My daughter noticed it first. The city was a ghost town.
As we passed over the Champlain Bridge on a midday Monday, she remarked about the construction equipment seemingly abandoned.
“Isn’t it creepy,” she wondered aloud, “there doesn’t seem to be a
single soul anywhere?”
As we made our way into Montreal to celebrate spring break with a four-day holiday, I wondered if the Quebec province was celebrating a holiday of its own.
“Nope. I already checked.”
Then the only explanations I could come up with were a zombie apocalypse or an alien abduction.
Which, let’s face it, wouldn’t exactly surprise me considering my past history of planning our way through travel.
This diminutive vacation had been off to a rocky start from even before we’d arrived.
We’d been delayed at the border unexpectedly. Our car waved into a concrete slot while three uniformed men asked us to exit and stand at the curb.
“Take your hands out of your pockets, please,” asked one of the officials, whose voice didn’t make “please” sound in any way pleasant.
She had been excited to spend a few days exploring a foreign city. She had envisioned eating gravy-drenched fries and practicing her middle-school French for a stunned an appreciative audience.
I didn’t have the heart to tell her the minute she said “Bonjour,” her host would switch to English, having detected our native language expertly. She’d find out soon enough.
My daughter didn’t want to watch the latex-gloved inspectors paw through our things, so we took them up on their offer to take a seat inside a cement block building to stay out of the weather.
We had planned to see the old city, visit some museums and explore the Biodome, a museum of the environment that, as a google search would confirm, was not one in the same with the Biosphère, a similarly themed museum made from the 1967 World’s Fair pavilion designed by Buckminster Fuller.
Neither of which would be open during our stay.
It turned out the dome had shuttered for a complete renovation the day we arrived, leaving a gaping hole in our itinerary. The rest of the city seemed to be in a similar state of hibernation.
Everything seemed to be “ferme.”
We started to understand once we went into one shop and found that it spiraled into a city underground.
While it seemed a the survivors of the zombie apocalypse staggered around outside as Winter refused to concede Spring, life bustled under the streets and through buildings that connected, blending commuter trains with the retail terrain.
It felt ... how do you say?
Mort Vivant?
I think I may be too cynical for travel. Too fearful of being the illiterate who can only get lost. This trip has only reinforced my resolve to limit my surroundings to the familiar.
Back at our concrete shack at the border we sat behind a table and avoided looking in the direction of our car by translating a sign on the wall bearing the likeness of the saddest raccoon known to man:
“La Rage!”
“Ne jamais toucher à une chauve-souris, qu’elle soit vivante ou morte.”
“Rabies!
“Never touch a bat, be it alive or dead.”
It’s hard to deny that everything sounds better in French. And probably look better with a photo of a raccoon, too.
One of the inspectors motions to us as he walked to the table. When he arrived, he unleashed a torrent of words that cascaded around us in beautiful nonsense.
I cock my head and raise my shoulders as my daughter proudly used her French:
“Je ne paux pas parler français.”
“I do not speak French.”
He smiled and points to our car.
“Enjoy your stay in Canada.”
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