Toronto to London in Two Hours!
by NIH travel editor, Deon Scant
On December 23, 1997, I joined that enormous seasonal social movement which consists of people being carted around in large groups so that they can take part in traditional celebratory rites of their culture. I wanted to take the bus at 2:30 pm from Toronto to London, but in anticipation of the Christmas rush I arrived at the Bay Street bus terminal at a quarter past one.
Progress is not a myth. The Bay Street terminal was renovated a few years ago, and is no longer an outpost of hell. Real coffee is sold. There is enough room for everyone to wait on the ground floor. There are enough lockers.
There is no reservation system, though, and you must line up for tickets. There were only twenty or thirty people in the line when I joined it, and it moved quickly. The line seemed to include an even higher proportion of young people than usual, but that was probably because many older people who travel by bus were still at work and unable, unlike us self-unemployed, to get away early.
I had my ticket by 1:25, and spent most of the time till 2 o'clock in one of the terminal's comfortable armchairs quickly reading short stories from the book I had chosen to travel with, 50 Great Short Stories, ed. Milton Crane, 1952. I bought this book for my English course in my first year of university, and it is about all I got out of the course.
I renewed my acquaintance with "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn", by Thomas Wolfe, "The Other Side of the Hedge", by E. M. Forster, "The Jockey", by Carson McCullers, and "Graven Image", by John O'Hara. The Wolfe story is written in a phonetic transcription of Brooklyn speech, a practice which always annoys me. While someone from Brooklyn may say something that sounds like "Dere's no guy livin' dat knows Brooklyn t'roo and t'roo", he will, when writing a story, write "There's no guy living that knows Brooklyn through and through." For one thing, he'll want us to be able to understand him without having to decipher him. The spellings livin' and t'roo in the quotation are particularly annoying, since they assume that the writer knows how to spell but has instead chosen not to. I know, it's supposed to produce the effect of oral delivery. The only problem with this argument is that this effect is the last thing phonetic spelling produces. You have to work so hard to decipher the phonetics that the effect is more like reading in a foreign language with which you're only moderately familiar.
Anyway, if someone on the subway told you this story orally (which is the experience Wolfe was trying to evoke) you'd be bored out of your everloving mind. The guy had a map – how unusual.
The McCullers and the O'Hara were unpersuasive. I concluded that McCullers didn't have an extensive acquaintance among bookies, and the O'Hara was anti-climactic. Gee, a guy persuades another guy to give him a job, he then insults the other guy and the other guy takes the job back – go figure. Now if Browning had beaten up the malicious little twerp of an Undersecretary when he withdrew the offer, then you'd have a story.
And what did I think of "The Other Side of the Hedge"? Nothing, really.
At two o'clock, having resisted the attempts of four of the more important writers of the twentieth century to entertain and enlighten me, I went out to get in line. For several years now I have taken the bus instead of the train because it actually gets where it's supposed to be going. Buses and trains are usually scheduled to take about the same time to the same cities, but for a bus the scheduled time is usually the longest that will be required, while for a train it is the shortest.
The problem is getting on the bus. Forgotten in the plans for renovation of the Bay Street terminal was the opportunity to end the need for passengers to line up amid the buses in the garage, where they spend their time inhaling diesel exhaust and dodging giant motor vehicles. The line usually forms early, too, and my practice is to get in it half an hour ahead of time (the first bus usually fills and leaves before the scheduled departure time). In honour of Christmas they were loading early, and I walked right on the bus, which was already half-full.
I got a window seat at the back. As usual, the seat next to me was one of the last to be taken. People do not like to sit next to men travelling alone. Since I sit at the back and take up a lot of space, the seat next to me tends to remain empty longer. I often get two seats to myself if the bus doesn't fill. If you're travelling by bus, consider being a large man.
