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The plains of eastern Alberta and the Canadian National Railways main line receded into the distance on a bright July morning as VIA Rail train #1, the Canadian, approached Edmonton, two days into its run across Canada. I had not expected everything to be so green this far west; five hundred miles to the south, wildfires were burning out of control in Montana. Yet here were lakes, ponds, and rivers; wildflowers dotted the grassy banks of the rail bed, as they had all across the continent.

This was my first trip out of the United States in twenty five years. The U.S. Customs men and their German police dog who boarded and searched my Toronto-bound train at Niagara Falls reminded me eerily of the Soviet pogranichniki who had boarded and searched my Helsinki-bound train at the Soviet-Finnish border in 1975 (the Canadian customs service seems chiefly to employ cheerful young women, by contrast). As helicopters buzzed back and forth nervously along the border, my mind turned to thoughts of evil empires past and present.

Three days and some twenty five hundred miles later (while Canada is measured in kilometers, the markers beside its railroad tracks measure miles) I came to Edmonton to meet about fifty people I know from the Internet: some came from different parts of Canada, some from the United States, a few from the U.K., and one from Australia. We belong to a newsgroup, a gathering place in cyberspace that is at once everywhere in the world and nowhere at all. Some of these folks I had met in person in Chicago a year and a half ago; others I still knew only as disembodied thoughts, white words on a black computer screen. We are of various cultures and backgrounds; we often have difficulty finding a common language, even though our motto is communicate, communicate, communicate. We are, nevertheless, a community.

Western Ontario is a land of lakes and forests. The train left Toronto at twenty minutes to nine in the morning, traveling all day and all night through a land of hills, trees, and lakes, and when I got up the next morning I was still in Ontario. People with backpacks got off seemingly in the middle of nowhere, to be picked up in a few days by another train, no doubt; others such as the couple in the space across from me disembarked at improbably situated summer hideaways along the lake shores. This is real wilderness country; as the train rounded a curve a forlorn lake came into view on the right with an enormous moose wallowing in it. Beaver dams and birds were plentiful; I saw hawks, herons, and, among various duck-like birds, the ubiquitous Canada goose. They didn't seem fazed by the train at all, but they all went by too rapidly to photograph.

The Canadian is the only passenger train Edmonton sees, and it comes only six times a week (thrice from the east and thrice from the west). It is Canada's premier train, offering a smooth ride, spectacular views, excellent service and fantastic food. It is also much longer, at least in the summer, than any train Amtrak runs; the train I was on included eleven sleeping cars and three dining cars. On the Canadian one can actually get a fair amount of exercise walking through the train, particularly if one's walk takes one up and down the stairs in one of the dome cars.

Here's the view from a buggy dome window as the train rolled past another Ontario lake. The picture was taken from the "Park" car, a round-end dome car at the very end of the train. Canada was not at all what I expected; it is neither the "great white north" of SCTV nor a clone of the American states to the south. There is real wilderness up here; on an American train, by contrast, one is never more then a mile or two from civilization.

I would love to hear a Canadian perspective on some of the more important events in North American history. Take, for instance, the American revolution; we Americans point to July 4, 1776 as a defining point not only in our own country's history but in that of western civilization as a whole. Yet Canadians are no less free than we are, despite retaining their allegiance to the crown. Where is the "tyranny" our predecessors claimed to have sacrificed so many lives to escape? Since 1688, of all the Anglo-Saxon nations only we have used violence to decide the shape of our social institutions; the legacy of that, I believe, has been a tendency to fear and distrust one another and a love of the gun, which combination, I fear, may some day prove unfortunate.

Sioux Lookout, Ontario is a service stop for the Canadian. The train waited here for twenty minutes or so while the engines were refueled, the stocks of delicious food in the dining cars replenished, and, to my surprise, the windows in all nineteen cars washed clean (a man in a "cherry picker" showed up to clean the dome windows just after I took this picture). To the left, out of the picture, is an extensive rail yard; a short Canadian National work train consisting of a single locomotive and a caboose was parked (or, as railroaders would say, spotted) several tracks away. Nearby was an old CN passenger car dating from the time before VIA when CN ran its own passenger service; it had been converted into some sort of work car, but retained lingering traces of its former grandeur.

