(The following article by Catherine Dunphy appeared on the Toronto Star website on march 29.)
TORONTO — The day of Robert Sanford’s funeral, all the trains between Oshawa and Montreal stopped.
There were about 75 of them, en route or in the yards. For two minutes at 5 p.m. on that Saturday, Feb. 28, about 300 people Mr. Sanford used to work with at the Canadian Pacific Railways yard in Smith Falls, Ont., stopped and stood still in honour of the soft-spoken Mohawk who had loved trains since his Scarborough boyhood. Then, at 5:02, they gave their colleague their equivalent of a 21-gun salute — a blast of a whistle from each locomotive.
“We were very surprised. The order was put out by Rob’s manager out of Montreal. It’s very uncommon,” said Dan Lemay, who took Mr. Sanford’s place as chair of local 658 of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers.
But then Mr. Sanford was a very uncommon kind of guy.
If he believed in something, he worked to make it happen. There are lockers at the workplace because six years ago, Mr. Sanford crusaded to get them, going as far as naming his company for non-compliance under the Canada Labour Code and taking the matter to the federal Human Resources department.
A big man in size as well as spirit, he was what engineers call a “miles guy,” booking as much work time and travel as he could get to provide for his wife, Victoria, and two sons, Brandon, 9, and Austin, 7. Mr. Sanford was 6-foot-3 and about 230 toned pounds, thanks to years of weight training but his family teased him that he was finally getting out of shape when he noticed his arm twitching as he held an infant niece at a family party last August.
By October, he had been diagnosed with ALS, a fatal neuromuscular disease involving progressive muscle weakness leading to paralysis. In the U.S. it is better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, after the famous baseball player who died of it in 1941.
“He was a proud man. He worked for as long as he could,” said Lemay. Mr. Sanford booked off sick Dec. 19; he was 44 when he died on Feb. 26.
The linemen, brakemen, conductors, the office colleagues from his 15 years working out of Smith Falls and almost 10 years working with the railways before that all came out to pay their respects. The lineup at the funeral home lasted from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mr. Sanford’s older brother, David, was astonished.
David Sanford is a Toronto-based eco-warrior who calls himself David “Gray Eagle” Sanford. For several years he’s been fighting to save the Rouge Valley System and protect a First Nations burial site. In 2001, he protested a developer’s plans for the area by living in a teepee on site for more than 40 days. Recently he took the Ontario Realty Corp. to court for allegedly selling lands around the Little Rouge River without first consulting the Hurons, who deem it sacred.
Sanford said his brother’s colleagues knew him at the funeral home and knew of his battles on behalf of the site of an ancient Huron village. Robert Sanford had told them.
“It was like my brother was reaching out from his grave to tell me he loved me and really believed in what I was doing,” Sanford said.
And that his brother remembered how the Rouge Valley saved them both.
They were just kids when they started slipping away from their turbulent family home to fish. Their father was an American Mohawk, their mother was Scottish and they were taught to be proud of their aboriginal heritage. But it was only when the brothers were in the valley, sitting round a campfire, that they believed they were really Indians. They would get there before the sun rose, and some days when neither could face what was happening in their home, they stayed long into the night.
“Me and Robert, we were the family,” said Sanford. “There were no bad feelings, no stress there.”
Robert was a meticulous fisherman — the way he held the rod, the care with which he assessed the water’s colour and depth, the choice of lure, the way he touched the line.
They’d make coffee on the fire, taking it out on the stream in a steel flask. Always on the lookout for artefacts, stray pottery shards, they were thrilled whenever they found any. It was concrete proof of their ancestral connection to that place.
Their favourite spot was by the Twin River Bridge off Old Kingston Rd. Here they watched bucks, foxes and coyotes, and told each other the animals had come to them to greet them. One morning while fishing, they saw an eagle flying low. David named his brother for that magnificent bird. Flying Eagle became Robert Sanford’s Indian name. It was also a tattoo on his left shoulder. A year later, David said he received his Indian name when a gray eagle alighted near him as he was fishing, and stayed on its perch as he ate his lunch.
They fished in rain and during blizzards. They fished in the river amid the rainbow trout and the salmon, not on the banks. They fished because they were Indians, they told each other.
Not long before Mr. Sanford died, his brother went back to the river. Their river. He made a campfire and threw ceremonial tobacco into its flames. Then he got out his cellphone and called his brother and held the instrument near the fire, so Robert Sanford could hear the crackle of the flames, the sound of the night and be with his brother in the Rouge Valley one last time.