IN SEARCH OF KINDNESS

01 MONTREAL

Raindrops smear down the windows of our sleeping car, pulling with them the glow of Montreal’s streetlights. Inside, we are warm and dry, entranced by the guitar strumming of a folk duo from Vancouver. We are strangers, about to know each other’s names and destinations and feelings about the triple-tiered chocolate cake at dinner. We are retirees off to see newborn grandbabies and students just released from spring semesters; we are Ontarians and Nova Scotians and a guy who fled Calgary for the seascented air of Prince Edward Island. We are in this together—or at least on this together—this slowpoke of a train that will trundle east from Montreal, through birch forests and marshlands, until what fills every train window is, at last, the blue of the sea beyond Halifax.

The Ocean train, in operation since 1904, is the finest way to wind through most of the eastern provinces of Canada, known as the Maritimes. Or such was my theory when I booked tickets through Via Rail (the Canadian equivalent of Amtrak), snipping the 836-mile journey into three segments. It was spring. It was the year I married a Canadian: a man to whom the word “sorry” comes as readily as “hey,” a man whose past jobs have included planting trees and fighting forest fires. So friendly with strangers is my mate that we have a code for when I’m spent on small talk and need it to cease: a tug of the pinky finger, or in urgent cases, three.

I sometimes feel like I’m living alongside the classic embodiment of Canada, learning daily how place shapes a person.

Love is a wondrous back door into a foreign culture, swift and intimate, but like any access point, it has its limits. One person is one story. Canada is home to more than 37 million people and spans 3,400 miles. Canada is francophone, Canada is anglophone, Canada speaks 70 indigenous tongues. I got a ticket on The Ocean to meet some of those other