VITEZ TOUT CONTACT AVEC LEAU

DANICA EVERING

I EARLIER
Way back when, we say. Way back when. It is a fragmented sentence, followed by an
invisible ellipsis. It forgot where it was going. All of the actions that happened after when
are erased by time.
So okay, let me try to redraw one of these erasures (pencil lines on unleaded runnels,
amidst waxy rubbings). Last summer when I moved, I went to the Lachine Canal and put
my feet in your waters, to let you know I was here. Pay my respects, right? Our mingling
molecules must have meant something. Way back then, I made your acquaintance. Then
I was swept up by eddies of readings and writings and movings and I forgot.
On November 11, just after midnight, the City of Montreal dumped 8 billion litres of
untreated wastewater into the river.1 Pissshitbloodhairtoiletpaperpillstamponscondoms
dentalflossbabywipes, raw sewage gurgling out into the St. Lawrence.2 We didnt have a
choice,3 Mayor Denis Coderre said. Theres nothing we could do. But he did. He did do: he
went down, down into the sewer system. Descended under the earth into the underwear
underbelly underworld. In a slick blue hazmat suit, in a neon orange vest, in safety
glasses, in a yellow construction hat (with headlamp), in sturdy black galoshes, in teal
rubber gardening gloves, in a harness (under portly stretch of stomach), in a respirator, in
a red cage. 10 minutes in heaven. Way back when, Denis Coderre (I imagine huffing like
a Sith Lord) briskly paid his respects to you, then hastily hurried back to change in a
trailer. Shed his layers of protective gear like a snake. He was there for you physically.
Did it feel like respect? Or like something more indelicate?
The city put up a sign:
vitez tout contact avec leau.
Erase its number from your phone
and do not respond to its emails.
Do not look it in the eye.
When it tries to talk to you, turn around and walk away.
Speak of it only in the third person, disown it.
When someone asks you about your river
say: I have no river.
Silent water treatment.
CBC News, Montreal sewage dump: Kahnawake protesters block Mercier Bridge, 12 November, 2015.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/montreal-sewage-dump-kahnawake-protesters-block-mercierbridge-1.3315378
2 Rumor has it that a nearby bay in the neighbourhood of Verdun is called Baie des capotes for the
condoms that pop up like beached jellyfish after the rain.
3 Ren Bruemmer, We didnt have a choice, Coderre says of sewage dump, Montral Gazette, October 6,
2015. http://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/were-going-ahead-with-plan-to-dump-8-billion-litres-ofuntreated-sewage-into-st-lawrence-river-coderre-says
1

In December I wrote about you in an essay. I wrote that I had asked my colleague what
Montreals water source was. That neither of us knew. That we wondered how we could
have lived here for more than two months and not know what our water source was. I
wrote that when you are in the city, distracted by transit and cellphones and coffee, it is
possible to forget where you are. But, I wrote, it was this unknown water hissing through
the giant teal-and-cream espresso maker on the countertop that was the background to
my interview recording. I guess that was you, wasnt it? Aha, isnt it funny to meet
someone again when youve already met them before in a different context?
Isnt it?
(Montreals sources of drinking water are: the St. Lawrence River, Lac-St. Louis, and
Rivire des Prairies.)4
I started thinking of you again in January. It clicked: the dipped feet, the sewage dump,
the unknown-to-me-at-the-time water sources. I thought, how strange that I still havent seen
the shoreline. (The flirtation with the inland Lachine I wrote off as a chance encounter in a
crowded place.) We read Deborah McGregor write, We need to respect and treat water
as a relative, not a resource.5 So, let us not be a dysfunctional family, I thought. Let us
have each others back.
Yet although you felt so distant, you were with me all along. I began seeing you
everywhere. Walking by a van that read FERMETURE DEAU, I thought of you
coursing under the earth.6 My fingers had grown pruny and thick with you, scrubbing my
dishes (fried onions, caked eggs, sriracha). You kept me clean, running down my back (let
us have each others back) and in rivulets through my hair. You watered my plants and
kept me alive, too. At the end of bad days, you touched my cheeks. Margulis and Sagan
wrote it plainly, We sweat and cry seawater, they said.7
And it is you: the moisture inside my mouth.
Way back when
The city put up a sign:
vitez tout contact avec leau.
Ever impertinent
I decided to make contact.
Sant Montral Portal, Drinking Water. 22 December 2015, http://www.santemontreal.qc.ca/en/healthyliving/healthy-environment/drinking-water/.
5 Deborah McGregor, Honouring Our Relations: An Anishinaabe Perspective on Environmental Justice, in
Speaking for Ourselves, 2009.
6 Like Peter C. van Wyck and June Ying-Li Aldinuccis quest to find the significance of the small
stencilled numbers on the houses in their neighbourhood, I began to notice the infrastructure.
Numbering Numbers: Urban Semiology and Practical Pedagogy (Montreal: FOFA Gallery, 2012).
7 Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (Toronto: Anchor, 2004), 183.
4

