I wake up absurdly early, e-mail several friends over breakfast, and decide to climb the mountain. I pack my pockets with a notebook, a ballpoint pen, and a book (Thoreau's Walden and Other Writings), and carry my camera case over my shoulder. An icy blue sky, sunlight pouring through the streets like melted snow. Smoke clings to chimneys like my breath to my mouth. I migrate up the mountain, an animal with a magnet in my head.

I'm writing this on Mont-Royal, from a table in the Grand Chalet, on a monday morning. I passed about three people on the walk up here, the fewest I've ever seen. For a few moments, mine were the only eyes observing the city from the Kondiaronk Belvedere. I'll have to come here early more often; this place is best when it's full of emptiness. Statues of genuflecting squirrels in the rafters lend the chalet the air of a sylvan temple, and columns of sunlight tilt in through tall windows. While I write, a puddle of sunlight floats onto my foot; I can feel the heat of it through my hiking boot.

High on the walls of the Grand Chalet are a series of paintings illustrating the history of Montreal. Some of them are reproductions of old maps, and Newfoundland is included in a few, its outline occasionally misshapen. I love maps from an era when there was still terra incognita, the offending emptiness of uncharted land sometimes embellished with fictitious mountain chains or a strategically-placed cartouche. A time when cartography still had space for imagination.

Fortunately there is still uncharted territory in the map of Mont-Royal I keep in my head; I can explore here. I turn a corner I haven't turned before and find myself on a narrow trail, ski tracks threading a silver river between trees. I've brought a small mirrored ball with me in my camera case, thinking I might photograph it outside somewhere - I like the distortion of the spherical mirror, like a fisheye lens. It is a chime ball, and if I listen while I am walking I can hear it distantly jangling. I don't take many photos on days like this, as bitter air bites my fingers whenever I take my mittens off, but I like having the mirrorball just in case. I sometimes imagine that certain pretty passers-by will hear the faint sound of bells as they pass me on the trail, and wonder if perhaps there is something charming about this person who makes bells chime in their heads.

I am attuned to sounds today: the creaking of ice-rusted trees, or of my boots on the snow. The scrick, scrick of cross-country skis as someone passes me on the trail. Later, in the chalet, the rumble of sun-loosened snow sliding off the roof. A radio plays faintly in the canteen behind me, interrupted by the whirr of a cappuccino machine. The rustle of winter jackets, and the yips and yaps of clasps and velcro as other folks come in from the cold and unfasten their coats. I imagine sunlight must have a sound too, a frequency so high or low we cannot hear it - a kind of humming, or else the blustery sound a fire makes when you blow on it. The sound of something falling at the speed of light.

The sunbeam has climbed up to my face while I've been writing; I am illuminated. Alone at a table with an empty cup of cappuccino and an open notebook. There are a few other people here now, and as much as I enjoy my solitude, I sometimes wish one of them would venture to ask me what I'm writing.

Thoreau lived alone in a cabin by a pond, went for long walks in the woods, and spent his life writing notebooks and journals. I browse Walden for a while, and find this:

When I return to my house I find that visitors have been there and left their cards, either a bunch of flowers, or a wreath of evergreen, or a name in pencil on a yellow walnut leaf or chip. They who come rarely to the woods take some little piece of the forest into their hands to play with by the way, which they leave, either intentionally or accidentally.

When I return home I have four new e-mails; these are my walnut leaves. On the walk back I heard a knocking sound, and found a woodpecker with a red-feathered head - it let me get close and take photos, then eventually flew farther off. I spotted a cardinal, too, round and crimson, like a living Christmas ornament flitting from tree to tree. I photographed my hand holding a fallen leaf up to the sunlight, a latent map illuminated in its veins, its skin as pale as parchment.

My head feels clear, flush with fresh air. I come to the park to slow myself down, to walk and think, to collect thoughts and photographs, to listen to the sound of sunlight on snow. My brain, I think, is solar-powered.