Forty eight hours in Montreal, Logistics of Long Walks, Bad Delta, and Turtles
A grab-bag of short posts written before a sixteen hour flight
(I will be in Sapporro from Friday to Tuesday, then walking/riding-trains to Muroran on the south coast of Hokkaidō1. Before returning home I’ll make my now normal stop in Seoul, from Wednesday the fourth to the eighth. If you are around, join me for a walk in Japan, or if in Seoul, for a night at the Woodstock vinyl bar in Sillim.)
Montreal is good, very good.
When stuck in parties with the wealthy comparing homes, I used to say that I summered in El Paso and wintered in Montreal, only a slight exaggeration. I did spend a lot of time in each during those seasons, because both were my favorite cities in North America, and I prefer to be in a place in the full bloom of its essence.
I’ve already written about El Paso, but I’ve been saving Montreal for when I wanted a positive relaxing trip, and this last weekend wasn’t supposed to be that. Rather, I’d come on a personal trip, for a micro reunion with three college friends whom I’d not seen in a decade, but an illness left me by myself for two days in the city I’d not seen in over a decade.
I hadn’t intended to go to Montreal directly after writing a piece comparing Europe to the US, although it makes perfect sense, since Montreal is a combination of each, and if you like the city as I do, then it has the best of each, and if you don’t, then it has the worst of each.
My prior quip about Montreal was that it was like if Paris and Baltimore had a love child raised by Ottawa, and after wandering it again for two days, I stand by that.
From Paris, Montreal has inherited far more than just language. Its cafe culture bursts into splendor each spring when the snow melts and bespoke decks pop up in front of each restaurant, cafe, and bar, and the whooshing of cars gives over to the buzz of the social
These decks, taken down in late October and rebuilt by the owners themselves, often with rather shoddy work, cannibalize over half the parking spots on many streets. That this can happen, and is celebrated rather than fought over, represents the best of its European side.
Yet Montreal isn't fully a European city, and not just because of geography. It shares America's values of personal success and individual liberty, and so there’s more diversity, more "characters," while also appearing more like a US city.
If you plug your ears, you can walk long stretches and think you are in a slightly warped Baltimore, with a gritty downtown harbor, streets littered with garbage, a few districts dedicated to strip clubs, and then residential neighborhoods of quiet streets of row homes, with small backyards accessing super thin, drainage alleys.
The most noticeable difference is that the white marble stoops of Baltimore row-homes have been replaced by long steep spiral metal staircases, which give the neighborhoods an even more industrial feel.
Montreal is a pretty city, but that's primarily due to its location on a river island punctuated with the perfect sized city mountain, because at the built level the American side has won, trumping a Parisian attempt to accessorize the dominant somber, joyless, and brutal utilitarianism.
That Montreal style, modern brutalism, is most obvious in its metro stations, although the best example of it is the Olympic Park stadium, where the Expos baseball team used to play, which I sadly don't have pictures of (but you can google) because on my second day I lost my camera.
After my camera disappeared, the rains came, and so I spent my last day reading alone at a cafe before my friends arrived and that became the focus. So, I'll wait for another time to write more about why Montreal is so great, although that shouldn’t stop anyone from going. I still count it as one of my two favorite cities in North America.
I do want to explain briefly why I've not been in over a decade, which is only partly due to breaking my ankle there on my penultimate trip, in February 2014.
From about 2007 to 2015 I used to try and go to Montreal at least twice a year since it was only a pleasant five-hour drive from NYC, and a relaxing contrast to my work in the Bronx, as well as having an amusement park my children liked.
This second to last trip I was alone. During the winters I like to go to Mount Royal park to watch the ice skaters and skiers while drinking coffee in the second floor cafe, but this time I was goaded into trying to skate for the first time in my life by two elderly women next to me. They succeeded, because if they could do it so could I, and so I stepped out onto the ice and within minutes realized I'd made a mistake and while the two elderly women looped past my struggling self, with big smiles, waves, and their scarves fluttering in the wind, I baby stepped off where a skate stuck between rubber mats and I snapped my ankle. I lay there until some guy who felt bad for me (whom I never saw again) dropped me off at the hospital. The ER gave me ketamine, which set off a darkly bad trip where I thought I was being buried alive, and then the hospital shoved me out the door at one a.m. with a big bottle of pain killers they've banned in the US, because they are addictive. When a few days later I tried to get surgery the anesthesiologist asked for $500 in cash, which he told me I could get from an ATM a few blocks away (lol). So instead I spent a week in my motel room zonked out, watching the Sochi winter Olympics, trying to figure out how to get home until I finally I paid the Algerian hotel manger (who wanted compensation in cartons of Marlboro Reds) to take me and my car home, and for his return flight.
That somehow captures Montreal for me, and despite the pain it wasn’t the reason I stopped coming back. That instead was when on my next trip the Canadian border-crossing guards, thinking I was coming too much, so must be running drugs detained me for four hours, took my van apart, and opened my phone and computer. They even removed my tires, and pried off the heels of my church shoes, because why not.
I’m not sure what side that petty thuggishness represents, but I’ll go with Paris, because I lived in Baltimore for six years, like it, and think it gets piled on too much.
PS: I forgot to pack shorts this trip, so the cover photo is from my walk to WalMart. That at least, I’ll give to Baltimore. The flags on the scooters though, those are Paris.
Logistics of long walks
(If details of travel and hiking isn’t your thing, skip to next section.)
I get a lot of questions about the logistics of walking, and travel, and while I’ve covered it before (How to walk two-hundred miles, how to walk, how to travel), I’ve changed a few things, especially for this walk across Lombardy, that are worth noting.
The biggest change has been in my backpack, which I’ve upgraded because I realized what I am doing is similar to thru-hiking2, and so I stole some ideas from that community, including a list of the best backpacks. I chose the Hyperlite Windrider because it’s waterproof, but also because I like the lack of internal structure.
It’s less of a backpack, and more of a large plastic bag you stuff your things in, and if you already organize your things (rolling up your clothes, putting loose items like electronics in plastic sandwich bags), then it offers the most space for the least weight.
It’s absolutely wonderful because it is a larger version of a thirty-year-old pack that got me around the world eight times, which I’ve brought out of retirement, and now stuff into the larger bag like a nested Russian doll, with additional items on top of it. So now I have both a smaller around-the-town bag and a larger “carry everything across the country” bag.
