When Throwbacks Become Our Here And Now

Bill Arnott

A passage from Bill Arnott’s forthcoming travel memoir, Gone Viking II: Beyond Boundaries.

From what may be my favourite journal, dog-eared and embossed with a map of the world, frayed pages held in place by an elasticized band, while taped to the inside back cover is a photo of me and my dad: Travel. The allure of escape, exoticism, and yes, for some, bragging rights. For the rest of us, it represents time-warp slivers of childhood—when this world remained a place of mystery, adventure. Where you can live, for a spell, a hero’s life—desert sand, high seas and buried treasure. X marks the spot to other worlds, imagination, moments when the universe is nothing more than pure potential.

I was on the sofa in our tiny highrise apartment, the ambient score a rattle of shopping cart wheels on sidewalk, reminiscent of passenger trains slowing through town, crossing roadways. Clack-clack, clack-clack … clackclack, clack-clack. Identical journeys in their way. Somehow synesthetic. The same familial line of sensory sounds associated with every peregrination—whirr of rubber on bitumen, rumble of engines asea, and the wind-fueled rustle and snap of mainsail and jib.

I remembered losing myself in the incubating whoosh of a bow parting ocean in feathers of froth, a blend of cocooned isolation combined with utter connection. And the comforting, familiar yet foreign hum of coach tires speeding on sand—New Zealand highway where road was literally the coast, low tide sand that stretched for miles to the dunes at Te Paki. Speed limit on the beach: 100 km/h. The light there at that time was the same as where I am now—flat, dampened sunshine, the kind that makes you squint, tear-up, and question your emotions. Every photo from that long, dreamy trip is over- or under-exposed, muted in a way I now realize captures the experience precisely.

Back to the train, or more accurately, trains. We’d been living with covid for what seemed a very long time— numbers spiking again at an alarming rate. And I was attending a lecture, virtually. Propped up in a nest of plump pillows, feeling like a sultan, a steaming cup of coffee to hand. Travel author Monisha Rajesh spoke to us through laptop screens, as she was the presenter for London’s Royal Geographical Society lecture series. The subject? Her travels around the world on eighty trains, some of the world’s most scenic.

It had been a year or so since my own travel plans had been cancelled as a result of the pandemic—flights, accommodations, rental cars and commuter trains— refunds received, some forgone, airline points reinstated and turned into cash. From a traveller’s perspective, things looked dire, other than a pleasant but fleeting debit balance on the credit card. So along with a stack of travel-lit, -logues and -memoirs, I was doing my best to quell wanderlust as best I could. And for a jonesing dromomaniac, Monisha’s globe-spanning lecture was an ideal, albeit temporary cure.

When we eventually swapped messages, I was pleased to learn one of her favourite experiences on that expansive journey had been her travels in Western Canada, specifically through British Columbia and the Canadian Rockies. Interestingly, the same pockets of planet a globetrotting friend from Greenland described as her favourites as well. When I rode a similar route aboard Via Rail years prior, I felt much the same. Even as a local I was awed, slicing through mountains of sandstone, limestone and shale, a route I’d bisected many times in a car, but somehow from the sliding perspective of a train, the same land’s renewed. Invigorated. Old stone reborn.

Join me for that rail-bound journey, skirting the Canadian-American border with a northerly lilt, a sharp jog north, then a gentle traverse south, returning to the Pacific. If you’ve read my memoir Dromomania, some of this trek will be familiar. While the beauty of that ongoing journey, individuals met, and those windows onto life’s meaning remain ajar, I believe this “Viking” voyage, shared space and travel, resonates now more than ever. Bill Arnott is the award-winning, bestselling author of Gone Viking: A Travel Saga and Gone Viking II: Beyond Boundaries. His work is published around the globe. When not trekking with a small pack, journal, and laughably outdated camera phone, Bill can be found on Canada’s west coast, making friends and misbehaving. Bill Arnott Archives - Rocky Mountain Books (rmbooks.com)