How to ignore the jerks on the train
I made my way down the aisle, stumbling past travellers pushing their bags into overhead compartments, scanning the numbers over the windows for my seat.
And then I stopped, confused, searched my electronic ticket on my phone, then looked back at the woman sitting in the window seat number assigned to me. She seemed unperturbed by the fact that she had committed the most egregious of all travel sins: taking someone else’s seat.
I’ve spent a good chunk of this summer travelling back and forth to Montreal due to family obligations. I used to pack the dog into the car and make a road-trip out of it but at 11 years old, she’s much happier staying home on her cooling mat and her orthopedic bed, and I can’t say I blame her one bit. So, I’ve been making short, frequent trips without her — flying or taking the train, whichever offers the best deal.
Which brings me to this day on the train. The thing you have to know about travelling between Toronto and Montreal with VIA Rail is that half the car will be seated backwards. When you make your reservation, your ticket will indicate whether your seat is forwards- or backwardsfacing. And if you don’t like where you’re sitting (for any reason), all you need to do is place a quick phone call to VIA and ask them to change it. It’s really very simple and I do it every time I’m seated in a dreaded backwards-facing seat. But there are always problems, it seems, because the people who don’t bother to check their seats are always the most terrible — I guess they just figure they’ll do whatever they want anyway.
And here was a woman who didn’t plan. Who assumed I would just bow to her will because she said so. It’s a pretty good tactic because, of course, she was right. She motioned to the aisle seat across the aisle and told me to sit there. That was her seat, she explained. And she wanted to sit next to her husband, who had the aisle next to my window seat.
I looked over at her assigned aisle seat, next to an empty window seat. Fine, I thought, a million expletives fighting to be freed from my mouth — but I’m not that brave. So I agreed, sat down and slid over to the window to take in the scenery. The sympathetic train attendant assured me I’d be clear to sit in the window seat until Kingston, a good two hours away.
But at the next stop, another woman plopped down next to me, tapestry bag and all, into the aisle seat I was to occupy once we got to Kingston. I informed her as much and she nodded, pushing a set of headphones over her ears.
“You’ll have to go back to wherever you came from,” I told her as she stared straight ahead, pretending not to hear me.
The tapestry bag infuriated me. Here she was, carrying some organic, fair trade hippie bag she probably bought at some local hippie festival by a hippie vendor who spouted platitudes about love and being a good neighbour and peace for all. And this hypocritical, fake, hippie-bag-toting bitch was going to screw me into a backwards-facing seat when the passenger from Kingston arrived.
Well, she tried, anyway. Because fake hippie bitch pretended to be deaf when the rightfully angry guy from Kingston made his way to what should have been his seat. I asked her to move, but she wouldn’t look at me, wouldn’t acknowledge my existence. And as I started to get up, the train attendant found Kingston guy another forward-facing seat on the aisle. I told him I’d take it, but he grumbled something about not wanting to take me away from my friend.
“She’s not my friend!” I cried, to which Hippie Bitch glanced up, apparently cured of her temporary deafness. “I don’t know her at all. I’m happy to not sit next to her.”
But Kingston wasn’t stupid either, I guess, and decided the fittest punishment would be to force me to sit next to her for the remainder of the trip. So he settled in, smirked, and said he was good where he was.
The train is not normally this chaotic — it was an unusually stressful trip. But I did make a vow to spend as much time as possible, for the remainder of the summer, taking cues from my dog and romping in the parks around my home.