vignettes from urban winter
snow clearing and the intrepid buses of montréal
Times are awful and times are good. Right now, I’m actually home sick with a bad cold that hit me like a freight train, looking out at a great mound of snow in the parking lot after record-breaking snowfall. The world feels slow, hazy. For the past several days, I’ve taken the dog out with my partner in the evenings, marveling at the way the falling flakes seem to broaden at night into big flat sequins, so that everything glitters under the streetlamps. Snow has risen and drifted to knee-high levels. This morning, while digging out the car, I saw pedestrians sharing the street with cars, since the sidewalks were completely impossible to pass—in Montréal of all places!
I was very impressed when I first heard of Montréal’s snow-clearing operations. This was ten years ago: Boston got nearly ten feet of snow over the course of the winter, snow which fell in great gulps of two or three feet, so that for the whole month of February we didn’t have school on Monday or Tuesday. A family friend from Montréal chuckled at the idea that school would be cancelled for snow.
“If we did that in Montréal,” he said, “they wouldn’t go to school all winter!”
And indeed, at the time, McGill would never cancel classes, not ever, not even in dangerous conditions. I saw videos of Montréal’s snow-blowing plows that funneled snow into a neat formation of trucks, and the city even sent equipment down to Boston to help with the wintry deluge. Montréal seemed to have the whole “snow” thing figured out.
After moving here last year, I see it is not exactly so. While the city has extensive snow-clearing capabilities, the city government seems to believe that most people can survive without all the bells and whistles, by which I mean clear streets. Like all things in Montréal, there may be some element of corruption here (?) but who knows. There is a snow commission whose whole job is coordinating “snow clearing operations,” which have to be declared at the city level. But sometimes snow falls heavily only on one part of the city, and the commission is loath to rouse the great snow-clearing brigade for just one borough. So the people of that borough get angry and talk to their representatives, who clear their roads, but then get fined for using their snow equipment in a decentralized manner. In short, Montréal’s snow-clearing brigade doesn’t give a fuck about you. They’ll get to you when they get to you, and that could take days.
Two days out from the blizzard, my street has yet to be actually cleared—an initial layer was plowed, probably during the storm itself, to make the street barely passable. But most parking in Montréal is street parking, so most cars are snowed in, practically frozen into the side of the road until the drivers dig out. You’d better have winter tires, boots, and a shovel, because no one is coming to save you. No one, that is, except the bus drivers of Montréal.
Montréal’s transit system is a crown jewel, and no amount of local gripes will convince me otherwise. Sure, I’m happy to complain about bus non-arrivals and delays, but it’s one of the few cities in North America where you really don’t need a car to survive, even during a blizzard—as I captured on Sunday, before losing feeling in my hands:
The previous Thursday—the biggest storm of the season before Sunday arrived—I had ice cream to pick up in Saint-Henri, a neighborhood on the other side of the highway. There were piles of snow spilling into the street, but the city was in motion: there were people walking and cars passing, slower than usual, and some of my neighbors digging out their cars. I didn’t actually have a shovel, I realized, as I clomped through the calf-high snow—but my first task was getting the ice cream for Valentine’s Day.
The high-frequency bus I take stops across the main street, where you essentially have to jaywalk to get to the stop in any reasonable amount of time. My neighbor was also waiting in the glass-walled bus shelter—“I figured I’d go down there and it would come sometime,” he said, and it did, dropping us with minor delays at the metro. When I emerged in Saint-Henri, the snow had made everything soft except the wind, which cut into my face with tiny particles of snow and ice. I felt it physically sting, bending forward against the gusts—my hood wasn’t big enough to really shield my face.
I made it to the ice cream shop and got a scoop of Earl Grey gelato with hot fudge, waiting for the cashier to find my pre-ordered Valentine’s heart. With the order in an insulated bag (which to be honest seemed quite superfluous in the sub-zero temperatures), I turned my attention to shovel acquisition. After going to two supermarkets to no avail, I figured that the Canadian Tire at Atwater metro should have one and traipsed back to the metro to get there. On my way, one of the small snow clearing tractors was perched halfway into a snowbank, and the worker's breath puffed out of the open window, on break.
Clearly, I wasn’t the only procrastinator in the city—I got the last shovel, on a shelf that had clearly been put together specially for the storm. It was green, thick plastic, and seemed sturdy enough. I put it over my shoulder like one of the seven dwarves on the way to work, holding my insulated bag with the ice cream in the other hand. As I waited for the bus home, other dinky little tractors passed, pushing the slushy snow down sidewalks and across intersections. Cars were already buried, but no clearing operation had been announced—doubtless, because of the storm coming Sunday. As this extremely Québécois skit shows, it would be preposterous to clear the snow immediately, because sometimes it “re-snows,” you see, and then all the clearing would be a waste.
The bus didn’t take long to arrive and half-rolled, half-skidded its way back to my neighborhood. Most of the other riders were also carrying various Valentine’s trinkets—bouquets, chocolates, or singular roses. My shovel and I sat in a fold-out seat and watched the snowy landscape go by. It felt sort of absurd but also very joyful, and I am very grateful for the bus drivers of Montréal.
Times are awful and times are good. But the things I’m struck by are not just the terrible-ness, actually—it’s this mundane absurdity, and even more so, the beauty. My god, am I grateful to be alive this winter, and breathing the cold, cold air. When I was young, winter came and winter went and I remember it being very cold. I haven’t had a winter like that in a long time, maybe a decade. Just recently I was talking to a Canadian friend, who mused that she never used to wonder if there would be a white Christmas. I felt as though I had been to her future by growing up just a little further south, like a time traveler come to warn the people of Canada that warm winters were bearing down on them too. There will be fewer and fewer good winters now—last winter was warm and thick, frightening here in Montréal. Climate change and El Niño made for a season that zig-zagged between hard freezes and warm days, so that the whole season passed uneasily, with lots of rain.
But this year is different, precious, cold. I’ve been obstinate about getting outside, trying to go for walks on Mont-Royal. Despite my schoolwork, I spent a week in New Hampshire with friends and snowshoed on a frozen lake and had hot cocoa afterwards. Maybe stupidly, I went out during the blizzard three times, once to just look at the snow falling over the streets. I know it’s not the last winter, but I’d like to love it as if it were.
What I’ve been up to
I’m trying to participate in any remote actions I can against the current administration—calling, mostly, and donating to mutual aid. I’ve especially found the newsletter Chop Wood, Carry Water to be useful and grounding, though none of this is enough.
My co-translation of Adrienne Rich’s The Dream of a Common Language is out now (!!!!) with L’Arche Éditeur—you can order it, read a review in Le Monde, or catch us live on France Culture (!) on February 25th at 9am ET.
During the holidays, I visited three countries and four time zones within the space of three weeks. This included one stretch of travel which lasted 30 hours. Cannot recommend that specific course of action, but I’m glad I got to visit so many people!
I visited New Hampshire and New York in the past few weeks—seeing friends was so lovely and grounding!
My excuse for going to New York was attending the Albertine Prizes ceremony, since our translation of Laura Vazquez’s La Main de la main was awarded a grant!
outside the Guggenheim, looking south, at sunset
beautiful!