The Canadian

Jasper

A bone-chilling breeze wafts through the station. Two employees in heavy coats, toques and mitts emblazoned with the VIA Rail logo huddle near the tracks.

A man approaches offering them Tim Hortons coffee cups. He praises them profusely. The Service Manager, Meredith, gushes with gratitude. “That’s sooosweet,” she says, over and over again, pronouncing the letter o in that quintessential Canuck way linguists refer to as Canadian Raising.

The man leaves and Meredith removes her glasses to defog her lenses. She’s still in disbelief at the act of kindness. “It’s hard to cry when it’s so cold out,” she says.

Hinton 12:30 14:43

I locate my home for the next four days: The first lower berth in car 11. A blond woman fluffing a pillow introduces herself: “I’m Colleen.” I'm stuck by her calm, unhurried demeanour. She talks with genuine curiosity, like a mother talks to a babysitter after returning home from the first night away from her child.    

Colleen laughs when I ask if timetables are accurate: A recent run ended 16 hours late after the train hit a cow outside Winnipeg. Her voice is a mixture of despair and resolve. My heart pangs for her plight: Her eyes convey a weariness born of chronic underfunding and kowtowing to freight traffic. Goods always get precedence over people, she says. I ask why. “They own the tracks,” she says.

Edson 13:45 19:00

I’m in the Panoramic dome car now, sipping flat champagne from a tiny plastic flute and thumbing a 2024 issue of AARP magazine someone left behind.

I laugh reading the cover story: “Brooke wants you to know she's Shields just fine." At least that’s how it appears to any logical left-to-right reader. It’s the kind of design gaff I'd normally read aloud to George. It hits me how important humour was in our relationship. I want to text him, but I remember I can’t: We’re not together anymore.

A sadness pierces my heart as the train slices the winter scene in two. I think of the train trips I took with George: Chicago to New Orleans; Italy to Switzerland; Innsbruck to Salzburg. The expansive skies above start closing in. I second-guess myself: Did I make the right decision, or the biggest mistake of my life?

I look down at the cover and another headline jumps off the page. “Single and loving it: Life alone at 50.” I’m reminds that sadness isn’t all I feel: I also feel free.

I flip to the article in question and one word stands out: horde. I started a New Yorker crossword when I boarded back in Vancouver. I couldn’t think of a five-letter word for “teeming mass of people.” I tried ‘horde,’ but then crossed it out, convinced it was spelled h-o-a-r-d. Turns out I was right the first time.

A warm male voice comes over the PA to say we’re approaching Wabamun Lake.  Seconds later, it has already receded into the remote Alberta oblivion, and I make a solemn vow never to second-guess myself again.

Evansburg 13:19 19:50

The scene outside the dining car window is as white as the linen cloth beneath our Noritaki dinnerware. Jamie is sitting across from me. He has bushy, dishevelled grey hair and a wiry beard. His moustache curls up at both ends and his eyebrows peak in the middle, giving him an evil affect.

Jamie is retired after a career in the Canadian Navy: “A heavy maintenance mechanic at sea…but with explosives,” he laughs. His pupils expand as he recalls the thrill of operating what he calls "man killers": bazookas, army tanks, assault rifles. He mimics firing a 50-calibre weapon with both hands, shaking like a child playing Silent Scope at an arcade. I’m scared. But the more he talks, the more I wonder whether Jamie is just a giant sweetheart who loves blowing shit up.

Suddenly, it strikes me: 24 Across. Four letters: “A part of a sword.” I knew it started with ‘h’, because the ‘h’ was for ‘horde.’ I knew Jamie would know. His answer—“hilt”—confirms my other hunches: a rude person is “aloof.”; to leave unpaid is to “stiff.”; dorm mentors are “RAs.”

With Jamie’s help, I have ten words to go.

Edmonton 16:28 19:42

Viking 19:50 22:56

Wainwright 21:53 1:50

Unity 00:14 2:55

Biggar 01:47 5:08

Saskatoon 03:31 07:23

My phone rings rudely, rocking me from my sleep: It’s my doctor in St. John’s. To my surprise, it’s no problem to fill my gout pill prescription in Toronto.

I hang up and my head hits the pillow. I breathe a sigh of relief, thankful to live in the country I live in. I look out at the dead-flat landscape: 42 years as a Canadian, and I’m finally glimpsing the Prairies for the very first time.

Watrous 05:07 09:00

I’m in the Panoramic Dome, working on my crossword with one hand and holding my coffee with the other. The train rocks, spilling the cup’s contents down my hand and wrist. It’s still less risky than the seat-back table.

I continue agonizing over the first 10 clues, as I’ve done since Surrey, and decide I can’t take the torture. I shoot a frantic glance at the girl across from me. She must know the meaning of “catadromous.”

