An old town on the main line, where the trains still whistle through, even if they don’t stop very often or very long any longer. On a walk through unfamiliar streets, I suddenly reach almost the edge of town just as the brash horn blasts into the stillness of the warm end-of-summer evening. The train roars through, its cars illuminated by the streetlights and the stars above. They’re loaded with shipping containers, double decker, the type you see stacked up on the docks of large harbours. Now they’re strung out in a long, seemingly never-ending line charging across the flat landscape. As they flash by, I can see that many read “China Shipping,” a tantalizing cue to their origins and their possible contents. I wonder what’s in them, where they’re bound, from what sort of factory did their contents originate. Whose were the hands who assembled them, and what sort of life did the work of producing goods for insatiable Western consumers permit? I imagine these containers sitting on the docks in Vancouver, being loaded up, precipitously making their way around and through the Rockies, bursting out into the prairie and making a run for it straight through to the bush and muskeg before being unloaded again…where? Toronto? Montreal? To be unloaded, their contents shuttled here and there, probably some loaded on semi-trailers to be brought back West and delivered to various and sundry merchants, from Dollaramas to Wal-Marts to the local hardware store in this very town.
I missed the start of the train, but bringing up the rear was the familiar red Canadian Pacific engine, along for the ride this time, but soon enough to be taking on the burden of leading the way. Canadian Pacific. A world of meaning in those two words strung together. The CPR, the CP Line, the Banff Springs Hotel, Rogers Pass, blasting through mountains with nitro-glycerine, brand new towns named by CP surveyors, now towns without any train at all, some of them dead or dying, or maybe even thriving. Ribbons of steel, the last spike at Craigellachie, grand dining cars. All of these random and seemingly unrelated images spring to mind – all united by the CPR.
The whole thing can’t last more than two minutes, and yet so many images and thoughts swirl through my mind. How the quiet of the evening, overly punctuated, like too many commas in a run-on sentence, with the discordant whining of vehicles on the Trans-Canada Highway, was so disturbed by the sudden assault of the train. How I enjoyed the onslaught, how I’ve always loved hearing and watching trains go about their work. How it’s rare, since down in my country, in the Gap, there are no trains anymore, just decaying tracks. I think about how many hands have been involved in the common spectacle unfolding in front of my eyes – from the manufacture of the mysterious contents inside those shipping containers, to the containers themselves, to the people who operated the machines to get them on a train in China, to a dockyards somewhere in Asia, to a ship bound across the Pacific, to be unloaded in Vancouver, probably, to load them onto this Canadian train, and so on and so forth. The engineers, too, who are guiding this train, and the men who laid this track all those years ago, some of them perhaps underpaid, undervalued workers from China. Then there are the workers who maintain those tracks now, and the ones operating the schedules to ensure there’s only one train on any one given stretch of track at any one particular time.
I think all of this, and even more, but most of all I am struck by something powerful in its ordinariness.
from the gap 