The Weight of Air
When I was five years old, I got whooping cough, an illness reminiscent of the Middle Ages. Back then, families procreated like it was life insurance, making back-ups for plague-stricken kids who died in the absence of epidemiology and vaccines. I missed a few weeks of school in kindergarten, watching the bus drive off without me as I sat in the living room wearing pink PJs covered in smiley yellow suns until lunchtime. Truth is, I was happy to stay home with my mom. She doted on me, brought me snacks in bed, rubbed Vicks on my chest and told me to open wide for spoonfuls of cough syrup trying hard to taste like cherry and missing the mark, masking sharp bitterness under a sickly sweet layer. These days were blissful, except for the coughing fits that made me sound like I smoked a pack a day. My mom claims I emphasized the ailment by coughing into a Fisher-Price microphone. I still have a deep need to be heard.
At night, I would wake up choking on my cough, panicking as my lungs hungered for air. If I close my eyes and go back to my parents’ dark bedroom where I bunked for weeks—probably disrupting any scrap of affection they had left—I can hear my mom’s voice. She told me to breathe in slowly, trying to calm my hysterical, confused state of half-asleep. She would carry me to the bathroom, sit me on the edge of the bathtub and turn on the hot water full-blast so that vapour filled my nostrils and snaked through my airways, hydrating them gently, helping me catch my breath. The drops in their gaseous state soothed my lungs’ irritated tissue, an elastic lining that expands with each inhale. My muscles relaxed in the warm air. I calmed down as my mother rubbed my back in the bathroom’s thick fog.
My insides remained scary afterwards. When winter air, sharpened by cold, leaves me breathless, I wonder if those weeks of respiratory infection left scars in my young lungs. Suspicion of the invisible lodged itself deep in my tissues. A few years after that 15th century-worthy episode, my father crammed my two brothers and I, along with our toys and suitcases, into his minivan, before heading northwest. He and my mom were getting divorced, and it was our first trip without her. My father wanted to show us his homeland, Abitibi, maybe so he could fill in some blanks for the part of his story that had come before her, maybe so he could remember them, too. This hilly region of Quebec has been disfigured by hungry mining and forestry industries. They twisted its woods into monocultures and split open its earth for metals, marking the landscape like plastic surgeries gone wrong.
My insides remained scary afterwards. When winter air, sharpened by cold, leaves me breathless, I wonder if those weeks of respiratory infection left scars in my young lungs. Suspicion of the invisible lodged itself deep in my tissues.
My dad showed us around this region, stopping at some of its thousands of lakes so we could dive in. I was afraid of their silty bottoms where tall tales lurked in the muck with the dead leaves and fish bones. Watering holes were surrounded by boreal forest so dense it was nearly impassable, up to the edges of clear-cuts where it abruptly turned barren. Used to southeastern Quebec’s mixed forests, I’d never seen so many conifers—deciduous trees were as rare as anglophones like my mom. English crept into local parlances regardless: we swam in a lake nicknamed Crystal and another that dips into Ontario, where the sand was as pink as my Barbie’s dresses. Leaving those pastel shores, we saw a great grey owl, calmly perched on a fence post. Its yellow eyes were fixed on our minivan as we’d slowed to watch the bird. Its flat face followed us, turning 180 degrees as we passed, and I turned too, nose pressed against the glass.
Sitting on our dark cabin’s couches upholstered with scratchy brown and orange wool from the ‘70s, my brothers told me stories about black bears looking for blueberries who would settle for a little sister. They said the cabin was a spaceship that flew up into the sky at night and fell into a deep hole underground, which is why moss grew on the roof. In my mother’s absence, fear infiltrated me like soothing water droplets. During hikes at the base of a stout rounded mountain, Mont Chaudron, my lagging pace kept me a few metres behind the boys. I conjured the massive shadow of a bear out of the corner of my eye, convinced that its heavy, hungry body was the source of branches cracking along the trail.
After a week of swimming, walking in the forest, and fishing, my father took us to his brother’s house in Rouyn-Noranda, their hometown. We walked to Chadbourne Avenue where a modest house with an orange sheet metal roof had long sheltered my father and the seven other members of his family. The house seemed too small for all of them, but solid, honest in its promise to protect them against the elements. But there are things even the sturdiest of houses can’t do. There are substances endowed with the power of invisibility, like water light enough to float and slip into lungs.
My father told us about the forests surrounding the town, where mine waste was dumped, where he and his siblings used to play. The orange sludge looked like the sticky goo I got from a 25-cent vending machine at the grocery store. He talked with childhood wonder about this region colonized for its resources, much later than our southeastern home on the border with Vermont. Mining companies recruited immigrants fleeing the great European wars of the 20th century, when the cost of life was low, sending them to work in dangerous conditions—292 people died in the region’s mines between 1925 and 1950. Though safety in mining infrastructures improved over time, the air in Rouyn has remained invisibly heavy.
But there are things even the sturdiest of houses can’t do. There are substances endowed with the power of invisibility, like water light enough to float and slip into lungs.
As we criss-crossed the town’s grey streets, my father pointed one of his big carpentry-swollen fingers at the Horne Foundry, where copper is heated to 1,200 °C. The two lights on its chimney shined like eyes watching over Rouyn, as poisoned smoke puffed out of its head. Inorganic arsenic expelled during the copper smelting process adds its weight to the air before slipping into respiratory tracts and thirst-quenching water. Here, babies are born smaller than in the rest of the province and obstructive pulmonary diseases soar freely. The foundry gave life to this community before misshaping it and taking it away.
