How I digress!! My point is just that I am surprised to be playing on a high level team, and even more surprised, now that I am over my performance anxiety, to find that I really enjoy it. I like the players. They have spirit! And they also have strategy. This is actually what distinguishes them from other teams I have known. Not handling, not fitness, not fancy plays and drills–just really excellent strategy, the ability to analyse in detail and on the fly how the play is going, and to adapt plays and planning accordingly. Of course, the players are also highly skilled, but it’s their calm that carries them, the thinking they do as they run and pass and check.

They are also from quite a different cross-section of Montrealers than I meet in other life. More on that perhaps another time–it’s after midnight and I must sleep.

The god of thieves brought me something: my last bike was stolen, it’s taken nine months, my new beast I can ill afford–but I feel like I have wings, truly, flying feet. My little bike is that fast, that light. I have shot around the island these last few days. Today I explored an old mill, from the 1780’s, that used run-of-river waterwheels to power machines to make flour, nails, wool, and an assortment of other goods I can’t remember. Out in the far-flung corners of the island, between the condominium towers and residential streets, are remnants of eighteenth century villages. Stone houses set back from the streets; a waterwheel collapsed in the river –I love how in Quebec the discarded, reintegrated pieces of past centuries co-exist with the countryside, not remarkable unless you look.

I spent a long, long time looking out from the top of the tower. It did a lot for me. It had been weeks since I had been able to gaze that far. That landscape was like Teresa Island: I think I could watch it every day of my life, and always feel satisfied. There was so much to see, and the nuances changed by the day and even by the hour. The first morning I just wondered: why is the geology so different on the north and south shores of the St. Lawrence? Why do most of the islands run in long striated lines, and why is L’Ile D’Orleans such a round and fertile farming bump? Which way is north and how is the island actually oriented? What are the white flocks of birds? Are the shimmering green-brown not-so-far-away masses floating in the fleuve just clumps of seaweed? Is it a bank or shoal?

I loved watching the sky. I loved watching the shadows and the movement. One could see the shadows of birds shooting across the fallow fields, the snow just melted (there were no leaves, barely buds on any trees, everything was the colour of mud, mulch, and leftover grass bleached and rotting). I was eye level with the birds. I listened to the geese in the morning, and the crickets. And the early morning farming machinery–already the locals were out tilling, some were starting to plant and then covering the rows with plastic sheeting, to insulate against frost.

My companions had a more lackadaisical approach to camping. I got up at 7 and went for a run in my longjohns (the car was locked, couldn’t get more appropriate wear but luckily my longjohns were black and shiny like running tights) while they slept. I ran down the long rural roads, gazing out at the wide river as I crested the rolls of hills, then dipping down so I could only see the red-brown cliffs and north shore mountains (rugged, arctic, barren still in the first week of may, not a speck of green anywhere). Soon I found myself trotting by a clustering of farm houses, with dogs and kids playing in the yards, gates swung open for tractors to travel, and old men out doddering down the road in their baseball caps and flannel shirts. I stopped to ask one directions. He told me he was from the south shore of the island, had lived their all his life, but now he lived in a sanitorium of sorts. He was proud of himself: he had walked five kilometres yesterday. He told me he had cancer, that he had nearly died the winter before. I wished him health. “It’s not the kind of thing that can be cured,” he said. He spoke matter-of-factly, much as if he was telling me that a frost had killed the lettuce crop. We paused a minute, mulling over his truth, and then the conversation resumed: the road did not circle back to the main road, I could either cut across the fields or retrace my steps.

As we were chatting, another old fella came up and started in on greeting his friend. His speech came out as complete garble. To me, anyways. It was extremely jarring: I had had a conversation with the first old man no problem, but the second one–who actually spoke quite similarly–had an accent, and a slurry of local expressions, so thick that I could make no sense of anything. Of course, this old guy assumed that I understood every word he said, and I smiled and nodded along. After a few short minutes I took off, slapping my feet up the road and over the hill from whence I had arrived.

I felt a little bad just yelling goodbye, not again wishing well to the old fella, but it didn’t seem appropriate at the time.

After my run I again climbed the tower. The sun was much higher, the sky bright blue, the river glinting white and gun-metal grey at certain glimpses in its flow. I came down to have breakfast with everyone, but a part of me wanted to be back above the crowns of trees, looking down on the campground and fields, the ponds and granaries, and out past where the St. Lawrence opens up, wide wide and fluvial — a zone of diadromous drift, where almost an iceberg could float by. So many, peculiar coming-togethers: the north shore harsh, barren and with winds forever gusting; to the south the Appalachians smoothed and glossed, weighted down by millenia of ice, split from the shore by the St. Lawrence lowlands; and of course the river itself, pulsing tides, spindles of salt slipping and mixed deep, the long thin fingers of the gulf breaking open, waiting for the sea to extend its hand.

[I’ve never seen the disney movie or film: if I did I might have to change this alias.]

The pitch of the wind is about that of a whistle. Except it is thinner, and whorling–one can hear how it turns in upon itself, creating its own tunnel and rushing to meet its pitch.

Windstorms–not blizzards, but wind with rain–are an odd thing for a Montreal February. I am hoping not too much rain melts and freezes the top of the snowpack–as an aside, this is a major impact of climate change on animals in the boreal and tundra: they starve because the lichens and mosses in their winter ranges become glassed in, and the animals cannot chip through the ice enough to feed.

My freeze-up complications are comparatively minor: Wednesday I plan chase the lunar eclipse up Mont Royal (unless it is cloudy), which will become difficult if the escarpment is icy.

I hope I can convince people to climb with me.

I am too tired tonight. But perhaps tomorrow I will put up an excerpt from Don McKay’s Another Gravity –one of his moonpoems.

Or maybe not, ’cause you can already find one of them elsewhere in this blog (oct 2006).

Not the jump, but the descent, the floating, the supple fall. It’s like everything she teaches, that the centre is not where it seems. Moving backwards, the body may be forward; the arms thrown up are an illusion, as the knees, hips, and centre of gravity drop to hold steady.

I try to feel these things, as we repeat the motions over and over, rhythmic with a pattern of breath. My mind can rarely follow. I hope my body is learning something, and that it sticks.

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?

But I need to spend about six hours working. And I have less than six hours in which to work. Maybe I’ll work on the porch …