Seeking Moonrise

Last night, according to the news, was the Strawberry Supermoon. The sun set around 8:45pm, and the moon rose around 9:30pm. It wasn’t very cloudy last night, but we didn’t see the moon rise.

Even if we had gone out to look, we probably would have looked in the wrong direction. One thing that is perplexing to les nouveaux here is that Montréal and the surrouding regions defy simple Euclidean geography. For example, to go from Montréal-Est to Montréal-Norde, you have to travel south-west, or to travel from Montréal West to Montréal-Est, you have to travel almost due north.

The reason, as made clear by this map stolen from Bing Maps (fair use! fair use!), is that the Île Montréal is an irregular shape that doesn’t align very well with the cardinal points, and the city and streets were all developed in alignment with the St. Lawrence. Streets run southwest-to-northeast or southeast-to-northwest. Everything’s around 45º off the grid.

Where I grew up, it was easy to identify directions. The mountains were always visible, and were always to the north. Later, I moved to the coast, where the ocean was always to the west (unless you’re in Malibu). Here, a similar scheme using the river is doomed to failure — the river is in every direction!

I’m certainly not the first to make these observations, nor the most articulate (if you don’t mind profanity, this video by Paige Saunders does a great job). The conclusion I’ve reached is to just go with le courant and use the fake directions. Just as the magnetic pole has been drifting and magnetic north has gone somewhat southeast of where it was (from a North American perspective), we just have to consider that in Montréal cardinal north has drifted southwest. Better yet, we can just dispense with absolute directions and use widely-visible landmarks like Mont Royal, the Olympic Stadium, Downtown, La Grande Roue, and the Jacques Cartier bridge to figure out where things are in a relative way.