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For the past twelve years, on a day late in June I have boarded a train in Kitchener, Ontario, with my daughter, Esme, the first time when she was just five years old. Two further trains and twenty-seven hours later we disembark in Moncton. In those first moments as we roll out of town, we point out rat boxes behind the bread factory, fishermen on the shores of the Grand River, and, gaining speed, we poise ourselves at the window to catch a glimpse of what we’ve dubbed “the castle house,” a garish paradox amid this pastoral farmland, with its battlement roof and gated boundary. Who are they trying to keep out, I wonder. From our window, we have the perfect, albeit fleeting, view of the castle house and it feels like our secret discovery, an intrusion on those owners who want to be seen and not seen.
This seeing and not seeing is what we do during this entire journey: a rusted car, a stack of firewood, an empty swimming pool. Our eyes drift to the outer landscape, to the panoramic view, then flicker back to what is immediately before us, rushing by.
This back and forth, this shifting perspective is something we take for granted, so accustomed we are to this mode of travel we now consider “slow.” We are given a view, framed by the window, and have time to take it in, our eyes scanning lazily as though hypnotizing ourselves into a meditative state.
If we were a mother and daughter travelling in the nineteenth century, before trains came into popular use, we might travel by stagecoach and in so doing have an even more intimate connection to the flowers and trees outside our window. We would feel the breeze, perhaps tug at a shawl against the chill, hear voices of travellers on the road, or of farmers in passing fields. This is a connection we rarely have now with our environment as we travel. Our aim is to move swiftly, to get to our destination as quickly as possible. Who has time to determine what sort of hawk that is flying overhead?
If we were travelling when trains came into use, we might have been agitated by the speed of this new technology, which had so many images storming past our window. We would not be able to smell the lilacs, acknowledge the faces of those standing on the roadside or in a field, see the detail in the flowers on the embankment. Victor Hugo described the view from a train in a letter dated 22 August 1837: “The flowers by the side of the road are no longer flowers but flecks, or rather streaks, of red and white . . . the grain fields are great shocks of yellow hair; field of alfalfa, long green tresses; the towns, the steeples, and the trees perform a crazy mingling dance on the horizon; from time to time, a shape, a spectre appears and disappears with lightning speed behind the windows; it’s a railway guard.”
In the time of pandemic slowness, when we were considering the condition of the entire planet, when we couldn’t travel anywhere, I decided to go back in time, to think of the social history of train journeys, not only in longing, but also to understand what it is that we gain in movement, in travel. In doing this I wanted to think about what we see, and how we observe, on such journeys. I was thinking of that imagined stagecoach journey, and the actual train trips I’ve taken, and those I hope to take. There are also fictional and remembered conversations with fellow travellers over the years, those casual, intimate, sometimes intense exchanges that can come through travel, when something in us has loosened. All that was beyond us as we sat in our homes, and so this remembering and reflecting felt all the more urgent.
