Birthday Letter To An Older Brother

Anyway, we set off for Beausejour, the three of us with our collie, Shackelton, a complete idiot when it comes to understanding what a toboggan is for. First, he worries that we are all going to get on it and screw off and leave him, which is technically true, but only for a minute. Then he resorts to his standard operating procedure for things he doesn’t understand. He tries to eat the item or piss on it. So with Shackelton hurtling about, we arrived at the top of the hill. There is a wonderful gradual drop to the Bay of Fundy which you can see in the distance. There are just two impediments between us and the Bay. The important one is the CN main line. Although I have seriously thought of it while careening down the toboggan run, I doubt if we could get that far. The other impediment is a line of prickly bushes. Other than that and a few turds left by dog owners who seem to feed their animals enormous helpings of something bright orange, it is a wonderful clear run. Yesterday we brought my Global Positioning System, with which Dr. Beauchamp (sitting in the middle with Cec in the bow and me in the stern) reads out our speed as we descend. This is not as easy as you might think as it is very bumpy and it makes me think of that movie of Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier and all the cockpit instruments jumping around so he couldn’t read them, except of course we’re all on our asses on a wooden toboggan and the highest speed we hit was 24.2 kmph. However, when your bum is 4 mm from the snow the effect is quite threatrical. We had about ten or eleven runs, each one getting a little closer to the prickly bushes until we went right through them with little damage. We have a picture showing Cec and me relaxing after being thrown off the toboggan by the enormous G-forces exerted. Shackelton by this time had been banished to the car where he curled up in his cage and immediately fell asleep after eating half a cake of Swix Green ski wax. A good thing too as he likes to lick your face when you’re down. And that tongue has investigated every trace of yellow snow in Albert county. I don’t know if you have tobogganed lately but I personally have a difficult time getting on. It’s not like getting into a car or onto a bike. It’s like sitting on a dirt road only there are these little cleats jabbing into your ass like gravel. Anyway, once on board and shoving off, all this is forgotten and there is something about sliding down a long hill with people you love that causes you to yell “Yahoo”, and maybe even “holy shit” depending on whether the dog turds or the CN tracks seem to threaten. After the last run, we waited for the Ocean Limited to pass by on the tracks on its way to Montreal. You will remember the Ocean from the Gaspe days when we’d all get off it at Matapedia and catch the Gaspe flyer. On Wednesdays it is the old train. By that I mean the Scenic Domed, stainless steel streamliner, the very same train, indeed the same cars, which I advertised in my first job at McKim in 1961. Naively, they sent me with a tape recorder from Montreal to Vancouver on the Canadian, to interview passengers, get ideas and to return and write an ad campaign. I say naively, because I wrote the campaign before I left and thoroughly enjoyed the trip as they had forgotten to give me a mike for the tape recorder. On the way back I remember drinking cognac late one afternoon in the Scenic Dome with a lovely girl I had just met. She was from Hudson Quebec, and had been fired from the Banff Springs Hotel (I was hoping it was for sleeping around). As we chatted, the porter approached me with a little silver tray carrying an envelope and said; “Telegram for you Mr. Watt”. Very impressive, I mean this wasn’t in a cell phone world, this was a time when telephones were black and looked like Wal-Mart lamps. She was impressed, which was good as I was not far from the pimple stage and not altogether confident apart from the cognac. I opened the telegram and it read: “Get off train in Sudbury and take Toronto section”. I ended up eating one of those “complete with hair” egg sandwiches in the Sudbury station. What a tragedy. Anyway, this is the same train, in remarkably good condition for its years. I take it frequently to Montreal as does Jacinthe, and we love the rolling, jostling conviviality of trains, machines which actually touch the towns they pass. Alas, I’ve had 25 years of 100 airline flights a year. Unfortunately, the Scenic Dome train only runs twice a week, the other days are taken up with a set of toy trains Via bought from Bombardier in the U.K. I doubt very much if the knobs who run Via in Montreal, who are all in their early thirties, clad in black with cellphones and Blackberry’s welded to their communication orifices have ever been on a train. Evidently it didn’t fit legally in the Chunnel. Naturally they thought this was a bargain. Why? Because it’s sort of like an airplane. Everything on it is light, plasticky and hisses when you push it, the doors for instance. The main doors freeze because they’re air operated and evidently not used to 37 tons of ice welding them shut in winter. I assure you no one has ever been trapped in a toboggan. If the old train left the tracks it would take out a few hundred trees, maybe a sugar shack and a moose and stop pretty much intact. All of the new train crashes look like plane crashes. Nothing left higher than a couple of feet. But I digress. The old train brings back memories and as we stand at the foot of the hill with our toboggan, we see it approach. We wave like crazy, and the engineer blows his horn several times, honk, honk, honk honk. People in the domes wave. That is the wonder of trains. They are from a time when people ran the technology, rather than the other way around. Trains are big friendly things and when you think about it there are few big friendly things around these days. Cruise ships look to be big and friendly but who wants to ride around the ocean with a thousand tons of human waste swirling in the bilge. Again, I digress. After this we trudge back up the hill to the car, stow the toboggan next to Shackelton who is no doubt dreaming he has just won the Holmenkollen 15 km and is about to piss on King Olaf of Norway. So endeth a Watt Family Sackville afternoon. I have, in the interest of brevity and good taste omitted the bits involving stepping on marbles in my bare feet at 6 A.M. and shivering in the dark waiting for a hunched up Shackelton to deliver last night’s dinner to my waiting Sobey’s bag. Of course all the days are different, but they have one thing in common, they have a part, sometimes small, sometimes fairly extensive, when we Sackville Watts think of you Oakville Watts, and this is always a good happy part of our day. Jacinthe, Cecilia and I wish you many more birthdays filled with laughter at the ridiculous happenings within the human condition, and many more years of doing what you do so well, being Rody Watt, a great brother and an inspiring person. I leave you with a little thingy I wrote several years ago about trains and life as well as a more realistic appraisal of my present condition. With love and every good wish, Graham The Train Life is a ride on a train. Clickety-clack, we rumble through a strange landscape. Love, pain, bright meadows, dark forests, high days, low train whistle nights, and if you can stand the swaying, some pretty good meals up in the dining car. The trouble is the train often stops. And when it does, some of us have to get off. So as long as we're still on the train, we should enjoy the ride. Look out the window, enjoy the passing scenes, the ding-ding-ding of the crossings, the hollow sounds the bridges make, the blur of the fir trees. Above all we should wave to everyone we see outside our window. They will flash by, weirdly frozen yet like dissolving paintings in their misery, love and everydayness, caught surprised by the speed and grace of a train they're also on, and we, safe behind our window, untouched but feeling, can watch in ease even as our train slows and someone calls our station name.