A Path Through Montreal
By Ryan Gossen
Failure to adequately address plumbing issues as they arise is an indication of downward spiral. In the mind of the distracted property owner, it may be a looming sense of fear. In the world of the tenant, the place smells bad. The escutcheon on the shower head at the Chrome Hotel in downtown Montreal dangled around the stem emerging from the rough hole in the tile.
It bothered me because I had been plumbing a new bathtub before I left Austin, and I could still see those pipes behind the tile in my mind. It was a funny hotel, decor from the 80s. The hallway, the elevator, the lobby, and this unit all had distinctly different smells and none of them were good. I reached down to adjust the mixer valve and the tub faucet launched off the pipe and hit me in the shin.
Francois arrived quickly. Assuming I was talking to a professional, I tried to be concise: “The tub faucet needs to be put back, you’ll need a small Allen wrench for the set screw. Also, the escutcheon on the shower head is loose.”
I didn't mention the dangling escutcheon on the toilet supply or the smell in the hallway. The man was thirty-something, tatted up arms, baggy, faded black shirt and pants, with a modest-sized toolkit. His job was to run around the hotel all day fixing things as people complained about them. In about five minutes, he had the faucet back on and was on his way out.
“I suggest you run a bead of caulk around that faucet base. And under that escutcheon.”
He shrugged, not having a caulk gun in the kit he carries with him to every room. So be it. The place is a bomb slowly exploding into mold, but it is someone else's bomb.
I spent too much time online the first day in our hotel room, trying to map out which parts of Montreal might be dangerous. A little late, yes, but the question seemed suddenly salient. My wife, my daughter, and I would be splitting and meeting up and I wanted to offer guidance for safety. The red light district was supposed to extend down Sainte-Catherine Street from its epicenter at Saint-Laurent.
I assumed that the sex trade would be collocated with the drug trade and also homelessness, but this was not the case.
Drug people seemed to congregate around Chinatown, while massage parlors and girly show storefronts were on Sainte-Catherine, and the obvious streetwalkers were on René Lévesque. Where I’m from, if you want to buy sex you need desperate people, which means poverty and a zone of illegal activity. Prostitution is legal and regulated in Montreal, so it seems to be at least partially decoupled from those things. Bien joué, Montreal.
We wandered through all of it, in spite of any planning I did or didn't do.
Police sirens went off at all times of day, every day, and police seemed to be everywhere downtown. Black and white American-style patrol cars, dodge chargers, body armor, and full gear. It seemed most intense near Jazz Fest, so maybe they were working extra hard to keep the mess cleaned up, but I never saw the danger. No one was yelling at anyone, or posturing in a public space. I wondered what one had to do to run afoul of the streets in Montreal.
French-speaking Canadians have always fallen through the cracks in my Southern categories. What are these people? They aren't as rough as Cajuns. If you find yourself speaking to someone who speaks Cajun as their primary language, you have wandered far off the path. My experience of New Orleans is that, though their food is excellent, and they may say things like “Laissez les bons temps rouler!” they do not actually go around speaking French.
In Montreal, it’s the workhorse language, used for gossip, commerce, and interactions with strangers. It feels like a mellow version of Paris, but you can find a meal at any time of the day and men wear shorts. I have read in several places the wisdom that one should attempt to speak French to Montrealers out of courtesy, then let them switch to English.
This is terrible advice. I tried it for a couple of days. First, I would make my initial request, “Croissant et un espresso sile vous plait,” followed by the barista’s response, with which they ask a clarifying question, maybe something about warming up the pastry, maybe my preference for the espresso shot. I have no idea. My eyes dart around looking for clues, and the hand that holds my phone rises and falls, my pride fighting the urge to look at Google Translate. She asks a follow-up question, also in French. The need to confess becomes uncomfortable, but maybe I can save my dignity if I can do that in French. I identify the phrase I need and shove it out like a reluctant parachutist: “Parrle vois anglais?”
“Yes. Of course,” the barista says with the chagrin of someone who realizes they have been tricked. This is a victory for me, and for Duolingo, but not for her.
Driving a car around Montreal is out of the question. Many roads are closed off to cars, so getting from Point A to Point B requires a series of nonintuitive turns, followed by a parking dilemma that may be unsolvable. Once I got my rental car into a garage, I never touched it.
The first night, we walked around Old Montreal, which was a tourist aquarium. It had been fascinating to read about this unique place, a medieval city in North America, but standing here felt like Disneyland. Families and couples looking for ice cream, all of us gaping at the windows, examining cobblestones, the place felt like it was covered in several millimeters of lucite, preventing any real connection. The crowd itself was more interesting: all ages, hyper-multicultural, as if all the colors in a palate were mixed into a muddy gray and rinsed through the cobblestone streets.
