Off the Tracks
A Meditation on Train Journeys in a Time of No Travel
- Publisher
- ECW Press
- Initial publish date
- Apr 2024
- Category
- Rail Travel, Literary, Essays & Travelogues, History
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781770417298
- Publish Date
- Apr 2024
- List Price
- $24.95
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781778522550
- Publish Date
- Apr 2024
- List Price
- $16.99
-
Downloadable audio file
- ISBN
- 9781778523434
- Publish Date
- Apr 2024
- List Price
- $32.99
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Description
Train travel is having a renaissance. Grand old routes that had been canceled, or were moldering in neglect, have been refurbished as destinations in themselves. The Rocky Mountaineer, the Orient Express, and the Trans-Siberian Railroad run again in all their glory.
Pamela Mulloy has always loved train travel. Whether returning to the Maritimes every year with her daughter on the Ocean, or taking her family across Europe to Poland, trains have been a linchpin of her life. As COVID locked us down, Mulloy began an imaginary journey that recalled the trips she has taken, as well as those of others. Whether it was Mary Wollstonecraft traveling alone to Sweden in the late 1700s, or the incident that had Charles Dickens forever fearful of trains, or the famous actress Sarah Bernhardt trapped in her carriage in a midwestern blizzard in the 1890s, or Sir John A. Macdonald’s wife daring to cross the Rockies tied to the cowcatcher at the front of the train, the stories explore the odd mix of adventure and contemplation that travel permits.
Thoughtful, observant, and fun, Off the Tracks is the perfect blend of research and personal experience that, like a good train ride, will whisk you into another world.
About the author
Pamela Mulloy's short fiction has been published in the UK and Canada, most recently in Polish(ed) (Guernica, 2017), an anthology of Polish–Canadian writing. She is the editor of The New Quarterly. Pamela Mulloy grew up in Moncton, New Brunswick and now lives in Kitchener, Ontario with her husband and daughter
Awards
- Winner, Earphones Award
Excerpt: Off the Tracks: A Meditation on Train Journeys in a Time of No Travel (by (author) Pamela Mulloy)
For the past twelve years, on a day late in June I have boarded a train in Kitchener, Ontario, with my daughter, Esme, the first time when she was just five years old. Two further trains and twenty-seven hours later we disembark in Moncton. In those first moments as we roll out of town, we point out rat boxes behind the bread factory, fishermen on the shores of the Grand River, and, gaining speed, we poise ourselves at the window to catch a glimpse of what we’ve dubbed “the castle house,” a garish paradox amid this pastoral farmland, with its battlement roof and gated boundary. Who are they trying to keep out, I wonder. From our window, we have the perfect, albeit fleeting, view of the castle house and it feels like our secret discovery, an intrusion on those owners who want to be seen and not seen.
This seeing and not seeing is what we do during this entire journey: a rusted car, a stack of firewood, an empty swimming pool. Our eyes drift to the outer landscape, to the panoramic view, then flicker back to what is immediately before us, rushing by.
This back and forth, this shifting perspective is something we take for granted, so accustomed we are to this mode of travel we now consider “slow.” We are given a view, framed by the window, and have time to take it in, our eyes scanning lazily as though hypnotizing ourselves into a meditative state.
If we were a mother and daughter travelling in the nineteenth century, before trains came into popular use, we might travel by stagecoach and in so doing have an even more intimate connection to the flowers and trees outside our window. We would feel the breeze, perhaps tug at a shawl against the chill, hear voices of travellers on the road, or of farmers in passing fields. This is a connection we rarely have now with our environment as we travel. Our aim is to move swiftly, to get to our destination as quickly as possible. Who has time to determine what sort of hawk that is flying overhead?
If we were travelling when trains came into use, we might have been agitated by the speed of this new technology, which had so many images storming past our window. We would not be able to smell the lilacs, acknowledge the faces of those standing on the roadside or in a field, see the detail in the flowers on the embankment. Victor Hugo described the view from a train in a letter dated 22 August 1837: “The flowers by the side of the road are no longer flowers but flecks, or rather streaks, of red and white . . . the grain fields are great shocks of yellow hair; field of alfalfa, long green tresses; the towns, the steeples, and the trees perform a crazy mingling dance on the horizon; from time to time, a shape, a spectre appears and disappears with lightning speed behind the windows; it’s a railway guard.”
In the time of pandemic slowness, when we were considering the condition of the entire planet, when we couldn’t travel anywhere, I decided to go back in time, to think of the social history of train journeys, not only in longing, but also to understand what it is that we gain in movement, in travel. In doing this I wanted to think about what we see, and how we observe, on such journeys. I was thinking of that imagined stagecoach journey, and the actual train trips I’ve taken, and those I hope to take. There are also fictional and remembered conversations with fellow travellers over the years, those casual, intimate, sometimes intense exchanges that can come through travel, when something in us has loosened. All that was beyond us as we sat in our homes, and so this remembering and reflecting felt all the more urgent.
Editorial Reviews
“Readers will be persuaded that traveling can be more than a means for getting from point A to point B.” — Publishers Weekly
“An exceptional collection of essays evoking the clickety-clack of the tracks and the thinking space afforded by train travel.” — Library Journal
“Off the Tracks is an enchanting, lyrical reflection on memory, travel, and passenger trains … With pensive, evocative accounts of trains and travel, Off the Tracks is a lovely, immersive book about how our physical and mental journeys shape us.” — Foreword Reviews
“The book’s vignettes cover many aspects of train travel … The vision of shining rails leading to new horizons holds [the book] together.” — Library Journal
“I read Off the Tracks in one sitting, on a couch by a window that transformed into a European couchette, a stagecoach, a dining car speeding through a Maritime landscape and more on journeys that were remembered, imagined, and hoped for. Sparked by a stillness in time, Mulloy writes in beautiful, spare prose of travel as an act of the mind and memory, the ever-changing notion of home, and covers landscapes that are both geographic and metaphoric. Her travelling companions are historic as well as intimate, and always interesting, while Mulloy is a thoughtful, nuanced, and engaging guide.” — Emily Urquhart, author of Ordinary Wonder Tales
“Pamela Mulloy’s Off the Tracks is like ‘slow travel’ itself: absorbing, with many grace notes of observant and profound perceptions on the whole project of moving across space—preferably by train. Like Rebecca Solnit, Mulloy is an expert storyteller, allowing her personal relationship with travel to open doors onto travel’s relationship with history, gender, politics, and the whole project of selfhood. Perceptively written, it is full of fascinating insights on how travel allows us to discover and understand our world.” —Jean McNeil
“Mulloy sends us vivid dispatches on the beautiful topic of trains and train dreams, leaping easily from the Napoleonic Wars to Google Maps, botany and Brontë to Italian movies. Off the Tracks recounts both psychic and physical journeys, past and present, parallel trips to international destinations, and, perhaps more importantly, the in-between places of travel. This is an intimate memoir, brimming with pleasing tangents and informed by family, history, lit, and wit.” — Mark Anthony Jarman, author of Touch Anywhere to Begin
“Off the Tracks is doing a lot, but never feels overstuffed. Instead, Mulloy invites us to wander her memories and her learning in order to escape from the COVID days. It’s remarkable she was able to pull something meaningful and interesting from that exercise.” — Miramichi Reader
