Coming Home

I slept better on the train the last night than I had the two previous nights. My seat mate said the same thing. We wondered  if it was because we were so tired from not sleeping well the previous nights that we were able to ignore the discomfort and unusualness of sleeping sitting up. For me I think it was at least in part because we went to sleep a bit later - resisting the urge to sleep in exchange for more conversation and because when I woke up at 2:00AM I didn't try to go back to sleep - something that never works -but instead spent thirty minutes watching the ephemeral landscape drift by. I should know by now that if I am not tired - no matter how long I lay there with my eyes shut - I am not going to fall asleep.

There was more snow on the ground in Kamloops than we had seen anywhere else but it still was not nearly as much as I would have anticipated. It may have been my imagination but I think I did notice that with snow on the tracks the ride was quieter and it felt smoother.  The smoothness of the ride  somehow reminded me of riding a horse through the deep snow. By the time we left Kamloops we were only two hours and a bit late.

As the sun rose the next morning, I woke up my seat mate as we were passing through the last of the mountain ranges. Again the sun was shinning and the mountains looked really impressive. My seatmate went to the dome car for the last time. During the hour or so that he was gone, I packed up all of my stuff. It was so much easier doing so when I didn't have to clamber over his legs.  As I was moving back and forth between where I had stored my pack and my seat, I looked out the window. Somewhere west of Chilliwack we had left the snow behind and entered an area where everything was green, The grass looked luxurious, there were rows and rows of grape vines and it looked as if spring could be just be round the corner.

We got to the Vancouver train station just after 11:00, I said good bye to my seat mate, waited for thirty minutes to get my bag and was off to the Skytrain. The Skytrain was as good as always, I didn't get lost downtown, I didn't have to wait too long for the express bus and before long I was in the waiting room of the ferry terminal. The ferry ride was extraordinary in that it was very sunny and the mountains to the west were post card perfect with their gentle covering of snow. The only glitch in the crossing was when it appears as if the ferry was heading towards Crofton and had to slow down and turn north.

My son picked me up at the terminal and in less than an hour I was in Duncan.

It had been an interesting trip. I had talked to a few people, had some great conversations with my Chinese seat mate, managed to get some sleep, read a lot, listened to a lot of music, managed to stretch out my food with spending too much money, didn't get lost..... and now I was home...... ready to start a new phrase in my life.

Jasper

We were reasonably on time until we got near Saskatoon sometime around 11:00PM. We had to wait for three freight trains to go buy which took some time. Because it was so late (and dark), it took longer than normal to load the new passengers. Once that was done - the train moved twenty feet and stopped. The engine had apparently lost power and it took an hour or so to fix what ever the problem was, then we had to wait for another freight train to pass us by. By the next morning we were running four hours late.

It was a noisy night - whining kids, couples who were courting and people who were, like me, struggling to figure out how to sleep sitting up without infringing upon the space of the person beside them. It was no place to get a good night's sleep.

People who were leaving the train in Edmonton were up early getting ready. They clearly were not aware that the train was running late. Some of the kids had their coats on three hours early.  By the time they were getting ready to leave I was awake but I am not too sure if all of the other passengers were as pleased with the early morning chaos.

It is a bright clear morning , the frost on the trees suggested that it was cold outside. The train station in Edmonton is particularly uninspiring. I did not go outside for "fresh air".

While a number of people left the train at Edmonton, an equal number got on and the train remained crowded. The conductors did an admirable job of moving people around so that couples and families could be seated together.

Hours later the disembarkation and reloading scene happened again at Jasper. While it is normally an almost two hour layover at Jasper, we were only allowed 45 minutes. Which was fine for me. 45 minutes was enough time for me to run to the sub shop and pick up a veggie sub for supper.

During the day I seldom saw my seatmate. He was quite charmed by the Canadian countryside . He spent most of his time in the dome car taking pictures. I asked him at some point how many he had taken - he said well over a hundred. He was fortunate that coming into Jasper, it was bright and sunny. It was late in the afternoon and the sun touched the upper slopes of the mountains - making the whole range look quite magical. I was glad that he managed to get such great shots.

