Mont Tremblant is the place you keep arriving in, from multiple different angles and directions, and yet it looks different every time.
I’ve brought myself to the most dissociative place, yet one with a curious all-American cleanliness and cheeriness and something I can’t quite put my finger on … fictitiousness?
Don’t know if I’m in the village or the resort or in the town, but there’s many cyclists and a cool-as-a-cucumber 1970s Buick sedan.
This is a Canadian Dismaland for retirees and long-distance coach parties.
Pre-fab buildings with multi-coloured plastic roofs, expensive hotels with ski-in cocktail bars; upscale sportswear shops and overpriced ice cream parlours – with queues.
Human beings dawdling all over the faux-continental narrow pedestrian streets … how very quaint.
This is the first time on this trip I’ve stumbled across so many damn tourists … and it’s disconcerting, to the point of being mildly unsettling.
To regain some composure, I melt into Microbrasserie La Diable, located in the ‘Old Town’ – which presumably means it’s a little older than me. I take a bow for a croque monsieur and a homebrew beer, perched at the bar with all of the flies (who have briefly returned to haunt me from yesterday, in a sequel of sorts).
Sunshine terrace life lives outside, and I go there to avoid the discordant tour group with the bossy tour-group leader who desperately wants to be pub manager here.
In the bemusement park, everyone’s a tourist, and everything’s for sale.
It’s a smartphone farmyard this, where we’ll click ourselves under and the photographic evidence will be lost in the mire, or otherwise the deep winter snow.
All that will be left will be the fake plastic trees and the novelty wellies.
And everyone’s pretending to like this!
I escape on foot when no-one’s looking, shades-on to hide the shame and guilt of being here today, and to throw Interpol off the scent.
Walking past the redundant ascenseurs and the overly-elaborate water features and the fake multi-level square, where they’re preparing to put some visitors up on some scaffolding for a better view of nothingness.
I try my luck on the route up the hill past the empty chalets, over the nowhere bridge and up to the embarrassed luxury ski apartments.
Along the rubble path to the ski slopes and an admittedly decent view over the the town / village / resort / whatever-it-is, and the lake and the inevitable woodland beyond.
My big chair has arrived, and I’ll sing songs from it.
In an attempt to drag myself down, I end up getting higher, and this mountain is a reverse ski run, I swear.
Traipsing past the luge racers, stacked up still for winter, being readied to emerge from hibernation.
Other people now getting in my way, even though they’re several hundred yards ahead or behind me.
The man in the jilet-jaune on the ATV wearing his luxuriant French-Canadian moustache loud and proud.
I can’t compete with any of this … and I have to be somewhere to sit in the rain. The trees whisper ‘this way’; I think they’re having a laugh.
Beyond the forest, the cable cars swooshing past, up and down in continuous motion; some containing life, others sponsored by Corona.
Bugs everywhere!
I end up barrel-rolling down the whole mountainside, landing squarely on the BB King Stage, in the middle of the action, downtown. This is not the time for a song and a dance, and yet there’s already a crowd.
Over in another town, a powercut in the supermarket which does bring out the revellers for a sing-song. This quickly brings on light rain and then heavy showers – everyone out of tune, everyone out of step.
I surrender entirely to my retirement balcony on Lac Superieur, where I can just about hide under a warm front, with a cold one.
Dark clouds eventually pass, leaving the sky shaded in dusk colours, clearing the decks for a twilight saga.
This is my entertainment.
I will not go to the bar tonight.
An Outside World 