National Post (National Edition)
Mount Royal, Montreal
Christopher Curtis, The Gazette
Stillness washes over the city like a cold fog, sprawling through the empty streets and up Mount Royal.
Normally the summit overlooking Montreal is an ideal place to sit during rush hour: from the lookout, you can bathe in sunlight and smile as you watch traffic swarm the distant bridges and highways.
But on Wednesday in the midst of a lethal pandemic that’s forced millions across the country into hiding, rush hour is a distant, almost quaint memory. There is movement in the city below: an empty bus speeding across Sherbrooke Street in record time, a garbage truck that snakes along the shuttered storefronts and cafés, a jogger whose steps echo on the hard pavement.
Mostly, though, there is stillness.
Stillness punctuated by gusts of wind that shake maple trees and rattle the flag poles overlooking downtown. Stillness that carries the sound of screaming geese and beckons a rabbit from his burrow to forage through the tall grass.
Normally there’d be joggers, tourists catching the sunrise and cyclists getting a jump on an early spring.
Today there’s just the one woman, walking to the edge of the platform and pulling out her phone before hesitating. What, exactly, is she trying to capture on the device’s camera? The nothingness? The way the sunlight bounces off the empty sidewalks and skyscrapers like tombstones? The newly confident rabbit, suddenly free to roam without human interference?
She snaps a quick photo and begins her workout: pushups, squats, lunges and whatever else she can dream up on this lovely April morning.
The city isn’t dead. There’s still life faintly pulsing up and down the mountain, along the gravel walking paths, back into the city streets still littered with potholes and into the homes where hundreds of thousands are — through this stillness — waging war against the deadly pandemic.