C’est l’hivers, dans un Montréal de vent et de glace. Les fenêtres qui craquent, les portes qui claquent.
D’un souffle brusque, les carreaux qui vascillent maladroitement, menaçant d’éclater. Et par bourrasque, cette folle poudrerie qui vient s’agglutiner sur ma terrasse, au troisième niveau d’une sombre demeure outremontoise.
On attend que le ciel termine sa colère et puis, lorsque le calme renaît, j’ouvre lentement cette vieille porte qui me protège de toi.
Je te retrouve, jouant dans la neige, comme à tes six ans. Une boule de glace et quelques branches qui fouettent le ciel, et voilà un maladroit bonhomme, qui demain se dispersera. Comme une poupée qui prend le large, dans cette barque au large mat.
Et je t’entend crier, dans cet infini destin. Bruit sourd de tes pensées lourdes, enterrées par cet hivers qui efface les rires, comme ces pas dans la neige, et ces sourires dans la nuit.
C’est ainsi que l’hivers t’a vu partir, vers un destin qu’on ne connait pas.
By the time February rolls around, Montreal has already been buried in snow for a couple of months and your mental map of the city has changed considerably. Places you’d normally linger — the steps at Place des Arts, the plaza in front of Mont-Royal metro, the giant chess board in Berri Square — have vanished from the landscape, inaccessible under the snow, unpleasant in the sub-zero wind.
Montreal’s seasonal extremes are a challenge to urban planning: how do you create a vibrant place that can function just as well on a frigid January day as on a balmy August night? Some spaces are more adaptable than others. Neighbourhood retail streets will always be lively, since people still need to hit up the supermarket, coffee shop and drug store even when it’s cold. Park lawns make good toboggan slopes and hockey rinks in the winter. But hard-surfaced plazas and squares — those quintessentially urban spaces — have a hard time finding much use between December and April.
For most of the years I lived in Montreal, the only time of the winter when a downtown square came back to life was during February’s Nuit Blanche festival, when performances and light installations take over the snowbound tarmac at Place des Arts. Lately, however, some of the ideas behind that one night of wintertime festivities has been extended throughout the winter. Last year, the recently-built Place des Festivals played host to Champ de pixels, which transformed the square into a giant Lite Brite studded with illuminated “pixels” made from overturned plastic buckets. Each bucket was equipped with motion sensors; when you walked by, the colour of the light shifted from white to red.
“Everyone’s talking about the weather,” runs a loose translation of an old German political poster, “except us.” The slogan was used to parody a period railroad ad that trumpeted the Deutsche Bahn’s storm-resistant resilience, but it also attempted a deeper point: that meaningful politics is serious business, above the fray of such trivial, provincial preoccupations as the latest shower, hail, or frost.
In a recent essay at 3 Quarks Daily, Alyssa Pelish takes the other side of the argument. At first, she wonders whether talking about the three-day forecast might really be a sort of code obscuring some underlying purpose — functioning as a form of empathy, for example. Ultimately, she sees an even greater significance in sharing news about the weather: it provides one of the few “universally shared narratives” available to everyone.
It’s true that everyone experiences weather, full stop. But the way we do seems like it might be more effective at fostering individual communities rather than any single, universal one. Think, for example, of a snowstorm, when the collective, Herculean task of removing tons and tons of heavy, disruptive white stuff requires a city’s residents to work together — and, together, to interact with their government — at the most intimate, personal level.
It started with the new white curtains my girlfriend and I bought for our bedroom in Hong Kong. They’re opaque enough to block any potential embarrassment but shear enough to let light through, because there’s nothing I hate more than waking up in a dark room. After we installed them, they had an unintended effect. Sitting in the living room in the afternoon, my eye would wander to the bedroom, where for a second the slightly transparent curtains would trick me into thinking the window was iced over.
Later, lying in bed one sleepless night, I heard the sound of a shovel being scraped across pavement. My mind drifted to snowy nights in Montreal, when neighbours would get a head start on the falling snow by clearing their steps and front walks before going to bed. It created a peculiar chorus to the muffled hymn of car tires and footsteps trudging through the snow.
Recently, I’ve come to appreciate the seasonality of Canadian weather, which I took for granted until I moved to Hong Kong two and a half years ago. Hong Kong does have distinct seasons — I never realized 12 degrees could feel so cold until I experienced my first winter monsoon, when a chilly, dry wind blows from the north — but the differences between them are subtle. Only a small proportion of trees here lose their leaves in the winter; the best way to tell what season it is is by which tree flowers are blooming.
This just in from the Department of Eye Candy: a beautiful time-lapse video of a tropical storm rolling into Hong Kong last summer. One of the benefits of Hong Kong’s abundance of hills and skyscrapers is that it allows for some astounding weather-related sights. It’s nice enough to look out my window at the mountains just north of Kowloon, but when those mountains are framed by dark, fast-moving clouds, that’s an even more impressive sight. So is watching a storm rush towards you over the harbour. You get to see both in this video, which runs a bit long but is worth watching because it’s just so fun to look at.
