Echoes

The echoes from my North American trip continue to reverberate and some aspects grow while others recede. One background perception that has lurked in my memories of all my visits to North America is the harsh, crude pavements. Great slabs of in-situ concrete which, with age, use and ground swell become cracked, broken and uneven. They give any street or neighbourhood a hard unsympathetic look. It is a reaction I have had in various places in the US and now Canada. For me, used to asphaltic or small concrete slab type pavements, it can impose an unwelcoming feel from the place. I realise there is a partial and hardly objective side to this perception but then that is the sort of judgement we all rely on until we know a situation or place better. So when I was travelling on the bus from the airport at Montreal, looking out at the great ugly, heavily cracked and spalled concrete spaghetti junction roads we travelled on, beside, over and below I wondered what sort of place I had come to. The roads also seemed to travel through a bleak landscape covered with large areas of wasteland and spoil heaps. An image I had seen in mountains as scree and glacier moraines but now amongst, buildings, traffic and people.
Getting out of the bus, one stop before where I should have, I found myself disoriented in a wide sea of concrete pavements, roads and plaza. First impressions were not good. But then I had never been to a place that always suffers very harsh winters and so needs time to shake off the deadening effect of that regime. Then there were the numbers of down and outs opening begging even in the centre of town, the iffy feel of street life that initially made me wonder what sort of neighbourhood I was staying in. It was all so familiar and yet so different that my antenna were confused by the things they were picking up as against past and standard perceptions and judgements.
I subsequently was told that the law and policing is more relaxed at least in Montreal, presumably Quebec, and possibly Canada as a whole. Drugs are more freely available, public toilets sometimes have sharps boxes for discarding needles, it is, a was told, a much more tolerant place than I am used to.
It is Canada and I have some previous with Canada. At my secondary school I had the luck to be taught by a very charismatic Canadian teacher, one Jerry Wilson. He was tall, sharp witted and minded, full of stories, some probably very tall, about Canada and his life there. He had been a surveyor and minerals prospector in the tundra, director of television programmes, and goodness what else before leaving because they did not like his politics. He said he was a communist, an atheist, a pacifist, a jazz lover and, when in the mood, easily diverted from the topic he was meant to be teaching us. Hence our knowledge of his background, jazz, atheism, outlooks and personal histories. He pushed, cajoled, bullied, and reasoned us into using our brains. He showed me I could think and dare to be different. He showed us we could have independent points of view, we should question what we were told, should seek proof that what we were expected to think and do was valid and worthy of our acceptance and endorsement.
I started making my own decisions on what mattered to me. I started to read interesting books and articles, I went straight from reading the Eagle comic to reading the New Scientist. I started reasoning through the things Jerry and others had taught me and I had read and seen. I started to work out what mattered to me, what I felt about the world around me and how I related to it.
It was from him, and here I am talking of the late 50's and early 60's, that I recall him frequently railing against the asbestos industry and the terrible diseases and deaths that result from its mining and use. Remember this was at a time when it was still seen as
a wonder material in this country, although its dangers were known but suppressed. It was another twenty odd years before it was banned here. But Canada was a substantial producer up until very recently. Some other countries still are. Canada currently wants us to relax our concerns over the environmental damage caused by the extraction and use of oil sands. Jerry would be on their case.
So what has this all got to do with my trip and visit to Montreal in particular? Well it's all got to do with perceptions, the way your brain, and the training you and others have given it, react to new situations and stimuli. Those memories I had of Jerry' s tales of Canada, of those bits of news about the country I had heard during the intervening years, my compounded expectations, and there I was, walking through a world which was loosely familiar but had many aspects I had not expected, trying to tie it all together in a way that made sense. The experience was fantastic once I had recovered my sense of direction and rooted myself in a fascinating b&b.
I wanted to get back home for a multitude of reasons, but especially for the nervous but exciting time of the birth of my daughter Sarah's first child. But I also longed to stay, to be there still, exploring this unexpectedly familiar and, by turns, strange world. Trying to work out how my long held perceptions and expectations of the place meshed in with new experiences I was living through.