A Good Day's Work (7 page)

The only train song he plays is by Ozzy Osbourne, and really isn't about trains at all. Knowing how many train songs are out there, I find that a little odd. One day I went looking online and found a collection of train-related songs compiled by Wes Modes, a California “sculptor, writer, performer, artist and mischief maker,” who among his many interests “hops freight trains and gets in trouble.” He had tallied up 550. His list includes “Midnight Special” (Creedence Clearwater Revival), “Engine Number 9” (Wilson Pickett), “I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry” (Hank Williams), “Mystery Train” (Elvis Presley), “Love Train” (The O'Jays), “Peace Train”
(Cat Stevens), “Marrakesh Express” (Crosby, Stills and Nash), “Midnight Train to Georgia” (Gladys Knight and the Pips), “I'm Moving On” (Hank Snow), “King of the Road” (Roger Miller), “Take the ‘A' Train” (Duke Ellington), “Downbound Train” (Bruce Springsteen) and “Downtown Train” (the Mary Chapin Carpenter and Rod Stewart versions, but not the far superior one by Tom Waits, who wrote it).

He lists songs by artists like Jimmie Rodgers, Boxcar Willie, and Flatt and Scruggs, who seemed to do little else but write songs about hobos. Old blues yellers—Lead Belly, Son House, Big Bill Broonzy, Bessie Smith—loved trains as much as pasty-faced longhairs like the Rolling Stones, Grateful Dead and Neil Young. A lot of the songs are about disasters. Others are about movement—a train along the tracks, a man leaving something or heading somewhere. A very high percentage of them are about loneliness and longing.

One time I asked the late Toronto singer and guitar whiz Jeff Healey what it was about trains that engendered such great music. He talked about being a boy living in Brantford, Ontario, where he attended the local school for the blind, and the wistful feelings he experienced whenever the trains rolled past his dormitory. “I guess it's about being young with an imagination and thinking about being on these trains, going somewhere but never really sure where you are going to end up.” Another time I asked Greg Leskiw, formerly of The Guess Who, if something about the train itself attracted rockers and bluesmen. “It's like a train is a living thing,” said Leskiw, who by then lived in a house along the rail line in the south side of Winnipeg. “That rhythm builds and builds and it's so musical that you could go anywhere with it.”

If you listen selectively, you can hear the entire rise and fall of railroading captured in those songs. The first train song I can remember hearing was “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” by Gordon Lightfoot, which pretty much set the standard for the mythmaking school of train tunes in this country. A quarter of a century later, Hamilton's Daniel Lanois wrote “Death of a Train”: “We don't ride that train no more.”

Craig and Jordan know railroading isn't what it used to be—and that things are unlikely to get any better. They understand that they won't be the last men to run a transcontinental train in this country. But they also realize that their breed is dying. They just shrug and go about their business. This job they have chosen is a way of life more than an occupation. It is no nine-to-five, home-in-time-to-get-the-kids-off-to-the-rink gig. The five-days-on-two-days-off shifts mean missed birthdays, dinners and other family Kodak moments. The uncertainty of the work schedule means friends simply stop calling after you back out of yet another barbecue invite at the very last minute. Always being on call means that you need to steal naps in the middle of the day when everyone else in your life is dying to do something, anything. No wonder the job is so hard on personal relationships: Jordan's marriage ended in divorce; Craig lives alone. “You get a lot working on the railway in terms of comfortable income, benefits and pensions,” says Jordan. “But certain things get lost along the way.”

Except I really don't hear much regret in his voice. Jordan is the romantic of the duo—the guy who never wanted to be anywhere other than in the locomotive, moving trains and people across this land. Craig, you get a sense, would have a far easier time doing something else as long as it kept him moving
and engaged, mostly far from the city, in a way that involved big machines. Yet I want you to picture what I see at the end of their twelve-hour shift as we coast into the station at Capreol, where a crew change from Hornepayne awaits.

They are, remember, a pair of middle-aged men who have been working on the railroad for nearly twenty years apiece. And Capreol long ago must have ceased being an exciting place to stop. Still, there they stood—eyes glazed wih fatigue, joints creaking, stomach churning from rotgut coffee. The air was cool enough for long sleeves, but morning had broken twenty minutes ago. As they climb out of the locomotive onto the walkway, Craig moves his neck like a boxer loosening up. Jordan looks at the brightening sky.

“It's a great day,” he says.

“Yeah,” Craig says, “it's a great day.”

