Borderland: A fascination with borders and boundaries

I’ve long been fascinated by international borders and provincial boundaries. It started back in 1975-76. First, I decided in the Summer of 1975, between Grade 12 and 13 at Oshawa Catholic High School in Oshawa, Ontario, that I might was well catch a bus, head east, and then experience the end of the hitchhiking era. Part of that would involve borders. I recall walking across the Edmundston–Madawaska Bridge, an international bridge which opened in 1921 and connects the cities of Edmundston, New Brunswick, in Canada and Madawaska, Maine, in the United States, across the Saint John River. A new replacement bridge is currently under construction and scheduled to open in 2025.

I’m not sure quite what propelled me to walk over the river and into Aroostook County, Maine, but I think there was something about a girl in a bar in Madawaska (I know, sounds a bit like the opening salvo of a country-and-western song; I believe the legal drinking age may have been 18 in Maine at the time). I remember me back in Canada later sleeping in front of either Edmundston City Hall, or the Edmundston Police Force station (I’ve forgotten which, but the building was downtown, near the old S.M.T. (Eastern) Limited bus station, I think, in those days).

Remarkably, I only had a summer-weight sleeping bag and packsack (and notably no tent) in late June in the Maritimes.

My next stop would be camping out with the same gear in  Charlottetown in the back yard of the Government House of Prince Edward Island, often referred to as Fanningbank, where I was again neither disturbed or arrested, albeit I don’t recall then Lt.-Gov. Gordon Bennett inviting me in for some breakfast either.

A few days later, my sleeping back and I wound up camping out for the night atop some embankment, surrounded by cedar trees, I believe, in Truro, Nova Scotia. When I woke up the next morning my sleeping bag and I had descended about 30 yards down the embankment during the night, while my packsack was still back at top, marking where we had started out.

The following year was the United States’ bicentennial. To mark the occasion in 1976, Canada’s official gift to the United States on its bicentennial was a coffee table-size book, Between Friends/Entre Amis, which was chalk full of exquisite border photographs, and introduced me to the International Boundary Commission. I gave the book to my parents for their anniversary that year.

Between Friends/Entre Amis was where I learned about places like the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, situated at 93 Caswell Avenue in Derby Line, Vermont and 1 Church Street in Stanstead Quebec. It straddles two nations, with one foot in the United States and the other in Canada. A black line running along the floor – a strip of masking tape – marks the international border, separating the towns Derby Line, Vermont, from Stanstead, Quebec. The front door, community bulletin board and children’s books are in the United States; the remainder of the collection and the reading room is in Canada.

In the Summer of 1979, I lived briefly in Blaine, Washington, directly across from 0 Avenue in the Douglas neighbourhood of Surrey, British Columbia. The houses on the north side of the street right were in Surrey, the houses on the south side were in Blaine. My neighbours across the street had British Columbia licence plates visible in their driveways, while neighbours on either side of me had had Washington plates in theirs.

In 1983, I remember tagging along on a trip or two to Akwesasne with Richard Russell, when he was the circulation manager of The Standard-Freeholder in Cornwall, Ontario, and I was a daily newspaper reporter there. This is also around the time I came to love Lancaster, Ontario perch rolls in hot dog buns.

Akwesasne is an incredibly complicated and complex place. Was then and is now.

I may even have enjoyed a pint or two back in the 1980s in the Halfway House, a tavern also known as Taillon’s International Hotel, where the barroom straddles the Canada-United States border between Dundee, Quebec and Fort Covington, New York, and that was built in 1820 before the international border in that area was surveyed. I remember the demarcation line drawn on the floor by the pool table, and admonitions not to transport alcoholic beverages from Quebec into New York and vice-a-versa.

Perhaps this borderland and interprovincial boundary fascination runs in the blood. I remember going to my birth mother’s place for the first time in August 1999. She lived near Amherst, Nova Scotia, on Fort Lawrence Road, east of Exit 1, where the Via Rail Ocean passenger train, with its haunting but not at all unwelcome whistle filling the air, en route from Montréal to Halifax, or Halifax to Montréal, crossing the saltwater Tantramar marshes between Amherst, Nova Scotia and Sackville, New Brunswick, a stone’s throw from the Missiguash River, bordering New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and connecting the Nova Scotia peninsula with those who come from away elsewhere in North America.

