« p. 121-128: Montreal, the French City
The Running Road
p. 128-139
At three o’clock at night, I stand on a platform in Ottawa waiting for the Quebec-Vancouver express, which should take me along to Winnipeg. I didn’t get a lot out of the large eastern cities. I kept an open mind because I felt obliged to, but I was truly grateful every time I saw a crude telegraph pole, accompanied by men in red shirts and cowboy hats. It meant the West to me. I never bothered to take a look at the old, stylish city of Quebec. I told myself that there are enough old, stylish cities in Europe. Now I had to go West, where style hasn’t had a chance yet, where life, boundless and unconstrained, has yet to find a formula.
On the wall of the platform, a placard displays the letters C.P.R. Every child in Canada knows these mysterious letters mean: Canadian Pacific Railway. Hot joy overtakes me as I scan the thick lines which which run across the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the railways for the trains.
I can’t explain the silent, nomadic instinct which clouds my mind again and again every time I see a map or a time table. Even a fifteen-cent travel guide does it to me the second I take it in my hand. I tend to go easier on railway and steamship companies. Instead of analyzing all the connections and consequences of these capitalistic enterprises, I see them as the tools of mankind’s undeniable aspirations. They satisfy people’s urges for the world, for the end goal of every aspiration, for the brotherhood of all, everyone who lives on the earth and is subject to its laws everywhere and in every climate.
The train I’ll be taking out West has more of an effect on me than can be explained by the pleasure of a comfortable vehicle. Those three letters mean more than a corporation with its capital, dividends, real estate, well-paid employees and terribly paid employees. I’m not the first, in a burst of enthusiasm, to call this institution a world wonder.
On a farm in Saskatchewan, I found a music book for the organ, which included, with all its national and spiritual hymns, The C.P.R. Hymn. I recorded the last lines:
The Railroad cars are going humming
through the great North-West.
We’ll sacrifice our hats, we will,
Four Dollar hats, brand new!
If that good farmer had brought out a new four dollar hat, ready for the sacrifice, I would have immediately started a whole new page in my book! --
On the Imperial Limited, you start on the shore of the Atlantic and travel for a day through Normandy and Brittany. You fall asleep in Brittany and wake up in Thuringia. You go to sleep in the Harz and wake up in Siberia. You lay down in Siberia, wake up in Hungary and travel for two days and nights through the Hungarian wheatfields. You hit the hay in Voralberg, and by the time you’ve woken up, you’ve traveled through Switzerland. It goes on like this, hour after hour, until you see the twilight shining over the most fantastic mountain scenery. Another day would probably have brought you to the seas and hills of the Scottish highlands. But the night and the next morning takes you through rugged rock debris, right out of Gustave Doré’s Inferno. At last, you wake up among fruit and flower gardens in a tropical land of towering cedars, alders and vines. With the shimmering sea in the distance, you see bearded Hindus on both sides of the train, accompanied by the Chinese who hunt fish with spears, and all of a sudden the train can go no further.
Nothing comes close to the mythical train lines which sweep past all the wonders of the earth, like the Orient Express in-between Paris and Constantinople or the North-South train in-between Petersburg and Palermo. And then we have the Canadian trains, which don’t connect large cities so much as create them. This train, which makes its way along forests, wastelands, cliffs and valleys, nails down its track inch by inch from one sea to the other. People ride it, inch for inch, watching out for their homesteads as the train slowly disappears into the West. There are two large systems in Canada, the Grand Trunk Pacific and the Canadian Northern. Both inhabit the north and and help fulfill the promise of the West, but it’s the C.P.R. that is developing Canada.
Currently one thousand miles of its railroad are under construction among a total of 11,700 miles in Canada’s interior. (The company also owns 4,300 miles in the Union.) Their ships travel from Liverpool to Montreal and from Vancouver to Yokohama. Those three initials span the world’s traffic from Liverpool to Yokohama. The government has rewarded the business for all this land development with a gift, a loan of twenty-five million acres. I’d just like to mention that I have no knowledge of national economies. I’m saying this because I’m going to have to come back to this detail later. I’m also not sure what dangers are posed for the political management of a country when a private company is allowed to have so much territory. I also can’t judge what dangers this grant presents for Canada. --
In Ottawa, at three o’clock at night, I feel that strong joy boiling in me as the milky white light of the train appears in the distance, the cold eye of the headlight searching its way through Canada. The eye disappears behind houses and trees, leaving an eerie cloud in the night. Suddenly, the train screams out in the night, and the headlight illuminates two silver lines running parallel up to my feet. I walk along the platform, following the Negro who carries my suitcase.
