We flew from Guatemala to Toronto. From there we crossed Canada on board Via Rail's Canadian.
After Guatemala, this journey reminded us how fortunate we are to live in such a majestic, affluent and humane country.
Via Rail's Timetable: The Triumph of Hope over Experience
If you have a plane to catch, maybe crossing Canada by train is not the best idea. We started our train journey 11 and a half hours late. By the time we got into Vancouver we were 24 hours late. Some passengers experience longer delays, while for others, the train may be only a few hours late.
In this context, this sign that we saw in Melville, SK, had a certain poignant charm:
It's the precision that is so endearing - Departing for Vancouver at 6:34 pm. What's with being so specific about the minute, let alone the hour? Wouldn't it be more realistic, just to state the train will depart for Vancouver on say "Thursday-ish"?
Why this incredible tardiness in an otherwise well run operation? The answer has to do with the fact that the track bed is owned by the freight companies. Canadian National Railways owns the route used by the Canadian. The Via Rail train is just a little salmon swimming against the massive growing tide of freight volumes in general, and oil by rail in particular.
Oil production in Western Canada has outstripped the growth in pipeline capacity. Consequently the oil industry has been forced to rely on "pipelines on wheels" in order to get their product to market:
The amount of oil shipped in this manner has grown dramatically.
As a resident of BC, I cannot help worrying that our provincial government may be running into the Law of Unintended Consequences. They have staunchly opposed the expansion of the Trans Mountain Pipeline on environmental grounds. The problem is that there are also environmental risks associated with all that extra bitumen travelling through BC by rail. Trains can and do derail, as we saw with the recent fatal accident at Field in BC.
Life in the Boomer Bubble
Built in the 1950s, the Canadian is a wonderful state subsidized nod to the glory days of train travel, complete with sleeper cars, and white linen waiter service.
Who benefits from this subsidy? Who else but the Baby Boomers. We are the only ones with enough time and money to take advantage of the service.
This is just one more way that Canada's Boomers are winning the demographic jackpot. We spent our prime working years in an economy where steady employment and workplace pensions were the norm. We bought houses when they were still affordable. We draw far more, from government pensions, than we ever kicked in. For many of us, the mortgage is paid off and the kids have left home. Often our financial situation has also been helped by inheritances. In Canada, we Boomers are truly a financially blessed generation.
These sweeping generalisations are borne out by the numbers. On an individual basis, there are only too many cases of people in Canada living out a lonely old age having to cope with poverty and illness. However in aggregate, the battle against old age poverty is one of the country's great uncelebrated success stories. Dalhousie University economics professor Lars Osberg has called the reduction in the elderly poverty rate over the past three decades “the major success story of Canadian social policy in the twentieth century.”
Canada stacks up as one of the best countries to grow old in. Australia, by contrast is "no country for old men".
Source: Conference Board of Canada
Mennonites among the Millenials
There is no denying that the Millenials got the short end of the demographic stick. All the economic circumstances that have favored Boomers, are working against the Millenials. The situation is exacerbated by unprecedented levels of student debt, as well as a still difficult employment situation. Using the U.S. as a proxy, there is a disparity between the employment fortunes of Boomers and Millenials. Boomer labor force participation rates (blue) are hitting new highs, while Millenial rates (brown) have never bounced back from the Financial Crisis.
There may be no better way of witnessing this demographic divide than walking down the cars of the Canadian. In the cosy bar car at the back, you can watch us Boomers sipping our Gin and Tonics whiling away the time, boasting about past travel destinations.
Things are a little different in the Economy cars at the other end of the train. Greyhound recently shut down its Western Canadian bus routes. Short of hitch hiking, travelling Economy on the Canadian is now the cheapest way to cross the country. The fact that you will not be able to sleep, or have a shower for four nights, means that you have to be fairly desperate.
Beards, piercings and tattoos are very much in evidence. Like many Boomers, I cannot help wondering whether, in years to come, there will be regrets.