I understand that the Canadian bill of rights has an opt-out clause that allows provincial governments to override its provisions if they determine that it is in the public interest to do so. Now, my first reaction on hearing this was one of shock and horror; like many of my compatriots I'm very uncomfortable with giving those who govern me that sort of power. It would seem that Canadians (like some Europeans) are politically mature enough to trust their governments to respect their freedoms without the elaborate constitutional safeguards we Americans are used to, and without which I would feel naked.

In Alberta, restaurants offer free non-alcoholic drinks to pregnant women. That couldn't happen here; it would be condemned as discrimination against men, who unfortunately can't get pregnant, at least with the technology currently available.

This is Winnipeg, Manitoba, another service stop for the Canadian. An extraordinary thing happens just west of the Ontario - Manitoba border: the low hills and woods of Ontario give way abruptly to mostly treeless plains extending as far in any direction as the eye can see. The land is ruler-flat. It is greener, though, than the plains across the border; perhaps this is due to the proximity of Lake Winnipeg, a lake big enough to qualify as one of the Great Lakes.

Winnipeg is the place where Canada's two transcontinental railroad lines intersect; it is also where one catches the train to Churchill on Hudson's Bay, a town so far north that one can find polar bears there. Until May, 1967 there was rail service to Winnipeg from points south of the border; nowadays there is none, and if one wants to get to Edmonton from, say, Minneapolis, one must fly, or else take a long detour via Seattle and Vancouver.

At Winnipeg the car attendants, dining car people, and the rest of the crew that have been with us since Toronto got off, to be replaced by a fresh crew for the remainder of the train's journey.

The principal crops in eastern Manitoba . seem to be wheat and something with lots of little yellow flowers. There were no fences around the fields; perhaps that is because there seemed to be no cows or other herbivorous farm animals in the area. I said to myself that if I ever contemplated an invasion of Manitoba, the first wave would consist of several thousand cows which, parachuted into the fields, would rapidly eat up the entire economy of the province and thereby force its swift surrender.

I can never seem to get my mind around the fact that Canada is a kingdom. As someone who's been steeped from an early age in republicanism (but not, thank God, Republicanism!), monarchy is not something I'm used to associating with North America at the end of the twentieth century. In America Prince Charles is a mere celebrity, but in Canada he's the heir to the throne. The pictures of the Queen on the money and the crowns on the doors of the Edmonton police cars aren't just decorations; they're symbols of the personal sovereignty of a monarch. That impressed me profoundly, even though I knew the actual government is in the hands of a parliament and a prime minister.

According to Joel Garreau, Canada is the most loosely confederated of all the western democracies. I wish I knew more about Canadian politics; it used to be that one could pick up CBC radio stations in Boston, but most of them have been closed or moved to FM.

Here is the interior of the "Park" car looking forward. The stairs in the centre (as Canadians spell it) lead to the dome; immediately to the right are clocks showing the time in each of Canada's six time zones (of which this train passes through but four). Along the passageway on the left are a bar, a smoking lounge, and some bedrooms. This type of observation car was not uncommon on trains in the U.S. at one time. Since the rise of Amtrak, however, it has pretty much much disappeared.

I didn't get to see much of Saskatchewan; the train crossed most of it at night. It stopped in Saskatoon shortly before one A.M. local time, when I was fast asleep, and departed about a half hour later. The train keeps daylight savings time, but the province of Saskatchewan doesn't, so the clock in the Park car and the times on the published timetable were an hour later than the real time.

Two huge rail yards bracket the city of Edmonton: this one to the north, owned by Canadian National Railways, and another belonging to the rival Canadian Pacific Railway across the river to the south. From here the train backed into the Edmonton station, which is on the leg of a "Y" track extending south from the yard. Unfortunately it turned out to be miles away from the hotel hosting alt.polycon, which was in Old Strathcona across the river, ironically just four blocks from the Canadian Pacific yard.

Downtown Edmonton loomed in the distance as the train backed slowly into the station. The municipal airport (not Edmonton International Airport, which is south of town) is immediately on the other side of the station parking lot. The track in the foreground is the other side of the 'Y'; it is used by the eastbound Canadian to access the station. The track leading past the station appeared to continue some distance beyond it; perhaps this was to accomodate even longer trains than this one. The station location seems to have been chosen principally to keep waiting passenger trains off through tracks needed for freight runs; it doesn't seem very convenient for passengers.

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