It’s not unusual to hear complaints from McGill students that Montreal in winter is simply “uninhabitable.” On a recent jaunt up the mountain, a friend and I looked out over the frozen city and the icy expanse across the river wondering what early settlers could have been thinking when they set out due north and decided this was a good place to settle down. Anyone who has been inducted recently inducted into the rites of Montreal winter has their own collection of symptoms which demonstrate the folly of these original explorers: frozen boogers, frosty eyeglasses, sweat stains from overheated classrooms, the precious study time eaten up by lacing and unlacing slushy boots upon coming home or going out. These complaints can be heard for the majority of the eight-month semester. Yet when finals end, and those four precious months of Tam Tams, suntans, and cream sodas in the park begin, most students up and leave, subletting their apartment or letting it stay vacant, sucking up dollars and, by osmosis, good vibes, until students return at the end of August, ready for a few weeks of good weather before repeating the dreadful cycle all over again.
Riding the train home after my first year at McGill, I remember thinking how stupid I was to have endured Montreal’s notorious winter just to leave as soon as the flowers were starting to sprout and puppies and babies were coming out to play. It seemed silly to have suffered for so long only to decline the obvious redemption the summer offered. I resolved to stay in Montreal for most of the next summer in order to see what this frozen city would reveal when the snow and ice melted and its famous joie de vivre could really shine through.
Though much of what I did last summer in Montreal can certainly be done elsewhere, the memories I now have of those good times actually helped me get through this winter. I can’t say they exactly warmed me: the boogers still froze and the glasses dewed with frost. But the knowledge that this city was capable of more than just trying to kill me, that the same frozen St. Laurent that made my pant legs dirty and my genitals shrivel could also serve up delicious barbecue during a lively street fair on a hot summer night, made the past few months endurable. If you have the chance—and it is yours for the taking—to stay up here for at least one summer before graduation, I highly recommend you do so. Here’s some highlights from the Montreal summer that once was mine and can, more or less, be yours:
One night some friends and I biked over the Cartier Bridge to a free Arcade Fire concert in Longueil. On the way back we stopped in Jean Drapeau Park and swam in the shallows of the St. Lawrence. We lay upside-down on the rocks with our heads near the water’s edge and admired the reflection of the mountains and the city lights on the river’s surface. We stopped for pizza on the way home and slept with the windows open, and even then it was a bit too hot.
Another night we drank a bottle of wine on a grassy knoll near the Lachine Canal. We then moved to where the water from the canal flows into the river, and sat with our legs dangling over the edge, talking about the books we’d been reading and how they made everything different somehow.
For my birthday we gathered some firewood and a few dozen yeasayers on the mountain for an all-night campfire. We watched the sun rise over the river and the city began to stir. Our clothes smelled like smoke for weeks afterward.
We established a probably unhealthy reliance on several ingestible substances, not least of all orange cream soda.
The famous McGill bubble is one not only of space but also of time. Montreal is a city of great possibilities that are only waiting for May to be revealed.
