A midwinter night's dreams (Part 2)

And the aftermath

This is the second installment of my two part account of surviving Montreal’s Nuit Blanche; a dusk-till-dawn party in eight city neighborhoods, hosted in the middle of winter each year. CLICK HERE to read the first installment of the story.

1:10am: When I first committed to attending Nuit Blanche and realized that the events are spread across eight Montreal neighborhoods, I had aspired to visit all of them. But upon reviewing the schedule, I realized this would be impossible. The majority of the festival events end by 2am, which means that if you’re looking to stay up for the entire night, your late night wanderings are going to be limited to the nightlife hubs that are cranking on most Saturday nights of the year. And most of these hubs are in the city’s downtown area. Still, there are outliers, and the one in Villeray that I’m heading for is a collaborative perfume-making workshop, hosted at a loft next to the Autoroute 40 highway. I’m going to the city’s edge. I wonder how many are taking the same route.

1:11am: A lot, as it turns out. My first train ride on the green line, from Place des Arts station to Berri UQAM station, is typically crowded. But when I transfer to the orange line at Berri UQAM, I find myself standing on a platform with hundreds of festivalgoers awaiting the northbound train toward Jean Talon station (my final transfer stop.) And when that train pulls into the station and opens its doors, I am literally carried into the car by the throngs of festgoers. There are so many of us crammed into the train that grabbing onto the support bars isn’t even necessary. We’re literally holding each other up. This would be a nightmare for commuters, but on a festival night, it’s kind of sweet!

1:40am: From the Jean Talon station, where the crowds dissipated, the blue line train takes me just a couple of stops north to the end of the line at Saint-Michel Station. Is there a more satisfyingly eerie feeling than heading for “the end of the line” on a long train journey? That vibe is definitely cranked up for Nuit Blanche, because as soon as I emerge from the station entrance with a sparse handful of travelers, I’m surprised to find myself standing on a long drag of a street flanked by gas stations and apartment complexes, with no apparent signs of festivity. The loft where the perfume workshop is being held is 10 minutes away by foot, and the only hint that something curious is happening in the vicinity is a trio of 20-somethings walking that away and huddling together for warmth. Nothing about this area screams, “Walk here at night!” and yet, being out here feels good. Because on most nights of the year, this is where art and creativity takes shape in most major cities. In lofts and studios on the edge of town; not in the downtown high-rises that most visitors know. We have entered the mine.

1:52am: Thanks to Montreal’s pedestrian infrastructure, crossing beneath the highway is no problem. A crosswalk with a traffic signal is our bridge to a looming building that contains many loft apartments. From the outside it looks like a storage facility but the number on the front door confirms that this is where the perfume workshop is going down. But as I step inside, relieved to be toasty again and hoping that the workshop will include plenty of boreal essential oils, I see the three 20-somethings backtracking toward the door with glum expressions. The doors to the loft space are closed and a man sitting at a table nearby lets me down gently; the workshop has reached its full capacity. No perfume for you. While Montreal is very much a bilingual city, my French isn’t good enough for persuasion in a snafu like this, and I don’t want to be the whiny American cajoling the guy to make an exception for me. So I head back into the night.

2:00am: But I’m not heading back to the downtown nightclub hub just yet. Earlier, as I pored over the Nuit Blanche events, I was intrigued to see Plaza St. Hubert advertised as a place to wander throughout the night. Plaza St. Hubert is a unique shopping mall in Montreal’s Little Italy that runs the length of St. Hubert Street. The street itself is an open-air thoroughfare, but the sidewalks are covered with extensive shade canopies and the mall businesses are eclectic, from bookstores and bars, to lingerie shops and wedding gown designers (often side by side!) The festival app seemed to suggest that Plaza St. Hubert would be decorated for Nuit Blanche. Curious, I hop back on the blue line and I return to Jean Talon station, which is just a few steps away from the mall.

2:25am: My expectations may have gotten ahead of themselves, when I pictured the mall festooned with neon lights and ice sculptures for Nuit Blanche. But what I find when I step onto St. Hubert Street is arresting and strangely beautiful in its own way. The mall businessses, closed or open, are largely illuminated. The long shade canopy has a distinctly alien look to it. Occasionally I come across a piece of artwork that’s been attached to the support beams—say, a painting of a pink comb with the head of an elephant—but these temporary installations are almost beside the point. The mall itself is a work of art, in its shape and design, and getting to experience it with just a few wanderers on a winter night feels special. This is a genuine Nuit Blanche surprise.

3:00am: As I approach Beaubien station, near the opposite end of the mall from where I began, I’m suddenly hit by two colliding waves. The first is shivers—the logical result of spending over half an hour walking outside in 0-degree weather. And the other wave is fatigue. On the train back to the downtown area (much less crowded than my earlier ride) my head is beginning to droop and my mind is drifting. It’s time to crank the nitro for the final 2-3 hours of Nuit Blanche and conveniently, this creeping exhaustion has coincided with the most intense chapter of the night; good old Montreal clubbing!

