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It was Canada’s first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, who spearheaded the construction of a cross-country railway, cajoled in part by British Columbia, which agreed to join Confederation in 1871 on the condition that the East found a way to connect to the West. Today, the train still offers a window to the past, a mirror to the present, and a front-row seat to the country’s greatest spectacle: the vast, unyielding landscape.

My first pinch-me moment arrives midway through my journey, as my route veers north from Winnipeg to Churchill, a town so remote it is unreachable by road. Rocked to sleep by the rhythm of the rails, I wake to a knock on my cabin door. “The lights are out,” whispers Steve, the train service manager. Not the power. The aurora borealis.

I head to the glass-roofed dome car, where pyjama-clad passengers sit agog, their eyes (and iPhones) fixed upward. I gasp as I glimpse curtains and tendrils of pinks, purples, reds and greens dancing above us, as our train trundles deeper into the wild.

After I disembark in , I see even more. The subarctic outpost experiences auroral activity around 300 nights a year, on average. When I join an after-dark snowshoe tour with , the sight of the northern lights is stirring and elemental, filling me with a sense of being connected to something bigger. 

In Inuit belief, the northern lights are the spirits of ancestors playing in the sky. But not everyone had such a sentimental view. Dave Allcorn, a tour guide with , shares with me some local lore the next morning. As rumour has it, “when the military was stationed here during the Cold War, they tried to find a way to weaponize the aurora into some kind of death ray,” he says as we spot remnants of rocket ranges and radar towers. The purported death ray never came to pass, but I’m still jarred by the idea: a sacred sky transformed into a battleground of ambition.

Before leaving Churchill, I take in some of the art that has beautified derelict buildings, including the , organized in 2017 by Manitoban artist Kal Barteski in response to the year-long washout of the town’s vital rail connection. One work is a massive mural with the words “KNOW I’M HERE,” which speaks to me like an instruction for every landscape that follows. As I get back on the train, I feel a call to look beyond my surroundings and learn the stories of those who helped shape this country.

Later, on board the Canadian, I see morning light slipping through the peaks of the Rockies. It’s the postcard view most passengers have been waiting for. But as I admire it, I’m also reminded of what I’d learned weeks earlier in Toronto, at the .

The towering sculpture honours the 17,000 Chinese labourers who came to build the steel backbone of this country. Estimates vary, but it’s believed that hundreds, if not thousands, lost their lives during construction. Many died while blasting dynamite through the Rockies, now considered the most scenic stretch of track.

“This is something we were never taught in school,” said Sonya Pon Davidson of the Foundation to Commemorate the Chinese Railroad Workers in Canada. The Chinese rail workers who survived and wanted to stay were subjected to a racist head taxmeant to deter the “wrong” settlers.

This isn’t the only distressing rail history. It must also be acknowledged that a transcontinental train would not have been possible without accessing land from Indigenous Peoples through treaties that remain controversial and contested. I think about what’s happened in Canada’s past, even as I take in the pristine beauty all around me.

Nearing the last stretches of my journey, Via Rail runs through the wilds of northern B.C. I see towering spruce and cedar forests with encircling bald eagles, glacier-tipped mountains and emerald-green lakes, thundering waterfalls, winding rivers and, to my delight, my first black bear sighting of the season.

Sunshine illuminates the end of the tracks in Prince Rupert. Locals are quick to share that this harbour town of just 14,000 was once predicted to rival Vancouver as the powerhouse of the Pacific. But Charles Melville Hays, head of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway and the man behind its westward vision, died on the Titanic before he could see this through. His statue now stands outside city hall, a monument to what might have been.

While the rail is not the fastest way to get across the country, it remains the most revealing. It’s one thing to know how vast Canada is, but there’s nothing quite like travelling its breadth first-hand.

When I disembark for the last time, I leave with a clearer picture of the country and its complicated facets: endowed with astonishing natural beauty, etched with the scars of history, unified by tracks laid with sacrifice and, above all, still connected despite our differences and distance.

Rebecca Felgate is a Calgary-based writer. She received a grant from the Canada Media Fund for a video project based on her rail trip, but she travelled independently.