Issue link: https://bluemagazine.uberflip.com/i/25165
"If we get in an empty boxcar, make sure you stick a railroad spike in the door to hold it open, because If that door closes with you In It, they might not find you for months." more engines pass and Pike is throwing his pack on. I follow his lead , feeling drunk, blood roaring in my ears along with the clacking of the train as it slowly begins to pick up speed. "Come on!" Pike screams. "It's just gonna get faster! " So he starts running, his pack bouncing up and down like it's got a kangaroo in it, and I follow. We scramble up the embankment by the tracks, the train speeding up. "Pick your ride!" he shouts. The cars going by are long grain cars, with ladders and short covered porches, maybe four feet by eight, on both ends. I jog alongside the train, trying to keep up, the gravel giving way under my feet and the cars sliding by. I place one hand on a ladder rung and the train jerks ahead, but I hold on. The sensation is like having a large dog tugging on its leash. But this dog weighs thousands of tons. Hanging on, I try to put one foot on the bottom rung. It won't reach, so without thinking I put my foot on the hub around which the flashing silver wheel turns, just behind the ladder. Visions of dismemberment flash through my head. Stupid, stupid, I think. I step up onto the bottom rung with my other foot, leaving the ground and trusting my full weight to the train. The disembodied sensation of taking off in an airplane pales compared to catching hold of a train and not letting go. It's like grabbing the landing gear as the plane taxis up the runway. Suddenly, all the nausea of anticipation is gone. I am flying. I get both legs up on the ladder, and swing around, stepping onto the small porch at the front of the car and see Pike jumping on two cars back. The train is going over a highway overpass. Dozens of cars pass under me, and I wonder which one is going to call the Mounties on a cell phone. An opening, at the back of the porch, is about the size of a manhole cover. Inside is a little crawl space, just big enough for me and my pack. Everything is covered with a thick coating of diesel dust and rust. I squeeze through the hole. Darkness. The violent shaking of the car. A cacophony of the thousands of pieces of steel that make up the car rattling staccato. It smells of pigeons. I turn like a breech birth to get my head back out the hole and see the countryside flying by: sun dapple through leaves, fields of hay, orchards a month from harvest. The sound of the grainer is almost musical , the thunderous boom of the empty hopper traveling back to the wheat fields of Saskatchewan after hauling tons of grain to the coast, the falsetto of a braking wheel against the track, the machine-gun crackle of the slack being taken up in a mile of railcars as they begin to roll. Instantly we are in the absolute black of a tunnel. The world closes in around me and I cover my mouth and nose with my shirt. I can't tell if I'm hyperventilating from fear or asphyxiating on diesel fumes. It seems endless, and I shine my flashlight along the rough-hewn walls only a foot away from the train's sides. The tunnel seems haunted, dug and blasted by ghosts a century earl ier. It is an enormous rei ief when we burst back out into the light and clean air. The Canadian Pacific Railway was derided in Canada's parliament in 1871 as an "act of insane recklessness." After approval, it took 14 years to complete and was one of the most intense building projects in history. It served to unify Canada as a country, to tie a psychological knot between St John's, Newfoundland, and Victoria , British Columbia, 4,000 miles apart. The railroad was built by Scots, Irish , French Canadians, and some 8,000 Chinese coolies (a phonetic pronunciation of k'u Ii, "bitter strength"l. Some 800 men died building it, in rockslides, avalanches and tunnel collapses. They also died of scurvy and pneumonia. Men would stumble carrying ten-gallon drums of nitroglycerine and blow themselves to pieces. They drove the railway through some of the most impenetrable country on earth for a dollar a day, and now Pike and I are borne along it, reading the marks they left behind like hieroglyphs. In the tunnels you seem to hear the echoes of picks and the calls of the work gangs. The sun sets as we pass beneath the shadow of the Coast Range, a line of rainforest-cloaked, glacier-capped peaks marching up the west coast all the way to the Tongass of southeastern Alaska. Soon the lush coastal forests give way to a drier landscape and the train snakes up along the Fraser River Gorge, the milky gray water swirling in great eddies as the train rumbles over trestles spanning tributaries hundreds of feet below. Twilight falls and a crescent moon rises . A hundred yards ahead, the engine is a fire-breathing dragon casting a beam of light against the immense stone walls as it rounds bends. On an island in the middle of the raging river hundreds of feet below, a group of people stands around a bonfire, their rafts pulled onto the shore. We see them , but they have no idea that Pike and I exist.