Most of the residents at this end of the train seemed to be smokers of one sort or another. This was a problem given that they only got a smoking stop once every 12 hours, and half of those were in the middle of the night. Anybody interested in getting high for free, could have just hung around the entrance to an Economy car on one of the stops.
The cars at this end of the train developed a peculiar smell, all of their own. As a wine expert might say, "hints of marijuana and damp socks, with notes of human sweat and stale burgers".
Sitting somewhat incongruously in the middle of this mayhem, was a group of Old Order Mennonite women complete with aprons, white bonnets and long woollen skirts. Safe to say, they did not look as though they were enjoying the holiday of a lifetime.
Via's weird toilets masquerading as cabins
There is nothing like a toilet to highlight different national sensibilities. Brits are so overawed by the French that they imitate them and install bidets in their bathrooms. However the bidets are only for show. No Brit that I have ever met, has admitted to using a bidet.
Likewise the German toilets have this peculiar "shit on a shelf" system, that no other country seems able to explain, or want to emulate.
I am happy to say that, courtesy of its namesake train, Canada can also boast of a certain bathroom bizarreness.
I am not aware of any other country that retrofits its toilets into sleeper cabins.
The oddness starts with the fact that these spaces are curtained off. Who would want to use facilities that rely on curtains for privacy?
Then there's the armchair facing the toilet. What's with that? Are toilets the new status symbol? Can the passenger sit in his armchair, and gloat over the fact that he's got his own semi private bathroom?
The logic only gets more baffling once you bring the bed down. The bed deploys above the toilet, rendering the toilet useless at night. Most people only need a private toilet so that they are not forced to journey down drafty corridors in the middle of the night. So what purpose does this toilet actually serve?
Small Town Saskatchewan
Winters in Saskatchewan are long, cold and beautiful.
We rolled into Melville Saskatchewan (population 4,600) on our third day.
I invested $1.50 buying a copy of the local paper:
If I am going to be honest, I was hoping for some harmless entertainment, poking fun at the paper's provincialism. The city's logo is a little grandiose for such a small community:
But apart from that, all the evidence pointed to the proverbial Prairie values of thrift, hard work and public-spiritedness.
One example is all the time and money going into restoring the city's heritage railway station.
This is what it looked like before they started:
They have made a lot of progress since then.
The money for all this work has come from a never ending cycle of fund raising events such as this gala evening to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the 1939 royal visit of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.
As for thrift, my $1.50 investment was not entirely wasted. The Melville Advance did record this instance of Saskatchewan style Valentine's Day romance:
"Ed, my old neighbour, has discovered you can do Valentine's Day, a day late. On Feb 15, Ed handed Ruby a Valentine's card, a box of chocolates shaped like a heart, and a small bunch of flowers. Ed said, 'It is close enough - if you don't want the chocolates, I'll eat them'.
Ed usually ignores Valentine's Day, but this year when he went in the store a day after Valentine's Day, flowers and chocolates were half price, and Ed felt he could afford to be generous for a change. He saw a chance to surprise Ruby and show her his romantic side. He is not good at telling Ruby that he loves her."
The Train Of All Sorts
Four days of enforced proximity produces a weird sort of intimacy. Complete strangers emerge from their anonymous blur, and their personalities come into focus. You get a window into a diverse array of types, including the rich, the courageous, and the downright disturbing.
The ex Marine property Magnate
Getting up before everybody else let me experience a magical time on the train. I was able to sit in the dome car before sunrise watching the mountains looming out of the distance.
Strictly speaking, I was sitting in one of the chairs reserved for occupants of the Prestige sleeper cars. My solitude was broken by the company of one of these Prestige guests. He confided that he had recently finished writing an unpublished novel set in Vietnam that drew on his experiences as a Marine.
We ended up discussing why the tactic of using air supplied "defensive boxes" was a spectacular success for General Slim against the Japanese, and a complete failure for the French against the Vietnamese. As you can imagine, my end of the conversation was long on blather, but short on detail.
After Vietnam he went into law, but he made his real money from redeveloping a large swathe of downtown Nashville. The most important lesson that he learned from the Marines? If an officer wants to survive, he had better accept bad news when it is told to him by the soldiers in the ranks.
