Would I take the train again? I’m thinking yes, and possibly even in reverse. (West to East).
Or I’m thinking of a time when I might’ve liked to have taken it, earlier in my life.
Like Congress, the big annual SSHRC hullabaloo, especially on the occasions when it was down East: Toronto or Montreal.
Pack everything up, including the laptop and a couple books, board the train in Edmonton, and then sit tight for 3 days and just prep for the conference. Nothing else to do. Focus on the presentations, finish them as papers.
Walk into the conference ready. Prepped. Good to go.
Take the time, to dive into the conference and be present with the sessions. Make it a two-week thing.
And then fly back or whatever, or return via train and use the time to reflect on what you learned.
Riding the train has explained a lot, in terms of Canadian Communications Theory. Thinking specifically of both Innis and McLuhan, and the Bias of Communication specifically.
Rail and Road and Telecom: Parallel lines
Innis would have been speaking of the age of rail, but also the era of the fur trade, that ran in conjunction with that, though rarely overlapping. Rail during that era would have been the symbol of big industry, as was shipping obviously, though the Age of Sail was in the rear-view at that point, with the Age of Steam coming into its own.
Then the Shift happens, a shift without direction, though one is often implied as the charts of history put time on the Y axis. Rarely we may get something of a vertical orientation, either up or down, and almost never moving right to left.
(Might have to try that one sometime.)
Anyhoo, the Shift, as McLuhan is talking about, takes place in an era of air travel and electrical communications. (Innis too, but bear with me for a moment). The primary mode (of both transpo and comms) has changed, and while the old one still exists, and maybe even in a greater volume, the way we think about the world has changed as well.
The new and old continue exist in parallel lines, mirroring each other down vast stretches of the countryside. Part of this is simply due to convenience: once one route is carved, it’s easier to lay down the another next to it. Path Dependency. And the ground shapes it (well, maybe not in Saskatchewan) too; the land speaks through the topography. The paths may be laid down following valleys and gulleys and “paths of least resistance”, or “desire paths” as they are coming to be known.
This is described by Tung-Hui Hu in their book “A Prehistory of the Cloud“, how the paths of the telegraph wires from East to West followed the lines of the railroad, obviously, and how those followed the paths of the Pony Express. So the donkeys noses led the way, and we’re still using those paths all these years later.
Ringing out at every controlled and uncontrolled crossing, the honkening is incessant.
I guess it’s a good sign that there are roads out there, in the big empty blackness.
Sitting in the dome car at 5 am with the big empty of the Canadian Prairies, somewhere in Manitoba, west of Winnipeg (or maybe we crossed into Saskatchewan without noticing, it’s hard to say) one feels adrift in space, like an astronaut looking out the cupola into the void, with only occasional lights in the distance.
Ride by night…
Probably felt by nighttime pilots, especially in WWII. Probably why we had those navy men turn to writing sci-fi in the 50s and 60s. Hmmm.
Apparently 2.9% of the worlds surface area is inhabited by humans. (Thanks, internet!)
And after 2 days of the Canadian Shield and the Prairies, by rail, one asks “Really, that much?”
Clear to the horizon
No where else can really make you feel that small than the big empty of this chunk of our country.
Other places can make you feel small, of course, we’re small and tiny creatures clinging to the surface of a rock hurtling through the cosmos. But this particular kind of small, of the relentless miles, of the distance between everything, in ways that a car trip obscures (with the towns and gas stations and frequent stops, the points of interest), and air travel annihilates by dint of being above the clouds (and by finishing a four-day trip in four-hours).
I feel that everyone should do it at least once, in the same way that you see proposals that “everyone should have to work for a month (or year!) in x”, where x stands for the job that’s the author’s bugaboo, be it retail or waiting tables or delivery or whatever.
(FWIW, that proposal usually won’t work as intended, because one of the takeaways for the proposal is that it is tied to “living off the wage of the job in question”, and those that might learn something from it can just skate by insulating themselves from it with money.)
Looking up at the dome in Winnipeg’s Union station.
Arrived in Winnipeg, the “geographic centre of the continent” according to the announcer on the train, and which is also true.
Not quite the halfway point of the trip, time wise (two days and three sleeps* to go), but definitely crossing that border.
Much like the last post, there’s definitely a boundary feeling here. Winnipeg feels more in common with the cities of the East, the ornate buildings, the Union Station downtown, but… less so perhaps, as the fraying tendrils of empire degrade the further out one gets from the centre of it, or in this case the further West one drives (or rides).
This view of the empire, of the core and the periphery, is central to the work of Harold Innis, the Canadian communication studies scholar (well, “political economy”, but communication was a key theme) and his earlier work studying the history of the fur trade in Canada.
His later work on the Bias of Communication, of the dichotomy between time and space, between durability and speed, is something I gave a guest lecture on several years ago. The title of the lecture was “Monolithic and Ephemeral”. (I’ll see if I can find a copy and post it up here).
But it’s the part here, about how the reach of the Empire is dictated by the speed and quality of information coming from the heart. And here, at the railroad station at the centre of the continent, along those steel lines of communication, it feels more central than ever.
*: as if I’m getting a good and consistent sleep here..
