Beneath the Snow and Beyond the Trees

Near my house in Ahuntsic, Montreal, across the train tracks on Port-Royal, there is a site that used to be a limestone-pit nearly a hundred years ago. It also served as a garbage dump for twenty years. This site is called the “Carrière Miron” and since the 80’s, Montreal has been trying to turn it into an environmental complex. During the summer, I would bike ride around this immense hole in the middle of Montreal. I remember repeatedly visiting it to see the Olympic stadium nine kilometers away. I would take walks around it and read and write. It was a hole filled with nothing where I was able to listen to only myself. I would therefore consider it to be my Walden. When the fall semester would arrive, my days of visiting this developing park were put on hold as my mind was used more to solve math problems or to memorize terms of biology as opposed to reading and writing about what I truly care about. During my first winter break with my girlfriend Jade, I made sure to make an outing out of visiting this park with her. I had never visited it before during winter and I was eager to show her the view of East Montreal that it offered beyond its long chain of trees.

We had received a lot of snow the week prior but the streets had already returned to their black and dull state. De Lorimier Ave, the road leading to the park, was a boring and ugly street. It reflected in no way what was in its way passed the train tracks. When we reached the park, it seemed surreal. We were standing on a sidewalk separating a new world covered with pure white and untouched snow from the busy and always occupied streets of urban life. As we started to enter the park, our feet became consumed by snow. It reached mid-way to our calves by the time we made it ten meters in. No one dared to enter any further than we did since no footprints were present. The man-made trails were buried and all that was revealed were a couple of frail bushes, bare trees that bore pears in the summer, and large spruces that formed a chain blocking the west of Montreal from seeing the East. I wanted to show her this view but I was worried that the snow would be too deep as we approached the chain. So I picked her up- the underside of her knees on my right arm, her head resting on my left, and her arms wrapped around my neck.

I stepped further, with my feet breaking through the thin harder surface of snow to sink deep until reaching the ground that was touched by man the previous summer. The cooling snow continuously seeped little by little into my boots, wetting my feet more and more. Jade’s forehead was cold against my cheek but her hair provided surprising warmth to compensate. With every step leaving the first footprint of the park’s winter behind, I started to feel more distant than ever from the city. Modern civilization, for a moment, felt like an idea I had once imagined. The untouched snow amplified an absence of any evidence of human life. We were in unaltered wilderness. We were walking through a forest in its natural state. For a very short moment in our lives, we were Adam and Eve. The park was our snow-covered Garden of Eden. The bare pear trees that we encountered along the way would have bore the fruit that Adam and Eve were encouraged to eat. They would not suffice. I should have listened to the snow, which by now reached me above my knees and completely soaked my feet, as Adam should have listened to God. The chain of the tall conifer trees that we had finally reached were the trees of knowledge of good and evil. As I put Jade on her feet and parted the sappy branches of the spruces, we gazed through the once garbage filled hole and saw the Olympic stadium, the leaning tower of concrete, on the other side. We had tasted our forbidden fruit.