Spring, Finally
One of my favourite passages about Montreal comes from Leonard Cohen’s 1966 novel Beautiful Losers. “In Montreal spring is like an autopsy,” he writes. “Everyone wants to see the inside of the frozen mammoth. Girls rip off their sleeves and the flesh is sweet and white, like wood under green bark. From the streets a sexual manifesto rises like an inflating tire, ‘The winter has not killed us again!’”
Well, spring finally broke last week. The sleeves are off, the flesh is exposed and the city has adopted the air of a carnival. It’s like a revelation: after months of chill, people are finally in the streets again and not just passing through them.
Last Friday, I awoke and wandered into the kitchen as the sounds of children playing drifted in from the back alley. It was not just a sunny day, it was brilliant, with the kind of azure sky and warm light that pulls you outdoors, obligations be damned. Whereas just a week earlier a spring storm had dumped twenty centimetres of snow on the ground, it was now warm enough to wear a t-shirt outside—and so I did, wandering down a Park Avenue that bustled with grocery shoppers, Hasidic children on scooters and flâneurs like myself, people too distracted by the sun to work.
After turning onto St. Viateur Street and checking in with Stephen Welch to chat about his recently relocated bookstore (things are going well), I wandered down the shady side of the street to grab a coffee. It would be a perfect time to bump into a friend, I thought, and sure enough, as I glanced around, I spotted one: Rossana, an occasional Urbanphoto contributor. Dressed in a skirt, tank top and sunglasses, she had, like many Montrealers, decided to skip spring and head straight into summer.
Rossana was going downtown, to McGill. With no particular plan in mind, I joined her and walked back to Park to catch the 80 bus. She reminded me that it was April 20th—4/20—and that the McGill Harm Reduction Centre would be holding some sort of pot-smoking rally on campus that afternoon. I didn’t think much of it until we actually walked down Milton Street, passed through the university gates and found ourselves in front of the Redpath Museum. Gazing out across the Lower Field, towards the skyscrapers of Sherbrooke Street, the McGill campus was busier than I had ever seen it on a normal weekday. Hundreds of people sprawled across the grassy knoll in front of the museum, some of them reading, others drinking, a handful smoking, all of them basking in the sun. Casual games of soccer, frisbee, football and croquet (some kind of new ironic faux-bourgeois affectation?) were being played in the field beyond.
Judging by the number of backwards baseball caps, Urban Outfitters t-shirts and oversized sunglasses, an alarming number of people seemed to be of the obnoxious frat boy/McGill Girl type. But McGill’s lower campus, situated as it is in the middle of downtown Montreal, functions more as a public park than as a cloistered enclave, so there was enough of a diversity of people to make things comfortable. Cyclists were passing through, students from a nearby public school were playing soccer and children from nearby daycares, as curious and clueless as kittens, pranced about while ignoring their fussy keepers. When the students gathered to celebrate 4/20 lit up at exactly twenty past four o’clock, giant plumes of pot smoke drifted upwards; from afar it must have looked like a big barbeque, although it certainly didn’t smell like one. None of the bystanders appeared to mind, though. In fact, they greeted the whole spectacle with something akin to nonchalance.
Leaving McGill, we strolled around for a couple of hours, stopping to watch people in Place des Arts and St. Louis Square before finally retiring to Jeanne-Mance Park to absorb the day’s last rays of sunshine. As we sat on the park’s lawn, a trio of teenagers goofed off nearby, doing cartwheels and handstands and dancing to the music on their MP3 players. A little girl was being pulled around by a huge dog, running from one group of people to the next, occasionally tumbling as the dog gallopped ahead. Her name, it turned out, was Gabrielle, and she was a strangely well-spoken five-year-old. (Her dog was three.) Even more impressive was that she was well-spoken in three languages: English, French and, as we found out when an Argentine man came over to admire her dog, Spanish.
Everywhere we went that day, people seemed to talk louder, car stereos thumped more assertively and cigarette smoke seemed more pungent than in the winter. What was true in Leonard Cohen’s Montreal of the 1960s is true today: when spring comes, the senses are aroused and the city takes on a new life. I find it striking how in absence of a more profound connection to the environment, the weather is what binds most city dwellers to the natural word. It has a huge impact on their lives: a change in temperature and atmospheric conditions can trigger a profound shift on the city’s mood. This is true anywhere, but especially in a city of climactic extremes like in Montreal.
After last weekend, temperatures became more seasonable. Even now, as the cool spring rain falls and the first green leaves emerge, it is clear that there has been a shift in behaviour. People are more willing to linger outdoors, to stroll aimlessly through the streets. The warm season has begun and the city, at last, has come alive.
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