Last night I was walking home down St. Laurent when I saw a city truck go by, lifting bike racks off the street. There were a few bikes on the city trailer too: if they were attached to a rack, well, they went too.

There’s no removal notice fixed to the bike racks –I’ve been very careful in far-flung corners of the city all week, to lock my bike only to signposts, not bike racks, as I pass through Petit-Patrie and the like (I find it somewhat disturbing that a neighbourhood is actually called this, “little motherland”, intended with the full patriot connotation).

Suddenly, just in time for winter, the city systematically dismantles its entire cycling infrastructure. It removes the bike racks. Rips out the posts that separate bike paths from roads. There’s no co-ordinated system of public announcement around this. But woe be it to the unaware, who will receive only a stiff admonishment from the Quebec bureaucracy. Contempt. It’s just like Cinderella — your fault for not being home at midnight. Forget sunshine, shimmering, leaves dancing and diaphanous. Maples are deadwood, gardens just brown bits of earth. And your bicycle-chariot? Nothing more than a pumpkin.

Winter and the world turns bleak–if not naturally, then the state will make it so: parked cars fill up the bike lanes; wheels splash, soaking cyclists with slush. Riders are relegated to the narrow runnels between snow piles and disgruntled Honda Accords. It’s an endemic and peculiar logic: cycling in winter is subhuman — let’s make it worse — ah! cycling in winter is subhuman.

Other cities may neglect the winter cycling infrastructure — not clear the paths of snow, for instance. But they lack the underlying motive, the deeply buried drift, the full morose moment necessary to the Quebec psyche: misère a la Marie Chapdelaine. Only Montreal is so brilliant and idiosyncratic: nurture the summer cyclists, breed them like billions of flies, then–SPLAT–smack ‘em into winter traffic. It’s an elimination dance, a la Ondaatje — simple, swift, and sly.

One must live the national drama, non?

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