If you’re not the type who constantly follows the weather, it’s a bit of a surprise when you see that a typhoon warning has been “hoisted,” as people in Hong Kong so quaintly put it. The first indications appear in office buildings, MTR stations and shopping malls: little signposts bearing a somewhat cryptic T1 logo, accompanied by the inscription, “Typhoon signal no. 1 is hoisted.” What this means, according to Hong Kong’s decidedly proactive weather observatory, is that a typhoon is within 850 kilometres of Hong Kong and, in the near future, more serious warnings might be issued.
After spotting the warning, the day’s still air and muggy humidity become more ominous: the calm before the storm, as the cliché would have it. The sense of anticipation increases as you spot more and more of the warning signs throughout the city, and even on TV, where a little “T1″ is displayed in the upper left-hand corner. You can almost feel the increase in nervous energy among your fellow pedestrians, bus riders and ferry-goers.
Hong Kong’s typhoon warning system dates back to 1884, when a gun—and later a bomb—was set off to warn the public of an approaching storm. 1917 saw the introduction of the first numbered warning signals, the same system that is in use today, with the exception of a few small refinements. After the first warning is issued, the Hong Kong Observatory can issue a number 3 warning for “strong winds,” a number 8 warning for gale-force winds, a number 9 warning for gale winds that are increasing, and a dreaded number 10 warning for hurricane-force winds of 118 km/h or more. Separate warnings are issued for thunderstorms and heavy rainfall, which makes the typhoon season a bit of a game — which storm can collect the most warnings?
Last Wednesday, shortly after I arrived in Hong Kong, I experienced my first real typhoon. Severe Tropical Storm Kammuri, as it was officially known, passed within 150 kilometres of Hong Kong, lashing it with heavy rain and sometimes frighteningly strong winds. It started the evening before with otherwise innocuous rain; by the time I woke up the next morning, winds rolling in from the sea slammed into the windows, and periodic waves of fog and rain reduced visibility to no more than a few feet. The number 8 warning was issued just before rush hour, and nearly all bus and ferry services were suspended for the day; MTR trains ran every 15 minutes. Shops and offices were closed.
I discovered most of this from watching television. The weather was too scary to venture outside, so I stared out the window at empty, rain-lashed streets. By the early evening, however, the storm had subsided. There were news reports of a toppled bus and and a fallen neon sign, but nothing too serious. After an entire day spent indoors, stir-crazy people trickled out of their apartments to buy dinner or groceries, pressing on against a strong, damp wind.
It was not exactly warm on the afternoon of January 24 as I stood at the corner of University and President Kennedy, waiting for a bus, shivering and sliding back and forth on the icy sidewalk.
Until the rain washed much of it away today, it seemed like the snow wouldn’t stop accumulating in the streets of Montreal. A big storm in early December left more than 30 centimetres of the stuff on the ground; no sooner had that been cleared away did another 40 or 50 centimetres fall over the course of a few days last week. The city’s blue collar workers couldn’t keep up and streets were gridlocked for a good three or four days.
One random guy on the news (I think he was on the Magdalen Islands) described the storm as “une bonne vieille tempête.” I like that expression. It reminds me of fourteenth-century French poet François Villon‘s famous line, “Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?” It gives the impression that, even as we run towards something new and unknown, the icy hands of the past continue to grasp at our ankles.
On December 1st, I awoke as the blue fingers of dawn took hold of the eastern sky. Unable to return to sleep, I went to the kitchen and made myself a coffee. With bleary eyes, I watched the back alley as the night’s darkness faded into a mute grey. A few snowflakes began tumbling down from the sky, the season’s first.
Later that day, exhausted from my early morning adventure, I took a long nap just as the sun set. By the time I woke up, at about 6:30 in the evening, everything was dark. I could hear the groan of gridlocked traffic on Park Avenue, just outside my bedroom window, but strangely, no light was coming in from the street. A strange popping sound accompanied the grinding tires and car horns. I turned over, saw the iced-over window and realized what had happened: an ice storm.
Australia is suffering from its worst drought in years. Meanwhile, smoke from bushfires in eastern Victoria has blanketed Melbourne in a thick, toxic haze.
Kansas City is amid its first major winterish weather event. The ice came first, then came the snow. I was planning on riding my bike to work this morning, but found that my bike lock was frozen, and was thus unable to unlatch my bike from the porch post on the back of my building. So I went around front and began scraping off my car to make the 1.6 mile trek to work. Upon arriving, one of my coworkers suggested that urinating on the bike lock would unfreeze it. Then, a more dignified approach to the dilemma struck me – I could simply pour a pot of hot water on the bike lock.
I find it odd though that everyone around me thinks it strange that I would consider biking in this weather. I would rather get in a bicycle accident than wreck my car.
debate over london underground map design continues - animation shows how schematic map would morph to geographic one http://t.co/dHDVhIc5about 7 minutes agofrom web
you've heard of food deserts- what about fast food deserts? this map of NY highlights where it's tough to get a burger http://t.co/ShacZhCyabout 10 minutes agofrom web
canada's census out today. here's a map of population changes in montreal since 06-suburban growth still strong there? http://t.co/h1xS5Y8Labout 25 minutes agofrom web
