Of Snow and Trains
There is a scene in the Japanese anime movie Summer Wars (Samā Wōzu) which always musters a sentiment of deep comfort and happiness when I watch it, maybe similar to the Scandinavian Hygge feeling. The scene takes place close to the beginning of the movie, as protagonists Kenji Koiso and Natsuki Shinohara depart Tokyo by train for Natsuki’s ancestral village, where a family gathering is taking place. The trip is beautifully decomposed into segments, showcasing the far reaches of Japan’s train network, but also the different atmosphere of each type of train. From the formal Shinkansen, carrying mostly workers and other passengers, to the cozier and slower regional and local trains, carrying mostly local inhabitants, one can hardly not be amazed about how the train network is well integrated into people’s moving habits.
From fiction to reality, Japanese train operators go to incredible lengths to provide a service of the utmost quality. For instance, Japan Railways decided to maintain a station running for a single student until she graduated, even though she was the only passenger. Another story is the Seiryu-Miharashi station that does not have any exit, entrance, nor ticket machine. Passengers can only access it with the local train and the station was built so people could step off and admire the beauty of nature and its tranquility. Shinrin — yoku, or “Forest Bathing”, is the simple act of walking aimlessly in a forest, to reconnect to nature through your five senses and thus ease inner tension, stress, and mental fatigue. It has been medically prescribed to individuals suffering from depression and psychological distress but also works wonders for any individual trapped in the modern web of various responsibilities.
I’m lucky enough to live in a city where there are multiple, large parks that are fairly accessible, whether you are walking, cycling, or using public transportation. Montréal has at its heart a hill teeming with raccoons, foxes, squirrels, and “wild” turkeys. The Mont-Royal Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted (co-designer of NYC’s Central Park), offers families, athletes, wanderers, and nature lovers a place to come together and enjoy a piece of the wild. Official paths spread across the hill, from one top to another, and are crisscrossed by a multitude of unofficial desire lines left in the snow by hikers, backcountry skiers, and snowshoers. During the spring, forest paths can take you to fields of newly grown flowers and burgeoning trees, all engulfed with the muddy and leafy odor of spring in the woods.
Thinking about how privileged we are to have this beautiful natural playing field in our urban backyard has got me thinking to other times, when I was still living in Geneva, and how the idea of a “natural backyard” was naturally associated with public transportation, not only within cities and their outskirts but throughout the whole country. Living now in Canada, I realize how access to an efficient and widespread public transport network offers equitable access to the Wilds.
I remember how during a winter night of 2017, as I was scurrying through the virtual hills of Google Maps, I stumbled upon this heated mountain “chalet” called Cabane Rochefort. Located in the heart of the Swiss Jura mountain range, two train stops from the village of Saint-Cergue and up a loggers’ and hiking path, I decided to go out by myself at the dawn of night and spend a night there. The hike and the night ended up being truly wondrous experiences, but the most memorable moment of this micro-adventure, to reference Alastair Humphreys’ book, was reaching the top of the first hill, and arriving in a typical Swiss grazing field, only covered in a smooth blanket of snow, which emphasized the omnipresent silence of the mountain, slightly disrupted by slow gushes of wind finding their way between the pine trees engulfed in the blacked night. It was one of the most blissful moments I’ve ever had.
Another experience luckily happened because of a dumb mistake, also in 2017. Not having checked whether ski stations were opened after this important snowstorm, I went online to book a Snow N’ Rail pass, which combines a train ticket with access to the Les Diablerets ski station. Both tickets are added on one card: the Swisspass. The train controller scans it and obtains your full itinerary in seconds. When reaching the ski lifts, no need to stop by the ticket booths: just scan your Swisspass directly on the lift’s readers, and your good to go.
Simple, easy, efficient.
The problem on that day was that the station was not yet opened; it was planned for the next day. Yikes! Walking back to the train station, a colleague calls me and as I am explaining the silly story, he cracks a joke about how I could still walk up the mountain. I paused for a moment and told him what a great idea it was. I went back to the village, rented snowshoes, and began ascending in a completely empty mountain, with trails not yet groomed and around 20 cm of fresh snow. Having reached the peak after two hours and having changed my boots, I took my phone, browsed through some songs, and ended up selecting Stayin’ Alive by the Bee Gees to ski down and give me the rhythm to enjoy the powder.
Back to Montréal, even though I can enjoy what the city offers as natural areas, it is far from what the rest of the province and country can. Not owning a car or having a membership to a car rental service proves to be limiting for a large swap of the population, myself included. I often find myself daydreaming of a day when wanting to leave the bustling city center for an overnight sleep in a cabin, or a longer 4-day hike in one of the many natural parks of the province and country, would be as simple as hopping on a train. I already hear the nay-sayers stepping in to shut down any such dream, brandishing financial, logistical, and maybe cultural arguments against such endeavor. They would partly be right, as the construction of such a widespread network would surely require large sums of dollars, implicate a wide array of different actors across the province and country, as well as demand a brilliantly crafted communication campaign, spawning several years to adequately raise awareness amongst the population. Should this deter us from wishing this idea to life? Absolutely not, provided we believe that the future will not be built on a continued overreliance on individual motorized vehicles.
Montréal is giving us a small, but concrete glimpse into this desired future. In Spring 2022, the first segment of the Réseau express métropolitain (REM), a light metro rapid transit system, will be inaugurated between downtown and the south shore. By 2024, two other branches will be added to the network: one towards the north shore, the other towards the west of the island, with a direct connection to the Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport. Interestingly, Montréal Mayor Valérie Plante and her team announced that by 2030, the Grand parc de l’Ouest would be inaugurated, covering a surface of 30 km2, and accessible via three REM stations: two in the south and one at the east of the park.
In a few years, the portion of the population that cannot or does not want to own a car will be able to take a 15–30 min train ride and walk, cycle, swim, smell blossoming flowers in the Spring, sit outside with friends and family members and look out onto the north shore of the Lake of Two Mountains. Montréal’s natural backyard will have expanded, and we will be better off for it.
