Making stops along the way*: Saskatoon to Toronto

“Why are we here, again?” T. asked as we stood in the Saskatoon VIA Rail station. Our train was late, but not as late as we really needed to be if we were going to check into our Airbnb. The station is several kilometres out of town and, improbably, undergoing renovations, so it looked completely desolate. Improbably, because the only passenger train that passes through is the Canadian, eastbound and westbound, two or three times a week.

We were here for two reasons. I wanted to at least stop off and see something of every province I hadn’t yet visited, and Saskatoon is where the train stops in Saskatchewan. I was pleasantly surprised. Saskatoon is a place I knew next to nothing about before, and it is really nice! 

Our hostess said the train station was the worst possible introduction, but her neighborhood quickly set things right. Picture, if you will, leafy, tranquil streets like those in Oak Park, Illinois. Saskatoon was founded in 1883 by a temperance society, but you wouldn’t know it now. A mere few blocks away in Nutana there’s live blues every night, a local pub with daily specials and friendly people, a record store, two bakeries, a fair trade/organic outdoors shop, and at least two independent bookstores, one of which is the largest in Canada. Plus, there’s the South Saskatchewan River, which winds through town lined by a walking trail and crossed by a number of historic bridges.

What I like about Saskatoon is that it must be the only city named after a berry. Saskatoons grow everywhere along the banks of the Saskatchewan River, and they make a delicious fruit pie. Isn’t that great?

And in 1962 Saskatchewan was the first place in the world to introduce a universal health-care plan. Medicare, which soon went nationwide, is still administered by provinces and territories today.

So why don’t more people seem to know about this place? I began to get an inkling why more people don’t live here from reading a novel by Sharon Butala, which I found in the basement. Butala is a Saskatchewan writer whose characters refer to Saskatoon simply as “the city.” They are ranch folks, and there are scenes in November in which the temperature out on the prairie drops to -30 degrees C. Not counting the chill from the wind that whips across from the Arctic.

But while we were there in September, it was lovely fall weather, and we enjoyed walking the riverbank along the Meewasin Trail. Meewasin is Cree for "beautiful." And I'm sure some Canadians said "Good day" to me as I walked in Gabriel Dumont Park. It must be a Saskatchewan thing.

At Turning the Tide bookstore, also within walking distance, I had trouble choosing from among books about the U.S. right, what white people need to learn about racism, or LGBTQ issues. When I finally settled on a book light enough to carry with me, the bookseller offered me another copy for 40% off, purely because it had been on window display and the cover was faded. He didn't have to do that!

We could have done so much more in Saskatoon, but only had a few days. Another day I walked across the Broadway Bridge.
It features in the song "Cherokee Louise" by Joni Mitchell. Joni was born in Alberta, but Saskatoon is very proud of the start she got there. In the notes to her first record, Joni Mitchell credited an English teacher for inspiring her to write.

To the south of the Broadway Bridge I could see the Victoria Bridge (1907) and to the north, the Canadian Pacific Railroad Bridge, one year older.

Victoria Bridge

Historic posters like these also hang in the Jasper train station.

I stopped at the Ukrainian Museum of Canada. Eastern Europeans, especially Ukrainians, played a huge role in the development of the prairies once they became agricultural. Ukrainians were oppressed in their own country, ruled by Austria-Hungary, Poland, and Russia and conscripted into armies to which they felt no allegiance. They came through the Winnipeg train station and settled in this harsh environment, and made it work. They fought for bilingual education and other issues that affected all Canadians.

An exhibit I found particularly touching was a series of photographs of Orthodox churches that once stood all around these provinces. Most of the buildings no longer function as churches, if they remain at all.

Kuroki (Farm) Ukrainian Orthodox Church

At the Vinyl Exchange on Broadway, I was sorely tempted by the record collection. I surely would have bought something had I any way of carrying it until I got back to a record player. A poster on the wall advertised a great album by Saskatchewan's native daughter.

The Charlie Jacobson Band was playing at Blues on Broadway. There's something on there every night, even Monday. I really enjoyed it. There was even a farmers' market in Saskatoon and, while it was modest and mostly indoors, the yellow corn on the cob was the sweetest I'd ever had. One benefit of a northern climate!

Well, you may recall that our train into Saskatoon was several hours late, and I was fine with that. The station was bleak enough at 9:00 AM; we wouldn't have wanted to be there at 4:40, particularly with nowhere to go. But when I called VIA Rail the night before our departure to check on the progress of the Canadian, it was still scheduled to be on time the next morning. So, we showed up at 4:00 in the morning like we were supposed to.

It was just as well VIA Rail hadn't been able to reach me overnight (my phone number was in their system, but it can't cope with a foreign number, or so I was told). If they had, they'd have told me the Canadian was canceled because of a freight train derailment. As it was, we arrived at Saskatoon station having missed all that excitement, and were told that the train was coming after all, but had not long left Edmonton! So we settled down to wait. At least we hadn't been on the train all night, stuck and wondering if or how we were ever going to get on the move.

There is only one woman who works at the Saskatoon train station. She kept us updated (we were "the British passengers," indeed the only passengers there for some hours). She even offered to squeeze us into her car and take us to a Tim Hortons, which I thought was a nice Canadian touch. We decided to stay rather than have to get a taxi back at some point.

