Canadians (2 page)

Train 638—two locomotives to pull only three cars—could not have chosen a happier route that surprisingly warm second day of October 2000.
All along that 187-kilometre stretch the people of eastern Ontario and western Quebec had come out to mark the passing of the unknowable man who had for so very long commanded the attention of their country. In leftover sunshine from summer they gathered at crossings and along the tracks and to the sides of bridges; they carried flowers and Canadian flags and more than a few babies, the infants held up and their tiny heads steered toward no. 638 as if this one simple act might lock its historical significance into a small brain unaware of any past at all, including the last diaper change.

All along the long route lay the unexpected. The surprises began on the outskirts of Ottawa when the funeral train began picking up speed and passed behind the repair shops for the city's public transit system. The mechanics had lain down their tools and made their way to the rear of the buildings where they stood, in dark coveralls, staring through the fence in silence, their big, grease-covered hands folded as if in recital.

Farther down the line, as the train slowed through an Ottawa Valley farm village, it was the volunteer fire brigade, in full uniform, all at attention on one side of the tracks while on the other stood a peewee hockey team, also in uniform, also at attention. None of the hockey players had even been born when the man they were honouring last held office.

At a leaf-littered golf course that ran along the west side of the tracks players stepped back from their putts and removed their golf caps, seeming for once to welcome a distraction. Those playing immediately behind walked away from their carts and also removed their caps, not one of them daring to stand in that wide-stance, arms-across-the-chest sign of impatience that is standard fare for those waiting to hit their approach shots to a green.

At one crossing a woman held up a cherry paddle, a rainbow-coloured voyageur scarf tied carefully around it. At another, a man held up his country's flag with his country's perfect flagpole: a hockey stick. A railway worker at the side of the tracks cradled his hard hat in his left arm while he stood at attention. Construction workers crawled free of the hole they were digging near a culvert to stand in respect, the yellow front-end loader behind them stilled, its scoop raised in its own serendipitous salute.

They came, sometimes alone, sometimes in numbers, to stand and stare into the window of the final link in train no. 638, a special car with draped windows through which the tall among them might make out, barely, the red maple leaf flag that covered the coffin of the man who had been prime minister for nearly sixteen years and prime personality for another sixteen following his retirement.

They came, many dabbing at their eyes, a few holding his signature red rose, some clapping quietly as the train passed. Simple country people, mourning a man from the cities who was born into privilege and lived in privilege; a man they connected to—sometimes off and on—but who could never quite connect to them unless he was on stage; a man who many years earlier had pressed his somewhat Mongolian, somewhat skull-like, somewhat handsome face to the window of the limousine carrying him through a southwestern Ontario night and looked long out at the flickering farm lights before wondering aloud to an aide,
“Whatever do they do?”

We could debate forever what it was they felt that day—the passing of their own youth? the end of an era where insecure Canada was finally noticed by others? the death of a man who caused so much change, so much controversy?—but we cannot argue whether they felt something that October morning, and felt it powerfully.

Not long into the long, slow ride to Montreal, Jim Munson, then a reporter for CTV, now a senator, and I left the small pack of journalists in the car assigned to the media and stood by a window on the left side, the two of us staring out at the country staring back.

We weren't being rude. We were merely doing what journalists are supposed to do: follow the story. The train had been set up so that, periodically, members of Trudeau's inner circle would be brought from the car carrying the coffin to the car carrying the media, and there a quick formal interview would be offered. Munson and I had listened politely to the reminiscences of Senator Jacques Hébert, Trudeau's great lifelong friend, and of Marc Lalonde, his former finance minister, but it had soon become apparent that what was going on inside the car was insignificant compared with what was going on outside.

It was one thing to talk about the past; quite another thing to witness the present.

