From Parallel #6.

This city responds magnificently to rain. It is a quality not shared by any other Canadian city except Halifax which, of course, is a city designed in the rain by drenched architects poring over soggy blueprints. Whenever it stops raining in Halifax, the city assumes a strangely desiccated appearance. Five minutes without rain makes it seem as dry and bleached as a soda cracker. You almost expect the Victorian cornices on the buildings to start sifting away on a powdery wind.

Victoria has a suspicion of the same character. Vancouver, despite its maritime history, just sulks in the rain. Prairie cities turn their backs on rain like wet buffalo. When the rain comes down on Toronto, it is more like Lake Ontario going up. The streets empty before the gray deluge. But Montreal welcomes the rain as joyfully as a boy with new rubber boots.

Observation has taught me that Montrealers like to watch liquid in action, whether it’s in a river, fountain (why aren’t there more fountains in the city?), gutter or glass. It comes from being an island people.

This watermania includes rain. On the lowest level, no taxi drivers in the world obtain more satisfaction from rain than ours in Montreal. They exult in speeding through the wet streets between sheets of spray that a British battleship might envy. Plodding pedestrians might curse but the taxi driver has only the song of the tires in his ears as he bowls along Sherbrooke Street suspended like a hovercraft on a pillow of wet turbulence.

Sherbrooke Street in the rain… I didn’t mean to mention it already. I wanted to save it to the end. I always think of Sherbrooke Street in the rain as John Little has painted it, somewhere around the McGill campus, with the lights of automobiles streaking over the black asphalt, and the bare elms marching up the campus to the mountain where the old buildings snuggle into the rock-like mausoleums.

The clubs on Sherbrooke Street, the old stone buildings, sit comfortably in the rain because there is something old-fashioned about rain, traditional, slightly British. The clubs seem a bit doddering in brilliant sunlight but they dream in the rain of the days when an Anglo-Saxon could afford to be gracious and gentlemanly about French Canadians, and could afford just about anything else he fancied.

The rain drives most people from Mount Royal. There is a painting, I forget by whom, not a new one, of the city seen between the trees of Mount Royal on a dark blue late afternoon in mid-winter which has a powerful feeling of being isolated above humanity, not from any negative rejection but from the happiness of being alone and the anticipation of returning to the warmth of the city. That is winter, of course, but rain on Mount Royal has the same ability to cut one off from the city while making the yellow windows down below look as cheerful as fireplaces.

Look at Dorchester Boulevard in the rain. On a rainy morning, the skyscrapers disappear in the clouds and you can imagine them continuing to impossible heights. At night, when the rain clouds are ripping themselves across the tops of the buildings, the skyscrapers move through the heavens.

Finally, there is something sinister about rain. You never stroll down a rainy street at night. You lurk. Maybe it has something to do with a lot of mysterious rainy movie scenes, but not entirely. Dickens was hatching plots in the rain long before John Ford filmed The Informer under the shower. Even before that, when God wanted to do something extremely impressive, he made it rain for 4 days and 4 nights. That’s better than I can do. Six hundred and thirty-one words on rain and I’m starting to dry up.