The remains of a phone

It's hard to describe how dead this station is. I had thought the Edmonton station was desolate and far out of town! In the women's room was an old Modess machine that charged 10 cents. Of course, it was "EM-TY."

The VIA Rail woman was deep into her book, but occasionally up for a chat. "It never fails," she said, "when trains have been on time I schedule an appointment for four hours after my shift, and sure enough the train is late!"

"So it's you," I said.

When the Canadian finally arrived (with free coffee, juice, and cookies set out for the inconvenienced passengers), we saw the woman again on the platform, whizzing our bags (the only checked baggage) on her little cart up to the baggage car. "'Bye ladies, enjoy the rest of your adventure!" she said. Well, why wouldn't she be cheerful? Imagine all the overtime she gets.

Saskatchewan is the world's largest producer of potash.

I couldn't look at the landscape of the prairies without trying to imagine it as it once was, covered with tall grass. Nowadays this food of the buffalo is rare, but for millennia the prairies in warm weather were wave upon wave of colorful wildflowers. There were millions of buffalo, and people who depended on them, and a way of life that had lasted for so long was almost wiped out in less than two decades of the nineteenth century. On the trains that built the West, the Winchester corporation used to hand out rifles to passengers, who would just lean out the windows and blow buffalo away. In all the annals of human waste, this is the story that way back in junior high school made me think that the word "savages" was used about the wrong people.

We did not shoot anything except photographs out the train window. For one thing, this is Canada.

Grain elevator

After the buffalo the Plains peoples were forced onto what Canada calls reserves. While the all-out massacres were not characteristic north of the 49th parallel, the people's way of life was still gone, and agriculture had arrived. During the next era of prairie life, colorful wooden grain elevators came to dot the prairie. The railway was lined with them, part of the "breadbasket of the world" industry, and each one represented its little community. Most that you will see today are concrete and generic. This era, like the one that preceded it, is vanishing.

We had two more days on the train, rolling into Winnipeg after midnight. We were not stopping over in Manitoba as we had later plans for that province, but did get off and check out Union Station, a grand central railway station that really should get more use. In its heyday Winnipeg's Union Station welcomed immigrants from Europe and, during the World Wars, shipped troops back.

Most of the stations we stopped at, though, were tiny. You can tell when a little old station is original because the station name is in all capital letters.

The historic Melville, Saskatchewan station (1898) is being restored.

It was darn cold in Winnipeg, so we were glad to get back on board. There were flurries outside the dome car, the kind a British passenger called "polystyrene snow." In the morning I saw big birds of prey swooping overhead, talons out.

We were in a third landscape by now, the boreal forest of northern Ontario. Lake after lake, the odd kayak, and leaves finally starting to shade to orange and red. St. Joseph Catholic Church like a tiny barn in the middle of nowhere.
And then we came to Longlac.

There was one older man who was always wandering around the train, repeating the same stories to everybody. He was probably just lonely but I lost track of whether former prime minister Jean Chrétien was responsible for CN being cruel to VIA Rail, or whether it was Bill Gates. Was just-in-time delivery the bad guy, or climate change? It was a welcome change when two railroad workers joined me and the men in the dome car. One was a very young man but the other had been working on the railroad since the age of 18. He was very enthusiastic about what T. and I are doing. "Come to Hornpayne!" he urged.

We did eventually stop in Hornpayne, Ontario to let them off, but first we had to offload the fishermen, or whatever they were. They had a lot of stuff like coolers to take off the train--hopefully not containing moose. 

Earlier in the train trip we'd had onboard entertainers who sang "Ring Of Fire" and "We'll Meet Again" in the bar car. The last night we had a Métis storyteller. The Métis, especially in western Canada, are a distinct people of mixed indigenous and European ancestry. They weren't placed on reserves, but like their First Nations brethren they suffered discrimination, the forbidding of their languages, etc. Only in the last generation or two has this finally changed.

The storyteller was armed with juggling balls and lots of stories about the fur trade. Unlike some other contacts with Europeans, the fur trade was more cooperative and led to a lot of French traders having families with First Nations women. Hence the Métis.

This man also, usefully, put to rest some myths. For example, although every part of the buffalo could be used for something, that doesn't mean that every part of every buffalo was used--there are only so many flyswatters that you need. And overtrapping and thus, the decline of some of the fur species was practiced by Cree as well as Europeans. Clearly, in the case of the buffalo indigenous people formed a relationship that was sustainable over an extremely long time. But we don't have to idealize them in some kind of "noble savage" way.  

The train was really rocketing while I slept that last night. By morning we were in Sudbury Junction, which means we'd clearly made up some time. My first job in Canada I worked for a woman from Sudbury, and she regarded Torontonians as wimps because Toronto's winter was so mild. Tennesseans regard Floridians as wimps for the same reason. I guess everyone in the northern hemisphere has some southerner to make fun of.

And so to the Canadian Shield. I'd seen deer bounding across the snow-kissed fields in Saskatchewan and two full days of the province of Ontario, but only now was it starting to look familiar.

I saw corn. I saw a black squirrel, that mysterious inhabitant of Canada that I have somehow never seen south of the U.S. border (how does it know?) I saw a GO train, a sure sign of the Toronto suburbs. Almost home.

*Gord Downie of The Tragically Hip, "Looking For A Place To Happen"