Some might call it mid-life crisis. I prefer to call it growing adventuresome with age. A few years ago, I got a tattoo, a funky haircut, bought a Can-Rail pass and took off alone on a train trip. My pass allowed me to go wherever the train tracks led. Along the way, often in remote areas that appeared inaccessible by foot, the rugged wilderness of Canada, I’d look out the train window and see small monuments - rock piled on top of rock. These little inuksuk must have taken great efforts to create, perched on granite cliffs or other precarious outcrops. What is it in human beings that leads us to build our own tiny personal stonehenges?
The same spirit, I suspect, the leads us to make journeys, whether personal journeys of interior landscape to put words on paper, or exterior journeys that lead to the unexpected discoveries, the stuff of which to write. The story that follows is a colourful bit of some of that “stuff.” Imagine being locked in a room with someone you want to escape, but the room has no doors. You realise with a start that there is no escape; you can’t get out. Imagine that, and you’ll have an inkling of what travelling alone for an extended trip can be like – well, at least when the person who takes the empty seat beside you is someone like Mad Jack. Let me tell you about Mad Jack...
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I sleep on the train with a stranger. It is the perfect word to describe him. I’ve never met anyone stranger than Jack. I secretly nickname him Mad Jack.
I suppose I should feel complimented.
After all, Mad Jack has chosen me.
Mad Jack arrives late, long after “All Aboard” and just before the train rolls out of the Vancouver station. From the aisle, he eyes the last two empty seats. He must pick one, the seat beside me, or the one beside a young woman who reads Margaret Atwood and looks very angry. He pauses, and then eases his lanky body next to mine.
Mad Jack sits with his knees wide apart. He squeezes a transparent drawstring bag into the space between his legs. The bag bulges with items shoved into it – blanket, pillow, jacket, clothes, towels, paperback book. Right on top, as if an afterthought, is a disposal camera, one of those cheap little things that non-photographers like me buy because we can’t figure out the finicky settings on a real camera.
As the train picks up speed, one mean-looking Via Rail broad reads us the riot act. Cause any trouble and she’ll put us off at the next stop, she says in her Welcome Aboard spiel. I have no doubt that she’d do it single-handedly and with immense pleasure. I feel as if I am in high school again.
After the riot act, the same lady scrutinises the passengers as if scouting. She stops beside Mad Jack and me. She’s found her man. And her woman, it seems.
She points out an axe stored behind glass. Will we use it to smash the window if the train derails? she asks us. Mad Jack grins. Of course we will. The Via Rail broad is pleased. Assigns him another task, too. Mad Jack is put in charge of the exit in the event of an emergency. He’s the door monitor.
Since Mad Jack and I are both travelling to Toronto from Vancouver, we are destined to spend a lot of time together. Twenty-four seven, in fact.
Well, twenty-four three. The trip will take three days and nights of non-stop travel, except for a few stops along the way where they let us out to stretch our legs for an hour or so. Jasper, Edmonton, Winnipeg, and Sioux Lookout.
Mad Jack and I are the paupers of train travel, travelling economy, so we don’t get a berth in a sleeper car. We’ll be sleeping side by side in our seats.
By the time we reach Kamloops, I have a detailed picture of Mad Jack’s many talents. Mad Jack, it seems, is a Jack-of-all-trades. He works in the film industry. Not just on National Film Board and CBC productions, but on some pretty big budget, Hollywood-style movies. Television too, do I recognise him from X-Files? Mad Jack says he’s an actor, stuntman, producer, film editor, radio interviewer, acting coach, movie director, scriptwriter (there’s a plot about famous dead actors and outer space that he’s afraid I’ll steal) and a director of photography for major films.
I look at his bag again. Note the throwaway camera. An odd choice for a director of photography of major films. And why is he travelling economy?
A flirtation stirs in the seats behind me. Three young men compete for the attention of a pretty woman headed East after attending a photography seminar in British Columbia. I tune them in, tune Jack out. One voice stands out. The voice is drenched in that sexiness and cultured intellect that is a trademark of European men. (They sound sexy and smart, even if they’re not). The sexy voice says he is a photojournalist. I smirk. He probably has a disposable camera in his bag, too.
An hour disappears into the Rockies as if we’ve entered some kind of Bermuda Triangle North. The couples travelling together burrow in for the night, legs and arms draped over one other, heads dug into shoulders.
Mad Jack and I are careful not to touch, even though his legs and arms dangle over into my space. He’s not fat. He’s quite the opposite, skinny.
He’s just, well, so long.
_____
That first night together, Mad Jack’s eyes glow excitedly in the dark. It is almost frightening, really, now that I think about it.
He tells me about another one of his passions. Guerrilla filmmaking.
“That’s when you haven’t got your permits in order,” he explains in a rush, “and there’s a scene you just have to shoot. So you drop in terrorist style, stage it fast, and get out of there before the police show up. Like the time we set off this massive explosion in downtown Vancouver.”
Mad Jack wears a vest with the name of a film production company stamped across the back. The lettering is faded. He could have picked the vest up at a thrift shop, I think warily. And he did tell me that story about his father being a psychiatrist at an asylum for the criminally insane. When Mad Jack was a boy, his dad regularly invited to family dinners inmates doing time for such everyday things as murdering their mothers.
Mad Jack’s stories are so wild, so mad, so many, that they are hard to believe. He’s either telling the absolute truth, or he’s a pathological liar.
