Baltimore's Mansion

by Wayne Johnston

  The train was a reminder for my father of his first trip off the island in September of 1948. Each journey on it was a recapitulation of that one, when he had seen Newfoundland for the first time, just prior to leaving it for the first time. That trip had been for him a strange hybrid of arrival and departure, discovery and abandonment. He for some reason often brought it up when we were driving home from Ferryland, but when I asked him why, he would not tell me.

  There was the circadian length of the trip. The island, as measured by the train, was almost exactly one day wide, twenty-four hours from coast to coast. One single Newfoundland-encompassing day. You departed and arrived at the same hour of the morning or the same hour of the evening. Or you did except when there were blockages along the line, when huge snowdrifts arced across the tracks and the train was stalled for days, as happened regularly on a northwest section of the line called the Gaff Topsails where, as the Pragmatists pointed out, it was not unusual for a passenger-filled train to be stranded for days, twenty unwalkable miles from the nearest settlement. The length of one memorable train trip had been more lunar than circadian, a group of travellers stalled in a train on the Gaff Topsails for twenty-six days. About a hundred times as many Newfoundlanders as it was possible for the train to hold claimed to have been on that run.

  On the train you travelled by night, and the night always found you in the “core,” as my father called it, in the wild, unsettled middle of the island as far inland as you could go except on foot. The train was a moving hotel and the whole of Newfoundland went by outside your window; it was a restaurant on wheels with an ever-changing view, one kind of landscape giving way to another as if the island were composed of many countries. The dining and sleeping accommodations were, as trains go, luxurious.

  What percentage of the train supporters had voted against Confederation in 1948 is impossible to say, but my father said that a large majority had. Unfortunately for them, it was announced before the “trial period” even started that according to a poll, Newfoundlanders preferred the bus to the train by five to one. Before the campaign to save it got off the ground, the train was doomed. The faster, cheaper buses that were setting out from St. John’s each morning were packed, while whole train cars that left from Riverhead Station were empty, pulled pointlessly along behind the few that were occupied. The loss of the train would be yet another of the foul fruits of Confederation. But father and the others clung to the notion that as soon as the novelty of the bus wore off, and as soon as the weather softened in the spring and there was no longer any possibility of being stranded on the tracks, the train would make up the gap. Or, as a compromise, the government would decide to run the train only from May to November.

  There was talk for a while that all the Johnstons and the Everards would book passage on a final Christmas run the day after Boxing Day, from St. John’s to Port aux Basques and back. My father and Harold pitched it to the others, and there was talk of a grand expedition. But interest in the trip soon fell off when it was discovered how expensive it would be. The only such group trip across the island that we could have afforded would have been by bus. My older brothers were of an age when to travel with one’s parents was no longer an adventure. If not all of us were going, my mother could not go. Eva and Jim bowed out. Marg would not go unless my mother did. The Everards had never been that interested. The number of travellers dwindled gradually until there were just my father and me and Harold left, and then Harold had to cancel out because of work. That left only ten-year-old me and my father.

  We started out from St. John’s just after sunrise on December 27, 1968. There was no snow on the east coast. The new highway roughly shadowed the railway tracks except for taking the short and easy way around most obstacles, and except for the elevated Gaff Topsails stretch, which the highway avoided altogether, instead forking up to Springdale on the coast, then down southwest again, more or less meeting up with the train tracks at Deer Lake.

  We were sometimes able to see the highway from the train, and once, not far outside of St. John’s, we ran all but side by side with one of the Roadcruiser buses. I had been surprised at Riverhead Station to see how small the buses were. It was hard to imagine them posing any threat to the train, which stretched as far as I could see, the initials CNR repeated on each car until they became an indecipherable white blur.

  But I found myself now treacherously rooting for that single silver bus. I was impressed by how much faster it was moving than we were. The bus looked like a sleek, wingless plane and, in comparison with the many-sectioned train, seemed so heroically singular, so self-sufficient. The highway itself seemed a marvel to me, its sides clear-cut of trees and bush, as did the strange sight of pavement in the woods, with those reassuringly artificial white lines down the middle that somehow made the wilderness less desolate. The weathered, wooden train, the wooden, black tarred ties, the rusting rails, the ancient railway bed along which trees had grown to full height since the line went through in 1898, the once-pink granite gravel now washed grey with age all seemed to blend in with the landscape, an unobtrusiveness that to some was one of its merits, though it did not seem so to me.

  We remained side by side with the bus only because of the train’s length. People, my father not among them, crowded one side of the train to see it. Children stuck out their tongues at it, though what effect this had on its driver or its occupants we couldn’t tell, for its windows were tinted.

  The railway and the road diverged, and the bus passed from view for several minutes, then was distantly visible, far ahead and to the right of us, turning sharply away from the railway track as if it were headed across a different island than we were, a more modern, train-excluding island. After it next passed from view, we did not see that bus again, though we came to within yards of the highway many times.

