The Habs and The Hab Nots

Posted on April 1, 2015 under Storytelling with one comment

A bit grainy… but you get the picture

Do you remember the days when news was news and weather was weather?   Nowadays, weather is news.  With every tropical depression or every flake of snow that hints at falling to the ground, the newshounds sound the warning.  These weather prognosticators follow the forecasts in breathless anticipation of impending Armageddon.  Farmers rely on the weather.  Fishermen rely on the weather.   Why, then, are the rest of us subjected to 24 hour a day coverage when Mother Nature does what Mother Nature does?   Because Canadians are addicted to weather and pity help the day that the media stops reporting it.  What would we have to talk about, now that most of our engagement with other humans comes in the form of hand-held mobile technology?

It seems that every winter storm that drops more than 25cm of snow is dubbed “the storm of the century”!   Well I am here to report that my friends and I witnessed a once in a century storm some forty years ago.   I can actually pinpoint the date with great certainty.

It was March break in 1971 when four of us boarded a train in Antigonish, headed for Montreal to catch a Habs game and some culture.  Okay.  We were headed to Montreal to party and go to a Montreal Canadiens hockey game.  Our grandfather, a retired Montreal city councillor, had arranged tickets to the hockey game and a place of refuge at his home.  We chose to sit up for the entire trip as befitted our status and means at the time.  By the time we reached Truro, an hour and a half from our home town, the air was blue with cigarette smoke and the beer was flowing.

Sometime during the night in the wilds of Northern New Brunswick it started to snow.  At Levis, Quebec the next morning the tracks were impassable.  We hadn’t slept much as we had discovered the bar car when our supply of beer and rum had been depleted.  By now “the Storm of the Century,” as it would be dubbed later, was in full fury.  Heavy snow and hurricane force winds brought the region to a standstill.  However, after a lengthy delay, the rail liner resumed its trek and pulled into the bowels of Central Station later in the day.

Chaos.  Pure and simple.  Thousands of people were stranded.  Those who had arrived from points east and west had nowhere to go and those hoping to leave the city by train were stranded as well.  Let’s just say that our foursome was just a bit on the seedy side after small doses of sleep and large doses of alcohol.

One floor above the station, at street level, stood the venerable Queen Elizabeth hotel which could be accessed without going outside.  There was really nowhere else to go so we followed the throngs and entered the lobby of the hotel.  It was utter pandemonium as people jostled each other in impossibly long lineups, desperately trying to acquire lodging at any price.  I think our luggage was in green garbage bags so we didn’t have much bargaining power.  We spotted a pay phone and placed a call to our grandfather.

I am not the most religious person in the world, so I rarely use the word miracle except for, say, “Miracle Whip”.  Grandpa had anticipated our problem long before we arrived in the city and had booked a suite at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel.  He told us to proceed directly to the “Executive check in”.  All of the other check in lineups had hundreds of people in them.  There were only a few well-dressed business types in ours.  When it was our turn the attendant looked at us and probably wondered if we were the maintenance crew or a group of street people.  We all had excessively long hair, wore tattered blue jeans and smelled like a bar at closing time.

No one has ever offered before or since to have someone carry my garbage bag to my room in a hotel.  You can just imagine the withering stares we were getting from the rest of the irritated masses.  We respectfully declined the bell hop service and took the elevator to our rooms.  Having consumed all of the sandwiches we had made for the trip we, of course, ordered room service.

When we awoke the next morning, the only things moving on St. Catherine Street, the major artery of downtown Montreal, were a handful of snowmobiles.  The combination of a heavy snowfall along with hurricane-force winds had created drifts that were two stories high.  There were two major news events on the television as we dined on eggs benedict.  Our Prime Minister at the time, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, had married the much younger Margaret Sinclair the day before in North Vancouver.  However, the much bigger story was that the hockey game at the Montreal Forum set for that day had been cancelled.  This was the first time a game had been called off in fifty years.

While we were disappointed that we would miss the game, at least we had the 20 hour journey back home on the train to look forward to.  We eventually made it to Grandpa’s and, to the eternal gratefulness of the train passengers; we were able to do our laundry before boarding the train for the return trip.

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