Arsenic is a carcinogen, a metalloid packed with deadly properties we’ve known about long before any other substance, classified as such since 1980. Exposure to it in excessive amounts causes metabolic biotransformation, meaning it weaves itself into DNA, restructures cells and tricks bodies into malignancy. When they break, our genes forget how not to kill us. The foundry’s toxic emissions were forgiven by the provincial government because the structure was built long before the standards that regulate it were drafted. This beast with molten insides was erected in Quebec’s Wild West era, when mining companies were cowboys lassoing in precious metals. The Horne Foundry is a reminder that it’s not over.
In 2021, a report stated that arsenic levels spat out by the foundry into the surrounding atmosphere clocked in at 87 nanograms per cubic metre, 29 times more than the limit established by the Québec government. This concentration is also way higher than the 15 nanograms beyond which it has repercussions on children’s neurological development. The media raised hell about Rouyn’s air quality, but reductions to hit a healthy target of three nanograms have yet to get on the books at Glencore, the multinational that owns the foundry. Their headquarters are in Switzerland, a high-altitude, far-away land where the air is light and fresh. The Québec government and Glencore continue to negotiate about nanograms in the air they don’t breathe as we count our dead. The Horne Foundry remains the beating heart of Rouyn, holding plenty of its residents hostage with a financial grip, and all of them at its mercy with pollutants.
In 2017, my father died from malignant spots in his lungs. It’s hard to definitively identify their cause, between him working in construction for decades, often doing carpentry without a mask, and his predilection for smoking joints as he stoked the fire of our basement’s wood stove. But those spots also marked the respiratory tracts of two of his sisters, only one of which is still alive. The spots dainty as polka dots spread outwards, became a tumour in my father’s liver, and eventually cancer that metastasized all the way into his bones. During his last days, I brought him Kleenex so that he could spit out lumps of mucous membrane detached from his lungs. Illness had eaten away at the rest, had swallowed up his long and strong muscles, leaving his legs covered in paper-thin skin, limbs we lifted gently to turn him onto his side in bed. Cancer had also gnawed at his mind, jumbling up time, seasons, and names in his brain, like a computer shutting down. He jumped from the boreal forest to the leafy woods behind our house in the Eastern Townships between two laboured breaths.
In 2021, I returned to Rouyn for the Festival de Musique Émergente (FME) with a Mason jar in my suitcase. It was filled with some of my father’s ashes, his malignant crushed bones. I wanted to bring a piece of him back to this land he loved. As I walked towards the house with an orange roof, hesitation grew with each step and a knot tied up my throat. I was moving away from the chimney that marks the city—a Québec-style Eiffel Tower emblem—but I still felt its presence. The house seemed even smaller than the first time, suffocating. The Glencore website’s landing page hosts a photo of Rouyn at sunset, the sky behind the chimney a shade of orange bright as the fires burning inside and the sheet metal roof on Chadbourne Avenue. The house was surrounded by air that felt as heavy as the weight on my chest when I realized that more than half of my family members who lived there were dead.
The next night was the last of the FME, dedicated to the region’s long-standing love of metal music, a natural pairing for the land’s geology. The hardcore band Tumours took the stage. Frontman Simon Turcotte came out in a wheelchair and hospital gown. The former employee of the Horne Foundry abruptly left his job in 2015 after pain started shooting up his leg. It was caused by a malignant tumour in his soft tissue. His leg ended up being amputated, and he pumped ensuing anger into his music aptly described as sludge-punk-hardcore. He yelled lyrics about the industry that stole his limb, trying to raise awareness among his fellow citizens to the fact that the foundry could do the same to them. “It’s not a fight between the foundry and its employees against idealistic dream-peddlers,” Turcotte wrote on a Facebook group that strives in vain to improve mining laws. “It’s a fight between the working class and a gigantic company that prioritizes its stakeholders’ profits (all of whom are very, very far away from toxic emissions and cancer risks) before the health of its workers and the people who live in the factory’s vicinity.”
The house was surrounded by air that felt as heavy as the weight on my chest when I realized that more than half of my family members who lived there were dead.
I left Abitibi for the second time with a hardened heart, armoured by metal molten at a high temperature so it could become indestructible, poisoned lightly in the process. The Mason jar of ashes had remained in my suitcase, still full. I didn’t want to leave another piece of my father in this town that had already taken so much of him. I have no desire to return to its streets filled with ghosts trudging around with copper shackles.
But fumes from that place seem determined to get their pound of flesh. In 2023, the Boreal Forest was engulfed in record flames. The largest biome on Earth started burning during our hottest season on record. I fell asleep with my bedroom window open during the night of St-Jean-Baptiste, lulled by Québec beer. I woke up choking, desperately gasping as Montréal recorded the worst air quality in the world. Outside, orange light pierced through smoke that had drifted south from forest fires, illuminating the hot sidewalks. Abitibi had come to choke me with an invisible grip.
Like many fellow Montréalers, I’d assumed I was safe from climate change in this city built around one of the small Monteregian mountains, protecting our homes from rising sea levels. But the air leaves us with few places to hide. Smoke infiltrated our island, twisted around our streets like a lake monster that’s impossible to catch. It drew lines between classes as it slithered, as people like me holed up with AC units and air purifiers, while many had no choice but to breathe in.
For a week, I feared sleep, afraid of waking up short of breath, far from the bathroom made foggy by my mother. The forest was no longer a benevolent filtrating lung. It had quickly turned into a diseased one that made me cough up a sludge-like substance into Kleenex. As each season grows warmer than the last, I wait for the creature watching from the edge of the forest, waiting for me to close my eyes. I wait to feel its burning breath on my neck, my chest. I wait to feel its teeth bite into my flesh, break my ribs, and devour my lungs. Pain will open my eyes. I’ll try to breathe. I might succeed, as my vision gets lost in a fog growing thicker.