This bus of course filled. A small androgynous person, who during the trip would occasionally beguile time by singing along in a feeble voice to whatever he or she was listening to on his or her CD player but was otherwise tolerable, finally sat next to me, two other people took the two other remaining seats at the same time, and we left ten minutes early. The train never leaves early, and rarely leaves on time.
The bus headed out into the darkening and foggy afternoon. We were slowed down by heavy traffic on the Gardiner Expressway. The bus took the alternative route through Hamilton and Brantford, which is, until Brantford is passed, more scenic than the usual route along the 401, unless you are elated by the sight of box-like factories and large tracts of farmland.
We were slowed down in Mississauga and again in Oakville. Because of the fog we could not see the lake, and chiefly what we saw along the alternative route were, before Hamilton, box-like factories, and, after, large tracts of farmland. However, the route still features the scenic trip through Hamilton.
Despite the occasional environmental catastrophe, Hamilton is an attractive enough place, and the route the bus takes through it includes some highly pleasing views, particularly along the causeway between the bay and Cootes Paradise, and on the trip up the face of the mountain.
Of course, looks aren't everything, are they? We shouldn't be prejudiced in favour of someone or something or some place because it is more beautiful than someone or something or some place else. Perhaps travel magazines should be full of articles entitled "Through Scarborough on the Eglinton West Bus", for example, or "The Delightful Dullness that is Etobicoke". But they are not. Anyway, Hamilton would still win. On a good day the entrance into Hamilton over the Skyway, with smoke and fire erupting from the mills to an extent that elsewhere would result in the attendance of armies of firefighters, is very agreeably unattractive.
I consider that once you're up Hamilton Mountain you're in Western Ontario, or rather, to be more precise, Outer Western Ontario. The route from Hamilton to Brantford is pleasingly pastoral. Between Brantford and Woodstock the route remains pastoral but offers less to look at. The first tobacco kilns appear, which means you have reached Inner Western Ontario.
The tobacco harvest used to be an important source of income for the locals and for the migrant workers who flocked to Western Ontario to work in it. However, successive tobacco-bashing, job-promoting governments have nevertheless seen fit to allow the growers to import permit workers who are admitted to the country just long enough to pick the tobacco at wages considerably lower than used to be paid, collect their tiny pay packets, and haul their skinny third-world asses back out of the country again. It must make the tobacco taste better or something, because I don't think tobacco-picking skills are hard to find in the Canadian workforce.
Near Woodstock the route switches to the 401. Woodstock is a lovely town. It looks like the little towns in old Hollywood movies, and it has a fine race track. From Woodstock a highly beautiful scenic route wends its way to London, much of the way along the Thames. Of course, the bus doesn't go into Woodstock and it doesn't wend its way along the highly beautiful scenic route. It barrels down the 401. There are some pleasant views of prosperous-looking farms, but if I had fallen asleep during any part of the trip after Brantford I wouldn't have considered that I had missed anything.
At London the bus took the Highbury Avenue exit and the route along Hamilton Road. This part of the city is much condescended to, but it is one of London's pleasanter sections. For one thing, it has not been despoiled by the maniacal overdevelopment that has made London a centre of the construction industry. London had the first shopping mall in North America, and was so thrilled with that one that it decided to put a mall on every block, except in southeast London. Most of southeast London is therefore cursed with leafy streets of modest houses whose residents have short walks to the neighbourhood stores.
If, by the way, you are interested in job opportunities in London, marketing is apparently unknown. A billboard announced that one of the radio stations styles itself BX93, when a little market research, or a little thought, would have revealed that this label would be transformed by many people into BS93.
We arrived ten minutes early, at twenty to five. We would have arrived fifteen minutes early if the designers of the London terminal hadn't contrived things so that it takes five minutes to cover the last fifty yards into it. Amazingly, the bus cleared quickly, so those of us at the back were able to get out before Christmas.
I alighted, the joys of the Forest City awaiting me.
Toronto to London in Two Hours © Actual Analysis, 1998
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