DE BIG-SHOT TRAIN: A Northern Love Affair with Algoma Central Country
A Rough and Ribald Story of a Lifetime in the Bush ~ Robert Cuerrier
Chapter 15 Going Up and Down the Line
DE BIG-SHOT TRAIN
I like to watch dat train go by
And hear de sound she make
To see her curve aroun’ de bend
Like some beeg silver snake
De whistle sound and it seem
Like de wail of love-sick cat
She slow right down, but nevair stop
Dees place too small for dat!
Dose people on de h-inside
Dey look outside at me
And say, “Look at dat poor guy
Who live by cut de’tree”
I guess I mus’ look funny
With hat and boots for snow
But dat’s de clothes for wear
At forty six below
And day guy who red his paper
With pictures fine to see
Maybe it come from a six foot log
Cut by a bucheron like me!
~ Author Unknown
AS THE CROW FLIES
An engineer on the line Kelly Hopkins made a friend. For years a crow waited for the train and Kelly to come through his range. As the train rattled by, the crow flew beside the engine while Kelly fed it snacks out the window.
FLAGSTOPS
The train will stop anywhere on a hand signal as long as it’s on a straight stretch. This is a blessing for hunters, timber cruisers, prospectors and anyone else who might emerge at random. Like folks who may have misplaced the canoe or the camp.
There are evocative names of stops and lakes along the line. Some have native origins like Ogidaki (high place) or Achigan (he who fights). Many sound pretty like Mekatina or Odena. Curiously some lakes and landforms take their names for their resemblance to male genitalia –Picea and Gargantua. In the Canadian multicultural tradition stations are almost an equal blend of Native, French and English like Chippewa, Dubreuilville and Hearst.
To this day, when I go up the line, I catch the train at the Odena flagstop just at the end of the farm where I live.
TUTELAGE ON THE TRACK
The Algoma Central Railway and its environs can easily be described as a three hundred-mile course in self-preservation.
RIDING THE TRAIN
In the fall of 1963, old Leonard St. Jean Baptiste and I were riding the rattler north on the way to the moose hunt. The train was full and the car we were assigned to was an overflow coach, a relic from the past replete with wooden seats. I was sixteen years old then- loved Canadiana and was enthralled. I sat down, studied the wood grain, enjoyed the texture of the seat and scanned the ceiling of the car for scars that might indicate that a wood stove heated the coach long ago, and then I drifted away.
I imagined that I was riding a colonist train in the early nineteen hundreds; they did try unsuccessfully to settle lands along the ACR for Farming then. In my mind I could see families soothing crying babies, taking turns cooking at the stove or huddling around it to keep warm. I had ridden the steam trains as a kid and thought back to how gritty everyone on board in those days felt with coal smoke and smut penetrating the coaches. Even today the railroads commodious coaches on the line are vintage, dating back to the country’s grand era of rail travel in the fifties.
My family has always been in cahoots with the ACR. When we left the farm and moved to Soo in 1953 we first stayed at the Algoma Hotel beside the station. Leonard met Oscar Boyer there. Oscar was an ACR stalwart, a starchy dresser, Métis, bucheron and local champion of the flour bag portage: Oscar reputedly once carried one thousand pounds in a competition. He introduced Leonard to Algoma Central country and his sun Butch was my first chum and mentor. Imagine a kid off the trapline showing a kid off the farm how to get around in the city.
We were miscast in town, so the train quickly became our path to nature. It put us back on the land for family vacations. Leonard located an old and deserted trapper’s shack at Mile 137 and a half and moved in. He made wood in three and four foot lengths, bucksawed, split, then piled it in big teepee-like stacks here and there in the bush close to camp. The family fished and fried speckled trout, hunted small game. In August we made quarts and quarts of wild blueberry and raspberry jam –enough to smother the bannock fried with every meal up there and enough to see us through the year in town. My parents always wanted to break even or turn a small profit during their holidays.
Of course old Leonard had no title to the shack: we were squatters, and in the sixties the cabin found itself within the borders of the newly-created Lake Superior Provincial Park. In the mid-seventies the Ministry of Natural Resources was going to burn it down. I wrote to the Minister, Russ Ramsay, and got a qualified response hinting that they wouldn’t do it in the old man’s lifetime. My brother, Earl, maintains the shack to this day and entertains many tourists who stop to enjoy a visit when canoeing the popular Sand River route.