II ON MY WAY
Water is heavy.
Deb Whitcraft, the former mayor of Beach Haven,8 said: Foot by foot, salt water weighs
64 pounds. Think of it. A cubic foot at 64 pounds multiplied by millions of cubic feet of
water has such an intensity that can take down buildings and demolish whole
communities.9 Thanks, Deb. I dont know about sweet water, its probably less than
that, hey? But it has an emotional weight. Gravity, from the latin gravitas. What it means is,
a weight, a seriousness. Even at its root, the word is tied up in the heart. My
grandparents grandparents on the Nordsee, on the way high up in Germany, knew the
weight of water.
I wanted string your weight from my chest like a plumb bob, pointing south.
My chest (not yet tethered) is full of hope and my eyes are full of sun and my nose is full
of icy air and the hairs inside crackle with each inhalation as I set off down the road in
broad beaming daylight. Down De Lorimier,10 the nearest road to me.
And at this point it feels like the river is not so far away.
I think: water carries sound. Rumor has it there are whales in the St. Lawrence Seaway. I
imagine them calling to each other under the cloudy water, ooaaaaaoooo ooaaaaaaaa ooooo.
The size of the whales lungs determines the length of each guttural utterance. The St.
Lawrence issues from Lake Ontario.11 vitez tout contact avec leau. What would happen if I
were to touch you? Would the pulse of my fingers somehow send a watery message to
my family at the rivers origin? Oooaaaaaoooo.
Its -36 C but because salt on the road, because bright searing sun, because cars, theres
water in the intersection. Condensate forms on the inside of my scarf. The size of my
lungs determines the size of the cloud of my breath. The sky is blue, the water is blue,
they both scatter molecules, glinting colour. Were made of the same stuff, us and the
sky, were mostly water. And water freezes in the winter, and I can feel the water in my
legs going slower, and getting sludgy, and I listen inside myself for hissing flecks of ice.
My heart is like
lub dub lub dub lub dub
St-Laurent
St. Lawrence.
A New Jersey city which faces the Atlantic and was excessively damaged during hurricane Sandy.
Liz Miller, interview with Deb Whitcraft, A Wake Up Call, The Shorelines Project,
http://theshorelineproject.org/portfolio/deb-whitcraft/
10 Named in memory of a notary and Patriote who was executed by the British for insurrection.
11 St. Lawrence River. http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/st-lawrence-river/
8
9

The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan made up this word, topophilia, to describe the affective bonds
that tie humans to particular places.12 -philia is a strange combining word, it connotes
affection but now has an deviant twist. Is this what I want, a feeling of love that will tie
me to Montreal? In the rambling audio recording of my walk down the street I hear
myself say I dont want this to just be about love though, I want to be more critical.
What is more critical than a body?
This is not a love letter.
It is less about affection than recognition, awareness, witnessing. Before I left, I told
myself: Dont go outside, stay indoors, cuddle up, be cozy, stay warm, stay dry. And yet. There is
something about being there, leaving the warmth of climate control for the frozen world
outside. In her article about Toxic Tourism, Pezzullo quotes Jan Cohen-Cruz, Bearing
witnessuses heightened means to direct attention onto actions of social magnitude,
often at sites where they actually occur and from a perspective that would otherwise be
missing.13 To, embodied, come from my perspective that would otherwise be missing,
to be reminded where my drinking water comes from and my waste water is going to.
Theres a man walking towards me erratically and shouting. His arms are flailing, his feet swinging.
After he passes I can see his footsteps in the snow, and theyre weaving, but for a bit they just look like
everyone elses footsteps. Can you tell the intention in a footstep, beyond verbal communication? But if I
look closer, I can read the anger in his footstep, actually. The wild curve of his pant leg sweeping in the
snow before it skids down to print deep, almost to the concrete below. The snow is drifting, these are fresh
tracks. So fresh, in fact, I fancy that can read emotion in them.
Body and land:
My ear is a shell.
Lift it to your ear
Can you hear the sea?
Tympanic membrane
Malleus
Incus
Stapes
Cochlea
(yes, the shell inside).

