Thanks Go to Montreal For First Opening My Eyes to the World

Growing up in Parsippany in the 1980’s wasn’t exactly like finding oneself situated in the middle of a cultural universe. Looking back from this global, hyper-connected age, I am only now beginning to understand how isolated and limited we were as children in the suburbs of Morris County. During most of the year, aside from perhaps hanging out with some friends, riding our bikes or chatting (locally) on the phone, there wasn’t much to do. The boredom could be agonizing.

I don’t blame my mother. A working single mom with two boys, she did the best she could to give us a middle class lifestyle in a decent neighborhood. We lived in one of Parsippany’s largest apartment complexes, Troy Hills Village. It was relatively safe, green, well kept and affordable. But it was boring, boring as all hell. And unless you drove, there wasn’t really anywhere to go. It’s not like I could take a bus to the Rockaway Mall, not that it was such an exciting destination, anyway. And until my later teen years I was too young to venture into Manhattan, which at that time was going through a very dangerous phase anyway.

But once in a while I’d get a break from the mundane. And the biggest break, one I remember so well, was when my mother and her then-boyfriend took me on a business trip to Montreal. It was 1982.

The 80’s were hard on the cities of the Northeast, especially New Jersey and

President Carter tours the South Bronx in the late 1970's;
for many of New Jersey's suburban and rural kids,
this was the common urban image of the 1970's and 80's

New York. Crime was rampant (and, at least in Newark, is again) and urban deterioration was at an all time high. The experiences I had with cities were limited and stressful ones. Aside from some field trips to New York Museums and a few frightening journeys down Newark’s dilapidated Springfield Avenue, I hadn’t seen much. And what I had seen I didn’t like. Oh, and there were those trips to the old Yankee Stadium, which introduced me to the devastated South Bronx at its worst.

This is why my first Montreal visit blew my mind. Just a six hour drive away (traffic permitting) from Northern New Jersey, it was like being transported to an alternate, albeit French-speaking urban universe. The streets were relatively clean. Public transportation was widely available. People actually treated the city as a place they wanted to be, not had to go to. When was the last time, as a New Jerseyan, you found yourself chatting with a friend at an outdoor café in Newark or Trenton or Elizabeth? My point exactly.

I want to do it again this summer with my son, if I can. I remember the drive there being just spectacular. Interstate 287, which I took every day and bisects Parsippany, turned into 87 which cut through the greening Hudson River Valley. Heading north through Albany, I was amazed at what I saw of the Adirondacks, and their snow-tipped peaks of early Spring. The Canadian Border was a blast (“don’t say anything or joke about smuggling!” my mother warned) and to see all of the signs change from English to French instantly widened my world. Canada isn’t the moon, but Quebec isn’t exactly home, and through my 11 year old eyes, that concept was beyond awesome.

We stayed in the Holiday Inn in Longueil, which is more or less the Hoboken of the Montreal Area. Situated opposite of the island city, I got a chance to survey this new, foreign land and all of its topography. There was the Saint Lawrence River – which seemed more alive than the Hudson – and the soaring bridges going over it. Montreal even had its own skyline, which looked more developed than what I had been expecting (most of the books on Montreal that I reviewed at the Central Junior High School library were dated from the late 60’s).

I remember my first sojourn into Montreal’s vast and efficient subway system,

Montreal's Metro: Efficient and Beautiful

The Metro. I recall the hush of the stations; everything was so much quieter and swifter than in New York. The trains ran on rubber tires. The stations were, or at least seemed, clean and safe and extremely colorful. The multicolor tiles, the red, illuminated exits proclaiming “Sortie,” the soft blues and the polished steel really struck me as remarkable. Public transportation, I thought, when well planned and affordable, brought a city its own form of freedom. And then there was the French. The smoothness of the French language, the elegant elocution of the Francophones, the children who seemed like little geniuses to me because they chatted in French with such ease. French advertisements, newspapers, magazines, directional signs…I wasn’t in America anymore. This wasn’t Parsippany. There was, I was realizing for the first time in my life, a real, live world out there. Functioning, working, buzzing…

I felt so far away from home and I loved it. The candy was different – it seemed richer, thicker and more chocolaty. The warm loaves of bread were like heaven and the breakfasts – really just ordinary crepes – tasted divine. For the first time in my life, America, the English language, the Yankees, all those things, were clearly not at the center of everybody’s life.

We went on a bus tour of the city that took us all over, from the Parisian streets of the Old City to the heights of Mount Royale. I remember being on top of the mountain, situated in a park in the middle of the city, and being able to survey the entire metropolitan area. It was exhilarating to see the vastness of my new foreign conquest; it went on and on. The churning St. Lawrence glimmered in the distance, peppered with islands. The skyscrapers and steeples of the city sat at my feet. People went on, living differently, living lives completely not oriented towards me or where I was from. Just wonderful!

We spent two or three full days there before heading home. I didn’t get to see Montreal for another decade, and I remember missing it terribly. I missed it so much, in fact, that during my undergraduate years at Rutgers I joined a student travel board just to plan trips there, and I returned at least four more times. Then I really got a chance to explore it, while at the same time doing a world of good for thousands of my fellow students at Rutgers-Newark, who otherwise, due to the realities of Newark in the 1990’s, couldn’t venture off campus at night – at least not on foot.

That first trip really opened my eyes to the wider world, and taught me that there’s really joy in going to a place where you and your culture are not the dominant one. It forces you to sit back and observe and learn. This summer, I hope to head back there again, to give my son his own first taste of the non-American world.