As kids, my younger brothers became bush and train brats. They started taking fishing trips alone as little wee guys traveling on kid’s fares. They’d come back the same day or camp out overnight. The train folks knew them and let them buy half fare kid’s tickets ‘til they started to grow mustaches.
After a few years riding the train you get so you could feel the track, sensing the straight-aways, grades, curves and could judge the speed. I would be sleeping or daydreaming, come to semi-consciousness and after a few minutes know what mile I was at and what I might expect to see if I opened my eyes. The track and I became intimates. I used to sit with a friendly conductor on many trips up and down the line and saw him wake once with a stat. I hadn’t felt anything unusual, but he said he had jumped up in a fright because he sensed a motion telling him that the train had near skipped the rails.
I loved to ride the train and never for a moment felt anxious about getting there. I watched out the windows riding the coaches, rode the baggage car, or stood between the cars where you could stick your face out into the elements. I would stare intently at the passing landscape. You’re clicking along questioning and pondering. “In this weather, what would it be like to be rough camping today?” “I wouldn’t want to climb that hill.” Or make judgements. “Be’Jesus I’d hate to have cut line there.” “That would be a good lakeside site for a log cabin and there’s a nice nearby stand of straight black spruce for logs. A good moose swamp, a good logging chance, easy canoeing, a likely fishing stream and perhaps a helacious mosquito swamp.”
I’d often think of the history, what it was like to build the road through rock cuts and across swamps, or how many log drives a stream had seen. There wasn’t a mile of ACR that did not intrigue me. I was never bored.
The train was the social lifeline for everyone making his living in the bush. It was a clearinghouse for information. Who’s trapping, prospecting, building, logging, where, and how are they making out. What’s new with folks living on the track- their prospects, their quirks and their families? You heard it on the train, especially in the baggage car where many of us congregated, measuring the miles in gossip and beer.
WAITING FOR THE TRAIN
Many times the passenger train was late: it depended on how many folks had to be picked up or dropped off. You had to be prepared to wait, patiently through all kinds of time and weather. At the Spruce Lake flagstop I had a lounge chair which was a smooth curve on a rock face to snooze on while waiting –dreaming alternately of seeming my wife or of being able to soon refreshingly breathe the used smoke in a honky-tonk bar.
Eddie Giroux and I once waited three days for a delinquent weight freight with material on it for a camp I was building. We’d run out of grub, the fish weren’t biting. Eddie sent me out to glean blueberries; the season was nearly done. We had flour and lard so Eddie made pies. We had tea as well, and that’s what we lived on till the train came.
Then there was Billy, the miserable old son-of-a-bitch. I met him as he stumbled drunkenly out at the track one time when it was 30 below and storming. Billy was riding that fine line between consciousness and oblivion. I could see that he was going to tighten up, so went into the bush with the axe and got birch bark, kindling and dry wood to make a fire. He like to have froze to death otherwise. The train was hours late, so it was a sustained effort to keep him propped up and to rotate him time to time to keep him warm. Meanwhile he didn’t pass an intelligible word with me.
A week or so later I was doing a promotion on the street outside my jean store and had a wood cookstove to make sausages and hot chocolate for folks. There was a sawbuck and I was cutting wood and splitting for the stove. We were also giving dogsled rides and had the team tied up there. Anyhow, ol’Billy came staggering down the street after a night at the Algoma, tripped on a piece of firewood, then found enough coherence to call the cops who came to investigate the complaint. Seems he could still talk but wasn’t seeing too good and suffered from faded memory: couldn’t remember my life-saving ministration on the frozen trackside.
FLAGGING A FREIGHT
Now flagging down a freight train is a serious thing but I did it twice in emergencies. Once when I took the family out in April the snow was soft, wet and deep, and every second step you took the snowshoes would go sideways, you were stuck and had to right yourself. It took hours longer to get out to the track from camp and we missed the passenger. It was raining hard, it was awful far to retreat –no train for another week, not much grub, a sour wife, tired, cranky kids and pressing business commitments in town. We flagged the next freight after a miserable eight-hour wait.
On another occasion I had to stop a freight to evacuate a woman from a group I was guiding on the pretense of a hangnail she feared would become infected an, in her view, would kill her. I figured she was just bushed and tried to explain it to her (hand how to handle her feelings), but she didn’t understand, was suffering a very visible nervous breakdown, and had to go. There was an embarrassing and tenuous moment before that calloused train crew accepted that this was a true emergency and much more than me just wanting to get shut of her.