The Negro stops and stares at the ground in front of him. “What’s the matter?” His white teeth illuminating his face in the night, the Negro explains to me that three hours ago a person was run over on this very spot, a person who had both his legs torn off by the train. It happened at midnight, so by now he must certainly be dead. He was forty years old, had a wife and children. He was no novice, no greenhorn, but a true and traveled servant of the company.
As the Negro deposited my suitcase in the sleeping car at the end of the train, I remained standing on that spot. My good mood had disappeared. I suddenly realized the price paid for the joy of each person, for every ounce of life on this earth. I think of the thousands and thousands who lead out their lives in the West so that trains like this can be built, so that people could come to the homesteads, so that a moment of joy could flicker briefly in the heart of a foreign traveler.
Don’t forget it! Always remind yourself who makes the modern world run and what prices they pay. Don’t forget it. Don’t forget it for a moment.
At the end of the train, it’s dark in the sleeping car, and everyone is already asleep. But here in the front, in the Colonist Cars behind the luggage and mail cars, there is still life, noise and light behind the lowered windows.
As the Negro carries my suitcase to the back, I stay on this car and find a scene in the night that I will never forget.
A brute is standing in the car. I can only see him from the waist up. His upper body is naked, and he’s holding two bare legs dangling from a bunk. Three eerie figures stagger in a group.
The brute is tattooed from his Adam’s apple to his navel. I see a blue and red snake coming from under his left armpit up onto his chest. A French flag is tattooed on his left bicep, and on his left, a dagger. His chest, stomach and navel are decorated with the obscene picture of a naked lady. On his throat sits the head of a circus wrestler. He speaks with a ghoulish voice to the person above him on the bunk, whose legs he holds tightly with his red fists.
The other three, openly drunk, gesticulate and yell. One of them swings a bottle over his hat. It’s hard to tell if he wants to share the bottle or flog the man with it.
The Negro comes back and cannot explain what is happening.
The next morning I go through the entire train and look at the people in each colonist car. The whole group seems to be disembarking. From here by the North Bay, a branch line runs to Colbalt, to a newly discovered gold mine in Porcupine, North Ontario.
I wake up later. Everyone is already awake in my car. We travel through a bleak stretch of stony ground, pine trees and wild shrubs. Sometimes we pass over rushing water filled with logs which get jammed on the bends and bays of the entire pond. For hours at a time, stone, pine trees, water, stone. At one station, a group of tattered, delinquent children stare out of a log cabin at the train. At another, a small wooden church stands in the middle of a group of log cabins.
I tried to imagine that I was an immigrant leaving his old homeland for this new one, traveling to the West just as I am right now, looking out the window and saying to myself with a shudder: “Am I really starting over in this country?” For a day and two nights, he will travel through these wastelands, hills, waters and forests. He would have to blindfold his eyes to keep his heart from breaking at the sight of this country.
But even for tourists in the beautiful observation car at the end of the train, there is still something upsetting to see, not only in-between Ottawa and Winnipeg, but also for the entire stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific, even on the country roads and mountain paths where the train can’t travel, even by the wagon ruts. I’m talking about the way that this country makes room for train tracks, streets, villages, telegraph wires, lanes and paths.
Simply put, every tree, tree trunk and handful of bushes that stand in the way will be burnt down or blasted with dynamite. Relentless, barbaric, sacrilegious insanity.
On this rich continent, it seems that a few thousand square miles of burnt forest count for nothing. That’s just how the Canadian Pacific and the Grand Trunk Railroad operate. With the exception of a part that ran through the prairie, the largest portion of my travels crossed over charred stretches of forest and torn-up tree roots from one sea to the other.
In the mountains of Kootenay, British Columbia, after traveling for four hours through an annihiliated prehistoric forest, an engineer explained to me that the cost of blowing up trees and roots was about sixty cents of dynamite, as opposed to paying workers a daily wage of a quarter to dig them up. And all along the way, sometimes on top of the charred stumps, I could see official signs from the minister of the interior forbidding the burning of the forest!
