AROUND
THE KITCHEN TABLE
Lloyd
Ratzlaff
Wes MacIntosh knew that I’d
had a longtime fantasy of playing railroad engineer, and several times
had asked permission from CP officials to take me with him on one of
his locomotive runs. I had asked other railway employees as well, both
active and retired, to solicit on my behalf, and had myself approached
CP, CN and Via Rail. But all of them said this was not allowed, no matter
that I offered to sign liability waivers or do almost anything it took
to earn the privilege. Eventually their responses began to sound like
What part of no don’t you understand?
In my 1950s Prairie village,
trains were the most powerful machines I ever saw; but in adulthood
the closest I got to a locomotive cab was with my granddaughter Katy
in CN’s Engine #9161 at Winnipeg Children’s Museum, or a
few times sitting alone in the cab of a restored steamer in Saskatoon’s
Western Development Museum.
In the 1970s, as a graduate
student with a body and head full of their own steam, I often used to
dream of trains. I’d be ordered by my parents to “drive
some engines” but was afraid I couldn’t manage it; or I’d
be clinging terrified to the headlamp of a locomotive hurtling toward
Carlton at the end of the line; or sitting between two women engineers
taking their train they knew where. I had pondered these images deeply
in trying to deal with eruptions of energy after so many years of religious
repression. By the time I met Wes MacIntosh, I no longer analyzed such
dream motifs for clinical insights, but had by no means given up the
fantasy of riding a locomotive.
So Wes had tried, others had tried, and the years passed. One evening when I was already in my early 60s, the telephone rang, and Karen, Wes’s wife, said that he was scheduled to take his final run the next morning.
Under these circumstances,
she said, officials tended to “look the other way,” and
if I could be at the railyard office by 6 a.m., a colleague would chauffeur
us — she and her daughter and two grandchildren and me —
an hour’s drive from the city, where we’d meet Wes’s
last train and accompany him bringing it home.
It was gift enough to be
regarded as an honorary family member; but this invitation triggered
a surge of adrenalin, and I set the alarm for 4:30 a.m. wondering if
I could sleep at all, finally this thing would happen, Gonna take
a sentimental journey . . . like a child in wild anticipation . . .
longing to hear that All Aboard . . .
When the clock rang (apparently I had slept), I leaped from bed and got dressed, and hurried out to the car. A fog hung over the city. I felt a bit dismayed, but drove across town, and outside the Sutherland office the promised chauffeur and van were waiting. Karen and her brood arrived, and we began making our way through the fog out of the city.
Going down the highway our
excitement grew whenever the fog lifted; and when another mist rolled
in, we fretted about what we’d see from CP #9700, and wondered
how Wes would feel about it.
By 7:00 o’clock we
had parked near a switch at a spur line that led to a potash mine, and
waited while an eastbound freight pulled away. Then we saw the headlamp
of Wes’s locomotive approaching in the fog. He stopped the train,
and waved from the window; we scrambled up through a staircase in the
nose of the engine as it idled at the junction.
Wes’s co-engineer greeted
me, “You’re my cousin, right?” I assumed it was a
hint to pretend that I was “family”; but he quickly added
that he’d discovered his mother and my dad were cousins. Meanwhile
Wes had begun distributing gifts — Teamsters hats, ball point
pens, decals from the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers.
It was standing room only
inside the cab. Wes sat down and pushed the throttle, and the train
began moving again. We “passengers” raised coffee mugs,
opened camera bags, and peered through the fog. I felt like a kid myself,
and here we come, here we go, Got my ticket, got my reservation,
and at the first level crossing Wes blew a Long-long-short-long
— lonesome wail of childhood, Doppler Effect of a high school
physics class — Stop, Look, Listen — and Wes explained
that the last wail must coincide with the locomotive’s crossing
any other road.
Then came another gift from
Wes. He invited us by turns to take the driver’s seat and sound
the horn for ourselves, but stood always behind the seat (no worries
for the officials!); and when my turn came, it might have meant nothing
to others, but in me there was enough adrenalin flowing to last until
next time — revelry inside the cab, while beyond the windows the
fog kept coming and going.
By mid-morning we approached
the railyards at the edge of the city. The sun had come out. Wes seemed
to have grown a little silent, and I turned away — it was not
a time for gawking as I’d done for those moments in the engineer’s
chair.
The train eased to a stop
beside the office, with only a mild squeal of brakes. The company staff
had gathered outside, flying banners and taking pictures as Wes left
the engine idling, and dismounted beneath the headlamp that still shone
ahead.
Inside the office, a cake
was waiting to be cut and eaten as soon as the engineer had signed his
last report. It tasted mighty fine. Happy retirement, Wes “Casey”
MacIntosh. He got his train here on the advertised time, just in time
to make a grown boy’s wish come true.
Ratzlaff is the author of two books of literary non-fiction, The Crow Who Tampered With Time and Backwater Mystic Blues. Formerly a minister, counsellor and university instructor, he now makes his living as a writer in Saskatoon.
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