Meeting A Train At Christmas By Misadventure and Surviving

 

Photos by Suzanne Currie

THE LONG WALK HOME AND THE GUIDING LIGHTS OF THE OLD RAILWAY STATION

A PREAMBLE TO TODAY’S POST

BY TED CURRIE

     Of course I was wrong to use the railway line as a local-rules shortcut, especially in the winter months, and my consequence-be-damned attitude very nearly cost me my mortal self. And imagine how much less writing I would have composed had I been taken on this particular winter night, walking the Canadian National Railway section from the Anne Street hill south toward the Bracebridge Train Station on Main Street. I don’t know how many yards it is from the intersection with Anne Street to the level ground just before the station, but in blowing snow, low light, and a passing train, it certainly seemed more than the length of a couple of football fields end to end. I had made this crossing a thousand times as a kid, and never once had I made the mistake of trying to share tracks with a southbound freight train. While there was no trestle, and no river to fall into if forced to jump as a last resort, there was a deep enough ravine on the west side, and a steep hillside on the east side, not to mention a fair amount of accumulated snow and embankments to hurdle over, on this ill-fated evening when all the past credits of survival meant nothing.

     I had just left my girlfriend, Linda Dawson, in the driveway of her home on Liddard Street, about two urban blocks from the intersection of road and railway. I was in a chipper mood as usual, and had enjoyed our sledding date on a hill at the end of her street. We were teens in a small town and honestly, back in the early 1970’s, before the growth spurt of my hometown yet to come, there wasn’t a lot to do for teenagers who didn’t party when it had anything to do with booze or the kind of recklessness that usually ends badly. We were quite contented to go to public skating at the arena, listen to records, have passive social gatherings, and just enjoy each others company on long walks in a small town snowscape. But I was not adverse to taking a little measured risk, when it came to my conduct alone, and this was what got me into trouble on this night, trying to outrun a locomotive.

     It is still a clear memory to me after all these years, and I do believe that something, or someone saved my life, if not by being hit by the passing train, then by getting knocked unconscious down the embankment only to freeze to death. Fear certainly electrified my imagination, and I had lots of strange recollections for months after the near fatal mishap. I suppose it might have been my Guardian Angel that knocked me clear of the train, and then helped me to regain my constitution so that I could crawl up the hillside after my tumble over the edge. I survived to tell the story, and as a writer, well, I’ll take this lesson as far as I can; even as a warning to all others with an adventurous spirit, to never tempt fate as I did, in the challenge of a fast moving train plowing through a winter storm.

     (1819 - THE SKETCH BOOK - CHRISTMAS AS BRACEBRIDGE HALL - BY WASHINGTON IRVING; BRACEBRIDGE, ONTARIO WAS NAMED AFTER THE TITLE OF IRVING’S LATER BOOK, 1822, BRACEBRIDGE HALL)

     “One of the least pleasing effects of modern refinement, is the havoc it has made among the hearty old holiday customs. It has completely taken off the short touchings and spirited reliefs of these embellishments of life, and has worn down society into a more smooth and polished, but certainly a less characteristic surface. Many of the games and ceremonies of Christmas have entirely disappeared, and like the sherri’s sack of old Falstaff, have become matters of speculation and dispute among commentators. They flourished in times full of spirit and lustihood, when men enjoyed life roughly, but heartily and vigorously; times wild and picturesque, which have furnished poetry with its richest materials, and the drama with its most attractive variety of characters and manners.

     “The world has become more worldly. There is more of dissipation and less of enjoyment. Pleasure has expanded into a broader, but shallower stream, and has forsaken many of those deep and quiet channels, where it flowed sweetly through the calm bosom of domestic life. Society has acquired a more enlightened and elegant tone; but it has lost many of its strong local peculiarities, its homebred feelings, its honest fireside delights. The traditionary customs of golden-hearted antiquity, its feudal hospitalities, and lordly wassailing, have passed away with the baronial castles and stately manor houses in which they were celebrated. The comported with the shadowy hall, the great oaken gallery and the tapestried parlor, but are unfitted for the light slowly salons and gay drawing-rooms of the modern villa.

     “Shorn, however, as it is, of its ancient and festive honors, Christmas is still a period of delightful excitement in England. It is gratifying to see that home feeling completely aroused which holds so powerful a place in every English bosom.”

