I’ve started to become fascinated by Smith Falls.
It’s one of the towns that the train always stops at as it journeys between Toronto and Ottawa. As such, I’ve probably passed through it around 100 times, and almost feel proprietary, like I know the place.
Every month or so, I move pass the back doors, catching a sort of posterior snapshot of some of the people who live near the train tracks in Smith Falls. Running parallel, the train moves slowly along Victoria Street. Out the window, I can see the squat, red brick apartments tracks the line the tracks. In some of the yards there are cars, half covered by tarps, in others, mismatched chairs and pieces of junk wait amidst weeds or snow, to one day be called back into the lives that rejected them.
Families sit in clusters on their back steps. They stare out at the passing trains, at the electrical wires and dormant lines of freight cars– Yankee Cargo, Union Pacific Railroad, Tomahawk Railway LP– that lie beyond. The names of the cars suggesting the broad world of possibility, mystery, and escape, that rumbles by so many times a day. But people seem indifferent to the suggestion. Young girls wearing shorts dribble basketballs on the street, and older boys drop their bikes one corner, like they’re suddenly too old for them and don’t want them anymore, before strutting off to look for trouble.
The town I see from the train seems kind of timeless, as if suspended in limbo. Nothing looks newly constructed, and the possibility of such a thing seems entirely improbable. The whole town, and all the people in it, give the appearance that they’ll never change, that they will remain the same, until they fall away and are forgotten.
Just as we’re about to pull away from the town, at the end of a long stretch of low, red brick structures, there is a green one. It’s a bar called Derailed. On the outside wall there are musical silhouettes—a guitar, a cowboy and a musical note. The sign hanging in the door always says open, but the lights are never on.
I always imagined that the place, located where it was on the wrong side of the tracks, suggested the boozy romance of departure and transition—the sort of unlikely place that Bob Dylan of Jack Kerouac might have stopped in somewhere down the line. They would have drunk with railroad men and flirted with local girls, later writing songs of their journeys that would propel the place forward into the world, so that those who stayed behind and watched the trains from their backs steps, would never be forgotten.