The saltwater Tantramar marshes, sometimes referred to singularly as the Tantramar Marsh, is a very special place indeed, and was even long before the first train crossed it in the 19th century. Memory surrounds you everywhere in Nova Scotia. This is the soil my Acadian ancestors lived and laboured on.  This is Aulac Ridge, a prominent rise running west to east across the Tantramar marshes on the Isthmus of Chignecto, just west of the Missiguash River. This is the demarcation line between Fort Lawrence and Fort Beauséjour, New France and British North America, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, overlooking the Cumberland Basin of the Bay of Fundy.

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Celebrating our Maple Leaf flag on its 57th anniversary and in the third COVID-19 pandemic winter of our discontent

Canada’s flag, the Maple Leaf, was raised for the first time on Parliament Hill on February 15, 1965 – and that was 57 years ago today. Xavier Gélinas, curator of political history at the Canadian Museum of History in Ottawa, notes.

The Canadian Flag or the Maple Leaf Flag, was decided by a vote. A joint committee of the Senate and House of Commons voted for the present flag back in 1964. The final design was taken up by Parliament and approved by a royal proclamation after months of debate.

“It was an epic battle, and entire chapters and books have been written about the process. Not so much about the actual flag itself or the design of the flag, but about the very torturous process in which the design was finally reached,” said Gélinas. “The final act of the drama takes place between the Spring of 1964 and the last days of December 1964. The idea that Canada’s truly distinct national flag had been brewing and simmering with various intensities of heat since the early 20th century,” he added.

“Canada was flying the Red Ensign in 1870,” Canadian Military Family Magazine (https://www.cmfmag.ca/history/february-15th-marks-56th-anniversary-of-our-maple-leaf/) noted last year. “In 1892, merchant vessels registered in Canada flew the Red Ensign with only the four original provinces represented.” Canadian Military Family Magazine, based in Petawawa, Ont., is not officially affiliated with the Canadian Armed Forces or Department of National Defence. “In 1925, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King proposed the idea of a new national flag. He backed off after his proposal was met with protest against any attack on the Union Jack. He tried and failed again in 1945 with a joint committee of the Senate and House of Commons.”

The 1960’s-era Canada that gave birth to the Maple Leaf flag – a flag of our very own for the first time – is often nostalgically remembered as a time of incredible optimism and possibility, as it was in much of the world. And surely it was. We had our Centennial in 1967 and the International and Universal Exposition, or Expo 67, as it was commonly known, a Category One World’s Fair general exhibition, held in Montréal from April 27 to Oct. 29, 1967. It is considered to be the most successful World’s Fair of the 20th century with the most attendees to that date and 62 nations participating. It also set the single-day attendance record for a world’s fair, with 569,500 visitors on its third day.

Lest we forget, we also had in that same decade and into 1970 the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ). Writing in 2013 in the Canadian Encyclopedia, now known as Historica Canada, Marc Laurendeau and Andrew McIntosh noted  FLQ members – or felquistes – were responsible for more than 200 bombings and dozens of robberies between 1963 and 1970 that left six people dead (https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/front-de-liberation-du-quebec).

The FLQ was founded in March 1963 by two Québecers, Raymond Villeneuve and Gabriel Hudon, and a Belgian, Georges Schoeters, who had fought with the resistance during the Second World War. “Québec was undergoing a period of profound political, social and cultural change at that time,” wrote Laurendeau and McIntosh, as well as rising unemployment. Members of the FLQ or felquistes – were influenced by anti-colonial and Communist movements in other parts of the world, particularly Algeria and Cuba. They shared a conviction that must liberate itself from anglophone domination and capitalism through armed struggle. Their objective was to destroy the influence of English colonialism by attacking its symbols. They hoped that Québecers would follow their example and overthrow their colonial oppressors.”

Their actions culminated in the 1970 kidnapping of British trade commissioner James Cross and the kidnapping and subsequent murder of Québec cabinet Labour Minister Pierre Laporte, in what became known as the October Crisis.