Once it was too dark to see and take pictures he would come back to his seat and we chatted until bedtime. If I had to have a seatmate - having one who spent much of his time in the dome car and who was a good conversationalist was the way to go.

On the Train Winter 2015

Leaving Sudbury this morning was much harder than I thought it would be. My daughter has driven me to the train station, to catch the train out west, a number of times. But on those other times - I was just going for a week or two, or at the most for eight weeks. This time it is for four and half months. This time, when I return to Ontario, it will be just for a visit. I must confess I was more than a bit choked up.

The train was of course a bit late. By the time the train pulled out of the Sudbury Junction station it was 6:30. I suppose for Via Rail being just over an hour  late after travelling from Toronto to Sudbury - a six hour drive by car - is not that bad. It could I suppose been much worse.

The train is surprisingly full. My memory of last Christmas when I travelled out west for a visit is that the cars felt half empty. I can remember at least one person who sat by himself in seats designed for four people. Today I think that there are relatively few empty seats. While I am sitting alone right now, I would think that I will not be  alone for the whole trip. While the company might be nice - it also means that I can't spread out as much as I would like.

The car, in spite of the fact that is more crowded than normal, is quieter than usual. There is a young family at the front of the car, but at least up to now the children are quiet. Other people seem to be sleeping. Across from me are two young guys who woke up an hour or so ago, went for a walk -perhaps to get a coffee - came back and seemed to have fallen asleep again. The seats in front of me and on the other side are each configured for a family group. It would appear that mom and her teenage daughter have one such four seat arrangement, and dad and son have the other. Again they have been very quiet either reading or sleeping.The only thing I know about the person behind me is that they have a bad cold and frequently cough. There are other people who are coughing in this car and I suspect that anyone who has not yet been exposed to this year's cold virus - will have ample opportunity to inhale more than the required volume of diseased droplets  to develop a cold.

4:45PM.
The train remains quiet. Much to my surprise it is on time.  I don't think we have had to pull over onto a siding to let a fright train go by more than twice. On both occasions we waited no more than ten minutes.  I mentioned my surprise on being on time to one of the VIA employees and they told me that the train had been on time on his last run too. Will wonders never cease!

I got out at Hornepayne. The sun was shining, which was a nice change from the grayness of the past few days, but it was rather cold - colder than I had experienced this year.  Within the last twelve hours it had snowed just enough to cover the barren and frozen earth and to lay a thick dusting on the bows of the tamarack and spruce trees. It made for a very pretty scene. I thought about walking up to the store but it was very slippery walking along the train tracks. There was nothing I really needed to buy that was worth falling for.

After the train started up again there was a bit of a magic show. The magician, who was getting free passage to do a couple of shows a day for both the economy class and the rich class was alright. Not wonderful (except for his steel ring tricks which were quite impressive), but it must be very hard to do tricks on a moving train with people within a foot of you. He was entertaining and if some of his tricks were a bit obvious - I think everyone who was there enjoyed it.

I am looking forward in some perverted fashion to sleeping tonight. I hope my body remembers how to sleep while folded up on a too small seat.

ALmost Gone

This time tomorrow (12:00 ish) I will be on the train heading west. It all feels a bit surrealistic to me. It is as if I can hardly believe that I am actually moving, or perhaps because, at least in my head, I left so long ago that the time in between the thought and the actual physical move has just been time that is irrelevant. Or perhaps this fuzzy disconnected feeling is just the effects of the decongestants that I am taking to combat a cold that I seem to have picked up from my daughter or at least her house.

While I think I said good bye to most of the people that I wanted to, it still feels as if there are folks that I have missed. There were others to whom I said good bye to and who didn't seem to take my move very seriously. It was almost as if at least a few of them assumed that I would be coming back to Peterborough. I wonder what they know that I don't? I think for of a few of the folks that I spoke to - I had been so long out of their lives, sometimes disconnected because of my switch in careers - that they wondered why I was telling them.  I suspect that my general aloofness perhaps discourages outward displays of feelings.

