In all the world, God has never made a more subtly unique geography than Montreal’s. Montreal, Mont-Royal, the Royal Mountain. A royal mountain royally situated and sculpted regardless of locale, but all the more so when one sees the mount in its proper place as it really is. It’s no wonder, that those who first saw it could not help but call it royal. Royal Montreal, the Paris of the West, the Paris of the North, America’s European city, why does the make of your simple earthen body move me so?

The city of Montreal swaddles the mountain, really the wide mound of one rippling green hill, and sits on the isle of Montreal: one of two major islands that ostensibly make up one greater yin-yang isle in the midst of the great Saint Lawrence River. The St. Lawrence being not just a river but a great river— a fleuve even. Fleuve designating that the Saint Lawrence belongs to an esoterically classed elite of rivers, loosely being those beings who are both powerful in stature and eventually find their end in an ocean or sea.

The fleuve St. Lawrence is much more than a great river, it is the blue-diamond mouth of North America’s winter breath. It is a channel, a passageway, a rushing vector free from the sins and indolence of the rest of the civilized world’s great rivers. A river with the greatest mass of freshwater bodies on earth on one end, the north Atlantic on the other, and clean pure motion between. There is no doldrum, no meandering, no slow tolerance of muddying, the river gapes beginning at the Gaspésie peninsula and slower tapers in appetize and size in almost perfectly linear fashion as it cuts to the center of the continent and great lakes with acute precision. Is it a channel, a lake, the divine ideal of a canal? One would settle for labelling it such if not for the simple impression a quick look at its surface brings— what rippling strength of motion!

North America’s other great river, supposedly its longest (I’ve always been particular to the Missouri as receiving the Mississippi’s tribute and not otherwise), is a vehicle and vessel all the same, but even 100 miles from its headwaters, it soon begins to weaken and widen and stink with muddied malaise. The same goes for the other continents’ great rivers: the Nile, the Pearl, the Ganges, the Yellow, the Amazon; For all their splendor and size these rivers all die in similar fashion, in splintering deltas of prolonged infection— you can see them bleed from space! The Saint Lawrence on the other hand, does it even have a delta? Look at the maps and let them speak! The very ocean seems its delta, and before reaching it, without fault it careers without splinter or division into its gulf. Elvis sings in his cover of Unchained Melody, “Lonely rivers flow to the sea, to the sea”, and if this be true, let it be known the St. Lawrence is anything but lonely. Having come to understand itself fully it must do more than flow, it must rush, to finally meet the sea. Why this purity of intent is unique to such northerly reaches of our earth is a question for another time… one to be asked around a crackling wood stove perhaps.

From its end at the bottom of the towering seaside cliffs of Gaspe, to the walled French glory of Quebec City, where the river still seems just less than an inlet, past the calm smoke of Trois-Rivieres, to the isle of Montreal the river maintains its coherence until suddenly the river splits itself unto a million folds while still maintaining its dominant arterial core. It then finds itself surrounding the numerous, previously highlighted, islands that sit in the middle of an endlessly flat green basin stretching 100 miles from the northernmost tip of the vertical shores of Lake Champlain to the southernmost beginnings of the Laurentian mountains. These two regions of familiar North-Appalachian topography remain forgotten once approaching the river: all that imprints itself upon one is how truly flat the landscape has become: sparsely interrupted by a lone plateau-like hill.

Then suddenly, regardless of the direction of approach, but maybe most remarkably when crossing the Champlain bridge on the island’s south side, the royal mountain appears. A wide, long rectilinear bubble towering even over the city’s lavender-azure skyscrapers, whose glassy sides, standing between the mountain and the fleuve’s shore, mirror the river’s color. In spring and summer, the mountain sits like a lazy green fist, confident and abrupt, on the otherwise flat island’s core; while in fall and winter the underlying body is revealed as the red and gold leaves slowly evaporate, leaving the mountain starkly white wrapped in the gray coral skeletons of its deciduous membrane. Walking up on the wide lazy switchback paths sculpted into the mountain by Frederick Olmstead, the same man who designed so many of the continents great parks: not least of which being Central and Prospect, leaves one feeling as Dante must have felt winding upwards on purgatory’s slopes all the while knowing it was not his final destination; can such be called purgatory?

All the while the city wraps itself around this royally inconvenient interruption to its order. On its south side rises the previously mentioned, glittering downtown flower of regular (they are required to be less than or equal to the height of the mountain) high-rises. On its east, at the beckoning of the giant sculpture of an angelic lady liberty, the city slows to a regular walkable size with numerous churches (many now apartments) interrupting the tidy mix of residential buildings and restaurants that can compete with even the best Paris has to offer. This region continues in regular city block fashion, with net worth and demographic homogeneity decreasing, until the towering white-ventriloquist hook of the Stade Olympique brings back verticality to the portrait. Northwest of the mountain hums Cafe Olympico and joyous little Italy, blending into due north of the mountain wherein lies “Outremont” (the other mount/side), with the polytechnic tower of University of Montreal and the great Basilica dome both nestled still and permanent into the descending slope of the mass. This region is the most French of Montreal’s cardinal directions, with it being possible to live and learn and mate and feast, on pastries of true French fashion and quality, without ever needing to leave or speak English. To the western side of the mountain lie Atwater—a confused region of decent, hypsterized ethnic restaurants, towering Chinese-owned apartments, and parks filled with feral diaspora Innuits— and Westmount, an old, rich, anglo-jewish enclave of elegant brick houses.

With the mountain being situated on the south-central edge of the island, much of the city by area lies to the north of the mountain past Outremont. On this remaining 2/3 of the island (and on all of the large isle of Laval to the north), you may find yourself not knowing what city, or country for that matter you are in. Is it Bangladesh, Haiti, India, Morocco? Regardless, over and over you will find yourself a part of quick transitions from residential to commercial streets and metro stations that in storefront, sound, demographic and feel, are ambiguous in everything but their softly third world aura.

That brings us to what life is like in Montreal, whether as a native Quebecois, loyal Anglophone, fourth generation Jew, newly arrived Immigrant, or visitor; which, with Montreal being situated in Canada, brings one resounding answer among an otherwise mixed bag: namely, that it is subpar (for those with any precedent otherwise), specifically in areas: social, financial, bureaucratic, and infrastructural— even while being infinitely less violent and dope-riddled than the States— but that is a conversation for another time.