reading, Lessons in Chemistry.*
This trip is my first re-emergence from Ontario, post-pandemic. I say post-pandemic, but of course, we’re all deluding ourselves into thinking it’s over. But even I’ve gotten to the stage where I’ve weighed my own mental health vs risk to physical health and often found in favour of the former. So here I am, off to visit my friend, Greg, who has job training in Montreal and has a hotel room with a pull-out couch. I can’t count the number of cities I’ve visited Greg in during our 40+ year friendship, but this is the first time we’ve been in Montreal together.
I love the feeling of disconnectedness that comes with travel. Oh sure, I could be on wifi now but I’m going old-school, enjoying the feeling of solitude. While VIARail transports me through space, it also transports me back through time to other train trips.
Half a life-time ago, I vacationed for a month in New Zealand. As I wound my way down to the tip of the South Island by train, I was as transfixed by the countryside as I was enthused about the indulgence of traveling alone. At times, the surf exploded from the South Pacific metres down the cliff beside me, the spray sometimes hitting the train windows. At other times, I watched sheep in their gravity-defying hillside grip. Mostly though I have vivid memories of doing what I wanted, when I wanted, without thought to anyone else’s needs. Sure, traveling alone has its downsides, but there are many positives too.
A few years later, I experienced European train travel for work - hurtling across Germany, conversations with colleagues moving easily between the merits of Gewürztraminer to sustainability, whether people were ready to downsize living to arrest climate change, and how many flip chart pads we needed for our conference. This was different travel, more convivial.
But today’s trip reminds me most of the last holiday I took with Jack. It was June 2018, just five months before he died but several weeks after we’d confirmed his cancer had metastasized. Driving to the west coast is the ultimate Canadian trip, and I so wanted to do it with Jack but he no longer had the stamina. A shorter trip through the mountains on the Rocky Mountaineer, a luxury train, seemed doable.
As we neared the departure date, he was failing physically. As with all pre-trip periods, the stress of imagining being away was taking its toll on him as he worried about how to cover his business expenses while he not working. Pre-travel stress is not my norm, but this time, I, too, experienced it when three days before our flight to Calgary it hit me: could Jack smoke on this train? Knowing he might back out if the answer was no, I kept my concern a secret, but it felt dishonest, disloyal, and selfish. For Jack, the notion he wouldn’t be able to smoke on anything other than a flight was unfathomable.
As we left Calgary’s ring road, approaching the Rockies for his first and last time, he asked me to stop the car for a smoke. This was neither the first nor the last time. While he puffed on a DuMaurier in a gas station parking lot, I thought about how many times he’d lit a cigarette in his nearly 50 years of smoking - definitely more than 500,000. Likely many more. Fuelled by the nicotine, he began to get excited about the mountains, allowing me to feel more upbeat too. He goofed around, teasing me about my driving. He looked cool in the biker jacket we’d bought during his treatment, a consolation for never getting a motorbike. You’d never have known he was sick.
The next day, as we boarded the train car for our two-day cross-mountain trip, Jack tried hard to maintain the excitement he’d shown during that foothill stop. We both knew, however, it was only to please me.
Once seated, Rocky Mountaineer passengers don’t move for 10 hours until everyone disembarks in Kamloops for a hotel night. Day 2 is a repeat but for the scenery which changes dramatically at every turn. Throughout, the tray table is rarely free of food or drink while train staff dazzle passengers with their knowledge of cultural and political history, geography, geology, and biology, all done with light humour. This travel is all about sampling from the buffet of the privileged. I won’t lie - I loved it.
While there were periods, sometimes long, when Jack dozed beside me, I didn’t feel as lonely as if we’d been in a car. I wandered around chatting to other passengers with a glass of wine in hand. I had a tete à tete with one of the staff to explain Jack was ill and not just an uninterested boor. She and I comforted each other in the galley about the unfairness of cancer, her father having just been diagnosed. Despite Jack’s illness and the fatigue that resulted, he and I shared some fun times chatting and playing SkipBo, our favourite card game. Mostly it was a good trip.
It was not, however, designed for a smoker.
The tracks run through forests and western forest fires are a problem. They don’t need careless smokers - or even careful ones - risking more. Smoking was therefore strictly forbidden.
No-smoking rules never fazed Jack though. He returned from a washroom break reporting he got caught smoking between the train cars. Of course he did, I hear his kids saying.
“You’re kidding, right Jack? You know they’re only going to let you stay because I told them about your health,” I chastised. “And know, Jack, if you do get yourself kicked off, you’re on your own. I’m staying on. You’ll need to figure out how to get to Vancouver without me.”
Like with so many moments in our relationship while he was sick, threatening him felt good and then it felt mean. He was too sick to be left on his own. We both knew it was an idle threat.
He got through the rest without smoking again (I think). He didn’t say much to me in the last few hours of the trip, anxious as he was to disembark.
We talked about this trip a few times before he died. He claimed he was pleased to see the mountains but I know he did it for me. For my own mental health, it was the right thing to do, and train travel was the right choice. But is forcing on someone a trip they really don’t want good caregiving? Train travel is the best time for heavy reflection and VIA1 has given me that chance today.
* See my blog about the book here.
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