I never even tried to re-visit the various places that have been important to me. I may in the future regret that, but as I was driving through the three counties that have shaped so much of my adult life, all I could think of was - what have I forgotten to do and how bad will the snow flurries get as I pass through the next snow belt?

All of that stuff is behind me now. what has been done, has been done. What I forgot to do or just didn't get around to doing won't get done. Things that have to get done - will get done at the other end.

I am off tomorrow - the train if it is on time, will leave Sudbury Junction at 5:13AM. A long time ago, on CBC television there use to be a children's program called Maggie Muggins. At the end of each program she use to dance around and sing " and I wonder what will happen tomorrow" (or at least that is how I remember it 55 years later). It often feels as if that little ditty could be mantra for my life.

Sleeping

I have not been sleeping all that well the past few weeks. Although when I think about it, throughout my life I have seldom slept well. When I was a director of a social service agency, or before that a supervisor and a front line worker I always worried in the dark hours of the night about the case load or about decisions that I was making. If there was no particular crisis to worry over, there were always a multitude of world problems that needed solutions. More recently there were classes to develop and students to worry about to keep my hyperactive mind awake. But for the last year my life has been relatively stress free. There are always the world problems that get solved so easily at 3:30 in the morning (with solutions just as easily forgotten by 7:30) but they don't keep me nearly as awake as they use to.  However in the past month I have reverted to my old sleep pattern of falling asleep very quickly, sleeping for a few hours, waking up around 3:30 and staying awake. Sometimes I drift off around 7:00 but usually I just get up.

The only reason that I can think of is my move out west.

There is no doubt that this moving process certainly feels weirder than usual and I am not entirely sure why. There is nothing particularly unusual for me about this move. I have twice moved across the country, I have moved to places that I didn't know more than once (including twice to apartments that I had rented without seeing) and I have seen my stuff loaded into a truck and disappear down the road, never being sure that if I would see it again. It may be that this move feels more permanent than other times but I don't think so. I have always made my moves with the assumption that the move would be reasonably permanent. Clearly something about this move is causing more anxiety than normal. The simple truth might be is that I have spent far too much time in the past four or do months thinking about this move and all of its complications and ramifications. I may have over-thought this whole process. I may have been better off if I had focused on something else as opposed to spending countless hours worrying about the endless minutia of moving.

For example I could have spent a lot less time thinking and planning what to put in each box. I was worried that I would make boxes too heavy or too awkward to lift. I need not have worried. The movers carried down the stairs my heaviest boxes two at a time. The large boxes, the trunks or large totes at felt awkward for me to manouver were managed without any complaint or obvious difficulty. As I have had people carry my stuff up and down various apartment stairs before, I should have known that they would have managed just fine. In my more rational moments I am equally as sure that all of my petty worries will prove to be equally as silly.

I hope that within a week I will, if not be sleeping my own place, I will at least be in Duncan. That should ease any remaining anxieties and therefore perhaps I will start to sleep through an entire night.

Or it may be that long ago I developed some really terrible sleep habits and up to now I have had created excuses not to accept that. Perhaps I should.

There are of course, all kinds of other reasons for my distorted sleep patterns.

Transgendered Judges

This past week, both the Globe and Mail and the CBC news site announced that Canada now had appointed its first transgender judge. Good for us!! Considering that that great bastion of progressive human rights to the south of us have three publically appointed individuals who also have been identified as trans, I guess we Canadians can be assured that we are in the forefront of all things politically correct. How nice for us.

 Please forgive the sarcasm.

Such an announcement raises two interesting and perhaps even important questions. One is why do we care? What makes this announcement even remotely interesting to anyone other than perhaps this newly appointed judge's closest friends and family? A corollary question could be: how long will it take until announcements such as this one are no longer considered newsworthy?