The escalation of FLQ activities prompted Québec Liberal Premier Robert Bourassa to ask Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to intervene. Trudeau, in turn, deployed the Armed Forces in Québec and Ottawa and invoked the 1914 War Measures Act – the first and only time it was ever used in a domestic crisis in Canada. Nearly 500 people were arrested without charge, including 150 suspected FLQ members.

Canada survived what appeared to many observers in 1970 to be an existential crisis. Whether the federal government was justified in invoking the now-repealed War Measures Act was controversial at the time and historians to this day still debate whether Pierre Trudeau did the right thing. Justin Trudeau invoking yesterday for the first time ever the 1988 Emergencies Act to deal with the trucker blockade and occupation of Ottawa, during this the third COVID-19 pandemic winter of our discontent, is also, of course, controversial. The Emergencies Act, which replaced the War Measures Act 34 years ago, was passed by in 1988 under the Progressive Conservative government led by former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.

Sometimes we forget just how remarkable an achievement Canada, the land of back bacon, pickerel, the Maple Leaf, beaver, moose and the loon, was in 1867. In the spring of 1864, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island were contemplating the possibility of Maritime Union. But nothing concrete happened until the Province of Canada, springing from the legislative union of Canada East and Canada West, heard of the proposed conference and members of the combined legislature requested permission to attend the meeting of the Maritime colonies, in order to raise the larger subject of British North American union.

Delegates from away arrived by steamer in Prince Edward Island and shared the spotlight with the first circus to visit the island in more than 20 years. No kidding. How absolutely Canadian can you get?

The historic Charlottetown Conference took place from Sept. 1 to 9, 1864. My ancestral Acadian roots are on the saltwater Tantramar marshes of Amherst, Nova Scotia, in Cumberland County on the Isthmus of Chignecto at the head of the Bay of Fundy and Missiguash River, bordering New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and connecting the Nova Scotia peninsula with those who come from away elsewhere in North America. From Amherst came four of the 36 Fathers of Confederation, more than any other city or town in Canada:  Robert Barry Dickey, Edward Barron Chandler, Jonathan McCully, and Sir Charles Tupper, a Conservative who went onto serve as Canada’s sixth prime minister briefly in 1896.  While he was born in Amherst, Chandler was best known as a New Brunswick legislator.

Tupper was also a medical doctor and founded Pugsley’s Pharmacy, dispensing chemists, at 63 Victoria Street East in downtown Amherst in 1843, the same year he became a doctor. Tupper was president of the Medical Society of Nova Scotia in 1863, and was the first president of the Canadian Medical Association from 1867 to 1870. Pugsley’s operated at the same location in the same historic Tupper Block building, as the oldest business in town and one of the oldest pharmacies in Canada, for 169 years until May 2012.

While there are differing historical opinions as to who should be considered a Father of Confederation, traditionally they have been defined as the 36 men who attended one or more of the three conferences held at Charlottetown; Québec City from Oct. 10 to 27, 1864; and London, England from Dec. 4, 1866 to Feb. 11, 1867 to discuss the union of British North America, preceding Confederation on July 1, 1867. Negotiators settled on the name “Dominion of Canada,” proposed by the head of the New Brunswick delegation, Samuel Leonard Tilley.  The word dominion was taken from the King James Bible: “He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth” (Psalm 72:8). Tilley, who had a background in pharmacy, became the minister of customs in Sir John A. Macdonald’s first cabinet in 1867.

As a Canadian, it also remains an uncommon privilege for me to have to sat in the public gallery in the balcony of historic Province House in Charlottetown, designed and built by local architect Isaac Smith and completed in 1847, to accommodate the legislative assembly of Prince Edward Island. To this day, the assembly has only 27 seats for the members from the ridings of Souris-Elmira through to Tignish-Palmer Road.

The July 1 holiday was established by statute in 1879, under the name Dominion Day. There is no record of organized ceremonies after the first anniversary, except for the 50th anniversary of Confederation in 1917, at which time the new Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings, under construction, was dedicated as a memorial to the Fathers of Confederation and to the valour of Canadians fighting in the First World War in Europe.

The next celebration was held in 1927 to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Confederation.

Since 1958, the federal government has arranged for an annual observance of Canada’s national day on July 1.

