Rupert ↔ Jasper

Lyle Neff recalls growing up on and off the Northern BC rails
Caution: Some tales may be tall

A northern train can give you the best sleep of your life. Used to be, there were a few sleeping cabins in the Via baggage car, at least ’til I was a footloose 16 or so. I took one trip from Smithers to Prince George round then, evening departure, while a tiny bit drunk. My Dad smuggled me into one of the sleepers, and the Murphy bed pulled out of the wall with a satisfying clunk. Its institutional linen was blindingly clean and felt like heaven. The shadowy trees and blacker hulks of the mountains raced by as I drifted off, warm in the icy moonlight, swaying. (Telkwa would have gone by, where Dad and Karen would later move, and Burns Lake, where my brother Eddy lives now, and the Endako Pub, where Eddy and I got a little gazereened on a trip down the Yellowhead just a couple of years ago.) The point of this anecdote being, all we adults know we’ll never sleep that well again, eh?

But the trains. You should love them when they’re given to you. I remember sitting on Dad’s lap, back when engineers’ kids were permitted to sit up front in the smell of diesel, watching the stupidest of eagles try to claw a red-faced salmon out of the saltchuck just by Rupert. We were chugging slowly by. The baldie was almost visibly grunting, trying to lift out the half-dead fish, and getting dragged down by it continuously—in fact the eagle was submerged at least half the time. Seems to me this was springtime, with not much ice left along the shore, and that I was drinking water out of a conical paper cup, and that after we clanked out of view that bird either ate or drowned. JJ said that he found it surprising. The line up North on eagles is, they’re just carrion-eaters with inflated reputations. But here was at least one who could work for his supper.

My father is John Jason Neff, called JJ by everyone from payroll clerks to grandbabies, and he used to change his facial hair on a pretty regular basis. He still does, but it no longer freaks me out like it did when I was a boy, when a soup-strainer moustache would develop over a long weekend, or a goatee become a full beard. My dad’s minor style adjustments back then got coated with frost, and produced stalactites or stalagmites of ice, depending on the whisker patterns. His jungly single eyebrow remained a snowy shelf whenever I saw him while crossing the railyard. And like everybody who walked through a Bulkley Valley winter, JJ suffered from a nose full of frozen mucous which nonetheless produced a river of snot. Which would freeze upon its pouring down—particularly if there were whiskers in its path.

“God, Dad,” I said on one of the many occasions when I’d missed the school bus home and was taking a shortcut across Railway Avenue to our property two miles up the mountain, “what happened to your face? ” The man I was talking to was dressed in full CN gear, earflaps and all, and waded along the snowy tracks turning switches with a hairy faceful of icicles and snowclumps. But he didn’t have sideburns. For a second I thought I was talking to the wrong brakeman. Then my dad looked at me, cracked his eyebrow by rolling his eyes, and said, “Never you mind.”

So I hustled home and broke out some oyster-shell feed and warm water for the chickens, and washed some birdshit off some eggs, accompanied by our loyal but stunned Norwegian Elkhound, Casey. Casey mostly slept outside, and would greet my brothers and Dad in the winter mornings with visible yelps of joy—in the form of puffs of cloud emerging from his iced-over grey muzzle. We were a sort of railway agricultural family, with chickens and pigs and a flock of diseased ducks that had to be kept alive through ‘til spring. At a later point JJ did resign us from hobby farming, thank Christ, since none of us were very good at it.

The eyebrow incident must have been near the end of JJ’s career as a brakeman. For a long time after that he was an engineer driving Canadian National freight trains, too, and then he took some kind of buyout to become, first a conductor, then an operator of the Via passenger-coach runs that pound through the brutal Rocky and Coastal ranges from Jasper to Prince Rupert.

Actually, Dad didn’t often drive the eastbound section between Prince George and Jasper—that was more the province of his brother, my Uncle Jimmy. Jim’s still an engineer out of PG , although he’s been ill lately. Also my Uncle Mike has done various Smithers and PG roundhouse electrical jobs over the years. In my generation, we have a pawn-shop owner, a millwright/apprentice or two, and me, a computer-puncher down here in Van; farther back in our history there’s a fair whack of pipefitting; but overall, the Neff clan is more railway than anything else.

