When the train used to run through here, the woods were louder than they are now. All that glass clattering across boarded ground. And sight lines into the forest and along the shore that you don’t see now. Robert Crouse, a name you don’t hear much anymore, would take the train from Crousetown near Petite Rivière to King’s College in Halifax to give his annual Dante lecture. He would then take it back in the evening. Surely no one travels through the woods as quickly and at such height as they did long ago. The network of forest roads in Lunenburg County is slowly turning back to moss. But at one time, even if you no longer had use of your legs and could not walk the old trails or cut a horse through them, you could see the forest through tempered glass.
What you can’t see or what you’ve left behind seem such a part of travelling on rails. So too do fantasy and hallucination seem such a part of travelling by train. So much are the two linked, that if you were thinking of buying a ticket on the Halifax & South Western Railway in the early 1900s, you were often asked to imagine a view or a landscape that you would never set eyes on. Early postcards circulated by the H&SW Railway showed vistas not only impossible to see from a passing train, but impossible to see from any human perspective. The old Mill Site at the mouth of the Mushamush River, seen as if from the height of a 500 foot white pine you had climbed up. Fort Port in LaHave from behind and above, Riverport glittering faintly in the June air.
Maybe if you were leaving behind a lover you would never see again, or parting from a dear friend, these images were meant to comfort you—their impossibility and so their inherent loss an analog for the thing left behind. Or maybe it was something else: their dusky sunsets and LaHave River drumlins a seduction calling you to seek out some other kind of life. Were these early images of landscape strong enough to lure you out of a comfortable settled home? To draw you outward toward some hidden desire? To leave behind family and house? So many of these cards are blank, a hundred years later, but more alluring still is finding a card mailed with a message. “Meet me at the sea caves.” “It’s all right.” “Tell me when you want me to come home.”