THE PASSING OF A TRAIN, THE ENVELOPING MISERY OF COLD AND SNOW

     It seemed a goodly amount of time had passed after the train had crossed the tracks on the embankment, about twenty feet from where I was clinging to iced-over rocks on its side. The great spirals of horizontally driven snow from the trains suction, kept weighing me down against the hillside, and that with the blowing snow of the winter evening, was making any escape from the ravine impossible. I had been forced to jump out of the way of the south bound freight train a few minutes earlier, very nearly run down when I underestimated how close the train horn was to the corner just north of the Anne Street crossing, a hundred yards from the frothing cold expanse of the Muskoka River, churned up by passage over the shallows of Bass Rock. So here I was, half frozen, exhausted from earlier recreations with skates and toboggan, unable to even get solid footing, because of the underlying ice from the flash freeze earlier in the afternoon of that December day that had deteriorated so fast.

     I couldn’t see much of anything from being trapped against the side of the steep embankment, and there was nothing I could grab above me, in order to be able to make any upward progress. It was dark and the only significant illumination came from the snow itself, but it was falling so thick and windswept, that it was hard to focus beyond about ten feet up and down the hill. I had lost sight of the glowing clock faces of the old federal building clock tower, which had assisted me when I was walking that first fifty yards from Anne Street toward Toronto Street. I was still a long way from getting to that connection with Main Street, where the Train Station was located, across from the historic Albion Hotel, and the sanctuary of hitting that well lit intersection of Thomas and Toronto Streets, at the union with the Hunt’s Hill bridge that I would have to cross in order to get home to Alice Street.

     I laid on the side of the hill and tried to keep my hands close to my body for warmth, and kept watch around me in the hope that the snow squall would weaken, and I could look for a better exit than I had at present, which was basically to slide down the rest of the slope on the river side, and try to navigate through neighborhood fences and backyards, to get back to the roadway. I would at least be on level ground sooner, than it would take now to climb a little and fall a lot back down the embankment. I was beginning to fear I was going to suffer serious frost bite on my fingers and toes, as my boots had holes in them, and my socks had been wet from earlier tobogganing with my then girlfriend Linda Dawson. Every time I walked her home, up on Liddard Street, she asked me to be careful and not take chances walking along the rail line. I thought a great deal of Linda, but not enough to follow her advice about walking along the tracks. I had done it with my mates and solo for all the years our family had lived in Bracebridge. My mother warned me of the dangers of doing this, but she was a realist about my sense of adventure and daring. I was in a great pot of simmer stew right now, but it was a cold vigil, awaiting the storm to let up enough for me to mount an escape.

     I decided that the only way to get home sooner, was to find the inner strength to climb inch by inch up the ice-covered slope, made worse by about a foot of fresh snow. I tried for fifteen minutes or so, but it seemed so much longer, and while I was still a long way from reaching the summit, you might say, I had been able to get a foot hold in various crannies, and against embankment boulders here and there on the jagged incline. It was at the point I was within reach of what seemed to be the top of the slope, I did once again take a tumble down, negating half of my gains. It was hugely frustrating, like trying to run fast in waist deep water. Then, without hearing anything but wind and snow hitting my jacket and toque, I heard as clear as the train horn minutes earlier, a voice from within the vortex of horizontally blown snow. “This way son,” was what I believed someone had yelled out to me, from somewhere along the ridge, probably on the rail tracks. I looked up but could see nothing, or no one, who might be responsible for this directive. “Follow me,” the voice yelled once more, and it seemed in good cheer for the dire situation of the circumstance, that a rescuer had found me, or had been following behind and saw my footprints disappear over the hillside. “Use the light to guide you,” was the very next message, yet still without a visible source. Not a silhouette or barest outline of the person calling out to me in my desperate condition, stuck in the snow and about to freeze to death.

     I decided that this had to be resolved, and I pulled together what courage my Guardian Angel had infused in me, and I followed exactly the same path up the slope that had almost got me to the top on my last attempt to escape this horrid snow pit. I kept my head down and made slow but steady progress, enough that I was finally able to look up into the night sky, compromised by snow, to see the flickering spark of light off a section of exposed silver rail. I had made it past my last greatest advance, and I was quickly leveling out on the flat of the shoulder of the embankment. The glittering of light of the rail caught my attention once again, and it was then I noticed a waving light from about twenty feet away, and it nearly froze my heart at once, when I imagined it might be another train coming from the opposite direction. It couldn’t be. It was too small. Was this a lantern being swung by the person who had earlier yelled out to me to follow the light? I pulled myself slowly to my feet, that were numb like my hands by this point, and studied the light that was being swung from left to right, or directionally, from east to west repeatedly. I could only assume that this was my bashful rescuer from the neighborhood, and I was going to keep that lantern light in focus, because it was taking me in the direction I needed to go. Toward the retired Bracebridge Train Station, light-less when I first embarked down the long length of tracks in that direction, and of course, onward to the great illuminated clock tower, that now glowed ghostly through the finer sprays of snow spirals, hitting me face-on as I marched slowly and carefully to the south.

