Montreal Summer Sizzles Beyond Bearing

Oh, summers in the city…at a certain point you start to wonder - just how many more pitchers of beer can you drink? Just how many more terrace-sitting nights can you enjoy? Just how much more jazz can you dance to? Just how many more drunken cartwheels can you turn in city parks?

Montreal Summers are infamous, perhaps the biggest cause of this being the Jazz Fest that’s going on as we speak. Visitors from around the continent (and beyond) flock in to experience the car-free magic. Free live music, beautiful people in minimal clothing, outdoor dance parties that start at noon and end fourteen hours later…this festival’s joie de vivre’s enough to break the hearts of all who come here for their Canada Day weekends, enough to make them consider quitting their Bay Street jobs or selling their Eglington West homes, however fleeting those fancies may be…

I’ve been keeping my distance this year. Maybe it’s carry-over from the Fringe, but the thought of navigating those crowds just repels me. I have many a wonderful memory of swing-dancing into the night with friends and strangers galore, of arriving at my day-camp jobs stoically exhausted from a night of dancing and debauchery. I recall fondly those moments of slipping off the Birks and dancing on the bare pavement. I recall with fondness the thrill of running into like, everyone I know, despite the tens-of-thousands crowds. This year, this just doesn’t appeal.

But last night I got the best taste of the festival yet. After a lovely dinner at a friend’s apartment, we went up to the rooftop of his 21-floor downtown building. When you’ve been in a city too long, you forget that visceral feeling of actually seeing open spaces. In cities we get used to always having our view obstructed. When you catch sight of a vista of any kind, the whole body just sort of sighs, “ahhhh…yes.” From up there, I could see everything…the mountains of Vermont, the Monster at La Ronde…and the Jazz Festival. The whole festival was this compact little box of lights and sound, with bodies sprinkled everywhere like sand. From the rooftop it was like hearing music underwater, with indiscernable strains of jazz wafting from the tiny site. It was so delightful, and such a true urban moment, to stand there on top of the world and witness this compressed piece of land just hopping with energy. I called my friend Eva from the roof, who was actually at the Jazz Fest, and heard the same music more acutely, more distinguishably through her cell. It was so amazing to imagine actual people down there…

Cities are amazing. We are such eccentric little balls of energy. We’re like powder kegs - just a whole lot of potential about to explode. And when you see the land stretching far and wide beyond our little islands of urbanity, it makes you realize just how quirky, how strange, how insane these places can be.

Hurray for rooftops.