The Italian pistol
This woman had embarked on a lucrative career as a supply chain lawyer, having graduated from elite schools in Chicago. All she needed to do in order to round out her resume, was to complete a few hours of pro bono work with the Public Defender's Office. Unfortunately (from a financial perspective), she was hooked from that day on, and has worked with the Public Defender's Office ever since. She litigates Post Conviction petitions including Police Misconduct, and "Pattern and Practice" cases.
She would be a great person to have in your corner. She's inherited the toughness of her grandfather who emigrated from Calabria. He had to take up prize fighting as a less violent alternative, to his previous career as a debt collector.
The last time I saw her, she had a dressing on her nose, which brought to mind the memory of the boxer in the family. That impression was only heightened by the vitriolic scorn she heaped on our quaint Canadian railway - the little train that could not get from A to B in a time that bore any resemblance to the timetable. She announced she was going to write to Conde Nast magazine and have the cross Canada route shut down. Fortunately, the sun subsequently came out, the mountains emerged, and her rage evaporated.
You can take the boy out of the Reich...
But can you take the Reich out of the boy? One night we found ourselves sitting opposite a spry little 89 year old man. He appeared to have escaped (maybe literally) from an old people's home. He was enjoying his (by no means virgin) Caesar cocktail. He proudly produced from his wallet a picture taken decades ago of him and his beautiful wife from Kenya, who is some thirty years younger than him.
He told us that he escaped occupied Germany by befriending a Russian tank commander. The commander cut through any potential border difficulties by driving the tank into the part of the country, occupied by the Western Allies.
Coming to Canada as a young man, he stated that he had gone to "AH School" which was a diplomatic translation of the elite doctrinaire boarding schools known as Adolf-Hitler-Schulen.
The conversation took a darker turn when he told us with a twinkle in his eye that he had met "the man himself". He told us that Hitler had come to Cologne in 1940 to inspect damage in the wake of an early Allied bombing raid. Our dinner guest, told us that as a standard bearer with the Hitler Youth, he had gotten to shake hands with the "big man".
A few sentences later he said "of course I do not necessarily agree with the accepted views of Hitler". In a quiet, casual voice he laid out the grounds of his Holocaust denial. A few of our fellow diners in the restaurant car were Jewish, which only underlined the horror of what he was saying.
He seemed to wear out his welcome with everyone. He did not eat with the same group twice.
The Camp Counsellors
Between the endless delays and the over abundance of food, you could see the passengers getting more lethargic by the hour.
The Via Rail crew took it upon themselves to assume the role of camp counsellors in an effort to lift our spirits.
A Via Rail maintenance man put on a slide show of the pictures he had taken from the train. Unfortunately it was not all that enlightening:
"Yeah....like....yeah I think....this was a mountain in a national park...coming up to Jasper....or maybe it was coming into Kamloops"
Likewise the wine tasting session consisted of the bar car guy reading out the descriptions written by the wineries.
Even though the entertainment may have been amateurish, the attitude of the crew, is a big part of the reason why passengers keep coming back.
Nobody's getting rich working for Via Rail. The hours are chaotic, and family life takes a hit. Nobody does it unless they love working on the railway. We all benefited from their enthusiasm.
As often happens, the entertainment offering was bolstered by a professional musician who was singing for his passage across the country.
Reconciliation
A quiet spoken brother and sister got on at Toronto. They grew up with the Siska Indian Band near Lytton. He is a professor of Social Work at the University of British Columbia. She is a transition worker In Vancouver's hellish Downtown East Side. They answered questions but they did not preach.
The only person who really won their trust was a young Dutch doctor called Peter, who was travelling to meet his fiancee in Vancouver. The brother and sister honoured him with a gift of an Indigenous medicine pouch.
On the ride into Vancouver, Peter told us all about how he had gone about choosing an engagement ring with a "ladybird" stone set in it. When we got to the station, there was was this beautiful young woman waiting for him. She was German. It was a reminder that peoples can reconcile.
