The Blork Blog

I moved to Montreal in 1987 after having spent that summer in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Before that, I passed four years in the tiny town of Antigonish, Nova Scotia. As such, the buzz of the big city was quite a thrill when I arrived here.

There was much to explore, and many new things to discover — some of which I found rather odd and difficult to understand. For example, the phenomenon of people abandoning their bicycles at the end of the summer and leaving them locked to posts to rot over the winter.

It wasn’t just an occasional one here and there. They were all over the place, in various stages of decomposition. Seats missing, wheels gone, frames bent by sidewalk snowplows — downtown Montreal was apparently where old bicycles go to die. In the spring, patrols of municipal workers would snap the locks and carry away the carcasses, but soon the cycle of decomposition would start all over again

Being a small town boy, I couldn’t understand why people would do that. If you don’t want your bike anymore, you sell it to someone, or give it away. You don’t just lock it to a post and walk away — leaving behind a perfectly good U-lock as well. It didn’t make any sense.

So I started photographing them.

I put together a small set I called my “decomposition” series, which was supposed to be funny because the images were all rather carefully composed. Each had some kind of visual joke within the image, and they were all shot on 6×6 (aka, 2-1/4) film on a twin-lens Mamiya medium format camera. Some were printed, but unfortunately I didn’t have regular access to a decent darkroom at the time, so I never got much beyond 8×10 “work prints.” I was also broke then, so the best I could do was to put them in cheapo clip frames.

Those prints have been stuffed into various boxes over the years, and shuffled from address to address. Occasionally, they have hung on a wall for a few months. Last week while tidying up the basement I found four of the better ones and decided to scan them for the Monday Morning Photo Blog. The first one went up this week, and the remaining three will follow in the coming weeks.

In the process of scanning and preparing the images, however, I was struck by an odd realization. Back then, I could not wrap my head around the idea of abandoning a bicycle to the streets. However, I recently did exactly that.

Last spring I had the brilliant idea of buying a cheapo bicycle and leaving it locked up downtown. I figured I would ride the Metro from the South Shore to Berri-UQAM, where the bike was locked up, and then ride the bike the rest of the way to work. I figured I’d get a bit of exercise, plus I would have wheels for riding around after work and during lunch.

Great idea. Unfortunately, the clunker of a used bike that I bought was so unpleasant to ride that I only rode it five or six times. The bearings were shot so pedaling was jumpy, the seat was hard as a rock, and the steering and brakes were stiff and uncomfortable. The last time I rode it was probably August of 2004.

My intention was to bring it home before the snow fell and to see if I could fix it up over the winter, or at least to donate it to someone or some cause. It wasn’t exactly a top priority, so I kept forgetting about it. Finally, in January, I went to look. There it was, locked to a post, with a bent wheel and the seat missing.

I walked away. It never even occurred to me to photograph it. I haven’t been back to check on it since.