June 2011

Kaley, left, and Erika, right, mull over their hands in a game of asshole. Photos by David Lansing.

Yesterday after lunch we were sitting around a table in the dining car looking for an excuse to go on drinking when Erika said, “Who knows how to play asshole?”

I’m pretty good at that, I told her. At least people tell me that all the time. (This reminds me of a fortune cookie I once got where the fortune said, “Try being less of a shit.”)

No, I mean the card game asshole.

Stop calling me an asshole, I told her.

She shook her head and smiled.

I like Erika. She’s a pistol. She smokes and she likes to drink and her voice sounds like a young Lauren Bacall. She also comes off kind of gruff and hard on the outside but you just know that it’s all bluff and she probably cries every time she sees a dog in the street. We were talking about her relationships yesterday morning and she admitted she’s got lousy taste in men. She just got out of a long relationship, she told me. “He was an angry Buddhist white boy.” In fact, she said, he’s the second or third angry Buddhist white boy she’s dated. “Maybe I should write a book about it. Angry Buddhist White Boys.” I told her I thought it was a fabulous idea and I do.

At the moment, she’s got a crush on one of the other writers on this trip, Rico. She knows that absolutely nothing is going to come of it. She lives in NY, he’s in Portland. But she doesn’t care. She said she likes having crushes. “They’re easier than being in love.”

Kaley does another round of pushups for being the asshole.

Anyway, Erika told us about this beer card game called asshole. The rules, such as they are, are very complicated. The object of the game is to get rid of all of your cards and you do that by laying down a card (or cards) of equal or greater value than the person to your left. And there is a ranking system, determined by the first hand, that goes President, Vice-President, Secretary, Asshole and the deal is that anyone who ranks higher than you can tell you to drink whenever they want to. Also (and this is the fun part), if the President remains President for a couple of rounds, they can create special rules, such as the word “drink” cannot be used. If the rule is broken, the offender must drink and do something else obnoxious like pushups.

It all sounded way too complicated for me, so I just sat across the group and watched them play. It seemed like Erika was always President. Maybe because she’s the only one who really knew how the game worked. Or maybe because she kept changing the rules. Anyway, somewhere along the line, she decided that if anyone said “damn” they had to drink a beer and do a pushup on the train floor. The guys didn’t have a problem with this, but two of the other women, Kara and Kaley, just kept falling in the trap. They’d watch the person to their left play a card, look at their own hands, and invariably murmur, “Damn.” I think Kaley, in particular, did more push-ups than a Marine grunt. But, you know, she just kept drinking beer so it didn’t really matter. (Although it seemed to matter to her this morning when she had to get up at 5:30).

Erika was certainly right about one thing: It’s a good way to make the time pass on a train trip.

Maybe it’s just the group I’m with, but everything on the train seems to revolve around eating and drinking. The drinking part is really easy. Basically, Antoine opens up the bar first thing in the morning (Bloody Marys), keeps it going while we’re waiting for lunch (Whistler Pale Ale), and recommences at “tea time” (whisky on the rocks). So far I’ve yet to see anyone ask for tea at tea time.

Yesterday as we were waiting for our call for lunch, Rocky Mountaineer executive chef Frédéric Couton came up to our dome car to ask us how we liked the food so far. What’s not to like? Our selections for lunch included an aged Alberta top sirloin, wild British Columbia salmon, or Alberta pork tenderloin. All served with lovely wines from the Okanagan Valley.

Frédéric, who was born in France and trained at Michelin Star restaurants in Paris and Geneva, considers working on the Rocky Mountaineer as something of a vacation. “It is very much less stressful than working in a restaurant,” he said in his heavily-inflected accent. He knows exactly how many meals he’s going to have to prepare every day and when we are going to eat it. “If your staff does the prep work well, it is not so hard to put out a gourmet meal on a train,” he said, although he admitted that the “kitchen” is “very, very small. I bend over and my fanny hits the other side.”

And by three in the afternoon, his day is done and he can relax and enjoy the train trip like everyone else. “I do a little paper work, maybe make some phone calls, but compared to a restaurant, it is nothing,” he said. “A walk in the park.”

He asked if we had any other questions and when we were all silent, he said, “Well, then, let’s go eat, shall we?” And so we did.

Hell's Gate at the narrowest part of the Fraser River. Photos by David Lansing.

I am standing outside on the viewing platform on the train when we are suddenly enveloped in darkness as we pass through the tunnel that leads to Hell’s Gate, so named by Simon Fraser, after whom this river and valley are named, in 1808 because he said it reminded him of the “Gates of Hell.”

About this narrow part of the river, where some 200 million gallons of water forces its way through the narrow canyon, Fraser wrote in his diary, “We had to pass where no human being should venture.”

Antoine has alerted every one on the coach to get their cameras ready and suddenly the viewing platform is jammed as everyone elbows themselves into a spot on the right side of the train to snap pics of both the whitewater and the Swiss-built tram which carries tourists 500 feet up the opposite side of the gorge.

Crowding around the viewing platform to get a good shot of Hell's Gate.

Antoine tells us that when Canadian Pacific built this section of the rail line in the 1880s, they had to lower men on ropes and makeshift ladders down the walls of the canyon so they could drill holes in the rock, stuffing them with dynamite, and then hope they’d be hauled back up to the top before the explosion went off.

“Usually they made it,” he says. “Sometimes they didn’t.”

This whole endeavor—building a railway line from one end of Canada to the other—was crazy. So much vast wilderness to survey and map, and then find the best route and sometimes you came to areas like Hell’s Gate and there just weren’t any options so, what the hell, build it anyway. And the money. Back in 1885, in the midst of construction, Canadian Pacific ran out of cash. They stopped paying their construction crews. This was a private company, mind you. So they went to the Canadian government for funding. And were bailed out. And as a result, the construction continued. And was completed later that year. A transcontinental railway, one of the engineering wonders of the world, running from Montreal to Vancouver. When the first train left Montreal’s Dalhousie Square Station on June 28, 1886, it covered the 3,000 mile journey in 139 hours and arrived in British Columbia only one minute late. Imagine.

Rico looks out at the Fraser River. Photo by David Lansing.

After breakfast rather than going back upstairs to our dome car, I walk outside to the viewing platform. I want to hear and smell the terrain we’re passing through. The train, traveling no more than 20 or 30 mph, follows the Fraser River as it cuts through fertile farmland. A young woman, feeding horses in a paddock, stops her chores long enough to give me a short wave and then stands there holding a bucket until we disappear from sight. She probably sees this train pass through most mornings and I wonder if she thinks about who is on it and where they’re going, and does she wish she were on a train going somewhere instead of feeding the farm animals?

The air is brisk and smells of hay and woodsmoke. The Fraser itself is not a pretty river—at least not this part of it. The First Nations people called it “muddy” in their language, and that’s exactly what it is, a thick mocha brown color that looks liked heavily creamed coffee. That’s because of all the sediment it carries down from the mountains from its headwaters on the west slopes of the Canadian Rockies as it flows northwest to the Vancouver delta.

Rico, whose real name is Frederick and lives in Portland, comes out on the viewing platform. He nods at me and I nod back. We lean against the cold metal railing, our heads hanging out to better feel the icy breeze, taking in the passing scene of bridges and barns and school buses waiting at crossings. When we go through some small town like Chilliwack or Komo, the engineer lets off a few plaintive blasts that roll across the flat farmland and dissipate in the trees.

“Why is that such a sad sound?” Rico says. It is a rhetorical question. He’s not waiting for an answer from me. There is no answer. Just the melancholy clickety-clack of our train as it crosses an old suspension bridge.