The Christmas train, now. When I was small, it went out of Smithers station up through the Moricetown canyon and back, maybe a two- or three-hour trip altogether. This was in the days when trains had elaborate end-cars, or cabooses, which they haven’t had for 15 years or more. In the caboose a genial Santa dispensed presents and unlimited unshelled peanuts. Outside, even the tunnels punched through blue mountains amid three-metre snowdrifts seemed boring to us, we honestly ungrateful Northern kids. I puked my peanutty guts out one trip, into the perfectly miniaturized railway toilet, and came out wiping my lips into the warm chaos of Santa and the Newton, Maillot, Rasmussen and Mackenzie children—and that’s just some of them—my peers, the railroaders’ kids. I could still feel princely among them (and could still eat mandarins), since JJ was engineer on the train. Even a sniveller like me could always borrow some glamour from that one fact: my Dad runs this show.

I was a rowdy youth; my brother Eddy was rowdier, and he ran with some of the rowdiest in the Bulkley Valley. Now, the trains could be a lethal problem for drivers, up North where everything is so far apart, and you’ve got to deal with tracks and crossings all the time; but it was a bigger problem for drunk kids riding around in pickups late at night. (It was always hellraisers who got killed, though there remained many hellraisers, since most every Smithereen raises hell.)

Some friends of Eddy’s get blocked at a crossing late one night, for example, doubtlessly crammed into the cab of a GMC pickup awash with stubby Beer-brand beer bottles. It was a huge train apparently, probably an eastbound freight studded with empty Saskatchewan Wheat Pool hoppers--though most grain cars back then would still have been the older types with the corrugated sides. Which is important. Because the driver of this truck decides to amuse his friends by popping the clutch and letting the GMC roll perilously close to the thundering train, ha ha. Of course he smacks it, at about five miles an hour and 20 below. So the boys bounce and spin but survive, with much screaming and broken glass I don’t doubt, and the truck even still runs. But pretty soon they’re out searching drunkenly up and down the line for the GMC ’s front end, because it’s gone, license plate and all. It can only have gotten stapled to the side of the train. It may have gone on a long strange journey, that fuckin’ grille. I like to think of it shining insanely in the Prairie sun, and maybe causing consternation in Winnipeg: "What is this thing, and why
does it say ?"

The rail lines up North were laid a few lives and generations ago, when names meant something, and acronyms even more so. For example, there used to be Canadian National Railways, and Canadian Pacific, otherwise known as the CPR , a.k.a. the national dream. Now CN and CP are Yankee... what, sub-offices? With gleaming people in suits who are paid to say: CN and CP don’t stand for anything at all. And they don’t. But not standing for anything is pretty sick, you ask me. Especially the bit where having Canada in your name is so evidently worthless.

When I was even smaller in Smithers, a town that happens to be named for an early CPR director, we had lived, of course, on Railway Avenue. We didn’t graduate to the mountainside hobby farm ‘til I was maybe six or seven—just before Dominion Day was stripped out and renamed Canada Day, perhaps. Railway was the longest street in the town, and the house, I now realize, was British to the core: cozy, with tiny steep stairways and attic alcoves for small boys—sturdy and modest, but with red-painted trim that made you think of bricks.

Its one picture window looked out on the Avenue; then perhaps 40 metres of boggy or snowy right-of-way; then the tracks, and a disused, sooty loading ramp beside them; then on a rocky cliff with a den at its base called Kelly’s Cave where miners and bad kids had allegedly died; and finally one looked up to Hudson’s Bay Mountain which, despite casting much of Smithers into shadow much of the time, was the most beloved mountain around, with skiing, lakes for fishing, and five-acre lots rising up her slopes.

I do remember sitting on a stepmum’s lap before that window in the Railway Avenue house there, watching a CN morning freight cruise by, seeming to sail over the snow, and she saying: It’s your dad drives that train. The horn blasted over and over, and I knew I’d probably be sitting in the red-nosed locomotive within a week or so, drinking water out of paper cups with JJ , smelling diesel, feeling important.

