Contrasts and Contradictions

by Joanne Carnegie

When I moved to Montreal, my son was six. He'd learned about earthquakes at daycare, and was worried: did Montreal have any?

"Of course not," I said with the casual certainty of someone raised on the Prairies, dead centre of a tectonic plate, thousands of miles away from any re-jigging of the planet. How could I have known?

Then one day, in the wee hours of the morning, I was awoken by my bed sliding in the direction of Halifax. We'd had a quake at Richter 4.5.

But by then I'd learned a key thing about Montreal: the surfaces aren't always what they seem. It's a city of contrasts, of contradictions. A dingy-looking restaurant serves exquisite food; a monument built to wow the world makes us a laughingstock instead.

There is beauty and there is squalor, and underneath there burns an energy so fierce you can walk down an ordinary street and feel it hum.