The Community Edition
TO JOURNEY, SEARCH AND FIND
The COVID-19 pandemic and its accompanying years of varying quarantine forced the world to slow down. It confined those privileged enough to afford it into our homes. The sudden stillness after decades of moving as fast as possible caused a sort of metaphorical whiplash in many.
Pamela Mulloy appreciates stillness while moving forward. Her book, Off the Tracks, is an ode to train travel, where she can achieve this state most readily.
“What I know about train travel is that it gives me a much-needed sense of propulsion while allowing me to be still,” she writes.
Mulloy spent her quarantine yearning for the chance to travel again. When she could not physically, she travelled in her memories. In her book Mulloy takes us along with her on her journey of remembrance—of journeys past, missed, imagined and planned.
The meandering path is undertaken at a sauntering pace where we can appreciate the beauty of travel.
“This is the way you should enter or exit the portal of travel, through a corridor of beauty with a lingering story of its past, and a sense of slow and melancholic ease,” she writes.
In a loosely chronological order, Mulloy begins with her solo travels shortly after university through Europe. She remembers these earlier trips in the earlier part of the pandemic, reflecting on the solitude and stillness in motion that train travel offers.
She recalls her expanding world alongside the expansions of the railways as she travelled alone. This eventually transitions into a more familiar and routine sort of travel–her annual trip to Moncton with her daughter, family trips to Europe with family friends. And then, in the midst of these routines, her daughter’s fresh perspective as a child brings new wonder to old sites.
Alongside her love for travel, Mulloy’s love for her daughter is ever-present in this book.
I appreciated Mulloy’s acknowledgement of the hurt that travel causes. At different parts, she delved into the impacts that the expansion of railways had on Indigenous and Chinese people, the exploitation of Black porters who were formerly enslaved, trains as part of gentrification and the impacts of not having a powerful passport.
Especially in her discussion of Black porters, Mulloy demonstrated the complexity of any history. While formerly enslaved Black people from the South were given paying jobs and a certain dignity through their porter positions, they were still exploited heavily. This continued exploitation influenced the Civil Rights Movement.
Mulloy draws these connections through history and imagination, painting a vivid tableau of ordinary life alongside the extraordinary development of trains. She draws the reader into her genuine love for both travel and trains.
However, she does not view either through rose-colored glasses. Instead, she writes a love letter to train travel that also gently reveals its flaws. Her criticisms are firm and well-researched, but her love for travel endures.
Like love, travel is about both the external and the internal world. The traveler is a key part of both the journey and the destination.
“…because that is what can happen when you embark on a journey. You find you are closer to yourself than you have ever been,” Mulloy writes.
In all of her writing, there is a sense of a melancholy and nostalgia, a wistful appreciation of passing scenery.
Once, as I walked along Ring Rd. during a particularly warm sunset, a dandelion seed walked alongside me for a short while. I remember clearly the golden light, the uncanny shadows of the buildings and the fleeting companionship of the seed.
In the chapter, “Women and Travel,” Mulloy describes how seeds travelled on trains, with new fauna growing alongside the tracks. Like those seeds, some of her reflections settle into the reader’s mind and some float gently.
I thought, as I slowed down during the pandemic and regained myself, that I would never let that go. While quarantine was ongoing, one of the common messages in the zeitgeist was that we cannot return to normal.
As Mulloy notes, as soon as restrictions began being lifted, we returned to our old ways with fervor.
“So eager was our return that we forgot what those days of reflection had revealed…That our way of living, our way of thinking was not as static as we might have believed,” she writes.
Off the Tracks is a hygge book. It ties coziness, melancholy and nostalgia. In Mulloy’s meditations, the reader is inspired to remember their own experiences of quarantine—of slowing down, of restlessness, of all the things we said we would never do again.
I cannot decide whether this was a sad or a hopeful read, perhaps it was both. But it was worthwhile and Off the Tracks is a book I will come back to again. f all the things we said we would never do again.
I cannot decide whether this was a sad or a hopeful read, perhaps it was both. But it was worthwhile and Off the Tracks is a book I will come back to again.