The first clue I fire off is the most critical: each of its eight letters is the first letter in eight other words. I know it’s not “excursion”—that’s nine. So is “adventure.” And I know it starts with “e” because 1 Down has to be “Ebert.” I ask the quiet, nerdy girl if she has any worldly idea what “The subject of a wild anecdote” could be. She stares at the clue, prying the magazine from my coffee-stained hand: “Escapade?”

I shoot her a stupefied glare. I’m happy she has the answer, but bummed that we are well past Watrous by the time she gets it.

Frantic at the prospect of cracking the cursed crossword, I interrogate the girl like she’s the sole suspect in the LuluLemon heist: “WHERE WAS ROGER EBERT BORN?” It has to be Champaign, Illinois. There’s a statue there of a man holding up a thumb. His name is five letters, the first one being “e.” If my hunch is right—which it is—I still have to figure out an eight-letter word for “constant” which is not “perennial” or “permanent,” but I’ll fry that fish later. Panicking, the girl scrambles to enter my urgent query into her phone. A worried frown breaks out on her be-speckled face: Roger Ebert is from Illinois—but Urbana, she says—notChampaign.

My face is now as red as her Doc Marten boots, I implore my fellow passenger to find out who the FUCK is immortalized in a statue in Champaign, Illinois. Through tears, she whispers the words my ears clamour to receive: “Roger…Ebert.”

Every block on the crossword is now filled, saved for five. There’s no way there’s a third eight-letter word for “constant” that starts with p-e-r. Then I realize: Yes. There is.

Perpetual.

My capillaries contract and my blood pressure returns to its normal rhythm. “Thank you,” I say, using only my eyes and lips. I look out as the mighty Wheat Kings of Saskatchewan whiz past. I close my eyes and allow the remaining answers to cascade forth from their hiding places in the crevices of my beleaguered brain and out onto the paper like the waters flow down over Pyramid Falls in BC’s Thompson River Valley: “A certain Greek-life member” is a “soror”; “A rapper named for a dessert” is “Cupcakke”; “A catadromous creature” is an “eel.”

I thank my newfound friend, apologize for the rocky start to our relationship, and head to the dining car for some much-needed lunch.

Melville 08:26 12:10

A 60-ish woman with a grey bob and purple-rimmed cat eye glasses sits across from me slicing off a forkful of her open-faced tuna melt. I ask her name and she enunciates every syllable—Be-a-trix—surely to avoid being called Beatrice one more time. Her bottom lip is chapped, probably from the bone-dry air in her hometown in rural Alberta. She tells me about her career in the ministry and I feel sick: George's mom was a minister, before she went into the home. Her decline has been slow and gradual. I realize I won't be there to help him in the hard times. I always swore I would be.

Beatrix is still talking, but I can’t hear her anymore. I glance outside at the dead white landscape and I no longer want to look at winter. For the first time since Vancouver, I wish the train would stop. Moments later, it does. I get up to gulp in a mouthful of Melville air.

It was the most necessary breath I’ve ever taken.

Rivers 12:57 16:08

I head to dinner and see Jamie on the way. He taps my elbow as I walk past: “Save me a seat!”

I arrive in the dining car and tell the waiter I’m alone. I take the last seat at a table of four. I immediately flag the waiter back: “Actually,” I tell him, “I’m waiting for a friend.”

Jamie arrives and beams with his usual smile as he drops his heavy-set frame into the seat in front me: “So, how’s your crossword coming along?,” he asks. I tell him it’s been a hard slog, but thanks to him, I’m going to figure it out.

Portage la Prairie 12:57 17:22

I think of Greg—the quiet one at that first seated dinner, with the long black hair, black baseball cap, and black clothes. He didn’t mutter a word—except to place his order when the waiter came around and when Jamie mentioned the federal gun buy-back program. “Those aren’t even the guns people use to kill people,” Greg said, peeking for the first time up out from below the rim of his black cap: He believed a bigger effort could be made to keep guns out of the country altogether. It struck me how Greg’s passion on that particular topic had sprung him from his silence.

Greg was headed home to Portage la Prairie. Via rail was the only way he ever travelled. He’s never been on a plane, other than the small engine ones his neighbour owns. And doesn’t plan to be anytime soon.

Winnipeg 19:15 22:12

The train stops and passengers gather in the vestibule between cars 11 and 12. They lean against the wall watching Colleen shovel the snow that has accumulated on the steel steps since Melville. She apologizes sweetly: “I didn’t think there’d be so much.” There is no audible response—just quiet, knowing nods: It’s March, after all. And it’s Canada.

Colleen descends to the platform below and reaches out her hand to help a tall, gentle man with mental challenges navigate the steps. She suggests he walk down backwards. She calls him by his first name.

As I watch the scene unfold, a man behind me pulls up a map of Canada on his iPhone. A red pin appears over Winnipeg. “The country’s midway point,” he tells his girlfriend.

“Halfway home," I think to myself. And then it dawns on me.

I’ve been home this whole time.