Driving Minnie's Piano (19 page)

^{In a year or ten at the
longest, the rains and seas will conspire to undo the ribbon of
land left between fresh water and sky. The stones of the well walls
will tumble. Geological time can be short on this coast. The
drumlin's cliff will be pried by ice, and pocked by pelting rain.
The sea will slip out stones from beneath the hill, the grassy turf
will tumble up above and eventually the fresh water of the farmer's
well will gush out of the heart of the headland and race down to
meet the sea.}

^{Should the sun suddenly tuck
itself behind a cloud, a shiver might run down your spine. The
gulls will protest again as you retreat landward but allow you to
pass, recognizing your caution with their offspring. Perhaps the
tide has risen and you see that your path back to the mainland will
be a wet one, hopping from one rock island to the next, ambushed by
afternoon waves coming at you from both sides until you are
drenched and chattering. And when your feet find their way back
onto near-solid sand, you reckon that it is all only an illusion.
Nothing is permanent on this shore. The gulls will hold the final
lease on old farms and abbreviated real estate. Then sail off to
safer shores to hatch their next generation of offspring when the
time comes.}

^{A Short History of Fog}

^{I admit I am a fan of fog, a
fog enthusiast of the highest order. Fortunately for me, I live on
a fog-prone shore. The fog has kept the population thin and I thank
the fog for that. It creates a dreamy environment that isolates a
beach for you to be alone with your thoughts. This is a wonderful
thing if you like to be alone with your thoughts. Some folks do
not.}

^{Not everyone shares my zeal
for fog. Fog makes ships run into things, sometimes each other.
This happened more often in the old days before radar and global
positioning devices. Sometimes people smash their cars up while
driving in the fog. It can be pretty darned intrusive when it comes
to vision. Fog doesn't really care if you or I can see a damned
thing. Sometimes you can't see your proverbial hand in front of
your face. That's some thick fog, or as the Newfoundlanders say,
“some t'ick.”}

^{I don't know why I'm thinking
so much about fog this morning except that it's foggy and I just
walked my dog Jody on the beach. I was looking for waves, of
course, and they were small, pitiful things but in a day or two we
should have some waves from an approaching hurricane and we'll see
how that pans out.}

^{At the beach my dog was
sniffing out the urine poems and fecal stories left by other dogs.
This doesn't sound like a lot of fun to me but since dogs can't
write or read, I figure they communicate through (a) barking, the
obvious vocal/verbal mode and (b) urinating and defecating on
grass, posts, tall weeds and tires among other
things.}

^{I think that the translation
of most barking comes down to some kind of statement of existence.
“Hey, I'm here. You're there,” if one dog is barking at another
dog. Or maybe, “Hey, I see something and I'm gonna make some
noise.” In the fog, dogs bark at anything. They're not sure if
anything is there or not so they just bark in case. They don't care
if they're wrong.}

^{Sometimes my dog barks because
she hears things. She barks at distant thunder and helicopters.
Jody really dislikes helicopters, for some reason. I guess just
because they're up above her making that racket for no obvious
reason and someday one could crash into the house so she's barking
to say, “Get the hell away! Go fly that damn contraption somewhere
else.” On clear days, military helicopters fly overhead a lot. They
fly way too low but it's because they're pretending to be doing
important work like looking for boats that smashed up on the rocks
in yesterday's fog. But in the summer, they have the side door
open, these big noisy Sea King helicopters which are about a
hundred years old and break down a lot. They're always losing oil
pressure, for some reason. A Sea King will be flying over at a
height not much more than the top of the power pole and two men in
military uniforms will be sitting with the door open, dangling
their legs like it's a ride at an amusement park. Sometimes they're
eating sandwiches.}

