John
Woolfrey 2241
words
1729
Rue de la Visitation
Montreal,
Quebec, Canada
H2L
3C3
(514)
597-2189
Il Neige !
Copyright 2005 by Raymond John Woolfrey
From East of the Big Q,
a collection of gay short stories about Montreal
“Tadddle,
taddle, taddle,” cries a tow-truck klaxon through the mid-December
night, warning people to move their parked cars. Its yellow roof light pulses through
the crack between my blind and window frame. It’s midnight. I doze off again,
but awaken a little later to … an earthquake? No. I remember. It’s snow-removal
time.
I roll out of bed and pull up the shade. A
parade of yellow graders—monster daddy-longlegs with their front legs reaching
way out ahead to the first pair of wheels—rumbles by. The beasts’ thick, steel
blades are scraping the streets clean of snow and ice, pushing it one way then
the other, sending sparks flying when they score the pavement. Behind them buzz
tank-like sidewalk ploughs to tidy up the edges around telephone poles and fire
hydrants. It only lasts a few minutes, this first snow-clearing raid, leaving
in its wake a line of tidily piled-up snow that awaits the star of this show, the
snowblower. Through the cold stillness of the night I can hear its plaintive
cry in the distance.
A dumptruck piled high with soiled snow
groans by on its way to the St. Lawrence River to dump the load it just caught
from the snowblower. I press my face sideways against the windowpane to look up
the street for it, the king of snow-removal beasts. Soon its flagman, like a
mediæval verger of a cathedral procession shooing away dogs and livestock,
comes into view. Twenty feet behind follows the snowblower, a new dumptruck at
its side to catch the ejaculate. They crawl toward me, the beast greedily
snorting the endless line of snow that stretches before it. As it approaches my
window, its roar reaches a peak: ferocious, angry, deadly serious. It can’t get
enough of its drug. Windows rattle, floors shake, faces appear at windows
across the street. Countless overtones stretch triple fortissimo across every
octave of its cry.
The dumptruck filled, the beast pauses.
Its roar falters, modulating upward to a plaintive whine for more stuff. A
fresh truck positions itself under the arched chute, and the roar lunges back
to life as the king resumes its frenzied churning and spewing past my window
and down the street.
I’ve heard people say: Montreal comes
alive in summer. Maybe they like all the life outside in the streets, but when
it gets to thirty degrees and ninety per cent humidity, all I want to do is
leave the crowds, head for the hills and jump in the lake.
In the winter, in the city, I live for the
record snowfalls. There are days and days of bitter cold when the sun shines
brightly but heatless upon streets littered by hardened black slush and empty
windshield-washer containers. But when a blizzard hits, my spirits soar. I love
it best when it happens during the week, paralysing the city. Like yesterday.
It started in the morning about ten
o’clock. The air was still, as though ionically charged. The people in my
office were giddy with expectation—a big storm, the first major one of the
season, had been forecast since suppertime the day before.
First a few white flakes fell gently from
out of the grey sky and past the greystone triplexes onto grey streets—it
hadn’t snowed since Halloween, and rain had washed away that a long time ago.
By noon winds whipped great sheets of snow so thick we could barely see across
the street from the windows. And by the time I left to walk home during the
evening rush hour, the storm, still raging, had dumped at least a foot.
A group of three people, so bundled up you
could barely see their eyes, entered the lobby as I passed through it. Clomp,
clomp, went their boots as they stomped them against the winter mats to shake
off the guck. Tuques and gloves came off, coats opened, noses were blown and
fogged-up glasses wiped. Their red-cheeked owners looked around at each other
and joked about the storm. A quiet sense of satisfaction brightened the air.
I turned out the fur of my Winnipeg
parka’s hood and stepped out in my mukluks. A crowded bus stopped in front of
me at the light. I peered in as I trudged past it. It looked still within, its
riders mesmerized by the power outside, wondering how much snow will fall,
wondering how long it will take them to get home. The bus’s pneumatic
windshield wipers hissed rhythmically as they pushed the melting snow to the
side. Wet lumps slid down from above the arcs carved out of the snow and got
pushed aside as well.
Once the bus passed, I leapt over the
snowbank and crossed the street. The plows couldn’t keep up with the snowfall on
the side street, and I had to walk in the car tracks, sliding on the black ice
here and there along the way. Through the muffling blizzard came the sounds of
car engines and horns and tires, spinning on ice, that cried out like big angry
cats.
When I was small, chains were fitted on
car and bus tires to give them a grip on the snow. They sounded like
sleighbells as they passed. I wanted to be a snowblower driver then. I figured
that in summer I could drive the trucks that splashed water over the pavement,
but I knew it wouldn’t be as much fun as driving the snowblower. I made models
out of soda-cracker boxes, trying as best as a treble could to roar as I pushed
them along the carpet.
The real ones went by our suburban house
only in the daytime. Unlike in the city where the snow is carted away and
dumped in the river, our red and blue Sicards threw it onto the front yards as
it went by. The piles of packed, beige snow made ideal hills for carving snow
forts out of and digging tunnels under. You couldn’t do that with ordinary
snow—it was too fluffy for tunnels and never high enough for forts. And when
another snowfall brought the snowplough out, we’d gather the biggest blocks
from its wake—before the snowblower got them—and use them for the walls of our
forts. Then we’d have a snowball fight with the fort across the street, but I
was more interested in building these complexes than anything as boring as
fighting.