Poutine was on my culinary bucket list, and we found a restaurant named “Poutine.” The sauce tasted like the Montreal Seasoning in my kitchen and I thought, “How straightforward.” It was like America had spun off a franchise: “America North: Montreal.”
I heard that Canadians take umbrage at the appropriation of the word “America” by the United States of America, so I used all three words when I described where I was from. After hearing dozens of Canadians use this word, however, I suspect they either have given up trying to retrieve it or no longer want it back. At the moment, many Native Americans refer to themselves as Indians, Indians call themselves South Asians, and Africans call themselves Black. Places and people can be named after geography, ethnicity, religion, or phenotype, but all names are political instruments, subject to ongoing struggles, so I don’t expect any of them to mean the same thing in twenty years.
On the second day, we walked up Mount Royal and down Saint-Denis. It was like someone took the cute, interesting part of a major city and created an entire city with it. Everywhere was pedestrian friendly, but the real privileged class in Montreal is bicycles, which enjoy protected lanes, blocked-off streets, and unfettered access to every part of the city.
On the third day, I was on my own. I rented a “Bixibike” out of one of those self-vending racks that require one to install an app.
I took one of the many arteries with a dedicated two-way bike lane to the north. As I rode away from the city center, the ambient air pressure decreased. The building style remained the same: three-story row houses with stairs up to the second floor and doors to basement apartments, but there were fewer shrubs and trees, the buildings were more in need of maintenance, and À Louer/For Rent signs looked out of curtained windows.
North of the Quartier Latin, graffiti grew pronounced. Any loose dumpster was a canvas, and any short tunnel that went under a larger road was a straight-up gallery. The tunnel where Ontario Street goes under Avenue Papineau was sprayed wall to wall, and there were two people openly working on a section when I rode by.
I stopped at a shop to look at junk. It felt like someone could have gone through everything in there and sent some of the things to a fancy antique store, where they would make more money, and the rest to a thrift, or “junk” store where they would sell faster. But this work had not been done, so the things in the store were disorganized and of uncertain status. The place smelled musty but not moldy, like the apartment of a person who still had several years left of being capable of living on their own.
I was greeted in gruff French from a hidden corner. A man hobbled out and quickly exhausted my French, switched to gruff English, and asked if I was looking for anything in particular. Junk proprietors understand the urges and personality types that wander into their stores and know that this is just small talk. People looking for something in particular don’t go to stores like this.
People come to stores like this to find what they didn't know existed, to let their gaze settle in soft focus across the shapes and textures of random things placed in random order, things with stories, artifacts that already had full lives, have been held, perhaps known love, used well or poorly, but played a role in human experiences. Some artifacts have the feeling of death about them, things that might not properly be antiques but are old enough to have been possessed by people who are dead.
A basic salt shaker, subtly worn with a metal cover dull with age suggests a presence at a million meals, standing in the center of an intimate domestic ritual, witness to love, rage, conversation, communion, boredom. Shaken and passed, left standing like a chess piece, and finally emptied and put in a box that lands here, perhaps following a death. Now it stands here, with some rather old silverware, teacups, and a tie clip. Presided over by a gruff character who forgets its existence, as surely as its previous owners, until someone walks in and takes an interest.
The man limps and uses a cane. His ankles are swollen and I suspect diabetes. Many Montrealers seem to use a cane, including younger people. At first, it seemed Parisian to me, like wearing a monocle, but my Canadian friend tells me this is because it is difficult to get orthopedic surgeons and there is a long wait for joint replacements. It's not the news I want to hear because I would like for there to be a utopia to my north, to which I could emigrate to improve my healthcare, leaving behind my own salt shakers and silverware.
“I’m looking for spoons,” I say to the man.
My grandmother, a Canadian, had an impressive collection of decorative tea spoons which interested me as a child. Besides being small, which was an attraction in itself, these spoons had a decoration on them, a city seal or some other token of location or an event like a world’s fair or expo. They were good things to take down and let a toddler examine and sort on the carpet.
I was surprised when I was the only one who wanted them after she passed. The vast majority of her physical possessions had already been purged in a dozen successive moves, starting with leaving the farm in Saskatoon. There was an awkward vibration of acquisitiveness I felt in the threads of the family web over who would get what, but there was really very little to get. My parents called me on the phone and asked if, when they went through to remove things, there was anything I would like to have. It was an exciting proposition because there were indeed so many things I had desired, but nothing that translated into what should be valuable to an adult.
My grandfather, in the bathroom, kept a collection of aftershaves, displayed in a rank on the sink like soldiers. They were different colors and shapes of glass, each with an evocative masculine power.
