On Mount Royal

Yesterday I took the train home from a few days in Montréal. I was pretty tired out from socializing past my bedtime, and I hadn’t been on the train in a while. Almost as soon as the train left the station, I was filled with a particular feeling I get whenever I travel by myself. It’s a feeling of melancholy, mixed with anticipation and a kind of self-congratulatory grit. It is really a very soundtracky sort of feeling.

Happily, my train car was sparsely booked and I had a two-seat row to myself. So I spread out my stuff, took off my shoes, and went to work on a couple of bagels with cheese and pâté that I had brought along for my dinner. And I jacked in to my iPod and let the shuffle gods do their thing.

They were in a good mood: the first song up, as the train chugged along through the burbs, was so appropriate as to be literal: the Bicycles’ “Gotta Get Out”. After that came a stream of upbeat, bagel-eating numbers from the New Pornographers, the Be Good Tanyas, and the Fembots, who are surprisingly appropriate for picking sesame seeds out of your teeth.

When the bagels were gone, I reorganized myself and curled my legs up on the adjacent seat. Night had fallen by this time, and because it was so brightly lit inside the train car, there was nothing to see through the window but pitch black dotted with white lights and smeared with the occasional orange streak of highway. I closed my eyes and, with the cooperation of the shuffle gods (who obligingly brought things down a few notches) I pretty soon drifted into a lovely little fugue state.

After a time, another feeling began to grow on me. This time, I felt that we were pulling uphill, sort of like the train had just taken off from a runway, but more like the tracks began to climb sharply, because this was a train that was going up, up, up to a high place; a high place that was a sanctuary, where it was clean and snowy, secret and sheltered, where we could all be alone but still safely together. While this feeling grew on me, I had a very strong sense memory of the smell of a wood fire blazing out of doors on a cold, clear night. Sparks from this fire fly up into the sky, and some of them become stars.

The song that was playing was “Birds and Bees” by Snailhouse. It is really a beautiful song, and it struck in me a rich chord made out of all the notes of sweetness, loneliness, hope, memory, wonder and despair that I feel when I am traveling alone, and especially when I am coming home. If it helps, I feel the same way when I am walking in a pine forest or hiking the headlands in winter, places that remind me of being a singularity, alone in a vast, sparkling field of singularities.

I always have this feeling when I have been away. Now I am coming back to you changed. You may even notice in me a lingering shade, as if, however briefly, I truly did go to the mountain.