All this activity is perhaps the truest symbol of our lives here in the winter tuque of the planet.
Get out your elbow pads, everyone!
We are approaching peak festival season, the annual 10-week stretch when Quebecers flee their homes in rampaging herds, eager to make up for eight months of snow, ice, rain, sleet or “cloudy, with occasional sunny-with-cloudy periods.”
Now at last, we can broil in tropical jungle heat instead.
Last week I visited the St-Laurent Blvd. street festival, the Mural Festival, the Francofolie, the fringe festival and my local Portuguese church festival, while my local diner had a “Festival of the Grilled Sardine.”
Wherever I go in this town, the crowd seems to follow.
A week earlier, some 18,000 strangers gathered in the park across from my house for the Tour de l’Île bike race, dragging me from my sleep with announcements like “Cyclist No. 11,457, please report to the registration desk.”
Oh yeah, it’s also the Fête nationale, though few anglos will be celebrating, since the CAQ government turned the Quebec flag into a divisive nationalist symbol and now celebrates anglo university losses as Quebec’s gain.
Mind you, next weekend’s Canada Day won’t be very passionate, either. We haven’t had a Canada Day parade here for years, apart from the mammoth July 1 crowds filling the streets to celebrate “moving day.”
I’ll bet more Quebecers will be carrying fridges than carrying flags.
After our two national fêtes comes the part of the festivities I love best: the jazz fest and Nuits d’Afrique, where Montrealers of every ethnicity rub shoulders and languages, dancing together happily to world music.
There are countless smaller festivals lined up too, waiting their turn for an empty street, like planes poised on a runway.
“This is the festival traffic-control tower. Sorry, but you cannot use St-Viateur St. for the Festival of Albanian Tree Climbers on July 11. It will be occupied by the Festival of Vegetarian Cattle-Raisers, followed by the Kazakhstan Foot-Cloggers Festival.”
This frenzy of festivities is perhaps the truest symbol of our lives here in the winter tuque of the planet. Other countries can spread out their festivities leisurely over 12 months.
But we are the mayfly of nations and must squeeze all life’s activities into a brief burst of summer.
We must plant our gardens, renovate our homes, take our vacations, open (and close) our summer cottages, move, marry and celebrate both our national holidays, all before the weather turns cooler and the darkness returns.
Like terminal patients with six months to live, we spend every moment savouring each precious ray of sunshine. Why go to a film or indoor concert when something might be happening outside?
“An open-air lecture on the ice termites of Tuktoyaktuk? Sounds great! Your portable chairs or mine?”
This fervour to celebrate summer extends to our daily lives, too, where our herd-like behaviour creates other unofficial festivities.
Take the Festival of Construction Workers, when 160,000 labourers will voluntarily leave on vacation at exactly the same minute this July 23, then converge on the Jacques Cartier Bridge all night.
Or the Festival of the Weekend Cottager: a lemming-like species that gathers en masse on the Laurentian Autoroute at 4:30 p.m. every Friday to stew together in three-hour traffic jams, then ignore mosquitoes the size of vultures and leap into lake water cold enough to freeze fish.
These cottagers will gather together at hundreds of smaller rural festivals like the Louiseville Festival of the Buckwheat Pancake, the Saint-Théophile Dragfest, the Saint-Alexis-des-Monts Festival of the Speckled Trout and the Festival of the Pig in Ste-Perpétue.
The rest of the time they will all be poised anxiously by their TVs to watch the Weather Channel, murmuring:
“Ohmygawd! They’re calling for 38 degrees outside, but with the humidex and UV factor it’s actually 49 degrees, with a ‘real feel’ of 80 Celsius. I’m gonna need my sunblock 600 and my asbestos heat shield to play golf.”
When you live in a climate like ours, you must squeeze what you can from every summer minute and make each moment a festival.
Why go out for a mundane sandwich when you can celebrate “Le Festival du Club Sandwich avec Mayonnaise”?
Festivals can make the banal sound exciting and the annoying seem alluring. I’m surprised our governments haven’t realized their full potential.
I keep expecting the city of Montreal to announce we are having a Festival of Orange Traffic Cones, accompanied by a Festival of Closed-down Terrasses. The province could counter with a Festival of Hospital Lineups and Family Doctor Shortages, or a Festival of the $11-Billion Budget Deficit.
Life can sometimes be difficult, but festivals are fun.
Bonne Fête nationale and happy Canada Day everyone, however you plan to spend them, as l will be off for two weeks. Let’s hope neither holiday turns into a Festival of Not Enough Air Conditioning.