All Aboard the Canadian by Nancy Lyon
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For my first train trip across Canada, on that storied and fabled symbol of Canadian national unity “The Canadian,” (which now avoids Montreal and only connects Toronto to Vancouver) I’d bought a brand new red notebook. Like those fastidious journal-keepers of Mark Twain's day, I meant to chronicle every twist and bend in the track, every pond and bog, grain elevator, dust devil and snowy peak. But after riding the sumptuous Via Rail train 2,800 miles between Toronto and Vancouver, the only proof that I'd come and gone was a few feeble scratchings - a real "slouch of a journal" as Twain would say.
My problem was lassitude. Simple sedentary sloth. First of all, I’d been lulled by the sheer elegance of the train and the first-class Silver & Blue service. True, these refurbished 1955 cars lacked certain amenities of the original 1930s lounge cars, such as bathtubs, barbershops and gymnasiums. But their plush leather, mellow desert palette decor, spiffy chrome and etched glass art deco partitions far surpassed anything in America's Amtrak dull rolling stock.
My journalistic inertia was exacerbated by my cozy roomette, (made for staring at the magic-lantern show of passing scenery, and cocooning under soft blankets, while the train clacked deep into the Canadian Shield) ...and by the constant round of dining (linen-and-porcelain affairs with grilled arctic char aux fines herbes , prosciutto and melon, consommé brunoise, rivers of wine and effervescent conversation) ...and by the spellbinding views from the panoramic dome of the Park Car.
I don’t recall seeing the “necklace of early-morning mist rising to embrace a stand of white pine at water's edge,” or the “caribou snacking on lichen-covered slopes above thundering waterfalls” described in the Via Rail brochure. But I'll never forget the lonely Manitoba prairie at dusk, or winding through the Rockies under a late-afternoon veil of spring rain. Even when the scenery was humdrum - just zillions of pine trees as Ontario went on forever - it was still just grand.
When I wasn't on the train, I was being too spoiled by the opulence of the Canadian Pacific's old railway hotels -Toronto's Royal York, Edmonton's Hotel MacDonald, the Jasper Park Lodge and the Hotel Vancouver -to lift a pen to paper. And so I have no proper notes for my seven-day rail jaunt across Canada. The following account, patched together from memory and menus, train tickets, schedules, and brochures will have to do...
It was a four-hour zip from Montreal to Toronto on the late afternoon Via express to connect with The Canadian leaving the next morning. I meant to take an evening walk (you don’t stroll in Toronto) around town but after a swim in the Royal York Hotel's skylit pool, my ambition shrank to exploring the hotel's imposing 1929 lobby cluttered with Royal Family memorabilia. I stared at the teacups, plates, and saucers bearing the Queen's image. To a transplanted American, this Queen stuff and worship seems bizarre. And coming from Quebec, it feels like I crossed the English Channel to get here.
The next morning I settled into Roomette No. 4 of Car No. 121 to await our 12:45 departure from Union Station. A zip across Canada is ho-hum routine today, but a century ago those who boarded the first Pacific Express on June 28, 1886 got a fanfare of fireworks and artillery salutes, bonfires, bands, bunting and flags.
Old Canadian Pacific railroader Bill Coo (author of the mile-by-mile 1988 Scenic Rail Guide to Western Canada ) described how in that first trans-Canadian voyage, locals hopped aboard at each station stop to gawk at the regal bathtub in the first-class sleeping car and the tooled leather benches in the opulent dining car, which served antelope steak, prairie hens and Fraser River salmon.
Through that first day we headed into the granite bedrock of the Canadian Shield. Sudbury made a spooky twilight accompaniment to poached salmon à la Mousseline. Bald blackened heaps of slag, smelters and bony birches floated past the windows of the dining car. Sticking out of the barren landscape of eroded grey clay and blackened rocks where U.S. astronauts trained in the 1960s was the International Nickel company’s 1,250-foot smokestack, tallest in the world.
The Western world's largest nickel mining and smelting complex is proud of its nickel. A coin toss away from the smokestack is “Numismatic Park” a kind of sculpture garden among the rubble, featuring a giant 1965 Canadian copper penny 12 feet in diameter and 1.4 feet thick, and a 30-foot high, two-feet thick Canadian nickel. The smog must have inspired me to try out the train’s phone booth sized hot shower - lathering up as Gogama went by, rinsing off as we chunneled through a tunnel.
Crossing northern Ontario takes longer than Texas from northwest to southeast. We were still monotonously deep in pine trees when I awoke, and the only thing to keep the eye alert in this bear and moose country is an occasional pre-war summer cottage or trapper’s cabin still accessible only by rail.
Eventually farmlands segued into marsh and then prairie. Grain elevators marked the Manitoba border. At Winnipeg we had only an hour to see a Ukrainian festival in full swing. There was a run on hot dogs at the outdoor market stand, as if everybody -even the train conductor - were dying for a fix of junk food to make it to the Coast. I tried a bag of dill-pickle flavored popcorn - weird yet delicious.
The West Edmonton Mall is flabberghasting. The WLW - World’s Largest Mall - is like a kind of -space-age ark containing a little bit of everything on our planet. A full-sized replica of Christopher Columbus's three-masted Santa Maria floating in the “world-largest indoor lake,” defended by sharks, caymans and four submarines (one more than the Canadian navy) ...eight department stores and 800 shops...a waterpark the size of five NFL football fields, with 22 water slides, a gigantic wave pool, hot tubs, a “beach” for sun worshippers. The salt water for this fake sea is mixed on the spot: 76,000 pounds of salt to 300,000 gallons of water. (Probably stirred with the submarines.)
There’s a casino and bingo hall, a chapel to pray in before or after gambling, 58 entrances and 20,000 parking spaces, 100 eateries, 325,000 light fixtures, 15,000 employees, and a daycare facility for shopaholics. A National Hockey League-sized ice skating rink, and an indoor amusement park with a triple-looping, spiral twisting Mindbender Rollercoaster that drops you fourteen stories at 70 mph and other less-nauseating roller-coasters, on which wedding ceremonies have actually been performed.
The Mall also features a car museum, petting zoo with iguana lizards and pygmy goats, and the Fantasyland Hotel with themed bedrooms. The African Room, with cheetah carpeting, zebra- covered bed and Jacuzzi water pumped through the trunk of a (fake) elephant's head. The Truck Room, where you sleep on a flatbed truck while stop lights blink off and on. The igloo room with wallpapered tundra and sled dogs, and an iceberg jacuzzi (for frigid honeymooners?).
Is the West Edmonton Mall the summa cum laude of bad taste? Absolutely! You either love it or hate it. I hate to say I loved it.
What else can I say about my Canadian traverse? Alberta's Jasper National Park was lousy with bighorn sheep. Its Columbia Icefield is the largest in the world outside and Arctic and Antarctic. The servers at the Jasper Park Lodge all ride bicycles. Brandishing silver trays piled high with gourmet cuisine, they cycle one-armed back and forth between the elegant cedar chalets.
In Vancouver I had a “Japanese business person's” breakfast of miso soup, nori, sushi and fleshy ginger root sliced tissue thin. And I smelled the Orient all day long - in the gardens of Stanley Park and the produce at the Granville Island Market.
It’s sloth to admit, but the best part of the cross-country trip was going nowhere. Feeling snug in my nook as the world rail-rolled by. Sometimes in life you just want to be a spectator. Try it yourself. And forget the red notebook.