^{If I'm out surfing, I wave and
they wave back. I figure it must look pretty cool from up there
looking down at a lone guy on his surfboard. So I paddle and catch
a wave and I guess I would have done that anyway - helicopter or no
helicopter. The sound of this old Sikorsky-built helicopter,
though, always reminds me of Vietnam. I didn't fight in Vietnam but
know people who did. I watched a lot of movies about Vietnam and
remember the TV news footage. And there was always helicopter
noise. That wonka, wonka sound that makes me want to start shouting
out protests against the war: “Hell no, we won't go!” “Impeach
Nixon!” “U.S.A. out of Vietnam!” That sort of thing. Even though
it's now Nova Scotia and several decades later, I still feel this
way.}

^{The helicopters don't fly much
in the fog because it would be no fun for the guys sitting by the
open side door. They couldn't see a blasted thing. Or maybe they
don't fly because they might bump into stuff and you don't want to
do that with a hundred-year-old helicopter, low oil pressure and
two buddies dangling legs over the side, eating
sandwiches.}

^{I don't know if those guys are
strapped in but they seem pretty casual. I think you get cocky
about unsafe stuff if you do it long enough. And that's probably a
good reason not to do any one thing for a really long time. There
are two types of cocky going around: old and cocky or young and
cocky. This is a man's thing, by the way. Women don't get cocky. I
don't know what they do, but it's something else.}

^{About this falling out of
flying machines - not far from where I surf is a big shallow kind
of bay called Cole Harbour. It's sometimes misspelled in magazines
as Coal Harbour but there is no coal there. It's right next to Cow
Bay and everyone expects there's a story about a cow to go with it.
But there isn't. A family named Cowie once owned the whole place.
They called the place Cowie Bay but they all died or moved to
Boston or something and people got tired of a two-syllable name for
a place so it became Cow Bay. In the 1950s a man with an obsession
for building life-size statues of concrete animals moved to Cow Bay
and guess what kind of statue he created right on the ocean beach
of Cow Bay?}

^{You guessed it, a moose. It's
still there and sometimes the waves are good for surfing right by
the statue. In fact, the locals who surf there call the break “The
Moose.” Of course, there haven't been any moose in the environs of
Cow Bay since the nineteenth century. They were all killed off by
men who like to kill animals with guns. Harold Horwood, the late
Newfoundland writer, was convinced that killing things with guns is
a sexual perversion of some sort. I think he's right, but I have
yet to express my opinion on this matter to all those bastard
hunters who show up in my marsh each year to shoot ducks and
deer.}

^{The point about Cole Harbour
and cockiness is this. In 1942, the armed forces were training
young men to fly planes for the war in Europe. They'd take off from
Shearwater Air Base over at Eastern Passage and fly out over the
future site of The Moose and then scoot around in the skies over
Cole Harbour because it was nearby, unpopulated, and I guess maybe
because it was not as deep as the nearby Atlantic Ocean. One day, a
young cocky pilot was out over the marsh practising loop-de-loops
for no clear reason. It wasn't like he was going to be able to go
over to Germany, get in a dog fight and show off his loop-de-loops
to scare the enemy away. But there you have it, anyway. It was a
two-seater plane with open cockpits. Open cockpits are notoriously
bad places to be cocky.}

^{They had seat belts to strap
them in but you know how your old Uncle Ed doesn't use seat belts
because he doesn't “believe in them.” He thinks it's a Communist
plot, an invasion of his rights and freedoms and he figures that if
he ever drove his truck off the road in the winter and through the
ice on Porters Lake, the damned thing would keep him trapped in his
truck cab and he'd drown there listening to his Tom T. Hall tape on
the cassette player.}

^{Well, the passenger of the
plane wasn't expecting any loop-de-loops that afternoon over Cole
Harbour. He might even have been eating a sandwich when the pilot
flying the plane took her vertical, and then fully upside down.
Buddy riding shotgun wasn't holding onto anything but maybe his
sandwich and a whole bagful of bad luck. He fell out of the
upside-down plane into the shallow waters of Cole Harbour and
didn't survive.}

