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I PUT HIM ON A PLANE when he was just 11 years old— held him hard and watched his bottom lip quiver for just a second before he turned and marched resolutely down the jetway, his overstuffed backpack swaying gently left and right like a slow wave goodbye.

It was September 2003, and my son Adam, my baby child, was leaving his island home in British Columbia to live and study at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet School in Manitoba. He had, after a successful month-long summer audition, made the difficult decision to head east to continue his dance training at a higher level. That fall, he was still in elementary school. He slept under a Tigger quilt.

At the airport, blindsided by grief, I leaned against a window and cried as I watched his life take off.

The young man who sauntered out of gate D49 at Calgary International Airport last December wore a black Team Canada hoodie and a spatter of adolescent acne across his nose; his telltale dancer's duck walk confirmed his identity. I had him fully engaged in a possessive maternal squeeze before I realized my blunder. Adam stood as straight as a prairie road, six feet of wiry muscle, and waited patiently for me to get the hell off him.

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It was the same every Christmas: for a few short weeks, Adam would parachute back into our lives, and within hours of deplaning, his social calendar would be booked solid. And while I appreciated his need to keep up with his local buddies, I inevitably felt a little shortchanged in the meaningfulconversation department.

The trick, I decided, was to get ahead of the problem by building some together time into the front end of his schedule. So instead of flying him directly home, I had arranged for us to rendezvous in Alberta, where we would hop on board the luxurious Rocky Mountaineer winter train between Banff and Vancouver. First, we would overnight in Calgary, then take a bus to Banff, where the train would be waiting to take us across the spine of the Rockies to Kamloops the first day, and on to Vancouver the next. With limited distractions and every creature comfort attended to, I would engage him in a memorable two-day dialogue. At least, that was the plan.

The next morning we boarded an overheated bus for the trip down the Trans-Canada to Banff's train station. It had been an early start out of Calgary; Adam was dozing against the rainstreaked picture window. I was thinking about how I could use a few pointers on how to talk to my own son, because my slightly desperate efforts to engage him in a spirited exchange were definitely not working. I needed to quit trying so hard; I needed to relax and let him lead.

He woke up half an hour outside of Banff, just as the front ranges of the Rockies were coming into view.

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"Hey, Mom, I've been thinking about something," he said, with not a little urgency.

Aha! Here it was, then, the first conversational thrust. I was immediately en garde and ready to parry.

"Do you think we'll get to the hotel in Kamloops in time to watch the Vancouver-Edmonton game tonight?"

We were going in circles in the dark.

WE HAD CROSSED the Continental Divide — the highest point on the trip — in relative silence, the result, perhaps, of the shot of champagne I'd allowed Claude, our car attendant, to add to Adam's early-morning orange juice. But as the train entered the famous Spiral Tunnels — completed in 1909 without benefit of calculator or computer to bypass the dangerous grade of the infamous Big Hill near the B.C.-Alberta border — he sprang out of his seat to get a better view of this feat of engineering.

"Very cool," he pronounced as Claude explained how the railway doubled back on itself, tunnelling under mountains and crossing the Kicking Horse River twice to cut down the perilously steep grade. "Very complicated."

He fell silent again, staring out the window at the fairy-tale scenery. The evergreens lining the tracks were heavy with snow; some branches were so weighted down that it seemed the addition of even a single flake might cause them to snap.

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"Something I've been wondering about," he said, turning back shyly. "Why are girls so complicated?"

In Kamloops, we ate dinner in front of the TV in our hotel room. The Oilers beat the Canucks 7-6 in regulation play, but Adam was so disgusted with his team, he switched off the game before the final horn blew.

We turned in by nine. The train would be pulling out early the next morning to make the most of the limited daylight hours. Adam went to change in the hotel's tiny bathroom, then dove into bed wearing boxers decorated with the logos of the original six NHL teams.

When I turned out the light on the bedside table between our chintz-covered twin beds, he asked me whether I liked my work. I told him I did, most days.

"Does Dad?"

"I think he loves teaching."

"How much do you guys earn?"

I told him, resisting the urge to inflate the numbers. Then we speculated about how much an NHL goalie makes.

It was black in the room. His breathing slowed. Just when I thought he'd fallen asleep, he spoke again.

"Mom — about the Rockies?"

"Hmm?"

"I'd heard so much about them, I thought I'd be let down."

"And?"

"I wasn't disappointed."

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BY DAY TWO, the conversational dam had burst, and Adam was chatting easily not only with me but also with complete strangers. He reminisced about memorable vacations with a family from Ojai, California, seated behind us; he debated the playoff potential of the Canucks with Claude. At a white-linen lunch in the dining car, he maintained good eye contact with the childless middle-aged couple seated across from us and made a heroic effort to keep up his end of the conversation.

He was feeling grown up and justifiably pleased with himself. He had sipped a mimosa on a train through the Rockies for heaven's sake; he was nearly a man of the world. He most definitely did not want to visit the children's car, where Santa had recently ensconced himself after being rescued along the tracks (his sleigh having developed a malfunction in the vicinity). But later, when the guy in red wandered back through our dome car to bestow best wishes for the season, Adam accepted his gift of a Rocky Mountaineer scarf and wore it with pride for the rest of the trip.

He wrapped it twice around his neck to ward off the damp cold while we waited outside in the vestibule to catch the best view of the dramatic meeting of the clear Thompson and the muddy Fraser rivers, a little south of Kamloops.

He leaned out into the drizzle. "Do you remember that time in grade four when I did a project about Simon Fraser?"

I did.

"Do you remember how you yelled at me because I left everything 'til the last minute?"

"So," I said, hoping to redirect the conversation, "this would be the junction he discovered while he was looking for a navigable river route to the Pacific Ocean."

"Yeah, I remember you were so mad, I felt like hiding."

At Hell's Gate, where an aerial tram carries tourists across a steep gorge churning with whitewater, Adam told me he had recently conquered the fear of heights that had occasionally paralyzed him in elementary school. As we descended the rugged Fraser Canyon and listened to commentary about how people travel from around the world to negotiate the intimidating Class IV rapids in rubber rafts, he explained he was also "pretty sure" he was no longer prone to seasickness. Somewhere past Hope, he told me quite a bit more than I had ever heard before about a girl — "just a friend" — named Alannah. And, in the middle of Chilliwack's farmland, over a bison-steak entree that instantly became his most memorable meal, he floated his most important question — the interrogative that would sustain our conversation for weeks and months to come: "What if I decide not to be a dancer?"

By the time we pulled into the Vancouver station a few hours later, Adam's desire to talk and my need to listen were finally reconciled. We stepped off the train into the rain-soaked night and were immediately swept into a bear hug by Brad, husband and father. As we settled into the waiting car, Brad turned back to Adam: "By the way, Matt called this morning. Wants to know if you want to go over and watch the game against Calgary tomorrow night."

Adam looked hopefully at me. "Mom?"

"Go," I said. And meant it.

Julie Ovenell-Carter lives on Bowen Island, B.C. She does not earn as much as an NHL goalie, but her son thinks she's priceless.

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