Driving Minnie's Piano (23 page)

^{On the previous Sunday, a week
before Labour Day, I surfed my brains out. The mind was limp by
about seven in the evening, my arms noodled from all that paddling.
I had seawater in my ears from the wipeouts and every once in a
while I did this odd little one-foot jig with my head tilted to the
side to try and flush small quantities of the Atlantic Ocean from
my left ear.}

^{In fact, that's what I was
doing - the seawater-in-the-ear-dance - while standing on the
headland overlooking Stoney Beach, just watching the ocean because
I like watching waves when I'm not riding them. The waves were even
bigger now than some I'd ridden earlier - two-to-three-metre range,
maybe some larger. That's when I noticed two kayakers in the ocean,
swamped and in trouble. They were at the precise place where the
Lawrencetown River empties into the open ocean. It was low tide,
which meant the river was rushing out while the waves were rushing
in. It's a big bad washing machine under these
circumstances.}

^{Because of the river current,
unwary swimmers have been sucked out to sea here and some have
drowned. In 1984 I swam to sea and pulled a woman, a mother of
four, to shore but my efforts had been in vain. She had stopped
breathing and her heart had stopped and she couldn't be revived.
This happened on a holiday, of course - Canada Day. I've never
trusted Canada Day - or any other holiday, for that matter, since.
The drowning has haunted me for years.}

^{So now the river and sea - and
my big boomy, beautiful thrusting, heaving, heavenly waves - were
conspiring to drown two more victims. At first I tried to convince
myself that these may be veteran kayakers who knew what they were
doing. But it soon became obvious that such was not the case. They
were in the raging waters, hanging onto their kayaks which were
completely filled with water. Maybe they would simply get washed
shoreward. I watched and waited for five minutes until I realized
they were in that most impossible zone: the river tugging outward
while incoming waves slammed down hard over them, pushing them
towards shore. The end result was that they could not get in to
shore nor could they drift out to sea beyond the crashing waves to
deeper water. They were stuck. One of the men started to yell and
wave his paddle in the air until another wave slammed over top of
him and he got chundered for maybe the thirtieth
time.}

^{There were no phones and no
assistance to be had. I raced home and quickly returned in five
minutes with my surfboard. Then I put in at Stoney Beach and
paddled out the river. My heart was thumping in my ears. At first,
I had convinced myself this would be easy: I had a wetsuit on,
which helps to float me. I had my trusty nine-foot surfboard. I
understood the mechanics of what was going on with the river. I
understood waves. But when I reached the washing machine zone, I
realized that I too was immediately stuck there as badly as they
were. And I was getting slammed by overhead waves.}

^{Here were two men, exhausted,
hanging on to two kayaks filled to the brim with water. One guy,
gulping water, tried to say he was glad to see me. He was trying to
pretend he wasn't scared. It was only then that it occurred to me
that I had fully committed myself to saving them and I began to
worry that I may not be capable of helping either one of
them.}

^{Just then, another surfer,
sixteen-year-old Chris Meuse, appeared on the scene. He was a kid I
sometimes surfed with. A good kid who understood waves. Although it
was comforting to have his assistance, I also felt a greater sense
of responsibility. Whether I liked it or not, I was in charge
here.}

^{Even as I was getting slapped
by another wall of water, I decided on the way I would try to play
this scene. I couldn't pretend to be brave or gutsy or fearless; I
just didn't have it in me. So I decided to play it cheerful.
Cheerful defiance is something I learned somewhere - a tool to use
when life throws you a grenade. And I felt like I had been handed a
big wet one about to go off each time a new set of waves rolled on
top of us.}

^{I urged the weaker of the two
men to let go of the kayak, get on my board and I'd swim alongside,
attached by my surf leash. Chris followed my lead with the other
guy, but not before one of the fibreglass kayaks slammed into them
and punched a hole in Chris's board. Ouch.}

^{I had a plan. Try to paddle
across the current and eventually come ashore on the rocks of the
headland.}