^{In a local history book, the
writer has written a whole chapter about “Air Tragedies at or Near
Lawrencetown Beach.” This chapter, however, is nothing compared to
the shipwrecks. We're working on three centuries of shipwrecks at
or near Lawrencetown Beach. In fact, one of the places I like to
surf on a good southeast swell is called “The Wreck.” Only the
boiler is left sticking up. I tore a hole in my wetsuit once on the
jagged metal of it as I caught a glassy little summer wave out
there. It was a foggy morning and I knew the stump of metal was
there. I just didn't see it in time. The wetsuit ripped but it
protected me from being cut too badly. If I had started bleeding,
it could have attracted those great white sharks that supposedly
lurk off our coast. They could sneak right up on you in a good
Atlantic fog.}

^{So it can be a very dangerous
place here or near where I live. Even the winds and salt air have
taken a heavy toll on the concrete moose, so a fund is being set up
at the local Royal Bank for people to donate to the “Save the
Moose” fund. I'm in favour of every community having at least one
person whose job it is to create something grand and ridiculous for
their town. Monuments to moose or giant raspberries, a three-storey
wooden replica of a bottle of Moosehead beer. Those sorts of
things. A couple of decades after the creation of these
masterpieces, future residents can have fundraisers to save them
and that will build community spirit.}

^{I'm in favour of saving things
in general, I guess. Oceans, whales, beaches, rivers, trees, clean
air. Fog even. It's possible that global warming will destroy the
fog in Nova Scotia. It's also possible that it will create more of
it, but that would only be temporary until the oceans evaporate and
come down as rain on Arizona and Libya and Mongolia. I don't want
people to mess around with fog. I like it the way it is and in the
quantity that it is dished out. I say to those who don't like fog -
the ones who think it is clammy, cold and a general nuisance - I
say to heck with you. Stay inland for all I care. But I apologize
for suddenly sounding militant and Greenpeace-ish about it. Call me
a fog hugger, if it makes you feel any better.}

^{Fog is a useful form of
punctuation between clear sun-filled days and stormy wind-whipped
days. I'm not opposed to what most people think of as good weather
but I just admire the imperative of a good fog. Some days I can
hear the fog horn at the mouth of Halifax Harbour. And so can my
dog. She'll bark at the wall when she hears it as if there is a
great bellowy sea monster inside that wall with the old eel grass
insulation.}

^{Being convinced that dogs
communicate fairly complex ideas to each other by way of urine, I
expect that my dog, when she pees on a patch of sea oats at the
beach, is leaving a kind of epic story about scaring off
helicopters or alerting my family to the presence of sea monsters.
I don't know what all those other peeing dogs are communicating
about - probably cars without mufflers, dirt bikers, annoying cats
and garbage trucks. Jody herself has an intense dislike for garbage
trucks. She would chase a garbage truck and dive right into the
tires if she could. It makes no sense but is probably related to a
previous incarnation. I think that she once chased wooly mammoths
as they thundered across the tundra making the same sound as the
local garbage truck when it slams into the potholes on my
road.}

<sup>I should tell you about
yesterday morning, just to be fair. There was no fog, no wind. The
sun was right where it wanted to be at 8:30 Atlantic Daylight
Saving Time. The sea was flat, blue and uncommunicative at the reef
- barely a ripple. A light north wind coming from the land gave the
air a sweet flowery smell. Bees were harvesting sustenance from the
zucchini flowers in my garden. The dill plants - tall, elegant and
dignified like beautiful foreign women who you see on TV - were
covered with dew. I was going to sit down and work on my novel
about an imaginary character but decided that I would devote my
efforts to real life this morning instead of fiction. Real-life
experience is a fairly mild addiction I have developed which
sometimes gets in the way of fiction writing. I may one day succumb
to it altogether if I'm not careful but for now I try to limit my
indulgence. I'm sure I can handle it if I'm
careful.</sup>

^{So on this golden but fogless
morning I drove my inflatable kayak to Rocky Run and set off
paddling out to sea. The water was clear and deep in the channel
and the tide was pushing inward so it was like a reverse river. I
hugged the shore, trying to avoid the seaworthy thrust of salt
water, then passed through the old railroad trestles and out
towards the cliffs near The Wreck.}