My berth was located in car 231 at the very end and thankfully close to the toilet and shower. Four people shared this berth. I was in a lower one, a young woman was in the upper and across the aisle was an older American couple from Georgia. He was very tall, overweight and wore shorts, white knee socks, huge runners and a baseball cap. He had a loud voice with a drawl. I labelled him " right wing sheriff from Texas." His wife was diminutive,exquisitely dressed and spoke in a soft southern accent. I named her " delicate Southern Belle who sips mint juleps." The young woman was from San Diego California. She had just chucked her job, stored everything and was traveling via train from Vancouver to Toronto, to Montreal and New York, then flying to Dubrovnik to sail the Adriatic coast for a week. She had no further future plans after that. She was quiet voiced, athletic, wore understated sports clothes and carried a serious backpack. I dubbed her " The quiet American -clean living, friend of the outdoors and a vegetarian." The next berth had a Canadian couple from Saskatoon. He was a retired train worker who spoke incessantly and she was his long suffering wife. We all called him "Trainman".
My first breakfast I shared with two older women who looked like sisters. They both said good morning ,ordered their cornflakes then bowed their heads to give thanks. I thought "Aha !sisters from Abbotsford on their way to a religious conference- this may be hard going. I was wrong-they were not sisters but old friends with interesting stories of their terrifying experience as teenage refugees in Poland during the 2nd world war and they eventually landed up growing up in Saskatchewan-We all had enthusiastic things to say about our love of that province.In Fact anytime I saw them during the next few days we always had fun times together-they were in their quiet ways always involved in the social events giggling and talking and they were the first ones to turn up for the wine tasting.
My "Quiet clean living American" morphed into a constant attendant in the Bar drinking beer and proved to be an expert on wine -she was not vegetarian and was popular with the men.
My two new wine drinking women friends were Torontonians, vibrant and talented-one was an artist and decorator, the other was an aspiring photographer. We were all on adventures and together with the quiet American spent happy times in the observation car in the evenings drinking wine. An English business man from Saritoga Florida often joined us calling us the four musketeers and flirting with us all. We did not trust him a bit. That assumption was correct.
On the third day, Trainman and his disgruntled wife got off in Saskatoon and I joined my comrades in our berth just in time to hear this discussion. "Did you hear him?" said the American man "Can you believe it ? He is a supporter of Trump! How can anyone do that? He thinks what Saskatoon needs is someone like him! And what about that argument you had with him not believing about climate change being a problem?" He turned to Ms Quiet American who shrugged and said that argument was pointless with someone like that and she should have not gotten involved. The American wife drawled softly "I thought his wife was going to kill him." She smiled mischievously -her favourite reading material was real crime fiction novels. She loved describing the more gruesome details to our horrified ears- especially her soft hearted husband's. So as you see almost all of my assumptions eventually had to be thrown out of the window of the moving train. Chastised I realized I too was in the habit of making false assumptions based on prejudices. As I embarked from the train in Toronto a thought struck me-"I wonder what the other passenger's assumptions about me were?"-a sobering thought.