I must have glanced at the disposable camera. Mad Jack feels the need to explain. He says he found the camera on the bench at the train station. Well, he wasn’t about to leave behind a perfectly good camera, it only had one picture taken. His own camera is gingerly packed and checked into the baggage compartment. Since he plans to work while on an extended vacation in Ontario, he brought far more than the 50-pound limit allowed each passenger, had to pay extra to bring along his specialised computer film editing equipment. That’s why he was late boarding. And, since he decided at the last minute to take the train instead of driving, the only ticket available was economy.
Psychopaths are smart, I’ve heard. Can make you believe anything.
Right now, Mad Jack acts out a scene while sitting in his train seat, mimes punching out Sean Penn’s lights during filming of a movie (Mr. Penn was extremely rude and deserved it). He segues smoothly to a prison scene where Mad Jack played opposite Robert DeNiro. Mad Jack was so realistic in the role of a vicious con that Bob (that’s Robert to the rest of us who aren’t on such friendly terms) was scared shitless by the portrayal. Bob thought Jack should win an Academy Award for his acting, but the scene ended up on the cutting room floor. And then there’s the story about Bob ordering take-out from a Parisian restaurant and sending his personal jet to pick it up from location on a beach in British Columbia.
Canada is a vast country. I now understand this geographical fact in a new way.
I put on my earphones as Mad Jack says something about Antonio Banderas and Omar Sharif (earphones, a travel tip on how to avoid talking with a chatty seatmate), and listen to Amanda Marshall belt out, “Everybody’s got a story…”
_____
After that first night crunched up together, Mad Jack trusts me enough to tell me his conspiracy theories. After the second night together, I start to believe them.
I am a reasonable person. It is frightening, my quick descent into the conspiratorial quagmire. I find myself nodding in agreement, adding a few theories of my own. Mad Jack and I, we’re kindred souls by now. Trains do that to you.
“They never landed on the moon,” Mad Jack says.
“Yeah, I heard that one,” I answer.
“As a director of photography, I know a few things the average person doesn’t, and those shots they showed us on television, without getting technical, they’re not right.”
We touch upon JFK, then move along to the Better Business Bureau. “Okay, think about it,” he says in a low voice, “BBB.”
He waits, as if it should mean something to me.
He gives me more clues. “Think of lower case letters, bbb. What does that remind you of? What numbers?”
“Ahhhh,” I say, either the conspiracy lights turning on or my brain cells turning off. “666. The number of the Anti-Christ. The Four Horseman. Revelations. The Apocalypse.”
My seatmate is pleased. He thinks he’s made the right choice. A woman who knows the meaning of 666.
Mad Jack doesn’t wear a watch but carries a Radio Shack personal organiser in his coat pocket. He’s programmed it with the canteen smoking schedule. The canteen car is the only place where smokers are allowed to satisfy their nicotine cravings, and then only according to a strict timetable set by Via Rail.
I don’t smoke, but I know the schedule off by heart. Remind Mad Jack ten minutes before it is time.
He looks at me gratefully, and then disappears. Thinks I’m just about perfect. A real goddess. A woman who knows 666 and doesn’t begrudge a guy his smokes – even reminds him when its time to go inhale some carcinogenics.
With Mad Jack gone, I stretch across our two seats. It is a delight to stretch. I now understand the wisdom of the phrase “life’s small pleasures.” Quickly fall asleep.
Too soon, I awake to Mad Jack poking my legs. I must have been in a deep sleep. Maybe a coma. He doesn’t poke gently.
Later, I stand in the aisle, debating what to do.
I’ve been away from my seat for about a half-hour, treated myself to last call dinner in the coach dining car. Splurged, defiantly order the baked salmon. Blew the rest of my food budget in true guerrilla-film fashion.
Mad Jack stretches his lanky frame across my seat. Sleeps soundly. Since mine is the window seat, I think for a moment that I’ll have to crawl over him. But then, instead, I lean over, poke vehemently. After all, he poked first. Mad Jack stirs, swings his long legs back in front of his own seat, lets me by.
A round moon sits large on the flat line of prairie. I try to cover my body with the coffin-narrow, Via Rail blanket, but it just won’t stretch far enough. It’s mathematically impossible. Either my elbows stick out or my ankles.
“You know Elvis isn’t really dead,” Mad Jack says. “The King lives on a deserted island in the Pacific with Marilyn Munro, James Dean and John Lennon.”
“But the island wouldn’t be deserted, would it?” I say, pondering the facts. “I mean, if they’re all living there together…”
Mad Jack arches an eyebrow. Shakes his head knowingly. Smiles enigmatically. “That’s what the BBB would want you to believe,” he says.
Of course, I think. It all comes down to 666.
There was a strange comfort to that thought, which I’m at a loss to explain when the train trip is finally over. But right now, rolling across these vast isolated stretches of Canada, passengers settling for the night, voices quiet, lights dimmed, I feel an odd satisfaction. Settle into my seat for another night, another province, another story, another conspiracy theory…
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Story Postscript: While Mad Jack was off smoking, I stole a look at the name on the VIA Rail luggage tag tied to his bag. When I got home from my train trip, I typed the name into my computer search engine along with the Production Company stamped across his vest, expecting nothing. Surely Mad Jack’s wild claims to movie fame were all just part of a wilder imagination. But I scored a clear hit right away. Both the man and the Production Company exist, located in the little town along the Vancouver Island shoreline - as told to me during that train journey.
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This travelogue was originally published in the anthology, Stones Turned. Stories and Poems of Journey.