Old Spice suggested an adventurous backstory to the man who wore it, on a sailing ship, obviously. Aqua Velva, to me, suggested a superpower, perhaps the ability to be Frank Sinatra underwater. Two of them, as if aimed directly at me, were related to Asian martial arts: Black Belt and High Karate.
My grandfather was a Mennonite Farmer with a limited range of motion, so it was hard for me to square these with his persona. I didn't really know him well, he was not a man who felt it was important for children to understand what went on in his head. Black Belt and High Karate were the first things that came to mind when my parents asked what I wanted from their apartment. The second thing was nail clippers. There were two deep recliners facing the television in the living room and in a container in the arm of each was a set of finger and toenail maintenance tools; clippers, scissors, cuticle manipulators.
Once I could reach them, they became very interesting and I was shooed away so many times they acquired the power of the forbidden. If no one else in the family claimed them, they could now be mine. Of course, I didn't really want my dead grandparents’ toenail clippers, and having thus discredited my instincts, I wondered what, if anything, they had owned that I could pass on to my own child or grandchild.
Grandma had some nice tea sets and plates that were known to be valuable, so valuable they could not be eaten on, even at Christmas, even if the plates themselves were decorated with Christmas trees. These were claimed by faster-acting family members. I was surprised no one else wanted the spoons. No other item in the house had been fetishized in such a concentrated way. Each one was a condensed little story. When I received them, some were tarnished to blackness. I fondled them all again as a fifty-year-old man, sorted them, Googled them, tried to identify the place or event each one pertained to, and decided which ones were my favorites and which was my ultimate favorite.
I started looking for spoons in airports on business trips, and sometimes found them. In the little stores that sell magazines and toothpaste near the gates, you can find decorative spoons about 30% of the time, usually hanging near the keychains with people’s first names, which, for some reason, are always available in airports. If you ask the cashier if they have decorative spoons, they will look at you like you have asked a silly question, then realize that, Oh shit, we DO sell spoons, but they have never personally seen a person who buys them. Then they will look at you as if you are the answer to a question they have had for as long as they worked there and direct you to the obscure location where spoons are hanging.
I got a heavy pewter spoon with a handle shaped like a guitar neck in Nashville. A small, heavy spoon with the Empire State Building in NYC, and a nasty little stamped metal spoon stuck into a plastic square that says “Don’t Mess With Texas.” I'm always looking for the classier spoons, like Grandma’s. Silver plate, with some kind of interesting pattern to the neck, and ideally, a pictorial crest or emblem at the end. One spoon has a cross-hatched neck and what looks like an atomic structure at the end, with the word, “Atomium.” It’s my favorite spoon.
When I said goodbye and walked out without purchasing anything or making any further inquiries, the proprietor did not seem disappointed. His business is curious people with nothing better to do. Most don't buy anything. It's a percentage game.
I kicked up the stand on the Bixibike. It was a tank with low-pressure tires, but three reasonable gears. After a week of travel, my quads needed the work and I felt let off the leash on the long gradual incline out of the city. I still had no plan, other than to link back up with my wife and daughter in a few hours. I turned down a side road which was abruptly blocked off to automobile traffic and continued as another dedicated bike lane. One side of this road was two-way bike traffic, the other side was a community garden in large planters directly on the asphalt, erupting with leafy vegetables. Hand-painted signs in French said things that probably described what was going on there.
The garden spit me out into a residential neighborhood that felt rent-controlled. Cute, old buildings of the same Victorian style as the larger boulevards in Saint Marie but one story lower and without the pedestrian traffic. Packed in like row houses but with trees interspersed between the addresses in the small yards. Toyotas, Hundais, a Ford Fiesta. Flower pots in windows. Babies in strollers. I was at the northern edge of Mount Royal and to my left, a hill beckoned my fidgety quads. I went up on the low gear, and turned left again, panting with fire in my legs, and coasted across the sidewalk.
A bike lane with a powerful sucking force pulled me left into a green field. It was the entrance to a park I could not see the edges of, with social paths crisscrossing ballfields, great trees shading nearly everything, and spreading over a former street with concrete barricades blocking the main road. I stopped in the street to look at my phone, standing over my bike between an upright piano and a bench.
This park, Parc La Fontaine, is immense, a city of grass. It was a farm sold to the city by James Logan in 1845, so it was Logan Park until 1901 when a wave of name changes swept across Canada. In Quebec, towns with English names changed to French. In Ontario, towns with German names changed to English.