The saltwater Tantramar marshes, sometimes referred to singularly as the Tantramar Marsh, is a very special place indeed, and was even long before the first train crossed it in the 19th century. This is Aulac Ridge, a prominent rise running west to east across the Tantramar marshes on the Isthmus of Chignecto, just west of the Missiguash River. This is the demarcation line between Fort Lawrence and Fort Beauséjour, New France and British North America, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, overlooking the Cumberland Basin of the Bay of Fundy.

Memory surrounds you everywhere in Nova Scotia. This is the soil my Acadian ancestors lived and laboured on. All I have to do is close my eyes for but a moment listening to Lorena McKennitt’s The Mystic’s Dream, and I clearly hear the words, “All along the English shore,” and in my mind’s eye I see the Acadian tricolor of blue, white and red, the gold star Stella Maris at top left, seeking the guidance and protection of the Virgin Mary, patron of the Acadians.

My land. My country. My Canada. My flag.

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Is coming home a geographical place or place of the heart? Perhaps it is some of both

 

 

What does “coming home” mean?

A friend of mine from Minnesota, long a union mover-and-shaker in Washington, D.C., recently wrote that “You Can’t Go Home Again, written by Thomas Wolfe, made it clear what this tension is that I feel. After 21 years gone from Minnesota I feel an existential angst when ‘coming home.’

“It took me many years to accept that it wasn’t home anymore – Maryland is. I tend to be overly sensitive to things. Moving away was the hardest thing I have ever done (not involving losing people to death and a couple … of other ways.) It has become almost a tortuous trip full of ‘dead memories,’ things that were real, or did I see them in a movie – and why was I in that movie too?

“I’ve come to understand places as having their own weight or wavelength. When I found out a few years back that gravity actually fluctuates around the globe, it made sense to me. I’m rambling I know – but have others felt this way too? Do you have a hard time returning to a place? In the end I know moves can be very important and you can grow from them. I also think Americans move too much and also lose a lot in the process. In the end I can’t square it exactly, but I too have learned you can never really go home again.”

Thought provoking questions, all, to be sure. Where and what indeed is “home”?

I grew up in Southern Ontario in Oshawa, just east of Toronto. Within five months of my going off to university in 1976, my dad had retired from General Motors and my parents retired away from there. Suddenly a place I had taken for granted as home wasn’t so much anymore, and never has been since. I unexpectedly but quickly lost most of my sense of connection to Oshawa. Some 40 years on I’ve seldom been back. Since leaving Oshawa, I’ve lived and worked across much of Canada – from Nova Scotia to the Northwest Territories – as well as spending time living in New Hampshire, Massachusetts and North Carolina. For the last nine years, I’ve lived in Thompson in Northern Manitoba. Yet on some level – time and tribe perhaps – Oshawa and Ontario will always be home. I can close my eyes but for just a minute and it is 1974 again, and I know exactly where I am and who I am with, and they know me in ways others never will, as the music on the AM radio band provides the soundtrack for our lives. As do train whistles.

I’ve always found them to have a haunting, slightly distant sound that engages the soul instantly. All through my childhood, growing up in Oshawa, an east wind invariably meant two things: You could hear the train whistle from the CN tracks well south at Bloor Street, and rain, long steady rain, was an hour or two, not much more, away. You could not hear the train whistle at any other time from the house I lived in from the age of six to 19, and while it rained at other times, especially with summer thunderstorms, with winds from other directions that was more unpredictable. An east wind started the clock running for the countdown to rain. For me, east winds and train whistles are so internalized they’re still part of my chronobiology at some deep level.

Years removed from Oshawa, I would still notice the haunting but not at all unwelcome sound of the train whistle when I would visit my mother, who lived near Amherst, Nova Scotia, on Fort Lawrence Road, east of Exit 1, as the Via Rail Ocean passenger train, en route from Montréal to Halifax, or Halifax to Montréal, crossed the saltwater Tantramar marshes between Amherst, Nova Scotia and Sackville, New Brunswick, a stone’s throw from the Missiguash River, bordering New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and connecting the Nova Scotia peninsula with those who come from away elsewhere in North America.