WE WERE ON A TRAIN headed for Montreal, the city in which, two decades earlier, I had first realized the great privilege journalism provides those fortunate enough to work in this unpredictable job.
Maclean's
magazine had sent me there to do a profile of Mordecai Richler, then about to publish a new novel. I carried a tape recorder. I did not like transcribing tapes then, and will do anything to avoid it now, but Richler had such a reputation for surliness, not to mention mumbling, that I had taken it along for self-protection.

It turned out to be the luckiest thing I ever did in my journalism career. We met at the Montreal Press Club for drinks and then headed for his Sherbrooke Street apartment for the formal interview. He insisted on stopping along the way to pick up two large bottles of Remy Martin and several packs of the small cigars he loved.

The interview went much better than I had expected. Richler was almost as eager to talk about his new book as he was to get into the Remy, and he smoked and talked and kept filling up two glasses, the smaller of which he would push in my direction. It was my first encounter with cognac.

The following morning I awoke in my hotel room still wearing the same clothes I had worn to the interview. The bed covers had never even been turned back.

I was certain I was doomed. No memory. No notes lying on the hotel-room desk. Nothing. And then I remembered …
the tape recorder
. Panicking, I rolled off the bed and found it tossed on a chair. Deep in prayer, promising first child, I flipped the tape and pressed the play button. Richler's voice came through loudly and clearly. I flipped the tape again, pressed rewind, and checked again. My voice was now slow and stupid, Richler's still strong and clear as he answered questions without so much as a slur (well, as far as enunciation went, anyway).

We were talking about journalism. I had asked him why he turned so often to magazine work. Wasn't it getting in the way of his novels?

He said, as he had said before so many times, that his sole purpose as a writer was to be an “honest witness” for his times. He needed real material to create that real world in fiction. And journalism provided this.

“It gives me
entrée,
” he said, “into worlds I could not otherwise be a part of.”

Exactly. This was precisely the sense I felt on VIA Rail no. 638 that morning. We were witnessing the times, history in the making. It was like being a Canadian Zelig, the Woody Allen movie character who keeps showing up everywhere but never actually takes part—just some face in the background of significant events. When you are a Zelig, no one is ever quite sure how you got there or exactly what you're doing. It can be an awkward feeling at times—a sense that you don't belong—but more often it's a quiet delight that you're somehow there and no one has yet thought to kick you out.

I once came across a wonderful short story called “The Leper's Squint” by Vancouver Island writer Jack Hodgins. It was about a fiction writer and the gathering of material for his work. Hodgins's narrator finds himself visiting Ireland's Rock of Cashel, where a guide points out the wall of rock and the tiny opening through which the outcasts were once allowed to watch, but not participate in, the religious services of the day. It was “like looking through the eye of a needle.” No journalist could read that passage without relating.

And yet there's a difference in what's done with the gathering. Journalism isn't, or at least shouldn't be, fiction. The journalist can sometimes become a small part of whatever's happening. Once Richler's lovely notion of
entrée
has been gained, there's a responsibility to be that dependable witness to what journalists like to call “history on the run”— but also a chance to determine, even if ever so slightly, even if accidentally, how fast the run and what shifts in direction it might take. A very small part, often insignificant, but still one to be taken seriously.

Looking back on more than three decades of this work, most of it spent running around this impossible and impossibly huge country, usually alone, I've often felt like a bit of an outsider–insider. I've been privy to so much thanks to this strange job where each year tends to begin and end
with a blank daybook. Most people fill in their days and weeks in advance, but a journalist has to look back—usually through clippings rather than a pocket calendar—to know where he or she was on a given day. It might be a federal or provincial election. It could be a trip through the Far North. It could be time spent on oil rigs, following Royal tours or the Stanley Cup playoffs, reporting on a Native standoff, analyzing a farm crisis, or simply doing one of those marvellous “people” stories that give this massive body called Canada its face.

