If my dear old dad was still alive, I would have given him a call on the weekend to tell him The Northlander is back. As Taras Grescoe wrote in his Saturday Globe and Mail opinion piece: “For the first time in 14 years, a passenger train headed for the eastern shores of Ontario’s Lake Nipissing and points north will roll out of Union Station.”
When the inaugural run takes place some time this year, The Northlander will take passengers eight hours and 40 minutes if they travel all the way from Toronto’s Union Station to Timmins where there’s a newly built station. The train service between Toronto and Timmins ended in 2012, two years before my father died. The train will again link the Great Lakes to James Bay. He’d be pleased I think.
“In 1964, the northern part of the line began to cater to tourists with the launch of the Polar Bear Express excursion train, which still runs between Cochrane and Moosonee,” the Globe article says.
I have my own memories of the Polar Bear express as Dad, Bob Moore, worked for the Ontario Northland from the time he was a teenager until he ended up working in public relations for the company before retiring to British Columbia.
Ghost Stories
The train will leave Union Station and go North to
where I’ll see my father who will engineer the
Ontario Northland from Cochrane, the Polar Bear
Express. I’ll visit his home where a woman called
Alice shares his bed.
He will never marry Alice – he’ll wait for Audrey,
citified and proper, a homophobe, which won’t
be apparent to me until some years later.
We pass Moose River Crossing where my father
grew up with eleven siblings though there were more –
a son born to his father’s lover the same year
I was born. Three others after my grandmother died.
In Moosonee, the Anglican chapel has prayer books
in Cree. It will be decades before I go west to Lytton
to learn more about my great uncle, an Anglican
priest, once principal of an Indian Residential School.
On the way south and home, a dining car with white
tablecloths and silver coffee urns. The daily newspaper
available if we want – my own news, I decide at seventeen
not to live with my mother and her third husband.
The thing is, I never attended my parents’ multiple nuptials,
never thought about the train as time, the standing
still of it, the future, the past of it, a porter with white gloves.
A woman saying my dad was on his best behaviour when I came to visit.
The “lover” I refer to was Elizabeth who became my grandfather Ernie’s second wife after my grandmother Nora May died in 1961. Ernie and Elizabeth had three more children together.
Would Dad and I have talked about that situation? There would probably have been some reference to it but mostly he would recall his days working for the Ontario Northland.
Some of what I learned about Dad’s railroad career was from an interview he did with Murray McLauchlan for Murray’s song “Railroad Man” released in 1984.
Dad read my poem “Railroad Man,” a pantoum I wrote, included in my collection Fishing for Mermaids (Leaf Press, 2014). I had written about him sanding the walks at the North Bay engine roundhouse with a repeated line from Murray’s song: “I started with a shovel. I started with a dream.”
After the war, Dad was given a wheelbarrow for his work before progressing on to becoming a fireman and then engineer.
I was a fireman before I became an engineer.
Mother waved a tea towel as the train passed through.
I’d blow the whistle from two miles back.
Everyone knew that Bob Moore was coming into town.
And another poem for Dad, Bob Moore (June 9, 1926 – October 19, 2014), with thanks to Billy Collins who wrote “Litany.”
Happy Hour
You are the engine steaming north,
the soapstone walrus with his tusks,
the tamped-down pipe,
the fishing fly.
You are happy hour at four.
You are not the hand-written letter,
the game of solitaire.
It is possible you are the wooden birdhouse,
the last rose of summer,
but you are not even close
to being an island,
a fir tree,
moss on craggy rocks.
It will interest you to know,
I am the camellia rooted up,
the shiny bits a crow collects.
I am a poem freshly made.
But don’t worry, I’m not the engine steaming north.
You will always be the engine steaming north,
the whistle blowing,
not to mention the pipe
and somehow, happy hour at four.