On January 9, 1998, downtown Montreal, that by many to be largely immune to the devastating icy retrograde existence of the rest of Western Quebec, Eastern Ontario and Northern New York, succumbed to the darkness. Let me tell you about it.
I was working at a crappy telemarketing firm (which led to a crappy sales career, but I digress). January 9 was a Friday. I knew that I had to work that day even though things were getting chaotic from this storm, because the managers were bastards. I did not expect, though, that we would be let go at noon that day. That was a blessing.
The company was in the Alexis-Nihon corporate tower and I lived on Pine and Clark, so it was one 15-minute bus ride home. I started walking on Atwater to Sherbrooke instead of waiting at de Maisonneuve, just for kicks, I suppose. At the time, there was a tall tree behind a bus shelter. Outside the shelter, an old woman was standing with her umbrella. All trees were incredibly and depressingly laden with very heavy ice; the larger the tree, the greater the amount of ice.This tree might have been forty feet tall under normal circumstances, but this day it was bent over so painfully and so much that it lost about ten to fifteen feet in height. It was straining with the added weight of ice. You really thought of these trees as overworked beasts of burden, or like the slaves that carried the rocks to build the pyramids.
