Ottawoctober
What does the soul of a city tell me?
“Every year the air smells like the cold and like the leaves and like the heater just came on in somebody else’s house. Every year the turn in the year smells like all the turns in all the years before it. Comparison is the thief of joy, but here we are in it again. Comparison and remembrance is all the calendar has to offer, and all it knows how to do. Here we are in every October before this October, and here we are in this one.”
This week, the magnificent Helena Fitzgerald put out an essay called simply “october,” and I haven’t read anything so perfectly heartbreaking and true in a long time. Here, you should read it, too. I’ll wait.
Okay look, it’s alright if you don’t read it right away, I don’t blame you. It’s wonderful, but it’s also deeply upsetting, and enough things are like that already this October.
Don’t get me wrong: it’s a stunner, this October, a really beautiful one so far, especially here in Ottawa where I landed this past Sunday night, after a drive from Halifax across three provinces and into a fourth that took two days, one styrofoam container of New Brunswick poutine, an astounding Americano made by a very handsome tattooed man who spoke not a word of English in a strange coffeehouse in Riviere-du-Loup that had a lot of pictures of angels and demons on the walls but no chairs in its vast room of tables and didn’t really seem like it should be open yet, a single passed-out night in a nice but weirdly loud hotel, at least seven random gas station bathrooms, and two shockingly adequate breakfast sandwiches from Tim Horton’s.
The colors were changing spectacularly under cerulean skies and wispy clouds that seemed designed to provoke melancholy, especially up through the Bas-St-Laurent region of Quebec, above the City. Here in Ottawa the skies have been spotless and the temperature the Platonic ideal of “crisp.”
The neighborhood we’ve picked is charming enough: little houses close together, pride flags waving, little kids being periodically walked on an octopus of leashes, ambling down the sidewalk at the speed of preschoolers. The apartment is small but pretty, little tchochkes everywhere and the warm colors of October on the living room walls. Everything should be wonderful but it somehow isn’t.
“‘Tomorrow, everything will be good again’ is often a real promise, one that can be kept, one that comes true. It’s just that it means only that: Tomorrow everything might be good again, but after that you’re on your own. Fall smells like fall. I take the old sweaters that used to be Lee’s down from the closet, the dry-cleaner paper inside them crunching like bright autumn leaves. Everything is good again for an hour, for five minutes, for a day and a half. Everything is beautiful again just long enough for it to feel like I’ve solved it, and then it disappears. The dark rushes back in early, coming for the afternoon. I try to love it; I succeed at loving it; loving it changes nothing. Here I am again, up against the same October, accumulating the text of all the other Octobers.”
I asked my partner earlier, what is it? Why does this place feel so weird? We’re recovering from Covid still and that’s real; we fell in love with Halifax and that’s real, too. I was worried that I was idealizing Halifax, but if anything, arriving in this capital city with its skyscrapers and more reserved strangers has shown me that love at first sight for a place can be real, because so can indifference at first sight.
This afternoon I said, remember the first thing that happened after we arrived in Halifax? We’d just moved into the lovely place we had there, when we got a call that a contractor would need to come in and investigate a leak in the lower unit. We’d just endured the stress of uprooting ourselves from our homes for a semester, crossing a country border with half of our worldly possessions stuffed into a Jetta and going to live for a month in a city we’d never even visited. A stranger was about to come into our place and start messing about with the pipes. And it was fine, I said. Totally fine! he agreed. The guy was sweet and innocuous, very helpful, and we learned what the Nova Scotia accent sounds like (very covered, round, and adorable, which could also describe a lot of the residents).
So why was this interaction we’d just had so off-putting?
We had just collected some squash from the woman who runs our Air BnB. She had us select from what she’d gathered in her garden, then threw in some garlic and an onion too. She asked us to shuffle cars so she could get out to a show tonight, and we had to park on an adjacent street, only to move it again once she was out. Her husband, or someone, had shown up for the evening and sort of introduced himself to me, mostly by guessing we were guests, then chatting awkwardly about a mysterious item he’d just picked from the trash. I introduced myself and he seemed taken aback, then recalled himself and told me his name.
The whole interaction was just weird in a way I couldn’t place, but had something in common with a lot of the interactions I’ve had in Ottawa so far. People seem polite, yet strangely cold. Slightly spaced out, like they’re a little high but don’t want you to know it, or worrying they’ve left the stove on. You offer your name and they don’t offer theirs back, or at least they hesitate, like they’ve already said too much. It’s a very odd thing, this quality I keep seeing, where the fear of imposing seems strong, but not as powerful as the compulsion to intrude.
I read a wonderful Reddit comment about this phenomenon, which essentially boils down to “in Ottawa, there’s no there there.” It’s a kind of constructed city, without an essence you can really pin down. The defining people are government workers, only there for that reason. As such, everything and everyone is sort of disconnected from place, not really part of anything larger. I got closer to defining it earlier today: a sense that whoever is talking to you is covering something up, and is sure that you are, too. It sucks the authenticity from interactions, and makes everything feel just a little off.
It’s all part of a vibe I’ve been trying to pin down for a few days now, since we’ve arrived. Halifax greeted us with an unexpected plumber, a broken phone, a giant orb-weaver and a field mouse running into our house at the same time, five masked minutes at a crappy party that almost burst my eardrums, and later, a case of Covid and a hurricane. We nevertheless felt nothing but fawning affection for the city we’d found ourselves in, and wept to leave it.
Here in Ottawa, a nice older lady offers us vegetables and we feel like something bad is about to happen.
But it’s been this way since we got here. The first night we went to a nearby restaurant to get a good meal and try to settle in, and the server was...drunk? High? Something was going on with her that was affecting both her physical coordination and her ability to keep our orders straight in her head, and she somehow simultaneously didn't give us great service and bothered us too much?
In the grocery store the next day a woman came up to me and said hi like she knew me, and I froze in my smile as one does who fears imminent proselytization. Instead she enlisted me (a very tall person) to help her reach something up high, which turned out to be hanging a flyer on the bulletin board. She asked my name at the end but then didn't introduce herself. I felt aggressively befriended for a purpose, then dropped once the transaction was complete.
Here in the little second floor apartment the floors have been covered up with that awful gray laminate except in the bedrooms, which retain some charming, scuffed-up hardwood. The refrigerator buzzes very loudly, and is missing a rail on the inside of the door. The drawers don’t close properly, and there are no baking pans. There are plenty of shelves around, but they’re all covered with the kind of knick-knacks you find in a house that’s been staged by a realtor, none of which serve any purpose, as, say, a candle or a stack of coasters might, particularly when your side table is of the varnished wood variety. The bathroom door is an inch too short for me to walk through without stooping. There are no closets in the bedrooms.
It’s all little, niggling stuff, but it niggles nonetheless. So far Ottawa feels itchy, like a sweater you keep taking out every year when it gets chilly like this, wear once and then remember that you hate how it feels. You put it back in the closet and do it all over again next October. It’s too expensive to just get rid of.
I’m told that maybe the city will grow on me, and we haven’t explored much yet. We’ve been settling in, trying to find some comfort. Tomorrow we’ll go across the river to Gatineau, Quebec and see what the rock gym is like. We’ll explore the sights of the city, get out and try to meet people. We’ll go to our French classes. Perhaps we’ll warm to it all, decide the sweater just needs some understanding, maybe a turtleneck underneath. We’re trying to be open to possibility.
But also right now I miss Halifax, with its genuine, cheery people, its grit, its scrappiness and neighborly style. And I remind myself: it’s all information, and it’s okay to notice and trust how it feels.