Ursula K. Heise, From the Blue Planet to Google Earth, in Sense of Place and Sense of
Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (New York: Oxford, 2008) 37.
13 Phaedra C. Pezzullo, Identification and Imagined Communities, in Toxic
Tourism: Rhetorics of Pollution, Travel and Environmental Justice (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009)
145.
12

III HERE
Okay, I say, now I can see the river
I hold my breath, then. There is a long pause on the recording. (A racked pause, the
stretched-out space in between the moment when Dr. Frank-N-Furter utters Antici
and the moment he says, finally, pation.)14
Though I have come out into the cold, down the street, over the highway, across the
snow, around a median, over another highway (this time without a cross-walk), under a
bridge, across a street, I hit a wall:
ACCS INTERDIT
and how do I get there? I feel like this is going to be the hardest part. How do I get to
the river? How do I not fall in when I get to the river? My legs are so frozen. I dont
know if I can climb a fence. I should have thought this through. My voice is desperate,
self-deprecate, the pitch raising and a terrible whiny catching behind the soft palate.
Stretching before me in both directions behind a vast expanse of chain-link fence and
barbed wire is a wall of industry. To my left, a Molson warehouse, a U-Haul storage shed.
Before me, an expanse of concrete and shipping crates. Their colours like rusted candies:
yellow, green, red, blue, orange. Behind the crates, a railway. Behind the railway, a tanker. To
my right is a little park with two huts. Behind the park is another fence.
I have become surly.
I wonder how many people even go to this fucking park, I say bitterly.
It was something I hadnt even considered.
Shalan Joudry has a short poem:
how can something known
become unknown
in so little time15
All I wanted to do was walk down the road
and touch the river
(10 minutes in heaven)16
and then leave
before my limbs completely turn to ice.
This is Tim Currys line from the song Sweet Transvestite in the 1975 musical comedy horror film The
Rocky Horror Picture Show, directed by Jim Sharman and written by Sharman and Richard OBrien.
15 Shalan Joudry, The Known World, Generations Re-Emerging (Kentville: Gaspereau, 2014) 11.
16 Am I really any better than Denis Coderre?
14

Reality is rarely how you imagine it is going to be, I guess. The plan, the map, the theory,
the concept, the build-up unravel and I am scrambling now to make it work. What do I
do, I wonder to myself, Google search beach?
But my fingers are numb and the reception is bad.
Karen Houle writes, A custodial respect / for open water / takes us / out over it.17
But I cannot even get to the shoreline to pay my custodial respects.
I head toward the downtown with a small flame still guttering near my throat that I might
make it to the Old Port. Maybe there is a beach there.
Ave. Papineau is ahead and for a moment my heart rises and my head whips to the left
*snap* down towards what should be water. Ah, but no, the foot of Papineau is a factory.
ACCS INTERDIT.
Is it possible to feel claustrophobic in an open space? And yet I do: it is a similar feeling
of stuck-ness. I am far away from both home and public transit. I am starving and I
scrabble in my bag cramming frozen fistfuls almonds into my mouth. Salt doubtlessly
falls to the ground, and because salt, because hunger, melts the ice there.
This time, a condo development, no doubt selling a view of the river at a premium. My
contact with the water is evaded by architecture and industry. After a labyrinth of more
bridges, condos, buses, traffic, highways, sidestreets, small cafs, churches, cobblestones,
novelty tallships: I see the water. Down the hill, a rushing in my throat. Maybe finally? To
my left is a skating rink. A few brave tourists carve the ice that is beside but not of the
river. Who only have one weekend here, who bought tickets already, who so its a little
cold were here anyway, who gosh we had just the nicest time in Montral and went
skating on the river, who it really feels like Europe there doesnt it. Doesnt it?
I finally get to the rivers edge, and here a fence and there the roiling river. Ice crinkles in
folds, roiling and bending beneath the water like a tissue on a stick, close and far away.
And in the background, the thudding thumping of blaring pop music at the rink:
You used to, you used to
Wonder if you bendin' over backwards for someone else
Wonder if you're rollin' up a Backwoods for someone else
You dont need no one else
Why you never alone.18
17
18

Karen Houle, Surface Tension: Three Crossings, in Ballast (Toronto: Anansi, 2000), 41.
Drake, Hotline Bling (remix of D.R.A.M.'s "Cha Cha"), July 31, 2015.

