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A trundle through trees
A trip on the Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway
Courtenay, a large small town about halfway up the east side of Vancouver Island, announces itself on a board attached to a wall of it railway station as "The Recreation Capital of Canada". I doubt very much whether all the other recreational capitals of Canada will be trembling in their shoes...
The town is engaging at its heart, where the sidewalks are wide and muzak plays from speakers mounted on street lamps. But it has a slightly unkempt feel about its edges. That's probably due to its industrial past, now almost invisible, and its present proximity to forestry, which tends to mess places up a little before new growth takes over again. "Recreation" is mostly skiing at nearby Mount Washington and Forbidden Plateau, and all the usual Canadian pursuits of hunting, shooting, fishing and driving noisy things through quiet places in order to gouge muddy ruts in trails..
I am here with Lenore, on a late February Wednesday afternoon, to catch the 13.15 train from Courtenay south to Victoria.
The Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway line ends at Courtenay. Northwards beyond the diminutive station building the track gets rustier and rustier and more and more uneven and then just stops, at the foot of a scruffy hedgerow. It was once meant to go further north, up to Campbell River, but in 1914 everyone involved lost enthusiasm for the idea and the E&N reached its greatest length just over 139 miles. Campbell River got on quite nicely without it.
The up train comes into the station from Victoria, on time, with a great deal of hooting and ringing of its bell, as if it was announcing a much grander entrance than the single diminutive diesel railcar that it actually is. Local road traffic, accustomed to this display of bombast, continues to cross the track seconds before the railcar reaches each level crossing.
We quickly claim a window on the East side of the train, which I have guessed will be the most scenic (the sea is to the East). When it leaves Courtenay, at 15.19, the car contains about 20 passengers half a dozen in their twenties, me in the middle and the remainder of retirement age. A group behind us are in high spirits, and as the train rumbles forwards they begin to talk at the top of their voices, and continue without drawing breath (except for one gentleman who coughs incessantly) all the way to Duncan. Opposite us sits a strange young man who extracts two pieces of awful artwork from a black plastic bag and insists on showing them to us. We nod politely and pass them back.
Our journey is divisible into two parts a trip through the back yards of small town west coast Canada and a trundle through trees.
What evidence there is of present-day freight traffic, is limited to a few propane waggons, scattered up and down the line in short sidings. One siding in Courtenay is literally tucked behind a row of conifers. At the junction with the Port Alberni line stand a couple of rows of box cars. No other locomotives were visible.
That Courtney and its environs were once significant centres of coal mining is almost invisible today. As the train gathers speed I notice a couple of indistinct vegetation-covered embankments curving away into the forest. I rather hopefully identify the point where the rails from Cumberland's mines passed beneath the E&N on their way down to Union Bay, once a busy coal port and now a undistinguished seaside suburb. Courtenay museum is keener on dinosaur fossils than the industrial past. But mining may return to Cumberland (at least 30 million tons of coal have been identified). And in an age where the environment is at least given lip-service, it is depressing to read that instead of once again transporting the coal to the sea by rail, the mineØs promoters are suggesting the creation of a four-lane highway.
The backyards of life
Back yards are fascinating things. A few are pristine, each blade of grass in its place, each fallen leaf picked up and packed away. But most are depositories of failed and forgotten plans, ventures and hobbies, the resting place of discarded objects whose weight dictates their distance from the back door, a store of material for which a use might be (but never is) found. And so they contain the flotsam of suburban life on a sea of uncut grass, weeds and stinging nettles. We pass mysterious grey heaps of carefully cut timber, rotting. There is the detritus of childrenØs imagination, a flung-about scatter of wheeled toys, sagging swings, collapsing tree-houses. Mossy tarpaulins flap wearily over the neglected hulls of half-finished boats of all sizes, from dream yachts that will never make that round-the-world trip to humble row-boats that will rot before they even reach the water. Dozens of skeletal green-houses sink into rampant weeds beneath bunting of wind-shredded polythene.
Here too is evidence of the last outdoor barbecue before winter arrived last year. Lawn chairs lie flung back, as if their occupants had just gone inside.
This being North America we pass hundreds of dead automobiles. Some lie beneath tarpaulins, a thick growth of moss attesting to the lack of progress of some restoration project. Others rust in corners of back yards, mouldering back into the earth from which their iron ore was once extracted. We pass car bodies, deceased pickup trucks, lichen-covered trailers, laboriously hauled to some lonely ravine and pushed in. Some are real archaeological artefacts, the products of the first half of the century. Others are pathetically chrome-covered, decomposing beneath their own tawdry decoration.
As the train wobbles southwards we catch glimpses of the sea shore, its winter population a few scattered sea birds and elderly ladies walking dogs. On the other side of the Georgia Straight is continuous line of snow-covered mountains, the sharp-toothed lower jaw of the monstrous Rocky mountains, its gums green with forest. It is a beautiful sight, made even more so by wintry evening light.
Of sinister seals
At Nanoose Bay the big-voiced bigot behind us tells this by now long-suffering companion that the US once trained seals here for various nefarious purposes. The grey buildings dug into the hillside on the opposite side of the bay certainly look sinister enough even for this.
We creep into Nanaimo, passing alongside one of the ugliest stretches of highway on the island. We see the whites of the afternoon drivers' eyes. Schoolboys nip contemptuously across the tracks on their way home. For some reason Vancouver Island seems to have allowed the planting of dozens of hideously-ugly and offensive hoardings at the entrance to each of its large towns. I am constantly reminded of that poem by (I think) Ogden Nash:
- I think
that I will never see
- A hoarding lovely as a tree
- In fact unless the hoardings fall
- I'll never see a tree at all.
- A hoarding lovely as a tree
Again there is little evidence of Nanaimo's mining past. It is now a long-drawn-out city with miles of malls and a seemingly almost-forgotten town centre. Nanaimo is, however, the location of one of my favourite eating places " Filthy McNasty's".
The train rests for ten minutes. The smokers disembark and smoke desperately, the hungry and thirst disembark and jostle around a coffee waggon.
Winter tourists board the train at Chemainus, a small lumber town that revived its flagging fortunes by painting every available surface with murals and then inviting the world to come and see them. Rails to the MacMillan Bloedel Mill are no longer connected to the E&N. Similarly, a little further south, two abandoned curves of black steel run eastwards towards the Fletcher Challenge mill at Crofton. The pulp mill still operates an extensive railway system, but no longer joins the E&N.
One of the attractions of North American railways to the archaeologist in me is this habit of merely abandoning track and walking away from it.
This journey is really a rapid trundle through trees -- trees of all sorts, most of which I cannot identify, although the ecologist in me recognises a change between a large number of birch amongst the conifers to the north of, say Chemainus, to a large number of arbutus amongst the conifers at the south end of the line.
As we get nearer to Victoria, the line does some spectacular hill-hugging and a couple of leaps over chasms, and the views are momentarily (between the trees), spectacular. At Duncan the train is pretty well full. A small boy gets on carrying a fishing rod longer than himself.
Dusk is frowning gloomily as we enter Victoria, swinging through suburbia, then through older parts of town. We rattle across an amazing junction where five roads, plus the railway line, all meet precariously like wheel spokes. We pass the old E&N workshops and roundhouse, an area of lifted sidings, and finally rumble across the lifting bridge that delivers the train to Victoria station, a mere shed beside the track end.
No
time to sightsee -- we have a ferry to catch back to Vancouver...