Driving Minnie's Piano (10 page)

^{It's true that, up until
recent history, there were no skunks in my part of Nova Scotia. But
they were obviously on the move and great at increasing the
population every year.}

^{Skunk number five turned out
to be more docile. The whole skunk business had already turned me
mildly insane and now I found myself sitting beside the cage of the
new skunk, feeding him a hot dog out of my hand. He ate it with two
delicate paws and I went inside the house to get him a
second.}

^{“What are you doing out
there?” Sunyata asked.}

^{“I'm feeding the new
skunk.”}

^{“We have another
one?”}

^“Yep.”

^{As I closed the refrigerator
door and stood there with a hot dog in my hand, I foolishly said,
“This one is really cute. Maybe we can have that operation to
remove the sacs and then we can keep him as a
pet.”}

^{My family just stared at me
with glaring eyes.}

^{So I hoisted the hot dog
eating skunk to the roof of my station wagon and we went for a
drive.}

^{Skunk number six was an angry
skunk who did not take kindly to me approaching him with hot dogs.
I didn't get out of the way fast enough and had to bury my
hazardous waste overalls and find new skunk gear.}

^{Along my daily commute to the
skunk lake, I passed two women out for a morning jog. I hadn't
really noticed them before but they must have noticed me. They were
jogging towards me when I rounded the bend. Suddenly, one of the
women pointed at my car. It would have been pretty obvious that I
was driving down the road with some kind of animal on my roof. But
they must have caught the aroma on other days.}

^{They quickly stopped running
towards me and darted down a side street clutching their noses. I'm
sure they could not figure out why a person in a station wagon
drove down this road - almost every day - with a live skunk on the
roof of his car.}

^{With snow on the ground, there
were several cold but clear days to follow. I discovered that the
process was more streamlined if I set the live trap in an old
plastic child's sled with a rope attached. In the morning, the
skunk would be in the cage, in the sled and all I had to do was tow
it to the car, set it on top, covered now by that incredibly
odoriferous blanket. At the lake, I would tow the skunk sled to the
woods for release. Day after day.}

^{I was pretty certain that
number thirteen would be the last. I had now read up on skunk
families and knew that they could have litters of ten or eleven
skunk kittens. But it wasn't until I caught skunk number sixteen
that I was through.}

^{The final skunk had clearly
been in a bad temper. He had chewed at the bars and tried to take a
swipe at me with his paw. The last skunk gave one final, great
spray of skunk juice to the old blanket to vent his anger at me. As
Glenn would later say, “Guess that blanket's not going back on the
bed.”}

^{There was a heavy snowfall on
the day I caught skunk number sixteen. The joggers were not out to
watch as I took a corner too fast on a snow-slick surface and
skidded off the road, missing a row of mailboxes by mere
centimetres. I was headed towards the lake. My front wheels dangled
over the edge of a drop-off, with a frozen lake below. My heart was
pounding. I watched my breath in the frosty air as I opened the
door.}

^{It was a close call. The skunk
and I were both shaken but not harmed and, after getting some
assistance to get back on the road, I delivered the skunk to the
designated location for the skunk family.}

^{It was almost spring by now
and it seemed downright odd to awake in the morning to see an empty
skunk trap in front of my house. A big chunk of my morning every
day had begun with talking to, and chauffeuring, skunks. I began to
feel that something was missing from my life.}

^{Life slowly returned to some
semblance of normality in our household, although it took months
before a visitor could come to our house and not detect some aroma
of skunk. Even now, you can open a closet or peer into a cabinet
and discover the smell has been somehow stored there from the past
as if in some bizarre kind of skunk smell museum. Damp weather,
too, brings back aromatic reminders of days gone
by.}

^{When summer approached I
decided to drive to the drop-off point by the lake to the north and
see if there was any evidence of the large family of skunks I had
displaced. I began to think that this was probably how skunks
migrated - how they moved into new territory. I had been
responsible for increasing the range of skunks in Nova Scotia. Who
knew what this would lead to? Skunks, it is said, because of their
great defense, have no predators except for great horned owls that
apparently have very little sense of smell. And we had very few
great horned owls in this neck of the woods. Every other predator
in the animal kingdom left skunks alone. Except for me. And I
wasn't a real predator. I was just the operator of a skunk taxi
service.}

^{As I got out of my car and
walked to the familiar spot of release, I could smell skunk,
nothing dramatic, just the sightly heady scent of skunk presence. I
was trying to do the math in my head. I had dropped off two parents
and fourteen offspring - or so I guessed. If paired off, two
offspring might each have up to fourteen more cute little baby
skunks who would grow up to be adult skunks who might have more
children. How long before there were ten thousand skunks in this
beautiful wilderness forest? And what might that do to the
environment?}

^{That's when I noticed a newly
constructed sign, just a short distance from my favoured freedom
trail for skunks. It was over towards the big rock outcropping
painted to look like a green frog. The sign announced that here was
the future site of a major housing project. It showed a map with
curved streets and housing lots all around the lake. “150 one acre
housing lots now for sale at reasonable prices,” the sign
boasted.}

^{I was pretty sure that it
would be a very interesting place to live for whomever was going to
move into that neighbourhood. I felt bad that developers would
carve away at this beautiful forest and put houses all around the
lake and I worried about the fate of those generations of skunks to
come. But I was pretty certain that they would adapt to life in
backyards and find comfortable homes in sheds and garages. On the
other hand, once word got around - and word about skunks travels
pretty fast in these parts - there's a good chance that the houses
won't ever be built and thus the wilderness will be spared. Maybe
the skunks will save the forest and urge everyone to keep a safe
distance. Skunks may not be smarter than people but they have a lot
going for them.}