^{The plan didn't
work.}

^{We were still trapped in the
push-pull of river and wave. And the waves were slamming over us
now with cruel and regular ferocity. We all struggled until we
finally succeeded in getting away from the kayaks but we still
couldn't make any headway in any direction.}

^{My Plan B was to not fight
anything. Just get away from the breaking waves. Let the river pull
us all out to sea and wait for the rescue zodiac to arrive. (The
zodiac, as it turned out, was not about to arrive. It showed up at
the wrong beach.) So we had our kayakers, one on each board, as
Chris and I wallowed in the waves until it seemed the waves were
pushing us more towards the sandy shores of Conrad Beach on the
west side of the river. Nothing to do but go with the flow. At this
point, those once nasty waves were in their own way kinder than the
river. They helped us get to shore. Heavy breathing all
around.}

^{One of the kayaks was
eventually pulled straight out to sea and never seen again. The
other eventually washed in. Names and handshakes: Tom and John, if
I remember correctly. One was bleeding from the face but nothing
critical. They thanked us profusely and offered to buy us beer and
steak. Chris said that he was too young to drink. I said I was a
vegetarian, which was only partially true. I think they offered to
reward us in some other way but we both just shook our heads and
paddled across the inner mouth of the river to tell the fireman's
rescue team (without the zodiac) that had just arrived that it was
all over.}

^{Later I would learn that the
only reason Chris showed up was because he saw a woman who he
thought was his mother waving from the shore. It wasn't. It was a
woman directing him to help the drowning kayakers. And so there he
was. I was on the scene only because I wanted one more look at the
ocean and the waves before the sun went down. And the sun did go
down, less than an hour after we all stumbled
ashore.}

^{I surfed on into the week on
slightly smaller but elegant waves as Cindy turned towards
Newfoundland where the colder waters of the Labrador Current
drained its tropical strength to naught.}

^{Somewhere in the middle of the
week leading up to Labour Day, I completed a small obligation I had
made to a local theatre company. Willpower Theatre had commissioned
playwrights David French, Mary Colin Chisholm and Ed Thomson to
each write a short play on the morning of the very day that series
of plays would be staged. I had been chosen as the guest writer to
write the first line that all of them would use. Each would take my
opening sentence, write an entire play that would be cast,
rehearsed and performed that same evening at the posh Neptune
Theatre in downtown Halifax.}

^{What I came up with was this:
“I may appear angry on the outside but it's just a necessary
disguise for the happiness I feel within.”}

^{I don't know who that “I” was
for sure but I think some part of it is me. Maybe that's why I
drove my car backwards into a tree but I will not pursue that
thread of logic further. To the world, I believe, I rarely appear
angry, nervous, frightened or full of despair. Sometimes I appear
downright competent. I even convince people that I know what I'm
doing. Chris and the kayakers were fairly convinced that I had a
workable plan out there in the heaving sea. Such a “necessary
disguise” was useful in those circumstances. But the truth is that
I spend a lot of time floundering, awash in the briny turmoil
pummelling each of us on a daily basis. My theatrical alter ego
would counter this with genuine anger - as good an engine as any to
help him make it through the day. My other self who ambulates
through the waking world adopts the cheerful defiance approach to
carry him through holidays and family departures, car disasters,
sea calamities and the morning sadness of a pigeon named China with
three toes.}

^{Class Reunion}

^{I had not been planning on
going to a high school class reunion. Not even the approaching
thirty-year reunion. But, one night in a dream, the late great
bearded poet of Fredericton, Alden Nowlan, appeared to me. He was
standing in front of an old floor-model TV set, adjusting the
antenna - the portable V-type unit that was once referred to as
rabbit ears. Alden knew I was in the room and, as the black and
white picture shifted from fuzzy grey snow to clarity, he smiled at
me. I don't know why I was there in the room or why Alden was
watching TV. Nor can I think of any reason why I would be dreaming
Alden back into existence on this particular
night.}