Meanwhile, even we small kids had to get across the railyard sometimes—and without saying that we "played" on the trains, I have to report that we scampered over the big couplings and underneath the railcar wheels, and sometimes we would haul ourselves up the small iron ladders each car possessed, and dash down a flatbed deck in a spirit of insane daring. But only when the trains were stationary, usually, and for just a few moments of terror and glee. This went on for years, even after my family moved up the mountain—our parents had no way of knowing. We rail offspring got threatened continuously with gruesome tales of workers who’d lost limbs in agony by being inattentive, just for a sec, around the cars. Well, these weren’t fairy tales; many a leg and an arm do get left in a seeping, snowy puddle around the Northern trains. You wouldn’t see those amputee guys around anymore after their accidents. You’d just keep working the rails and living the attendant life.

Dad swears the following amputation tale is true, though he would never tell me who was involved. The man I suspect was engineer on this nutty ride has long since been out of Via work; let’s call him Brydon Grisly. So Grisly is engineer on a short Via train one fine spring at the end of hibernation season, when he hits a bear. (Now look, I’m jaded just from hearing about the wildlife bloodbath that trains cause in the Northern bush; so please don’t accuse me of being gross when I tell you the tracks from George to Smithers to Rupert are a ribbon of fox, moose, deer and porcupine entrails, OK ? Railroaders are used to it. It’s sad. It’s messy.)

He kills a fine old dish-faced bruin. The conductor’s son, maybe eight or 10, sees this and wants to stop. The child is doing some kind of report at school, on bears, and he wants a look. There are two cars full of “tourons” in back—lots of Germans always, sometimes Americans and Japanese, always paying big money; but Grisly brakes down. And he and his workie and his workie’s son walk back and look at the disaster, which I guess is a fairly intact horrorshow, and not very reverently they decide they need a paw.

But they’ve nothing to cut with, and it’s a big bear. So. Pretty quick the tourons, who have no idea why the train stopped in the middle of nowhere to begin with, are puzzled when it starts jolting backwards, for some equally unapparent reason, and then stops again.... World’s biggest carving knife, is what it was. They just stretched the hapless grizzly’s leg across the track, JJ told me straight, and Brydon Grisly proved you don’t need a saw to get a good bearclaw. I bet there was a happy boy who deadheaded home with a dripping plastic bag that day, about to become the king of Grade Six, feeling like a fortunate son.

Ah, me. There’s no comedy like that in cities, eh? But you hear—and live—more solemn stories too, growing up in a railway family. (By the way: the system is a rail way, but those who work it are rail roaders. ) JJ told me one he’d heard from a real old-timer, about a horrific trestle collapse early in the 20 th century. (Did I mention that the system up there runs over scores of towering, rickety-looking bridges? It does.)

So this old boy is waiting for his pickup at a freezing switch, and craning his neck out, as you do, for the headlight. He sees the glowing nose come around the corner, gets happy as you do, and then watches as (he finds out later) a frost-stressed trestle gives way, just before the flying locomotive would’ve crossed onto Canadian rock again. All the old-timer actually sees is the light he’s been waiting for suddenly point up , before it winks out.

So. Not to be poignant, and not to be dreamy, and please God, not to be like Justin Trudeau: but Christ there’s nothing like a railway life, even at one remove, and my father really exemplifies it.

Just to quickly set a scene here: Dad married one Karen eventually, but 20 years of her unifying love couldn’t stop her being torn from us by cancer, at 49 in the spring of ‘04; also that summer my dad lost his father EJ , for whom my brother Eddy is named; in the way of all families, our clan has suffered divisions, setbacks, torments, and some particularly shitty years.

Yet here we are in December of ‘04, my brothers and I and our wives and kids, completely dominating the adults’ Christmas train to Prince Rupert (because almost no one else is aboard), lounging insider-style in the ass-end car with the concession and the domed roof; I’m drinking beer and fetching small conical cups of water for my Vancouver-born oldest, called baby Jimmy. It’s maybe -30° outside, and the dark masses of forest and mountain are trimmed with the white of deep snow and river ice, swaying by. We’re eating mandarins; we’re the monarchy of the North; we’re Canadians. No need to be nostalgic when the past hasn’t gone away. JJ Neff runs this train, and he never freezes.