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There’s something remarkably honest about the United Steel Workers of Montreal. Far from being a contrivance, their country and bluegrass music feels earnest and appropriate, and nowhere is that more obvious than in the new video for their song “Émile Bertrand.”
This elegy for the lost working-class life of Montreal’s southwest is named in honour of the Émile Bertrand restaurant, a snack bar at Notre-Dame and Mountain that was famous for its home-brewed spruce beer. It closed in 2006 when its owner, Barbara Strudensky, died of cancer, so the USWM filmed their video in Point St. Charles’ Paul Patates, which has inherited Émile Bertrand’s legacy — and spruce beer. “Dreamin’ just comes easy when work is just too hard to bear,” croon the USWM’s vocalists, Felicity Hamer and Sean Beauchamp, as the video cuts between present-day scenes of the Lachine Canal, St. Henri and Point St. Charles and historical photos of Griffintown.
There’s something about this landscape that invites nostalgia. Maybe it’s the unexpected tranquility of the canal and the brooding ghosts of industry along it. Five years ago, when I lived in St. Henri, I lay awake at night listening to the mysterious clanging of trains in the nearby railyards. Those solitary moments, more than anything, are what I remember about living in the city’s southwest.
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“The house where Jean had found his little furnished room was just in front of the swing-bridge of St. Augustin street. It could watch the passage of flatboats, tankers that stank of oil or gasoline, wood barges, colliers, all of them giving a triple blast with their foghorns just before its door: their demand to be let out from the narrows of the towns into the wide, rough waters of the Great Lakes.
But the house was not only on the path of the frieghters. It was also near the railway, at the crossroads of the eastern and western lines and the maritime routes of the great city. It was on the pathways of the oceans, the Great Lakes, and the prairies.
To its left were shining rails. Directly in front of it shone red and green signals. In the night, coal and dust and soot flew around it, amid a cavalcade of wheels, the frenzied gallop of puffing steam, the long wailing of whistles, the short, chopped blast from the chimneys of the flatboats; among these sounds tripped the shrill, broken ringing of the alarm and, prolonged beyond this clamour, the slow purring of a ship’s screw. Often, when he awoke at night with all these sounds about him, Jean imagined he was on a voyage, sometimes on a freighter, sometimes on a Pullman car. He would close his eyes and go to sleep with the agreeable impression that he was escaping, constantly escaping.”
These word are from The Tin Flute, a translation of Bonheur d’occasion, the famous novel by Gabrielle Roy set in Saint Henri
during the end of the depression and the start of World War Two.