Often, at the end of an after-school hour
or so expanding my tunnel system, I’d lie inside, snug in my snowsuit, gazing
up through my skylight at the darkening sky, listening to the muffled hush of
the city.
Snowblower drivers took care not to damage
our forts. And child mythology had it that a kid had gotten chewed up by one
and his blood and gouts were splattered all over the white front yard. I didn’t
believe it could happen to me, but I almost got run over by a plow one day—or
so I believed. I was playing in the snowbank in the street after a very heavy
snowfall, when I suddenly became aware of a lot of honking. I looked up to see
the driver waving his arm furiously at me. Startled, and thinking immediately
of the kid who got chewed up, I scurried over the snowblower hill toward the
house where I found an anxious and rather cross mother glowering out between
the curtains, trying to open the frozen window.
After a thaw the snowblower hills would
freeze again as solid as ice, and almost as slippery. But they usually had
rough spots and made fun mountain ranges to traverse on the way to school. Up
and down my make-believe Andes I would clamber, conquering, exploring, and
simply travelling from mountain range to another, crossing the gorges of
driveways in between.
Today, like most days that follow storms,
is sunny and much colder. The virgin snow is blindingly white in the sun and an
eerie blue in the shadows. From my front window I survey the new world without.
In the porte-cochère across the street a snowdrift stands four feet high. Through the park next to it a path through
the new snowfall has already been started—just a single trail of deep
footsteps. But in a few days it’ll become trodden down to a usable trail. In
the early spring a miniature Great Wall of China will emerge as the snow on
either side, not being as densely packed, will have melted before the trail.
On the façades of the rowhouses two-foot
high puffs of snow curl out over ornate cornices, with smaller piles like
banners flung haphazardly across window gables and porches. Neighbours emerge
from their flats to dig out their cars; later, they’ll carve out slots for them
in the snowbanks, some with signs proclaiming ownership during an owner’s
absence.
On the street my neighbour Benoît opens
the rear hatch of his car and starts to climb in. His foot slips off the cold,
slippery bumper, and I can read the curses that form on his lips as his shin
bangs against the hatch frame. After jumping around from the pain for a while,
he tries again, squirming all the way over the seat-backs until falling at last
upside-down onto the front seat. Then his friend, wearing only jeans and a
shirt, pops out of their ground-floor flat, leaps through the cold to the back
of the car, slams the hatch shut, and flies back inside their home. I guess the
locks on Benoît’s car must have frozen, and the only way to get in was through
the hatch. I hoped his heater will thaw out the locks.
In dressing gown and slippers I pad to my
kitchen at the back and make breakfast. Though the sun never shines in that
room in winter, I eat my porridge in a joyous brightness that bounces off the
snow lying beneath the windows. After so many weeks of a cozy near-darkness
from the gloomy rain, the new light feels warm and cheering, as though perhaps
the world wasn’t coming to an end after all.
After breakfast I want a paper. Even more,
I want to smell the fresh, crisp air. So I bundle up again and slip out the
front door, broom in hand. One of the Mesdames Thivièrge next door is sweeping
her curving staircase, the mirror image of mine. “Bonjour !” I cry out.
“Bonjour,” she replies. Then, smiling and rolling her eyes , she adds, “Et
ça commence !” meaning, the snow’s endless grip on the city had begun. I
push the snow off the steps and I headed for the dépanneur[1].
I pass a father hauling a toboggan with two little kids, their stubby arms with
their lobster-claw mittens on the ends sticking straight out from their round
little bundled-up bodies. Later, when the street becomes bare of snow, the
sleds and toboggans make an awful noise as they scrape over it.
The snow squeaks beneath my mukluks, and
the snow feels like stale seven-minute icing when you break it with your fork.
Ahead of me trudges a young woman, her head bowed to the sidewalk beneath her.
As she approaches the vacant store at the corner, she notices the little
triangle of virgin snow bordered by the corner-store door and the intersecting
sidewalks. She lightens her gait and steps lightly through the fluffy snow,
making it spray before her. At the next corner a man and two boys had lined up
Christmas trees along the walls of the dépanneur. As I pass, their tiny puppy
jumps up at me, yipping, asking me to play. I wondered if they had just carted
the trees in from the country and hadn’t been caught by the City yet.
The few cars that go by scrunch loudly
over the compacted snow, trailing clouds of white vapour sucked from their
hearths. In the distance a car is forced to life, squealing loudly in protest
as its fan belt slips in the cold.
The dépanneur, lit up from the reflecting
snow, is busy with locals, all chatting gaily at the same time. I slip in among
them and silently pay for my paper, smiling back at Serge, the cashier, who
flashes a grin at me in mid-sentence. As I step out of the store a guy about my
age flies by, sliding on a three-foot length of smooth, black ice. He must have
sped up to do it—he was perfectly in control. He looks up at me and smiles as I
pass, a little sheepishly, and a little cruisily. He resumes his walking at the
other end of the ice patch and looks back one more time, still smiling, looking
quite pleased with himself.
I’m pleased too. There’ll be enough days
of dirty, barren streets and twenty-below bone-chilling dampness. There’ll be
days of freezing rain that makes it far to slippery to go anywhere, and dank,
humid evenings that stink of the east-end oil refineries. Sure, there’s the
January thaw, when sweet, balmy air blows up from the south, but the cold
always comes back, often lingering into April. So if it were to snow every
other day, with lots of sunshine in between and just the right amount of cute,
ice-sliding guys to warm up a bed with, Montreal would make the perfect winter
paradise. Come to think about it, on most days—and nights—it is.
[1] Quebec French for convenience store