  It was on this train trip that I finally crossed the Isthmus of Avalon. For a time on the isthmus, as when we drove in the car until forced back by the fog, we could see the ocean on either side. Then we plunged into the river of fog, and I was awed by the certainty that this time we would not turn round but would come out the other side, as if the train could do what our little car could not. We rumbled through the fog. I pressed my face to the window, just able to make out vague shapes and colours.

  And then suddenly we hurtled out of Avalon into the mundane world. I imagined the view of someone watching from trackside as more and more of the train emerged from the tunnel of fog, some of it out, some of it still inside, my imaginary spectator wondering if the train would ever end, then seeing the car with me inside, my face pressed to the glass, looking for the first time on this the origin of grievous wounds.

  It looked exactly like Avalon, but I had expected it would, had prepared myself for this illusion and was almost able to convince myself that we were now sub-Avalon, pre-Avalon, post-Avalon, lapsed in some way all the more sinister for being imperceptible. We were in the land of the baymen now, the land of the bush-borns.

  For a while we travelled parallel to the highway again. Cars overtook us with embarrassing ease. Then a Roadcruiser bus.

  “Look,” my father said, loud enough for the whole car to hear, “it’s that bloody bus again.”

  “Not the same one,” a man sitting several seats ahead of us said, remaining face forward so that all we could see of him was the back of his head, a starched shirt collar, the shoulders of an impeccable new black suit. “That one left Riverhead two hours after we did. Caught up with us already.”

  “It looks like a lunch bucket on wheels,” my father said, and many people let out snorts of derision.

  “It may not look like much,” the man said, “but it gets you where you want to go faster than this train does.”

  “Does it, now?” my father said. “Well, what are you doing on the train if you love the bus so much?”

  “Never said I loved the bus,” the man said, still not turning round. “But we might as well face facts —”

  A collective g
roan cut the man short. The need to “face facts” was the pro-bus argument, and they had heard it all before. My father asked the man again what he was doing on the train if he loved the bus so much.

  “Never said I loved the bus,” the man said, as if he was implacably determined not to have words put in his mouth. “Taking one last ride for old times’ sake, like everybody else. We might just as well face facts —”

  The woman beside him, whom I presumed was his wife, gave him a now-don’t-go-starting-something nudge with her shoulder. The man straightened up as if in silent defiance of her warning.

  “Why might we just as well face facts?” my father said. “Could you tell me that? Why might we just as well face facts? If we all faced facts, there’d be no one left in Newfoundland. There’s nothing in the facts to keep us here.”

  I knew from his tone of voice and his expression that he was one provocation away from launching into an attack on Joey Smallwood, the fixed referendum and Confederation. I half-hoped, half-dreaded, that the man would say something else. There was a nervous silence in the car.

  “We’re a country of fact-facing bus-boomers,” my father said, grinning, looking out the window.

  “A province,” the fact-facing bus-boomer said. “We’re a province now, not a country. Never were a country, really. If you know your history.” I heard in his voice a politeness that was meant to be transparently insincere, patronizing, the tone of someone who held in reserve a trump card he need never play. I could just see it. A riot on the train fought over a matter decided twenty years ago.

  “I know my history,” my father said. “A province of progress, is that what we are?” “A province of progress” was one of Joey’s latest slogans.

  “Better than a backward country,” the fact-facing bus-boomer said. It was all there now, just beneath the surface. His continuing to face forward while he spoke, showing us nothing but the back of his head was clearly getting to my father. He had no idea what my father looked like, nor did he care to know, the back of his head seemed to say.

  “Is this what we’ll have to listen to, from here to Port aux Basques,” my father said, “a fact-facing, bus-booming, arse-kissing civil servant?” My father all but spat out the last two words as if thereby expressing his distaste for his own occupation with the federal Fisheries department and ridding himself of the self-contempt he had to live with every day.

  “One last look for old times’ sake,” my father said. “Tell me, if your mother was going under for the third time, would you take one last look for old times’ sake? What am I saying — of course you would.”

  I was sure the man would turn around now, but he didn’t. A purser whose CNR uniform lent him an authority that belied his skinny, almost puny frame and who must have heard my father came halfway up the stairs of the observation car, just to show himself, a tacit reminder that no troublemaking would be tolerated.

  My father looked at the man across the aisle from us and both of them smiled and looked at the fact-facing bus-boomer, the back of whose neck was now a livid red. His wife was gripping his upper arm with both her hands, her head bobbing emphatically as if she were urgently whispering to him.

  It was probably no coincidence that just before the train stopped at Gambo, the birthplace of Joey Smallwood, the bus-boomer and his wife got up and left the observation car, which they were able to do without turning round to face my father, the stairway that led down below being several rows in front of them. We only saw them briefly in profile as they went quickly down the steps. All I remember of them is that both were blushing so that they looked as if through years of marriage they had developed perfectly compatible complexions.

