Yisroel Besser relives three days sans power in Montreal

Wednesday, Erev Pesach.

Frost on Erev Pesach isn’t unusual in Montreal, and some years fresh snow falls softly on the bi’ur chometz fires. It’s not a big deal here; people go about their business largely disregarding the weather.

Just before Pesach this year, when it started to rain — a slushy, weird sort of drizzle — there were the inevitable pictures sent by friends in Florida: cobalt skies and gently waving palm trees and “there’s still time to hop on a plane lol.”

The drizzle turned into a freezing rain, a peculiar mix that stayed icy as it fell. It was interesting, but who had time to sightsee on Erev Pesach — there’s always one more trip to the grocery store, did someone pick up the pants from the cleaners, and wouldn’t a nap be nice?

I happened to be in line at One Stop Kosher (again!) when the power went out, but no one made a big deal of it. It would go on in no time, we assumed. The tech-savvy ones checked the reliable Hydro Quebec app, which informed us that power would return within two hours.

I headed home, trying to pretend this was a regular blackout, but it was clear that it wasn’t. There was something faintly eerie about the app’s initial picture of the stricken areas, as if someone had taken a pencil and tried to perfectly partition off Montreal’s frum neighborhoods and ignore the rest of the city.

Something weird was going on.

As the day progressed, I stood on the porch and looked out at what appeared to be a Gadi Pollack illustration of the Makkos come to life, complete with creepy audio.

The freezing rain was not landing on the ground, but rather, coating each individual branch of the large maples lining the streets with layers of ice, as if a collector had put each branch in a protective case to keep it whole. It was beautiful. For about 30 seconds. And then we heard the first snap and just like that, a large branch — 15 feet long — simply snapped off the tree, unable to bear the weight of the icy coating. It fell to the ground, where it dented the hood of a car.

All down the block, people were moving their cars out of the shade of the trees, pulling into driveways, walking gingerly to avoid what was becoming a hail of falling branches.

Then a towering tree a few houses down — not a branch, but the tree itself — danced this way and that for a few moments, like a drunk person trying to find balance, and then it, too, toppled over, easily slicing a wire in two. Now the two wire halves were swinging back and forth over the slick, wet road.

Soon enough there were live wires all across the road, and city emergency crews arrived. They tried vainly to rope off roads and alleys, running yellow caution tape from private garbage cans so that the street looked like a construction site gone wrong.

My phone’s battery was at two percent when the shul email came in directing people not to go to shul on that night — leil hiskadesh hachag! — because of the danger posed by live wires, fallen trees, and total darkness in the streets. We were about to welcome Pesach in the dark.