3:25am: Usually, when I go to a club, I like to be a participant; dressed properly, head banging, hips thrusting, fist pumping, etc. In my 20s, I could have done this at 3:25am on Nuit Blanche. But now I am in my mid-30s. I don’t have the energy to be a Montreal club participant at this hour. And my fleece and wool layering system definitely won’t qualify as dressing the part for these clubs, where fishnets, leather, and glow-in-the-dark jewelry are staples. So I decide that tonight, I will be an observer instead. I pull out my “MEDIA” lanyard and badge, provided to me by the Nuit Blanche organizers, and after showing the credential to a bouncer, I open the door to Circus Afterhours.

3:26am: A small cascade of melted salty snow is trickling down the steps of the club. Steam fogs my glasses almost instantly. The walls are thumping and flashing with panels of neon lights as red lasers cut across the heads of the nightclubbers who are convened around the main stage and the bar. I realize, pretty quickly, that half of the people here are probably on ecstasy or ketamine, and all of them are younger than I am. The only person who appears to be close to my age is the inevitable single man with a mustache standing in the corner, holding a G&T and nodding along to the beat; the guy with big, “Hello, fellow kids,” energy. I’ve joined his company now. It’s humbling.

4:05am: This is where things get hazy. I remember walking through a series of wintery arches at a park near Circus Afterhours. I’m not sure if I boarded the metro again, to make it to my last stop of the night, but I do recall passing a Tim Horton’s and looking through the window to see at least 50 teens and 20-somethings inside. Many of them were decked out in goth makeup as they ripped into cruellers and Timbits (munchkins, for my fellow American readers.) It crosses my mind that I might actually be dying.

4:30am: When I step into the MTELUS concert hall on St. Laurent Street, I go straight to the bar and I order a whiskey shot. It’s the equivalent of the adrenaline shot to the heart in Pulp Fiction—a desperate dose of liquid energy to stave off collapse for the final hour of Nuit Blanche. On the stage, the dancers and DJs of Moonshine—an afro diasporic music collective whose parties have become a sensation in Montreal and abroad—are keeping the action going until 6am with thunderous sounds and moves. The place is packed with Nuit Blanche adventurers who all seem to be overcome by lethargy. There’s not as much movement among the crowd now; it’s a sea of bobbing heads. Up on the balcony level, there are scores of abandoned beer cans and plastic cups; the detritus of those who called it a night. Maybe it’s the smell of all those half empty drinks or the flashing of the strobe from the stage, but my brain is speaking.

It’s time for bed.

5:28am: In the end, I catch the earliest rays of light on the St. Lawrence River from the window of my hotel room, two seconds before flopping into bed and barely pulling the duvet over myself before falling into deepest, most lumbering sleep I’ve had in years.

THE AFTERMATH (EPILOGUE)

The morning after was less wretched than I expected—probably because I only had three drinks between dinner at O’Thym and going to bed. (Again, I am in my mid-30s.) Meeting for a post-Nuit Blanche brunch is a ritualistic coda to the event; a chance to reconvene and unpack gossip and exploits while shoveling nourishing food into your gullet. I rejoined my fellow journalists at Kamuy, chef Paul Toussaint’s mouthwatering pan-Carribbean restaurant near the festival plaza, where the brunch included savory root vegetable stew, beef brisket, and quite possibly the best jerk drumsticks I’ve ever eaten. Another proven recovery ritual for many Nuit Blanche veterans is slipping on a swimsuit and sweating out the toxins in the saunas, steam rooms, and thermal pools of Bota Bota; a spa on a boat that’s anchored on the waterfront. It was here, sitting in one of those pools and gazing at the frozen city, when my throat started feeling tickly.

I managed to drive back to Boston before my symptoms escalated into COVID-19; a much milder and quicker case than my first brush with the bug back in 2023, but still cause to self-isolate and live on chicken soup and Goldfish crackers (courtesy of my dear parents) for a sniffly 5-6 days. And I regret to admit that during those 5-6 days, I read and watched way too much national news. In particular, I followed the disturbing story of Trump’s unhinged fixation with using tariffs to wreck the Canadian economy, as a pretext to annexing the country; a fixation of a diseased mind. This is something that Canadians are treating with deadly seriousness, as they should, and Americans are just starting to realize that 1: Trump isn’t joking, and 2: We shouldn’t treat this like a joke. I couldn’t process it—experiencing a night of collective joy and curiosity hosted by our friends and neighbors to the north, and then heading back home and listening to our sadistic president subjecting our friends and neighbors to psychological abuse.

Like I said in Part 1 of this story, I needed Nuit Blanche in a more spiritual way than I had realized when I drove to Montreal for the festival. To spend a whole night walking around the city with tens of thousands of other revelers—in the middle of winter, or rather, in the middle of this winter—is to defiantly, desperately, and proudly Rage.

Rage.

Against the dying of the light.