The saltwater Tantramar marshes, sometimes referred to singularly as the Tantramar Marsh, is a very special place indeed, and was even long before the first train crossed it in the 19th century. Memory surrounds you everywhere in Nova Scotia. This is the soil my Acadian ancestors lived and laboured on. Like being a teenager in Oshawa in the 1970s, again, all I have to do is close my eyes for but a moment listening to Lorena McKennitt’s The Mystic’s Dream and I clearly hear the words, “All along the English shore,” and in my mind’s eye I see the Acadian tricolor of blue, white and red, the gold star Stella Maris at top left, seeking the guidance and protection of the Virgin Mary, patron of the Acadians.

This is Aulac Ridge, a prominent rise running west to east across the Tantramar marshes on the Isthmus of Chignecto, just west of the Missiguash River. This is the demarcation line between Fort Lawrence and Fort Beauséjour, New France and British North America, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, overlooking the Cumberland Basin of the Bay of Fundy.

Nowhere, of course, in the song are the words, “All along the English shore” actually heard, not even as a mondegreen where you mishear the lyrics to a song, which is a sort of aural malapropism, where instead of saying the wrong word, you hear the wrong word as a result of near-homophony, in a way that gives it a new meaning. No, this, as it was for Marcel Proust, is remembrance of things past.

While my hometown of Oshawa is a lot bigger (and for that matter older) than Thompson, it was in many ways, at least as I recall it from growing up there, a lot like Thompson in being a working-class blue-collar town.

The men in my Nipigon Street neighbourhood – guys like Earl Kirkpatrick, Snow Willson and my dad – were often working six days a weeks, with overtime on Saturdays when they were on day shift. If they were on nights, they’d be busy flooding the Nipigon Park outdoor rink at 2:30 a.m. – after their eight-hour night shift ended and they went to bed – so us kids could skate the next day. That’s how I remember my dad.

Instead of going to Inco or Vale and down into a mine or working at the surface in a refinery or smelter, the men (and they were invariably men back then) I knew in the 1960s carried their metal lunch pails into the factory at General Motors to build cars and trucks. When they were leaving at the end of their shift, they punched the same clock they had coming in. Every time I hear Men of the Deeps sing Rise Again or Working Man, my union resolve deepens just a little bit more.

I spent the first of five summers as a university student, beginning in 1976, working in that very same West Plant in the high-seniority Completely Knocked Down (CKD) department my dad had retired from the year before. Some of his buddies were still there; some I had heard about for years and met for the first time.

My first job was hammering large wooden crates together. It was just an amazing cavernous building that old West Plant with great big windows and wooden floors. I remember once going across the tunnel (or bridge, I’m not sure now how it was referred to) connecting the West Plant and the North Plant over Division Street. Later that summer, I hung rads in the rad room of the old North Plant across the street.

You Can’t Go Home Again tells the story of George Webber, a novice author, who writes a book that makes frequent references to his home town of Libya Hill, a fictional small town set in the South, to find it is no longer the peaceful place of his youth. The town is caught up in frenzied real estate speculation that precedes the stock market crash of 1929. The book is a national success but the residents of the town, unhappy with what they view as Webber’s distorted depiction of them, send the author menacing letters and death threats.

Wolfe took the title, You Can’t Go Home,  from a conversation with Australian-born journalist Ella Winter, who had remarked to him: “Don’t you know you can’t go home again?” Wolfe then asked Winter for permission to use the phrase as the title of his book.

The title acts as counterpoint to nostalgia, which is so often weighted with both inaccurately positive bias and an inability to appreciate the changes wrought by time on places and people we remember as static and permanent. In general terms, it means that attempts to relive youthful memories are never as fulfilling as during their initial creation. Webber realizes: “You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood … back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame … back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”

Up here in Thompson, we tell people home is where the heart is. Raymonde, the head cashier at Giant Tiger here, has built a new home with her husband to retire to in a couple of years back in Campbellton, New Brunswick, on the south bank of the Restigouche River opposite Pointe-à-la-Croix, Quebec.  Another friend and colleague from University College of the North here, who arrived in Thompson in July 2007, the same month and year I arrived, is soon decamping to return home to the Membertou First Nation, just outside Sydney, Nova Scotia on Cape Breton Island.

