A Rather Blustery Day

I spent part of yesterday trying to snap a picture of the wind with very little succes.

You could see it in the posture of the cyclists hunched over their handlebars with their jackets billowing, in the way the west-bound bikers swerving to a near-standstill as they struggle to push the pedal against the gusts. You could see the wind flirting on street corners, tustling girls’ hair and turning up the hems of their dresses. You could see it, of course, in the way tree branches bowed and buckiled, and their leaves turned inside-out, and in the litter that tornadoed up from the sidewalks and skittled down the street. You could hear it, in the rustling leaves, in the cracks between buildings, in the laughs and quickened footsteps, but still it’s no easy thing to capture.

I believe that the corner of Atwater and DeMaisonneuve is the windiest spot in the city, although I don’t know it for a fact and I couldn’t tell you why. Aside from the Alexis Nihon tower, the buildings are not so tall as to stir up air currents. Perhaps the wind is channelled between the Mountain and Summit Circle and comes rushing down Atwater, but this is conjecture.

On the corner of Atwater and DeMaisonneuve yesterday afternoon, people made goofy paddling motions and children leaned forward testing whether the wall of air could keep them vertical, and everyone was looking rather like Winnie the Pooh on a blustery day. It was one of those rare moments where our surroundings force their way into our consciousness, and we suddenly realize that we are  sharing an unordinary moment with our fellow city-dwellers.

But the wind is not only visible in the ruslting of leaves and skirts: it has arguably had a profound effect on the organization of our urban landscape dating back several centuries…

On that note, a pop quiz: which way does the wind blow?

Due to the Coriolis effect, caused by the rotation of the earth, the prevailing winds are Westerlies in our part of the world, that is latitudes between 30 and 60 degrees North. The wind almost always blows from West to East in Montreal (indeed, it’s almost always against me as I cycle home to NDG).

It’s not for nothing that the smokestacks are located in the East end, and the wind obligingly whisks the haze away from Westmount mansions. In industrial cities across North America and Europe, the down-and-out East-side and posh West-end pattern repeats. Of course sometimes other things like access to water may trump the trend, but here in Montreal, the Saint-Lawrence also flows from West to East, meaning double the incentive for those with means to move upstream.