^{The Final Draft}

^{I had been
living with this one for nearly six years. I didn't know what the
original title was but now, on the verge of becoming a real book,
the novel was titled
Cold Clear
Morning
. It was either a
clever, sharp title - a model of simple elegance - or it was a
dull, stupid title for a book: mundane, flat, uninspiring. But it
was the title that would appear on the cover
nonetheless.}

^{The problem with the novel was
that I had rewritten it twelve times. It had been composed with
inspiration and enthusiasm, but now, on the very cusp of
publication, the author wanted nothing to do with
it.}

^{Every time I begin a new book
(and I've been through this fifty-odd times before), I have to fool
myself into believing it will all be fun and games. I will sit down
and the words will pour out. The story will be true and vital and
change the lives of all who read it. I feel the honesty of it
welling up from deep within as I spill my soul into the keyboard. I
doubt that it has any imperfections at all but if they should
occur, I pretend that someone else will rewrite it, fix it
up.}

^{This is a great and sustaining
myth that allows me to begin every new book. Without it, I would be
silenced.}

^{I can't remember what
originally inspired Cold Clear Morning. I think it was actually a
cold, clear morning. Standing by the shore of a harbour on that
morning, I began thinking about a story that would begin just like
this. But it was not to be a tale about me; instead, it was about
Taylor Colby, a musician who had left this place, these sacred
shores of Nova Scotia, to seek his destiny as a professional
guitarist. There would be a girl, the love of his life. She goes
away with him and she does not survive.}

^{Taylor must
eventually come back home, back to the harbour.
And then stuff
happens
.}

^{Well, the
danger here is great - trying to explain the plot. I've begun to
refuse answering the question, “What is your new book about?”
Reducing novels to plots that make sense to your relatives is a bad
business. What people want is a short blurb like the ones in
your
TV Guide
for the movie
Independence Day
: “Aliens
invade earth and are met with resistance.”}

^{My novels often get reduced to
something like that. “Man (or woman) tries hard at something but
fails, then figures out how to succeed (or not).” Reductionism is
not a healthy thing when it comes to novels. You could try it in
headline form and it is equally disastrous. “Man beaten down by
circumstance fights back.” Or my favourite (this one borrowed):
“Man Bewildered by Woman.”}

^{As a writer and an English
professor, I also fail to possess the verbal apparatus to properly
categorize my novel. My colleagues in the English department want
to know if it is modern or postmodern. I haven't a clue. My
neighbours here on the Eastern Shore want to know if it is a
mystery or a thriller. Well, not really. People die but no one gets
murdered. Murdering your characters seems unconscionably
uncreative. I say that it is a contemporary story and that helps
not at all. I say that it is a novel about “real” people - a
boldface lie since it is fiction. I sometimes stumble and suggest
it is a literary novel and the eyes glaze over.}

^{What is it
then?}

^{It is a story about a
man.}

^{Taylor Colby came into my life
on that cold clear morning six years ago. He had problems, sure. He
whined a lot about his problems and, eventually, in the final
draft, I did not let him whine and moan as much as he wanted to. He
still feels sorry for himself and his losses, the way we all do. He
is beaten down, despite his seeming success, and he doesn't have a
clue as to what will save him. (And we all want to be saved by
something, by someone, or by ourselves.)}

<sup>To every pre-publication
critic who read the manuscript, I defended the first thirty pages
of my novel until it was finally submitted to its current publisher
- Beach Holme Publishing. I was on the verge of mailing the
manuscript to Michael Carroll, the editor there, when I looked at
the stack of pages - all three hundred and twenty of them. I knew I
had to eventually lop off the first three chapters. (Household
critics had told me this so often before but I always liked those
first thirty pages. Now they were smoked.)</sup>

^{The great thing about mailing
off a manuscript is that you can fool yourself into thinking your
work is over. Taylor Colby, with his guitar and his missing mother
and dead wife, was gone for a while and I could rent out his room
to some other protagonist.}

^{So the novel was accepted.
Nervous Nelly that I am, I said I would “go through it one more
time” before the editor undertook his work. I wrestled with it,
nipped and tucked and cut out more whining and complaining. Taylor
Colby was learning to suffer (and heal) with fewer complaints. I
told him not to repeat himself so often. I harangued the author for
beating his reader over the head with a shovel each time a point
was to be made.}

^{I am an optimist so I can be a
poor editor of my own work at times. I want to think that
everything is okay - when it is not. So I hired a competent friend,
an English professor named Julia Swan, to go at my manuscript
before I shipped it back to Beach Holme.}

^{She pencilled in quite a few
changes and told me outright when a scene that I thought was
dramatic was downright silly. And she was right. She found typos
that had eluded me for six years. She corrected me about details
that I had wrong. Timelines, for example. I get easily confused as
to what year my story is taking place in. Anachronisms crop up. A
minor character is thirty-four one day and somehow has turned forty
within a month, as if she has stepped into a time
machine.}

^{So it was
spat upon and polished and fired back to Beach Holme. Then there
was a long hiatus where nothing happened. I often basked in such
halcyon days. It was off my desk and on someone else's. I got on
with other things - another novel about a woman with a bookstore
who tried to apply Strunk and White's
Elements of Style
as a guidebook for
living.}