I appreciate that our judicial system needs to be in some way representative of the diversity of our population. I also accept that in the fairly recent past individuals who have expressed sexual identities different from the norm (as established by a puritan, conservative, judgemental and ethnocentric class) were not given a fair hearing in any of our pubic institutions including the courts. However to assume that the appointment of one or even ten transgender judges will do anything to correct the sins of the past or prevent such errors in the future is absurd. Just adding a representative of particular minority, underrepresented  or oppressed group to the bench is not a guarantee of justice in the future. For example in spite of the fact that we have had women sitting as judges for some time and that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is a woman, a  Canadian judge recently asked a rape victim is she could have just kept her legs closed? Clearly we have a long way to go in changing how at least some judges think. A single judicial appointment will have no effect on how the courts or in fact the public thinks.

The second question is why is it any of our business what this one individual has done to reconcile his sexual identity with his secondary sexual characteristics? Clearly there is none. While it might be interesting to know what sort of law this individual has specialized in, whether or not he has some standing in his community as a fair and honourable man or how engaged he is in the broader community, it is absolutely irrelevant as to what his sexual identity is. Furthermore, it seems to me to be an invasion of his privacy. While I hope this particular person is okay with being identified as a transgender person, we should never assume that everyone is as comfortable.

The bottom line is that I don't need to know and I don't want to know. The only conceivable reason why the story was deemed newsworthy is because it makes us look good. It makes it look as if we have done something noble or worthwhile. As a friend said to me - the really important news will be when we can make such appointments and not announce them as being something profoundly radical wonderful.

Moving - Being Homeless

Homeless - sort of....... I, of course, am not really homeless. I have a nice place to live in Duncan BC. Within a week the floors there will be all done, the windows will have new moldings and other bits and pieces will be done to make the place quite functional. But I am not there and I won't be there for another few weeks. In the meantime almost all of my possessions are in some sort of trucker limbo as they sit in a depot waiting for other stuff to make a full truck load.

It was a strange feeling watching my stuff being taken away by strangers. They were nice strangers - the three of them worked hard and efficiently. Other than a few comments about how I had more stuff than I had estimated, they were gracious and kind. They were very careful about my furniture as they wrapped up everything. I kept on saying that a few more scratches on my two dining room chairs that we bought 35-40 years at an auction or a few more dings on lamps equally as old would not matter but they insisted that every bit of furniture needed to be protected.

I was worried about some of the boxes and totes being too heavy. I need not have. For the most part they carried two, three and even sometimes four boxes at a time. One of the guys in particular had an unusual technique for carrying the boxes. He stacked up a few boxes and then turned his back to the pile, reached behind, grabbed the lowest box and walked away. In other words he was carrying them on his back as opposed to carrying them on his front - which makes sense as I can carry far more weight in my backpack than I can in my arms in front of me. Certainly carrying boxes that way would save back pain.

There were three movers....which was unusual but when I mentioned this to the driver he said it was because he had had a quad bypass just nine weeks ago and needed to be careful. His doctor had not yet cleared him to go back to work. He made sure that everything was given a sticker with a number on it and that number was recorded on a sheet with a description of the item. He did carry some boxes but we all nagged at him when he tried to do too much. One guy stayed in the truck. Hs job was to stack the stuff. I won't know until the other end and see if anything got broken if he did a good job or not - but he clearly knew what he was doing. The third guy did most of the carrying ( although I did move some of the lighter stuff). He was not very big but he certainly had a lot of energy and was surprisingly strong.

The movers left, I swept the floors, made a run to the recycling centre, came back and loaded up my car, some neighbours said good bye, (they also gave me some shortbread for my trip),  and I was off.

After all my work in the past month or so getting ready - three hours of loading a truck and it was if I had never been there. One of my neighbours said a few weeks ago that the street won't be the same if I am not there. I think she was just being nice. But I was a renter for five or so years which is longer than most, I did do a lot of walking so even if we didn't talk people saw me up and about, and at least once of year some of them visited me when I had a sale.

But now I don't live there - I don't live anywhere.................