CHAPTER
TWO

HOLY SWEET MOTHER

I
N
New Brunswick's Westmorland County a woman in green coveralls, a red toque and a pair of silver studs in her right ear stands inside a barn. Her serenity is extraordinary. Not just because swallows dive-bomb her from overhead and it is frigid enough that her breath forms sleet. Or because the barn echoes with the moos of 106 roaming cows—ropes of mucus hanging from their nostrils, distended udders swinging like a listing ship's chandeliers—overlaid with a noise like rain on a tin roof but that is actually torrents of manure and urine splatting on a concrete floor. No, I find the calmness of Dr. Jessica Harvey-Chappell impressive for this reason and this reason alone: I have seen athletes with seasons on the line, and watched police stand nose to nose with strikers. I have been
in the room when politicians have told people who care that entire industries, probably their towns, are closing down. But never have I seen someone coolly trade farm-country gossip—what cows are yielding how much milk, who wants how much for what plot of land—while her arm is shoulder deep in the rectum of a dairy cow.

Jessica, from her calm expression, could be sitting in a nice ergonomic chair in an office somewhere, reading a report. With all her training she could be in a doctor's office, her name on the door, sipping a cappuccino between patients. She could be taking a day off at home, wondering what to pull out of the freezer for her husband, Les, and their two kids for dinner. Looking at her standing atop the overturned milk crate, you would not know that the barn smells ripe and that a few inches from her head a white Holstein cow with black spots like a Rorschach test is emptying her bowels in spectacular fashion.

Most of us live within a humdrum universe where a person's face becomes a sour knot if their iPhone dies. But this is the world Jessica has chosen, the life, for as far as she can remember, she wanted above all others. “I always knew I was going to be either a farmer or a vet,” she says. In fact, she inhabits both worlds. And so, amid the noise, the smell and the flying fecal matter, patches of sunlight lather her forty-year-old face with fire, making Jessica look as serene as she does happy.

A staggeringly cold Wednesday morning. So cold that when Jessica pulled her truck—institutional grey with the green-and-white New Brunswick Department of Agriculture logo—into the provincial government parking lot at 8:30 a.m., she feared that the medicine in the modular insert on the back of the rig might freeze. She slapped the truck into park. Then
she just left the engine running, as it would remain throughout her entire shift today, while she used her swipe key to enter the side door into the low-slung, regulation-issue government building. (When the weather is below freezing and she's got the truck at home, Jessica either keeps the truck in the shop with her farm equipment, as she did last night, or outside with the Bowie box insert plugged into a ceramic heater.)

The space inside the clinic is nothing special: metal filing cabinets, wooden desks, a glass window that opens to a counter where clients pay their bills, pick up medications and ask for advice from whichever vet is still in the office. A few touches let you know this is a veterinary medical office: posters of horse and cow breeds; the storage room with the stacks of medicine and supplies; the sawed-off X-ray machine, which she takes out to farm visits, sitting in the corner. Naturally, there are the requisite jars of weird animal fetuses: the foal that was only discovered when a dead mare was opened up, the pig with two sets of buttocks, the really long worm found in some animal's intestine.

Bernice Landry and Aline Mazerolle, the administrators who keep the trains running on time, were already in when Jessica entered, travel mug full of tea in hand. So were the trio of other vets who work out of the Moncton clinic: a pair of grown-up New Brunswick farm kids named Carl Dingee and Lisa Freeze, and André Saindon, whose words still carry the whiff of his Quebec birthplace and who is just months off from retirement. As she has done most days for the past eight years, Jessica removes her coat and hangs it behind the door in her office. Then she walks over to have a peek at the appointment book to see what's come in since she left the previous afternoon.

Jessica works for the Provincial Veterinary Field Services division of New Brunswick's Department of Agriculture, Aquaculture and Fisheries. That means that she doesn't see shih tzus and parakeets. She has never dewormed a pot-bellied pig, or had to put down a gerbil. Her world, like the world of her veterinary colleagues, is livestock—cows, horses, goats and sheep—that live, breed and die on the farms of southeastern New Brunswick. That makes them figures of historical import in this country. I say this because although Grand Banks cod and the inland fur trade may have brought the first European settlers to Canada, farming is what built it.

Farmers in these areas don't have to call Jessica or the others. But their services are cheaper than private clinics—for instance, they don't charge mileage on visits—and they will go anywhere to deal with a problem. They also offer 24-7 emergency service, something few private practices list on their website because it's hard work and not a moneymaker. Let me put it this way: rural private practice vets who make house calls are about as common as old-style country docs who show up in the midst of the snowstorm of the century. Which means that most farmers in the bottom left corner of New Brunswick can really only count on the four men and women inside this Moncton clinic, who, because their geographical districts tend to overlap, huddle for a few minutes each morning to ensure that all the calls get taken care of in the most efficient way possible.