I recognize these dates from Confederate monuments in the South. When Canadians were playing musical chairs with place names, the second phase of confederate monument building was underway, erecting statues that were no longer slabs mourning the dead, but military men on horseback and bronze flags snapping in the wind. Apparently, regional cultures were asserting their identity and power all across North America. Compared to the repercussions of slavery, the tension between French and English speakers is hard to take seriously. Nevertheless, it seems to have colored much of Montreal’s infrastructure and persisting identity.
It’s an understatement to say Montreal invested in parks and culture. Houses within and surrounding the Logan farmland were expropriated, expanding the park as its ambitions accelerated. Epic landscaping, monumental sculpture, school facilities, restaurants, and an amphitheater. Like the city streets, the park went through a period of decay and rejuvenation, into its current, very pleasant state.
Into the green, my path wove around trees, past a baseball field past a bocce ball court. I associate bocce with ancient Italian men and high waistlines. It is a nearly perfect game, designed to facilitate human interaction rather than test physical prowess. It can be done just as well with a drink in hand, while flirting, arguing, planning a coup, or ordering a pizza. A bocce court requires a flat area. A fancy bocce court requires a flat gravel area. Balls are balls.
There must be expensive and precious bocce balls, objects which find their way into the junk-antique continuum, but it seems feasible to play with rocks. The ballers I pedaled past were milling around their balls like pigeons holding beers and laughing at each other. They looked to be in their 20s and 30s.
How did the older generation so successfully pass down this practice? Something about it seemed like a massive social success and a vindication of the park.
My path penetrated a field of picnickers. Smoke rose from portable grills and people drank openly, as if they lived in a civilized society where the consumption of alcohol could be allowed without the wheels falling off the city. I took the Bixibike down a gentle hill on the grass, rattling every part of it, and encountered a big, kidney-shaped pond bordered by a sidewalk and a hill where more picnickers reclined and enjoyed each other and their dogs.
My wife was downtown at Jazz Fest, which occupied yet more city blocks cleared of cars. It reminded me of Austin, where we host a string of obtrusive, loud, music festivals in the main city park. I’m told they are fun, but I have an aversion to going behind cyclone fences where I will be compressed into a horde and forbidden from climbing trees.
In Montreal, they leave the parks to the locals and it’s downtown that is transformed to host the festivals. The Quartier des Spectacles is a neighborhood of buildings, the bottom floors of which are indoor venues and malls. Vendors and decorations go up in the streets and become a kind of fairground amidst skyscrapers. Larger venues host the big acts and pocket parks and plazas host enough continuous free shows that one just happens across them. One never has to commit to a UN refugee camp-style wristband-controlled enclosure.
When I was walking through, a spontaneous dance performance was happening in front of concentric stairs that seemed a place bankers might eat lunch on a nice day, but also happened to be shaped like a small amphitheater. A bicycle-towed DJ booth formed the backstage and a group of dancers took turns doing b-boy, wacking, and partner variations. After the applause crested and fell, the performers, their apparatus, and the audience simply ceased to exist, dissolving into the flow of the crowd, the place becoming, again, where people sat down to eat.
The next morning, we evaporated from the hotel and searched for coffee on Sainte-Catherine with our luggage, then, coffee in one hand, dragged our bags to the alley and paused in front of the riot door sealing our garage. When I parked here, the door had mysteriously opened for the car, like I had won a game of chicken, but it did not respond to pedestrians with baggage. There was a machine next to the door, adorned with several sentences in French. It seemed passive-aggressive for a parking garage in the hotel district. I am accustomed to being at the cultural apex, and if I haven't had breakfast this sort of thing can hurt my feelings.
A woman walked past us and placed her ticket in a scanner set into the machine and the door slid open. We followed her down the ramp.
It was good to be in the car again, like coming home from the hotel room. After a minor struggle, I got the navigation on my phone to appear on the screen of the Hyundai, and we were off. A couple of turns put us on the freeway. It didn't feel like the city wanted us gone, exactly, more like Montreal just drains well.
Canada opened up quickly, and after a detour due to road construction, we were in the kind of green, rolling farmland a child would draw. It was Mennonite country. Everything was clean and put away, no cars on blocks or evidence of any sort of project other than growing. It was vast and open and clear, and there was no affordance for us, except for the occasional unattended stand for displaying cut flowers to be purchased with the honor system.
Outside of a city, we were like termites, who could only travel in an enclosure, exiting when we found wet wood. I settled in and looked longingly at the ponds as each of us enclosed ourselves in a micro-world inside the car.
Ryan Gossen is a writer living in Austin, Texas, where he also pursues dance, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and climbing, and is an active member of Texas Search and Rescue. He has had many vocations, including user experience (UX) designer, experimental psychologist, construction worker, arborist, and ski bum. He writes mostly about man’s interaction with nature. More of his writing can be found on his website.
