When I lived in Montreal, I had a lot of bad days. I was broke, even while working full time as an unemployed writer.
Fortunately, the city offers an affordable cure. Whenever I had a bad day, I walked up the mountain.
Mount Royal isn't much of a mountain. It's a big wooded hill in the middle of the city. But from the summit you can see the whole island, and the walk up always cleared my head.
The walkway doesn't climb so much as wander. It switches back and forth across the slope, so gently you hardly feel the grade.
That experience of clarity and rejuvenation is the result of careful design. The park was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect behind NYC Central Park. Olmsted wanted a slow climb, and he opposed any shortcut that would rush people to the top and skip the clearings, vistas, and tributary trails he'd laid out along the way.
Then, near the summit, the trees open up and the whole city is below you: downtown, the St Lawrence river, the bridges—all at once.
That climax was why I went. From up there, problems that had filled my week shrunk to the size of a city block on a road play rug.
You may recall my undergraduate thesis, on skyscrapers in 1920s American fiction. One thing I took from those novels was how the new towers enabled a new way of thinking. Stay in the city, and you’re a cog in the machine; get above the city, and you can see it at a glance. Once you can see the whole system, you can reassess where you stand in it.
When F. Scott Fitzgerald climbed to the roof of the new Empire State Building, he saw the limits of New York, which had otherwise seemed endless from the street. Beyond its edges, on every side, lay open country.
The same thing happens when you write.
