November Bike Ride (an epic)

My bicycle tires crunch through frozen puddles. I’m bundled in a hat, scarf, ski mitts, down jacket, in wooly socks and jeans and tights, because a couple flurries and incoherent late-night bus routes won’t keep me home tonight.

I’m headed for Dare-Dare’s Plan d’Aménagement, urban planning meets performance art in an empty Rosemont store front. The show is all derelict and glittery - tomorrow I’ll blog about what I’ve seen, but for now it’s just a chapter in an epic night’s adventure.

Afterwards, over midnight coffee, Joel and I discuss how making art about our city seems like such a daunting task. So many of the creative people in Montreal seem to flock here from out-of-town, while all the stories I write are about Newfoundland or New Orleans, an innocuous outsiders’ view of places I’ve loved fleetingly.

We nibble on a smoked-meat sandwich in some warp-zone version of The Main: a Québecois deli on St-Hubert street. How can we capture these strange yet delicate intricacies? Still, we agree that it is more powerful to create from the place that has made us who we are. Not just more powerful, Joel says, but necessary.

And then I bundle up for the bike ride home: under the train tracks to the Plateau, through the enchanting criss-cross of Gilford and Saint-Denis and the Narnian passageway behind Rue Drolet, then whip around my favourite Milton Park alley and pause to point a drunken tourist back to Ste-Catherine Street.

I whiz through McGill’s campus, my old stomping ground, then I take a new route and head down to the fresh-laid asphalt and glowing lines of the brand new bike path on De Maisonneuve. I feel elated with a new sense of legitimacy. After going home night after night though these streets, it’s as if they have finally proposed to me.

Past Crescent now, where the night is still charged - I consider stopping by one of the bars - but I’m in no mood for chatting up strangers and an extra pint at this point might turn out to be dangerous.

So I push on through rough Westerlies that nearly grind me to a halt, fighting the wind as I approach Westmount Park. This is a kind of sacred place for me – I came he as a child, growing up in Saint-Henri (we would walk up Glen road past the old POM bakery).

From the bike path, I catch sight of an ancient willow that bows deep over the now-empty pond. I know that the bark on its branches is polished smooth by generations of children’s shoes. High on cold air and scenes of the city, I decide to pay a visit to my childhood climbing tree.

So I slip off my bike onto the winding red-brick path but before I can even set foot on the grass, I’m caught in the headlights of a Westmount Security Van.

I could play dumb (park closed? what sign?) but I’ve been in this predicament too many times. How often were we kicked off the swing set after dark, during those awkward teenage years when we were too young for bars?

“I’m just heading home,” I call out to the Security, and trudge back towards the cold November street. Alas, there’s no public space past 11 o’clock, there’s nowhere to go but cafés and bars, and I suppose the roads in between, or in my case back home, although it still feels too early.