Others, perhaps surprisingly stay on here long after retirement. A friend from Grand Falls-Windsor, a town located in the centre of Newfoundland and Labrador, has told me many times he and his wife go back for visits every few years but have no interest in moving back to the Rock with their children and grandchildren in this area, where they were born and raised. Maybe Brandon, he says, thinking about moving some day maybe, because the winter is milder, if not less stormy in Southern Manitoba.  It’s a not unfamiliar story. Another friend saw her parents move this past winter, after five years of retirement back home in St. John’s, to Sanford in the Rural Municipality of Macdonald, just a few kilometres southwest of Winnipeg in south central Manitoba. Grandchildren and children – family – trumping other considerations over the longer run.

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Fête nationale: Long live Acadie, long live the Tintamarre

My name likely doesn’t immediately point to my Acadian ancestry. But indeed my birth mother came from a long line of LeBlancs and Cormiers, who settled on both sides of the saltwater Tantramar Marsh straddling the Nova Scotia and New Brunswick provincial boundary at the Missiguash River. This is the soil of Acadie where my Acadian ancestors lived and laboured near Aulac Ridge, a prominent rise running west to east across the Tantramar Marsh on the Isthmus of Chignecto, overlooking the Cumberland Basin of the Bay of Fundy. It also from Acadie that more than two-thirds of the Acadian population was expelled by the British between 1755 and 1764 during Le Grand Dérangement.

My mother, who lived for many years in Southern Ontario, returned to live on the Tantramar Marsh between Sackville, New Brunswick and Amherst, Nova Scotia, on Fort Lawrence Road, in the early 1990s. She spent the last 15 years or so of her life living just a couple of kilometres away from the modest two-storey house she had grown up in at the corner of Cornwall and Cordova streets in Amherst. The home remained in the family for generations until the last family resident, my uncle Harold Cecil Hicks, who spent most of his life living there, died in September 2013.

My mother didn’t talk much about her ancestry, although she acknowledged it in that way Nova Scotians have of accepting something but stopping somewhat short of perhaps fully embracing it, leaving room for lots of ambiguity. My family is big on ambiguity. When I first saw a photograph of my maternal grandmother, Adeline LeBlanc, who I never met, and mentioned to my mother how aboriginal she appeared to be to me, my mother told me she was “part Mi’kmaq.” Somehow that just hadn’t come up before my observation.  The Acadian side of our ancestry didn’t get stressed a whole lot more, truth be told, although my mother seemed to be more conversant in French than I’ve ever been.

People are products of their times. I could hardly expect my mother, who grew up in rural Nova Scotia in the 1940s and 1950s, to be trumpeting her Acadian or Mi’kmaq ancestral heritage.

Still, I saw the momentary anxiety show on her face, quickly followed by a look of pride, when she came home one day and “Nita’s boy” as my Nova Scotia relatives call me, abbreviating her name Juanita, had affixed outside her house the Acadian tricolor of blue, white and red, the gold star Stella Maris at top left, seeking the guidance and protection of the Virgin Mary, patron of the Acadians. It wasn’t lost on my mother, living on a road named Fort Lawrence, that we were standing on some of the most contested land in North America, where New France made its last stand some 250 years earlier against British North America, and even some American colonists from New England came up for a bit of skirmishing from time-to-time. The Acadian pennant flew outside of her house, faded after a few years in the sun and saltwater breeze off Cumberland Basin, for the rest of her life.

All of this comes to mind perhaps because Fête nationale nationale des Acadiens et des Acadiennes will be marked by annual celebrations again Saturday.

After a full two weeks of its own special brand of joie de vivre, marked by the “clangour” or “din” of musical merriment known as the Tintamarre, the 53rd annual Festival acadien de Caraquet on Nouveau-Brunswick’s Péninsule acadienne wraps up Saturday with revelers making as much noise as they can to celebrate Fête nationale, or more formally, nationale des Acadiens et des Acadiennes on 15 Août.

First held in 1955 to commemorate the bicentenary of  Le Grand Dérangement of the Acadians from the Maritime provinces, the Tintamarre takes its inspiration from a medieval French custom during which a crowd makes as much noise as possible in order to mark a sad or a joyful event.

