August 5, 2012
I know I can get through this. My fingers are twitching. There is a buzzing in my ear. I’m fidgety. There is a sense of loss: the profound missing of a thing that has been with you day and night for ten years, or more, and now is gone. Vanished. Replaced by an X. Everywhere. I’m paralysed. Eyes roving round. All is lost.
As of this writing, I have been without internet and mobile connection for sixteen hours. If an email, or a text, does not reach you, has it been sent? If no email is sent to you, do you even exist? I have been filling the time, to be sure. There is that thing we used to do, in days long gone. Con-ver-sation, I think, it was called. Where you have an actual person in front of or next to you, and you let your mouth, and not your fingers, do the talking. Quaint. The conversation goes on, uninterrupted by text or telephone or email. There appears to be a coherent flow of logic, argument and/or narrative. Confusing. There is a lag, a lull; no email or text to check and distract. What to do? Come up with a new topic, that’s what the Wise Ones used to advise in the old days. Distressing.
I am on board the Canadian, fitfully traversing Northern Ontario.
Destination Vancouver, in three days. The train is rolling along fine, making photos a hash of smears and mis-exposure. And then, with no warning, it slows down and grinds to a halt. We wait. A freight train (three locomotives and 167 cars) passes.
We restart. Train rolls; pictures get smudged; we come to a slow halt. Fitfully.
In just three hours I will break my own record of length of time on a train.
Last time, it was between Lisbon and San Sebastian. Or Donostia in the local language. The accents are missing – assuming they were needed in the first place. With no internet; how can I check spelling? How can I ensure accuracy? How do I know that anything I think I know is still true? Eighteen hours and change. My recollection of that ride is as vivid as if it happened just last week; which says nothing at all about the accuracy of what I think I remember, only that the pictures I conjure up are remarkably lucid. Technicolour, even. (HD, for the young ‘uns.) A woman, darkly beautiful, bare bronzed shoulders, luscious lips, eyes ready, Carmen-like, to direct a dagger into an unfaithful lover’s back. A slight man in his early twenties; glasses slipping down his nose; reading a thick book, well-thumbed-through; the kind of young man who, those days, looked forward to the promise of an Erasmus scholarship for a term in the Hague and a term in Athens and who, these days, has the prospect of endless unemployment and potential recruitment into the latest crypto-fascist promise of “a better life under an iron hand.”
The train comes to a stop. There is a muffled announcement; movement in the corridors; fresh air rushes in. We are let out. Hornepayne. A small town of 1700. One restaurant; one variety store; an abandoned elementary school right next to the train tracks – city-planning this far north requires work. Mobile access! And nothing. Just a spam email. Does anyone not care that I have not been in touch for sixteen hours? Legs stretched, we are back on board. Connection gone, lost, once again. Soon the train is swaying as it speeds into the night. Just one spam email in sixteen hours. I feel not just lost and disconnected, but bereft.
Stop before Winnipeg
Train. Spain. Carmen. Nerd. And two farmer types, so short that their feet did not touch the ground as they sat back in the chair; rotund, and a waft of manure. The husband and wife stare at me the entire time they are in the cabin, which is about six hours. They get off but the effects of their staring, like the waft of manure and hay, is left behind.
No peasants on this trip; no Carmen; and only one or two nerd types in a 22-car train. A lot of retirees and some overseas tourists. And at least two federal civil servants. Still in Ontario, but darkness has landed gently all around us and so there is nothing to be seen out there; the cloud cover hides the sky from our searching eyes.
The Canadian is advertised not only for comfort or scenery but for its food. This is the first time in six years that I am eating in a train dining car. Last time was in Italy. Train from Venice to Geneva. I remember going through the mountains, but the food, aside from its price, remains out of reach in my memory. Or, at least, my brain fails to reconstruct, true or not, a new history of that trip. The dining experience on board our Canadian train is certainly special. This is a white linen service. The food is fresh and while perhaps not quite as good as advertised, is still very good. (Cajun veal chop for dinner: excellent; salmon at lunch: good; the greens were crunchy and the salad was crisp – which is about the only thing you could ask for. Overall, the food is about as good as it has any right to be in a train dining room.)
The first day comes to a close.
The adventure continues …