Here and there, it looks as if the people learned this sort of rage against the forest from the thunderstorms which have transformed entire hilltops into wastelands of gray, dead branches and trunks. The burnt forests out here and the dead, grayish-blue branches further inland make a picture against the sky of dreary destruction that you can’t help but remember.
But fertile, triumphant nature drives on in the midst of all this mutilation and plays its tricks on the foolish, overbearing little people. In the embers of the burning forest, seeds ripen, burst and launch their insides in a wide arc onto the surrounding earth, where it buries itself in the cracks . . . The burnt stumps protrude out of a tropical maze of colorful weeds, attracting all the animals to come out to this section of the track! Out West, I saw machines anxiously placed before the locomotive -- weedburners, which douse the colorful children with fire in an attempt to curb the growth.
The Imperial Limited travels from ocean to ocean with eighteen cars. I travel one time through the entire train, observing the people who live with me on this rushing road. Our apartment moves unceasingly to the West, the goal of every one of us.
The locomotives riding these rails look like submarines traveling on wheels the height of a man. A small, comical chimney sticks up out of it, behind which sit two humps like small observation towers, and in-between these humps a bell swings incessantly back and forth. In front of the chimney sits the Cyclops’s eye, which I had seen from the platform, and which I continue to see in the prairie, in chasms, streams and rock fissures and finally by the waves of the Strait of San Juan de Fuca in the weeks to come. There is also an instrument at the front of the locomotive designed to clear the way, a giant plow-like iron grating, the cowcatcher. This hybrid entity, looking like a plow in front and a submarine in back, follows the road West!
It is really a road. A long peculiar road, beginning in a poor worker’s village, traveling through the opulent districts and the cities of the villas of the rich. Run, wonderful road, run to the West!
The Colonist Cars in the front of the train are furnished like living rooms. A hallway runs through the middle of the car. (All American cars, from the Pullmans on down. You only see separate compartments in the best cars, furnished for the needs of the four hundred people who can pay for it.) To the right and the left, benches have room for two. A convertible bed is fixed to the wall, but over the benches planks are bolted to the ceiling that can be let down at night, emerging as bunks attached to chains. Every car of the colonist class has a proper kitchen at the end. Every hour of the day, mothers, daughters and various ladies cook meals for the families. For three, four, five days, they will cook, eat, sleep, play, live -- and hope -- in this room.
And sing! In every region I traveled through, there were men, women and mostly whole families who would sing psalms with loud voices. Once, on a Sunday afternoon up in the Northwest, I heard an entire Colonist Car singing:
Nearer, my God, to Thee
The candy boy constantly comes and goes throughout the train, yelling with a monotonous voice: “Chiclets, Choc’lates, Chewing Gum!” They offer books, newspapers and magazines from the city. The Negroes in their gray uniforms, those poor Negroes work for a dollar a day and often aren’t allowed a wink of sleep for three days. They lean and yawn in the gangway between cars. The white conductor sets himself up with the travelers, takes a nap or courts one of the ladies traveling alone. Three typewriters rattle from early morning until late at night in front of the poor restless slaves who will never have a chance to experience the wonder of travel. Back in the observation car, everyone has made close friendships with each other. The tattooed person holds on tight. Two younger sons found each other and reveal to me naively and kindly in the smoking room their plans to speculate using maps and farm prospects. The small children run around and allow their parents to make friends. My day passes by pleasantly with the younger sons, a warm-hearted elderly couple from Montreal and a young Japanese man traveling home to Nagasaki.
I’m not so lucky in the Colonist Car. The people are quiet, sleepy and taciturn. They live in so much filth and dust that it forces a general grumpiness into their faces whenever someone descends upon them from the Pullman World. It was just like steerage on the ship. Everyone sneered at any visitor from above venturing into their midst.
At stations, which could be hard to come by, everybody gets out to stretch their legs on the firm ground after the rattling and shaking of endless travel. Entire towns would come out to the platform and blend in with the travelers as the train rested. The travelers stare curiously at these people who lead their lives in the wilderness. Then the train whistles, the Negro arrives with a stool to help you into the car, and the inhabitants left behind in their small village in the wilderness stare at the departing train without the slightest sign of envy. On the last car, the observation car, clearly visible letters are written across the back: Imperial C.P.R. Limited.