     The person with the lantern was a Godsend for me at this time, especially when the snow squall became more intense, and the clock lights for all intents an purposes, blacked out by the heavy snowfall. The lantern seemed to be floating on its own, always about twenty yards ahead of me, and as intensely as I could study the road ahead, there was not even the slightest shadow to let me know there was a human carrying that swinging lantern. The most curious situation developed on the right side of my trek through the deep snow, which was the west side, when a momentary calm in wind, and lessening snow, revealed a fully illuminated train station and platform, which had been only a short while before, only a dark silhouette on my horizon. What was going on that the lights would be fully engaged this evening, when for the past few years the historic building had been basically abandoned and I couldn’t even remember it being lit up in the evenings, especially the platform. I was absolutely spellbound by the way this relic of architecture had become fully engaged as an active train station again, as if I had somehow time travelled courtesy this wild snow squall that had nearly ended my young life in frozen fashion.

     As I approached the station with heavy boots, tired legs and frozen extremities, I still couldn’t quite believe my eyes, seeing the station waiting room illuminated. As youngsters we used to gain access to the station on Saturday afternoons when we were bored, and we’d pretend the station was fully functioning, and take rolls as either the ticket agent, the conductor, or the eager passengers awaiting their cross country adventures to commence with the incoming passenger train of the Canadian National Railway. It was a sad place back then, and I’m pretty sure the electricity had been cut off anyway, and that was a long time before now, and here was this amazing scene, as if a train was about to arrive. And this made me nervous enough to step up my travels, to get to the safety of Main Street, where it was easier to walk, as many vehicles had used the street during the squall, probably to go to and from the Albion Hotel.

     I was thankful of reaching this small slice of on-earth heaven, and it was so pleasant then to look up at the huge glowing dials of the clock tower, and the well lit Hunt’s Hill bridge over the cauldron of Muskoka River, my very next challenge, as it was always an atmospheric horror, as a most wicked wind howled down the river valley hitting hard at anyone who dared cross its expanse. When I got to the Toronto Street commencement, after turning homeward off Main Street, as it intersected with Thomas Street, in the shadow of the clock tower, I couldn’t avoid stopping for a moment to catch my breath, and, yes, thank my lucky stars, for having survived that incredible journey, the grave perils that I could never reveal to either Linda, for fear of harsh reprimand, or my mother, who would say, as she had many times in the past, “I knew it, I knew it, I just knew you were in trouble, because your Guardian Angel kept rapping on our door.” My mother was aggressively superstitious in this way, and significantly religious when the mood suited her recall of former church days.

     When I settled myself down, and regained perspective, even with in the “teeth of inclement weather,” as Charles Dickens might have written having experienced a night like this, I took one last glance down the ribbon rails, now being heavily sculpted by wind blown snow, I couldn’t believe my eyes. The lights in the trains station had been switched off, and I found this to be a little eerie, in shallow retrospective, considering I had only moments earlier passed by and looked into the waiting room, thinking I had actually seen people sitting in the chairs placed around the walls of the small room on the south side of the building. Now it was darkened as I had always known it, on my many other evening hikes up and down this section of urban rail line. As I studied the strange scene, I could see once again, closer to the station, the same shining lantern light that had led me from my unfortunate position, pinned against the side of the embankment, and southward through the driving snow to reach where I am standing now. Who was swinging that lantern?

     I have wondered many times, when passing by that intersection, still in the soft evening glow of the federal building clock tower, if the lantern bearer that stormy evening had been a former railwayman who patrolled this section of track for the CNR. Possibly it was his ghost that protected the life and limb of all those who took risks to travel that dangerous length of of train line, especially at times of forbidding winter squalls trailing north to south along this deep ravine of river valley. A swinging light from an antiquated lantern is one of the most often identified anomalies of railway legend throughout North America, and I ponder every now and again, who, in life, that trainman was, who assisted me to safety, up the embankment, and then guided me safely homeward, as if nothing more than the routine business of the great old railway of pioneer times.

     I can’t resist concluding this story, by mentioning the very clear and resonating sound I heard, on the brink of the Hunt’s Hill reach of Toronto Street, hearing then the sound of a steam whistle, haunting the abyss of the ongoing storm, once again, when I looked back down at the valley from which I had just climbed above, engulfing what had one been a solitude of Christmas nostalgia in this old hometown, not invisible through the squall-line. I only heard the steam whistle once, and never again saw the guiding lantern light of a long lost railwayman. I never again walked the length of that rail line, and was safer for the effort of walking a little further in gentler circumstance.