Maggie Exploring the World: Agawa Canyon Railway

Friday was the day the trip was planned for. We were up at 5:00, long before the sun, and it was “Springhill coal mine” dark! Coffee was in travel mugs ready for the trip to Sault Ste Marie where John promised Egg McMuffins before heading to the Agawa Canyon Train Station.

At the end of WW I, Lauren Harris led an assembly of artist friends to the Agawa Canyon on the first “RV” trip. Their accommodation was a specially fitted red boxcar that they parked along the Algoma Railway line. It was the base camp for the now famous Group of Seven boxcar trips, which produced the iconic Canadian masterpieces! Today we traveled the same historic line to gaze in awe at the views that inspired the familiar paintings. It isn’t difficult to understand how they were inspired to paint. The views along the line, even in the rain are beautiful!

When I started out on my year off, one of my fall goals was to watch the leaves change. Our timing of this trip has provided the opportunity to do just that. There is still a predominant green to the view; part of that is of course the abundance of evergreen on the Canadian Shield, but many of the deciduous trees still cling to their green. The bright, verdant green of the spring and early summer has faded however and the green that remains John described as “tired”. I couldn’t had said it better myself! Liberally mixed with the green however, are splashes of magnificent colour. The reds, oranges and yellows that are beginning to appear offer the ever changing landscape that is iconic Canada!

Fall used to be my least favourite time of year. As a child I really mourned the loss of summer. Summers in Newfoundland, though short, were spent outdoors. We were a camping family and I remember vividly the excitement of the last day of school. It signaled our transfer into our tent, or in later years our tent trailer, and a move to a Provincial Park. We would sometimes spend the entire summer there, with my Dad donning court robes in the campground to head in for a day of work! We would spend our days swimming, hiking and exploring, and generally making our own fun. On Sunday morning we would go home for Mass, laundry, proper baths and regrouping before heading back to the park! Fall in Newfoundland put an end to all that. Even if the weather did cooperate, getting four children ready for school from a tent was understandably more than my poor parents were willing to tackle! So fall always represented a loss. Additionally, much of Newfoundland forest is coniferous, so depending on which part of the province you lived, “fall colours” really weren’t much of a thing. I remember my first springs and falls in Ontario reminding me more of things I had read about in books than my actual experience of the change of seasons. It took a while for me to appreciate fall. In fact I remember specifically the year it happened. In the fall of 1984 we bought our first home and anticipated becoming parents in November of that year. I believe the joy of all the new beginnings and possibilities that year helped focus a different perspective. I remember standing at a top floor window, painting our new home, and a large flock of geese flew over. Their v-formation and incessant honking had me gazing out the window over the blazing colour of leaves in our neighbourhood, realizing that I loved fall. I remember being startled by the realization! I’m sure it also helped, that back in those days, sans A/C, I was appreciating the end of the suffocating summer heat that this girl from the North Atlantic has never learned to appreciate! Whatever the reasons, from that day to this, I have thoroughly enjoyed 35 autumns, and this year is no exception.

The train ride is a lengthy endeavor. We boarded the train at 7:30 and we were chugging along by 8:00. We arrived in Agawa Canyon by noon where we were let loose for 90 minutes before re-boarding for the ride home. We were back at the truck at 6:00, preparing for the hour long drive back to the park. All in all, up at 5:00 AM to prepare for the journey, and back in the site by 7:30 PM – a long day!

The rain throughout the day did little to dampen our enthusiasm for the experience! It was however startlingly obvious how light changes our perception of colour. There was a camera on the front of the train projecting images onto monitors in the rail cars. At first I thought it was projecting black and white footage, which I thought odd, until the sun came out to correct my error! Through the window, the forest appeared a dull green. There were occasional splashes of colour for sure but overall, during those rainy times, there was scant evidence of the brilliant scenes of autumn that appeared during those moments of sunshine – a very interesting, and striking contrast. The company was great, the train narration provided intermittent bits of local history, geography and culture, and the lull of the train’s motion was calming and pleasant rendering the rain an almost neutral factor.

We were quite pleased though when fate deemed our 90 minute hike through the Agawa Canyon rain free. We hiked along the river to view several waterfalls and had a chance to “re-create” the Group of Seven art with some help from Canon and Nikon!