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The train whistle carries on the east wind

I wrote the time down: 12:47 p.m. Yesterday. I wanted to make a note of it because I so seldom hear train whistles up here in Thompson, Manitoba. The wind has to be blowing in just the right direction at the right time.

Thompson is pretty much at the dead centre of Manitoba, Canada and North America, give or take a few kilometres here and there. Halfway north, halfway south, halfway east and halfway west, I have to remind myself at times. In the winter, we feel (quite literally with our legendary -40°C/-40°F temperatures) more connected to our northern geography. But conversely in summer, when July temperatures average 23°C and temperatures of 30°C and even higher are registered, we’re more aware of our southern connections to the Prairies of Southern Manitoba.

The bonus of a 30°C day in Thompson in July is that the humidity, with the exception of a few days usually each summer, remains relatively low and bearable compared to what I lived with for years in Southern Ontario. The only relief from that stifling summer heat for me for many years was annual trips to the Maritimes, when you knew that once you got just past Quebec City on the St. Lawrence River, somewhere between Montmagny, Kamouraska and Notre Dame du Portage, the air was going to clear of humidity and the temperature drop, making for pleasant driving for the rest of the evening to Edmundston, New Brunswick, gateway to the Atlantic time zone and jumping of point for all places in the Maritimes. Here in Thompson, the air cools off routinely at night to at least as low as 12°C or 13°C, even after a 30°C day, and the number of nights the temperature has been above say 20°C still at midnight, I could probably count on the fingers of one hand in my more than eight years living here now. Certainly, I’ve never needed a fan or air conditioning, although life-long Northerners tend to make a run on both here at Wal-Mart or Canadian Tire if they notice the thermometer is predicted to head up to 27°C or 28°C for more than a day or two.

Even in summer, we’re just close enough to Hudson Bay that a deep low pressure system with a strong counter-clockwise rotation, can send our temperature abruptly back down to 8°C for a day or so, reminding us the polar bears are never really that far away

As for train whistles, I’ve always found them to have a haunting, slightly distant sound that engages the soul instantly. All through my childhood, growing up in Oshawa, just east of Toronto, an east wind invariably meant two things: You could hear the train whistle from the CN tracks well south at Bloor Street, and rain, long steady rain, was an hour or two, not much more, away. You could not hear the train whistle at any other time from the house I lived in from the age of six to 19, and while it rained at other times, especially with summer thunderstorms, with winds from other directions, that was more unpredictable. An east wind started the clock running for the countdown to rain. For me, east winds and train whistles are so internalized they’re still part of my chronobiology at some deep level.

Years removed from Oshawa, I would still notice the haunting but not at all unwelcome sound of the train whistle when I would visit my mother, who by then lived on Fort Lawrence Road, east of Exit 1, as the Via Rail Ocean passenger train, en route from Montréal to Halifax, or Halifax to Montréal, crossed the saltwater Tantramar marshes between Amherst, Nova Scotia and Sackville, New Brunswick, a stone’s throw from the Missiguash River, bordering New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and connecting the Nova Scotia peninsula with those who come from away elsewhere in North America. The saltwater Tantramar marshes, sometimes referred to singularly as the Tantramar Marsh, is a very special place indeed, and was even long before the first train crossed it in the 19th century. Memory surrounds you everywhere in Nova Scotia. This is the soil my Acadian ancestors lived and laboured on. All I have to do is close my eyes for but a moment listening to Lorena McKennitt’s The Mystic’s Dream and I clearly hear the words, “All along the English shore,” and in my mind’s eye I see the Acadian tricolor of blue, white and red, the gold star Stella Maris at top left, seeking the guidance and protection of the Virgin Mary, patron of the Acadians. This is Aulac Ridge, a prominent rise running west to east across the Tantramar marshes on the Isthmus of Chignecto, just west of the Missaguash River. This is the demarcation line between Fort Lawrence and Fort Beauséjour, New France and British North America, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, overlooking the Cumberland Basin of the Bay of Fundy.