DERAILMENTS AND BAIN
Derailments sometimes happened. A southbound freight had a car jump off the track and dragged it seven miles before the train crew noticed it. It broke most every tie along its path and wrecked the deck of the Harmony River Bridge. The northbound passenger train stopped there, couldn’t cross and was turning back to the Soo. Ricky Giroux and I hopped off with our packs and my dogs, determined not to be held up. There was a five-foot gap between broken ties on the bridge, which was about 100 feet over the river. We tossed the packsacks over the breach first, then took a run and leapt. I ‘m scared of heights and closed my eyes coming into the jump. Once we headed down the track, I knew the dogs would follow. The jumped and we dogsledded, proudly, the rest of the way.
The next day the train was running again. They threw a plank or two across the hole, and two trainmen, one on either side, held a rope for the passengers to hold as they walked across. There was a train waiting on the north side to pick them up and take them on. My family was coming to join me. George Collar a man with a serious heart condition, bravely carried my squirming young daughter over the gap and along the length of that long and frightening bridge. I wasn’t there to meet them, since I had no idea the bridge had not been repaired.
On another occasion there was a derailment to the south, plugging up the line, and a train was dispatched from the north to pick us up and take us up to Montreal River and then down by bus to the Soo. Since a lot of us had trucks and cars at Searchmont Mile 33, we wanted to go there instead. As a group we stood on the ground outside the baggage car waiting for a decision. Bain, our conductor, mounted his pulpit up in the baggage car doors and sermonized “I don’t care what your problems are! You’re now off my train and no longer my responsibility and I don’t give a shit.” The train pulled out. I thought about what the Lord once said about putting out someone’s eyes.
Bain was an enigma, had the girth of an abbot and a curdled personality, constantly nasty, seldom nice. Yet he was a great friend of my Mom and Dad: he’d grasp them solicitously by the elbow to help them off the train –couldn’t do enough and always had a cake-icing smile for them.
But he generally hated passengers and in particular my brother, Earl. He saw Earl as shiftless and no good because when we were headed back after a spree he’d missed the train in the Soo and had to drive hell-bent to Heyden to flag it down.
With Earl, Bain was stickler for the rules of the line that he imposed on no one else. It was no drinking, no standing between cars, no riding in the baggage car and “Get your feet off the seat, fella!” Earl was a shirker and not worth a pinch of coonshit.
Earl fought back. Instead of his usual war-whoop leap out the baggage car doors, he’d go carefully down the stairs, ask Bain to level or move the little stool closer and, perhaps, would he kindly extend a steadying grip to help him detrain.
BOOZE ON THE RAILS
The history of the train if for the large part a composite of the call of the wild, the folks who rode it, both elements dampened by strong drink. Booze on the train has a storied past and vibrant present. During the ACR’s early days, the train crew would come on board ready to ride with a few drinks along with which to polish their early morning eyes. They’d make their way to Searchmont and then send a couple of men across the track to fill a few pails of beer form the local outlet before proceeding north. On the return trip they stopped close to town on the north side of the Bellevue trestle where there was a freshwater spring. While the passengers waited they’d smoke their pipes, drink water and sober up some before heading ‘er into the Soo where there were big shots who might have taken issue otherwise.
As time progressed there was a bar car, but it was discontinued as a bad idea because of trappers, loggers and others who rode the train unrestrained and frisky. Yet the passengers drank feely in the coaches and baggage cars through the prohibition era ‘til they reopened the bar in the eighties. It doesn’t have the same mystique today nor sense of camaraderie that it did in the restricted days when we snapped a cap with an axe head and gathered in conversation and a communal sense of conspiracy.
I have a wooden train whistle I got from Lee Valley Tools. Late at night I like to sit around the campfire and imitate the calls of the Old 44 as it passes the farm here. And when I load up my horse drawn sleigh rides and hay rides on the farm I often blow a long and plaintiff call before intoning “All aboard.”
ETHICS AND CULTURE SHOCK
Jeff was riding the train to Achigan in the early seventies. He as from the States, and when the bloody call to glory came he would not raise his hand and crossed the border. Who could blame him? He took a lot of kidding about being a frostback. We asked him what the biggest hardship was about moving to Canada. He replied, “Vinegar on the French fries.”
