BURLINGTON — By the time the cloth came down Sunday morning, the atrium at Burlington Central Transit Hub smelled like coffee and wet boots, and more people were crammed along the mezzanine railing than the space was probably designed for.

'Les Marées / The Tides' stretches nearly forty feet across the transit hub's eastern concourse wall — a rippling, bilingual panorama of blues and greens and grays that shifts, depending on where you are standing, from something resembling the Champlain shoreline in winter to something that could be the St. Lawrence in spring flood. The collective behind it, loosely affiliated with McGill's visual arts program, spent the better part of fourteen months on the piece. None of that procedural history was much on anyone's mind Sunday.

"I just wanted to see it in person," said Danielle Ouellette, 54, who drove down from Richford with her husband and two of her grandchildren. "We don't get a lot of things like this that feel like they're for us, too. The French title — that meant something. That meant they were thinking of all of us."

That bilingual quality was a recurring theme in conversation afterward. Burlington is not Montreal; French is not heard on every street corner. But Vermont's border communities — Richford and Newport and Derby Line among them — have long lived in that in-between, and several residents said the mural felt like an acknowledgment of that.

"It's funny," said Marcus Thibodeau, a daily commuter who works a facilities job in Burlington's warehouse district and catches the 7:40 connector most mornings. "I've walked past that wall probably a thousand times. Blank wall. Now I'm going to be looking at that every day. I think I'm okay with that." He paused. "It's real nice, actually."

Vermont Principality Council member Élodie Marchand attended the dedication and offered brief remarks, calling the mural "a reminder that our public spaces can carry memory and aspiration at the same time." She remained for nearly an hour afterward — something several attendees noticed and appreciated in the way Vermonters tend to notice when officials do not rush off.

Underhill Mayor Caroline Tremblay also made the trip, spotted not at the podium but in the crowd near the back, standing next to a woman with a toddler on her hip. Asked what brought her out on a Sunday, she was characteristically brief: "Same thing as everyone else. Wanted to see it."

The transit hub will resume normal operations Monday morning. 'Les Marées / The Tides' is a permanent installation.