IV LATER
La crativit est subjective
La loi est claire
La vrit ne lest pas.19
The truth is unclear, and I am embarrassed. My cheeks flush pink from the sudden heat
of the bus and also my shame. I should have thought this through. I am in spite of myself. I am
self-loathing, a self-hating pagan. I have borne witness, but not in a way I had imagined.
La crativit est subjective. Why do I always resort to anthropomorphism?
In a futile gesture, in grade two, in Cobourg Ontario, in a puny stamp of forest behind
the school, our teachers told us each to claim a tree as our own.
This will be your tree, they said.
You can come and visit it whenever youre in this here woodlot.
I chose a thin aspen. It was wobbly and a bit diseased. Its bark was flaking off in the
process of being consumed by bugs or bacteria or both. I was a part-time homeschooled
kid, a hybrid brat existing miserably in both worlds and neither. I identified and projected
and claimed this tree as my own. I visited it often that fall with my brother: topophilia.
One day there was a neon ribbon around it. The next day, there were some forest
management people. We spoke to the man in the truck, tried to reason with him. This is
my tree, I told him, you cant cut it down. Its mine, I claimed it at school. Do you see?
We thought that if we explained this attachment to him well enough, he couldnt do it.
You wouldnt wring a puppys neck right in front of its kid, right?
I got the pint-sized equivalent of Im just trying to do my job, maam. Hot tears in our eyes,
tension inside our cotton-candy sweaters and second-hand dresses and gumboots my
brother and I, we kicked the tires of the truck:
BAM
BAM
BAM
Black rubber with orange soles thumped solidly on the harder black rubber of the wheels.
It was no use. The tree was bound for the chipper.
Mashup of two ads on the 10 De Lorimer bus, Socit de transport de Montral. The middle line is
a PSA promoting fair and non-violent treatment of the drivers. The top and middle are by a
commission supporting truth in advertising.
19

The 2005 film Grizzly Man is woven together and narrated in lush German-accented
English by Werner Herzog. It is a record of the life and death of Timothy Treadwell,
who went to live with the grizzly bears in Katmai National Park in Alaska, what he calls
Bear Country, and was eventually killed and eaten by a grizzly bear. Rumor has it that on
Treadwells severed arm his writstwatch was still ticking. Tickticktickticktick. It weaves
together Herzogs commentary, interviews with people Treadwell knew, and selections
from the over 100 hours of footage taken by Treadwell himself in the wilderness of his
interactions with the grizzlies, who he named individually.
It is this footage that catches in my throat the most, Treadwells desperate desire for
kinship, to find friends in the bears. During a period of drought, we see Treadwell
ensconced in the blue-green halflight of his tent. We need more rain! he shouts at the sky.
Melissa is eating her babies! Listening to my field recordings again is not exactly the same. Is
there a faint undertone of Treadwell in my voice, though? Is it just in that strange
halftone of talking to yourself and talking to others that happens when you record audio
or video in a private place, the private thoughts that might one day become public? Or is
there a breath of the romantic I can hear too?
Herzogs voiceover: I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony,
but chaos, hostility, and murder.20 I know, yes: it is dangerous to project.
Of Sierra Club Founder Thomas Muir, Anna Tsing writes: Muirs opponents weakened
him by portraying his cause as feminine.21 I see the power in the allocation and
segregation of the river and industry and tourism, the control of my walking feet between
them. In her Companion Species Manifesto, Harraway writes, Feminist inquiry is about
understanding how things work, who is in the action, what might be possible, and how
wordly actors might somehow be accountable to and love eachother less violently.22
This is not a love letter
Maybe though
a desire to hold myself accountable.
How do I tread the shoreline
between industry and presence?
Between reality and identification?
The city put up a sign:
vitez tout contact avec leau.
Grizzly Man, directed by Werner Herzog, Lion Gate Films, 2005.
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Natural Universals and the Global Scale, in Friction: An Ethnography of Global
Connection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 98.
22 Donna Harraway, The Companion Speices Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly
Paradigm, 2003), 7.
20
21