Nowhere, of course, in the song are the words, “All along the English shore” actually heard, not even as a mondegreen where you mishear the lyrics to a song, which is a sort of aural malapropism, where instead of saying the wrong word, you hear the wrong word as a result of near-homophony, in a way that gives it a new meaning. No, this, as it was for Marcel Proust, is remembrance of things past.

Train whistles, which were also called steam trumpets, originated in England in 1832 with the stationmaster at the Leicester and Swannington Railway opening, who suggested that trains should have an audible signaling device. A local musical instrument maker was commissioned to create a steam trumpet for the steam locomotive. The proportional tracker action of the steam calliope in those days allowed for the engineer to individualize to some extent the expression of the sound and many locomotive operators would have their own style of blowing the whistle so it would be often be known who was operating the locomotive by the sound.

The purpose of the train whistle was to serve as an audible warning device, which it still does, and as a way to signal to other rail workers up and down the railway track, which, of course, in the latter case today has been supplemented, although not replaced, by two-way radios and even smartphones and text messaging. And train whistles to this day are still seen as an inexpensive warning device compared to other options, such as elevated rail crossings where tracks intersect with roads used by motor vehicles. Under Transport Canada’s Canadian Rail Operating Rule (CROR 14), a combination of two long whistles, followed by a short whistle, then followed by another long whistle, indicates that a train is approaching a public grade crossing.

Both the old steam whistle and today’s compressed air whistle waver in pitch, suggesting a cry or wail, giving them that distinct haunting, lonesome or melancholic sound often ascribed to them. In the United States in the 19th century, different whistle sounds were created for different railroads (the preferred term rather than railway in the U.S.) in order to distinguish them, ranging from high pitched to deeper tones.

When I lived in Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories, I found that to be an exception to the east wind-means-rain rule. There, deep in the continent, like here, but without the proximity of meteorological effects emanating from Hudson Bay, an east wind off Great Slave Lake and Yellowknife Bay, which I could see down the road from my place, often meant high pressure and plenty of sunshine and fine weather, especially in the summer. As for trains, they only ran as far north as Hay River in the Northwest Territories, as I recall. There were no train whistles to be heard in Yellowknife.

Here in Northern Manitoba, Via Rail Canada Train  693 runs north between Winnipeg and Churchill, stopping in Thompson, while Train 692 runs south from Churchill to Winnipeg, also making a stop in Thompson, As well, Hudson Bay Railway (HBR), which owns the track and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of  OmniTRAX Canada, runs its own freight Train 295 from its interchange with CN Rail and its railhead at The Pas along the route. OmniTRAX Canada is in turn a wholly-owned subsidiary of Denver-based shortline railroad OmniTRAX, Inc., an affiliate of The Broe Group, which was founded in 1986 and is privately owned by Pat Broe, who founded the company in Denver in 1972 as a real estate asset management firm.

Via Rail Canada stations and stops along the Winnipeg to Churchill route in Manitoba and Saskatchewan include Portage-La-Prairie, Gladstone, Plumas, Glenella, McCreary, Laurier, Ochre River, Dauphin, Gilbert Plains, Grandview, Roblin, Togo, Sask., Kamsack, Sask., Veregin, Sask., Mikado, Sask., Canora, Sask., Sturgis, Sask., Endeavour, Sask., Reserve, Sask., Hudson Bay, Sask., The Pas, Prospector, Root Lake, Wanless, Atik, Simonhouse, Cranberry Portage, Optic Lake, Heming Lake, Sherridon, Ruddock, Charles, Pawistik, Mile 151.8, Pukatawagan, Orok, Halcrow, Cormorant, Dering, Dyce, Wekusko, Turnbull, Ponton and Pipun.

Along the Bayline, the stations and stops include Wabowden, Lyddal, Odhil, Hockin, Thicket Portage, Leven, Thompson, Sipiwesk, Pikwitonei, Bridgar, Pit Siding, Ilford, Wivenhoe, Gillam, Bird, Sundance, Amery, Charlebois, Weir River, Lawledge, Thibaudeau, Silcox, Herchmer, Kellett, O’Day, Back, McClintock, Cromarty, Belcher, Chesnaye, Lamprey, Bylot, Digges, Tidal and Fort Churchill. The Bayline reached Churchill on March 29, 1929.

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