  “We might as well face facts.” That was not just the argument for the bus. It had been the argument for Confederation. The confederates hadn’t argued for Canada per se because most Newfoundlanders knew nothing more about Canada than what little they had heard from Canadian servicemen stationed in St. John’s throughout the war. There had been far more Americans stationed there, a friendly occupation force that had poured money into Newfoundland, building military installations that had yet to be shut down. Wartime was looked back on by Newfoundlanders as the American era, years when they saw firsthand the swaggering largesse of the country to which thousands of their relatives had gone in search of jobs.

  On the siding at Gambo, my father did not once look out the window. But neither did Gambo inspire him to hold forth as I thought it would. Perhaps if the bus-boomer had stayed…

  My father sat in silence, engrossed, or pretending to be, in a book he’d brought along. Brooding, more likely. I had thought that by leaving, the bus-boomer had admitted defeat. But now I saw that he had not, that he had left because he had no need to argue: for the bus, for Smallwood, for Confederation, for anything. It was on this my father was brooding, on the smirk implicit in the man’s every word.

  We won, we won and nothing you can say can change that fact, and nothing makes victory sweeter than the enduring bitterness of men like you. That was the meaning of their disdainful march from the observation car.

  Sometime in the afternoon, I dozed off and did not wake up until we were approaching the Gaff Topsails, a steep-sloped tract of wilderness, the highest point on the line and the place where delays were most likely in the winter when the tracks were blocked by snow. The tracks along the Topsails were not only elevated but flat, so even when it wasn’t snowing all that was needed to bury the tracks was wind, which blew into drifts snow that was already on the ground.

  On this day, the tracks were open, but barely. The previous train had cut a trench between snow walls, which got higher as we moved into the Topsails until we could see nothing from either side of the train except sheer cliffs of snow mere inches from the windows. After that, even in the observation car, we could only tell how much deeper the trench was getting by how much darker it became in the train, for snow drifted across the top of the trench, blocking out the sky.

  Finally, the train began to slow down. “Snow on the tracks,” my father said. We could not see the snow on the tracks, but we soon felt the train nudge into it. We jolted forward slightly in our seats. Once the cowcatcher had edged into the snowdrift, the engineer increased the throttle. A great grinding noise began from the front of the train and moved down the length of it; soon the floor of our car was vibrating. We moved along at two or three miles an hour at most, though the locomotive roared as if we were going at full speed.

  The train continued in this fashion for a while, then slowed more as we began to go upgrade. We made excruciatingly suspenseful progress for about three miles, the passengers urging the train on, knowing that if we stalled we might be stranded for days. We laughed and rocked forward in our seats as if to coax the locomotive one more inch, and then one more until at last we felt it make the crest and a great cheer went up.

  Going downgrade was much easier, though we could not go at regular speed, for there were drifts across the tracks that might have derailed us had we crashed through them too fast. Every so often, as we hit one, we lurched forward in our seats, everyone shouting “Whoa!” and watching as the exploding snow went flying past our windows.

  In one way, we were crossing Newfoundland at the worst possible time, during the season of least light, a week past the day of least light. About half of the island we didn’t see at all, and some of it we saw at twilight, from four to six in the afternoon, from six to eight in the morning. But you hadn’t really seen Newfoundland, my father had told me before we set out, until you had seen it in winter from the train.

  In the course of our journey westward, we saw the sun rise and set and rise again. The journey began and ended at sunrise. We went from light to dark to light again. And regardless of what time of year it was, we would have travelled through some part of the core in darkness. The core was the vast basin that lay within the bowl of the coastal mountains beyond which, before the train, almost no one had set foot. And you always passed through the cor
e of the core in the middle of the night whether you travelled in June or in December.

  It was easy to imagine, impossible not to, that the core was always dark, that on this middle wilderness the sun never rose and the most it ever had by way of light it got on those rare nights when the sky was clear and the moon was full.

  We were surrounded from without by a wilderness of water and from within by one of land, an expansive assertion of land about which, before the train went through, next to nothing was known, had been seen by no one, not even by aboriginals who lived within a few miles of the coast, no one except a few people such as William Cormack. My father, who loved planting misconceptions in my head, told me the core was named after Cormack.

  To prepare for our trip, I had read Cormack’s account of his walk across the island. In 1822, at the age of twenty-six, he walked from Trinity Bay on the east coast to Bay St. George on the west coast. He set out on September 5, accompanied by a Micmac named Joe Sylvester, and completed his walk on November 4, then wrote his Narrative of a Journey Across the Island of Newfoundland, the Only One Ever Performed by a European. By European, he meant someone of European descent, for Cormack, though Old World educated, was New World born, having grown up in St. John’s and gone to university in Scotland.

  He was a solitary soul who before setting out wrote that it was a comfort to him to know that “no one would be injured by my annihilation.” It seemed a heart-rendingly pathetic thing to say about yourself. I could not imagine a man more profoundly alone than the one who had written that.

  He called the core the Terra Incognita, the unknown land. Before Cormack’s walk, there were fantastic stories about its inhabitants, stories about a race of giant aboriginals and strange animals of a sort that lived nowhere else on earth but Newfoundland.