^{The scene shifted right away
in that clever but confusing way that dreams often shift. Alden and
I were now someplace else and we were talking about two thousand
dollars. Why we were talking about two thousand dollars is a
mystery. Why that number? Why money at all?}

^{In the next shift, we were
looking at an old rusty car engine block - his or mine, probably
mine. The exhaust manifold was cracked and a chunk of the iron had
fallen out. Alden was pointing this out to me.}

<sup>In real life, I had once fixed
- or thought I'd fixed - that exact problem in one of my many old
cars. I had simply patched it up with wood stove cement, a solution
not recommended by anyone who knows anything about automotive
repair. It was an old Toyota engine and it was during that longish
phase in my life where I had almost no money. I did the best thing
I could under the circumstances: I swabbed a big whack of stove
cement on my problem and just kept driving the car. It was quiet at
first and then got noisy and the engine misfired a lot, but I
decided not to look under the hood to see if my patch had cracked
and fallen out. I kept driving the car in the belief that I had
fixed it and that was enough to keep it running until I could make
some money to pay someone to properly fix the
problem.</sup>

^{Now anyone who has never heard
of Alden Nowlan or never read his poetry should do so right away.
Even people who think they hate poetry. I was never a personal
friend of Nowlan but he was around when I moved to Canada. Alden,
through his writings, made me believe in the power of words and the
possibility of writing unpretentious and great stuff. I met him a
couple of times and he was always large, uncomfortable, shy,
awkward, difficult to understand and sometimes drunk. When
receiving an award one night in the Neptune Theatre he gave a
memorable thank you speech that rambled around in the backwoods of
confusion, good intentions, alcohol and nervousness until he got
around to saying something like this: “And so I'd like to quote
from something that the great Nova Scotian writer, Will R. Bird,
said on the occasion of receiving an award much like this, words
that have always stayed with me to this day . . . 'thank you very
much.'” Alden had either forgotten what Will R. Bird had said in
receiving his award or that was exactly what Bird had said. The
audience would never know but we all clapped and cheered as my
literary hero, stoop-shouldered and inebriated, lumbered off the
stage with some assistance from Greg Cook, who would one day write
a biography of the poet.}

^{Alden Nowlan was a bashful and
sometimes awkward man - or at least he seemed so. In that regard,
at least, he was of my tribe. Although I present a good face to the
world on most public occasions, part of me remains the shy,
insecure and somewhat awkward boy that I once was. Maybe the reason
the dead poet was fussing with the rabbit ears in my dream was
because he was trying to get me to tune in to something I need to
know. He believed I needed to point my antenna in the right
direction, find focus. I still haven't figured out the two thousand
dollars but the cracked manifold, I think, suggested that something
in the engine that was driving my life down the road needed
fixing.}

^{And then Alden Nowlan cleared
his throat and looked at me. He told me that I should go to my
class reunion. I should do this thing and not make up any excuses
to avoid it.}

^{And so I did.}

^{On the days leading up to this
pivotal event, Nova Scotia was gifted with a solid week of waves
generated by another hurricane. Warm water and head-high waves
thundered past the tip of every headland. I sidled into a routine
of surfing, writing, teaching and more surfing. It was a blissful
kind of existence punctuated by the occasionally embarrassing sinus
drain. If you don't spend a lot of time in salt water, you may need
an explanation.}

^{Wiping out repeatedly in
fresh, clean, salt water and getting chundered by energetic
high-impact waves means that salt water gets forced into several,
if not all, orifices of your body. Sometimes you get enough saline
solution shoved up your nostrils so that much later, at some
unpredictable moment hours later, well after the surf session is
over, your sinuses let go with a long clear flow of something that
is half ocean, half you. Sometimes it's a long, clear nasal drool
that hangs halfway to the floor and sways there like trapeze
artist. But more often it's a small Niagara that happens during a
job interview or, in my case, while I'm teaching my university
students about Walt Whitman or while I'm interviewing an almost
famous writer on my TV show. My camera man is now prepared for the
telltale sniffle leading up to a major sinus drain and is
hair-triggered to cut to the guest.}