THE MESSENGERS
Red brake lights blooming. Sunshine glinting off a car’s side mirror. The blur of elaborate wrought-iron handrails. Welcome to Montreal as it’s seen by bike couriers.
ABE NG WAS NEARLY invisible in the street ahead of me: a shadow on a shadowy bike, lost somewhere in the clash between the evening’s darkness and the headlights of passing cars. I geared down and pedalled harder, grinding uphill, just trying to keep him in sight. He’d gone easy on me earlier in the day, pedalling at the cyclist’s equivalent of a mosey and stopping for red lights instead of gunning it through. But now the dinner orders were piling up, and he couldn’t afford to baby me anymore. In the past couple of hours, we’d made eight deliveries, racing uphill and down, along busy thoroughfares and quiet side streets, burritos and rotisserie chicken and pizzas steaming up the specially designed, insulated cargo bag strapped to Ng’s back. It was a Monday night in Montreal, and the bike messengers of Chasseurs Courrier were making sure the city got fed. A flicker in the distance let me know that Ng had turned left, across traffic and up to the entrance of a tall condo building near the top of the hill. By the time I reached him, panting, he was off his bike and ready to go inside with the customer’s pizza. Until now I’d been tagging along with him right up to each customer’s doorstep, but this time I opted to wait outside and catch my breath. I was in Montreal to follow its bike messengers and experience their world: to pedal where they pedalled and see the city through their eyes. But as I gasped for air, I figured I could sacrifice a bit of authenticity in the name of survival. When Ng re-emerged, we launched ourselves down the hill at full speed, the wind roaring in our ears and the streetlights flashing by. This was Montreal like I’d never seen it before. I GREW UP IN OTTAWA, just two hours away, but I never got to know Montreal very well. I’d visited the Biodome, seen the Forum before it was torn down, toured the clubs of Crescent Street and visited friends a handful of times, but I had only a rough sense of the city’s geography: the mainland outskirts, the island and the titular mountain, Mont Royal, forming lopsided concentric circles. But in two days on a bike, trailing the Chasseurs crew, I got a better sense of the city — its landscapes, its people and its pulse — than I had in all those previous visits combined. I experienced it not as a panorama, but in flashes and small moments, like an Instagram feed unfurling in front of me: Red brake lights blooming. Sunshine glinting off a car’s side mirror. Elaborate wrought-iron handrails on the steps leading up to a tony red-brick townhouse door. The smell of cooking chicken at the iconic Romados. The way the lights of a restaurant spill out onto the sidewalk at night. The core Chasseurs delivery zone is a rough diamond, covering 100 square
kilometres, stretching from Rue JeanTalon, on the northwest edge, to Boulevard PIE-IX on the northeast. Boulevard Décarie defines the southwest boundary, and the Lachine Canal completes the border on the southeast. It takes in the mountain, the leafy streets of Outremont and the Plateau, and the denser blocks of downtown and the Vieux Port. The zone is emblematic of a city that poses serious geographical challenges for the riders of Chasseurs and the rest of Montreal’s tight-knit fleet of a few dozen messengers. There are North American cities with more and bigger hills than Montreal: Seattle, San Francisco. And there are cities with winters that are at least as ugly as Montreal’s: Edmonton, Minneapolis, New York City on a bad day. But no other city on the continent combines steep hills, freezing rain, black ice, whiteouts and months of winter cold and dark like the one on the St. Lawrence. That makes an already dangerous job even more hazardous. Bike couriers are renowned — or infamous, depending on your perspective — as risk-takers. In pop culture, they’re often depicted as tattooed, long-haired rebels, blowing red lights and playing a high-speed game of chicken with the much larger vehicles around them. But “it’s not as dangerous as people assume it is,” says Kelly Pennington, Chasseurs’ lone female member and the winner of the women’s division at the 2015 North American Cycle Courier Championship. “You can make it as dangerous or as safe as you want.” Trailing behind Ng and Pennington each time they went out on a call, I could see what she meant. I felt in control of my choices, despite the kaleidoscope of obstacles moving and shifting around me. I whizzed between a line of parked cars on my right and gridlock on my left. I held my breath and followed my guides through the long, narrow gap between a transport truck and a city bus, my handlebars nearly brushing the walls of the metal canyon that surrounded me. I put on a burst of speed and narrowly avoided a collision with a carriage horse in Old Montreal; carriages, it turns out, lack left-hand turn signals. With practice, Ng told me, “you get a sense of your surroundings and you really read the trajectory of moving Eva Holland writes for The Walrus, AFAR, Grantland and more. Rodolphe BeaulieuPoulin’s photography has appeared in several Quebec magazines, including Urbania.