Of all those privileged experiences over those years, perhaps the most moving was being allowed on-board VIA Rail no. 638 as it made its way toward Montreal that day. Standing in the rocking train car, periodically greasing the window with my nose, I was acutely aware of the gift
entrée
had given those few of us who decided to look out rather than in during this remarkable journey.

In this part of the country, it was quickly becoming clear, Pierre Trudeau still held an office that had nothing to do with elections or titles.

THE FUNERAL TRAIN picked up speed between the small villages and towns that line the Ontario side of the lower Ottawa River. In a way it was a shame, in that the leaves were late turning that mild fall: poplar just starting to yellow, maple but a hint of the orange splash to come. Only the sumac had already turned dark as dried blood in the sharp light of mid-morning.

The effect, even with the blurring from increasing speed, was of a countryside so soft and warm it seemed winter should be hemispheres away rather than weeks. Not far from the small town of Maxville the train rocked and hurdled through a marsh where a great blue heron lifted off, slowly banked to the north, and was instantly gone from sight. Nearer the Ontario–Quebec line, thousands of gathering Canada geese—suddenly spooked by the train whistle blown for an upcoming crossing—rose as one, all but darkening the eastern sky before they, too, instantly vanished.

It was such magnificent scenery, the October light playing across finished fields, the water along the South Nation and Ottawa rivers military-still on such a windless day. And yet the natural beauty of the
countryside lay far more in the people and their faces. Those who had been waiting at crossings in lawn chairs stood and cheered. Youngsters sat in trees and waved small flags. Older couples pulled their cars over on gravel shoulders, got out, and stood silently at attention as the train passed.

To the two of us at the window, these emotions seemed to come from another, less cynical time, as if this train had somehow headed backward into, say, 1967, when everything seemed so possible for this little country then celebrating its hundredth birthday, or 1968, when the curious-looking man from Montreal won his party's leadership and burst on to the Canadian political scene, as CBC broadcaster Gordon Donaldson once so dramatically put it, like “a stone through a stained-glass window.”

Near the outskirts of little Alexandria, something else began to happen. The train jerked, lost speed, then shuddered even slower. One of the funeral officials had earlier announced that the train would be moving at “an especially dignified pace,” but this seemed but a few turns short of a full stop. The conductor working our car seemed nervous, checking his watch as if playing a part in a French mystery film. Munson and I tried to lean as tight to the glass as we could to look ahead and see what the problem was.

It turned out that, as no. 638 began passing through Alexandria, the crowd, six and eight people deep in places, had pushed forward. Boy scouts and girl guides at attention were squeezed until they were forced to stutter-step closer. Aging members of the local Royal Canadian Legion branch—chests out, service medals flashing—were forced to edge in, the small corps of young cadets lined up beside the Legionnaires following suit as the growing crowd pushed ever nearer to the slowing train.

Through the glass we could hear a single piper playing “The Last Post.” The train slowed to a bare crawl. And this was when we heard the hands of Alexandria. Neither Munson nor I knew what it was at first. There was this sound, this rubbery …
squeak
… that we couldn't place. Not the wheels. Not the brakes. But something else.

And suddenly, instantly, we realized what it was.

Skin.

The people of Alexandria were reaching out to touch the train carrying Pierre Trudeau home. They were, literally, feeling his passing, their hands rubbing along the metal of the cars as the train slowly made its way through the small town and on to Montreal.

Munson and I looked down at hundreds of hands—some so young they had to reach up, some so old they shook helplessly—reaching out to touch the funeral train. Their faces, many openly weeping, were the faces of Canada, every age, both sexes, different languages, old Canadians and young Canadians, old Canadians and new Canadians, all reaching out to touch the train that was carrying Pierre Trudeau to his grave.

Jim Munson broke down first. But he was not alone for long.

I do not believe I have heard anything quite so moving as the sound of the skin of Canada on the history of Canada. It sent chills up and down the spines of every person in the funeral car and still, today, sends chills up and down mine to remember that oddly mouselike sound that had baffled us in Alexandria.