The corridor, seen from a train window

I took the early train out of Union Station last October with a paper cup that was already cooling and a bag that I had packed twice. The hall still smelled like wet stone and coffee. I found my car by walking too far and then walking back, which is my usual method. The first lurch is always smaller than I remember. Then the platforms slide away and Toronto starts to thin.

What I did not expect, the first time I did this for a meeting instead of a holiday, was how quickly the city gives up. One minute you are under the Gardiner’s concrete, the next you are looking at a strip of lake that does not care about your calendar. Farmland arrives without a speech. A barn. A stand of maples that have already started to turn. Someone across the aisle opens a laptop and pretends the view is not winning.

People who live here call it the corridor as if it were a hallway. It is the busy rail spine between Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec City — the route most Canadians actually travel when they are not driving themselves into a mood on the 401. It is not the romantic long-haul of the travel posters. It is the workhorse. I have come to prefer it for that reason.

I choose the train over driving because I have sat in that eastbound traffic enough times to know what my shoulders do. I choose it over flying because airport security theatre uses a morning I would rather spend watching the shoreline. There is actual legroom. There is a tray table that becomes a desk if you let it. The landscape unrolls like a film you did not have to cast.

This journal is only my notes. I wrote what the ride itself feels like because colleagues kept asking whether they would be bored. I wrote planning notes from a repeat rider because the first trip is easy to undershoot. The FAQ is the text thread I got tired of repeating.

Four hours of someone else driving, and Ontario quietly performing outside the window.

I should say what the corridor is not, because people arrive with a movie in their heads. It is not wilderness tourism. It is not a steam special. It is the ordinary east–west habit of this part of the country: students with duffels, public servants with laptops, families who decided not to argue in a minivan. I like that mix. It keeps the ride from turning into a performance of itself.

The train forces you to slow down in a way a car does not allow and a plane refuses to admit. You cannot skip ahead. You cannot refresh the map until the pin jumps. You sit. You look. By Kingston I have usually stopped rehearsing the meeting. That is the whole point, at least for me. I am not here to sell you a seat. I am here because I still think about that October departure, coffee going cold, and because writing it down is how I remember to take the train again.