IN TWO DAYS ON A BIKE, I GOT A BETTER SENSE OF MONTREAL ITS LANDSCAPES, ITS PEOPLE AND ITS PULSE THAN I HAD IN ALL MY PREVIOUS VISITS COMBINED.
objects around you. You understand the natural path of objects.” Still, that takes a rider only so far, and the sheer number of road hours a messenger logs increases the odds of an accident. “Things just come out — like a door, or a child darting out. Those are surprises that can happen. It’s hard to avoid.” So why do it? Why take on a lowpaying, high-risk job in an industry in flux (see “An industry in flux,” right) that sometimes requires you to ride a bicycle through a blizzard? “There are so many amazing things about it,” says Ng. “You get to be outside, you’re exercising, you get to be on a bike all day.” Completing a delivery as efficiently as possible offers a concrete sense of accomplishment. There’s a freedom to it too — freedom from dress codes, from active supervision, from being stuck sitting at a desk. And then there’s the intimacy. And not just the kind that comes from being inside buildings — people’s homes, corporate spaces, fancy hotels — you wouldn’t otherwise see. “You get glimpses,” Pennington says, “into people’s lives.” Conversations about office gossip and job anxiety are overheard in elevators. Sometimes, clouds of marijuana smoke are seen escaping when customers open their apartment door for the nachos or pizza or poutine they ordered. Pennington once transported a bra left behind in a hotel room to a UPS office so it could be returned to its owner. Another Chasseurs rider, Mackenzie Kirby, has delivered breast milk. Ng has had a customer open the door in her bathrobe, accept her delivery, and then
I PUT ON A BURST OF SPEED AND NARROWLY AVOIDED A COLLISION WITH A CARRIAGE HORSE IN OLD MONTREAL; CARRIAGES, IT TURNS OUT, LACK LEFT-HAND TURN SIGNALS.
walk out of sight to get him some change. When she returned, she had, as he puts it delicately, “unrobed herself.” TWO DAYS WENT BY in a blur. Between deliveries — $42 worth of hip vegetarian diner fare to a pair of young undergrads here, a daily order of nachos to a man in a blue dress shirt and flannel pajama pants there — I lounged in the Chasseurs office, watching the riders tweak their bikes and debate the merits of various brands of messenger bag. I hadn’t necessarily expected to enjoy my time among the couriers. I had expected suffering — aching muscles and a sore butt — and my friends and family had gloomily predicted even worse. (“You know you might actually die, right?” one friend asked me.) But despite the hills, despite the traffic, I felt myself getting hooked on the experience. I felt connected to the city in a visceral way; I liked the simultaneous feeling of total freedom mixed with a sense of real connection to the larger urban machine. After that first night’s hectic dinner rush, Ng and I paused for calories: orange juice and fresh-baked Montreal bagels. We ate them on a sidewalk bench, our bikes leaning against a nearby pole, letting the city pass us by for a few precious minutes instead of hurling ourselves through it: cars, buses, bicycles, people walking their dogs and shouting into their cell phones. Then we stood up, brushed sesame seeds off our clothes, and pushed off into traffic again.
‘IT’S NOT AS DANGEROUS AS PEOPLE ASSUME IT IS,’ SAYS COURIER KELLY PENNINGTON. ‘YOU CAN MAKE IT AS DANGEROUS OR AS SAFE AS YOU WANT.’