Driving Minnie's Piano (3 page)

^{It was everybody's tax money
that went into mosquito control. I think it was DDT that was most
popular in those days despite the fact Rachel Carson had warned
everybody that it was killing butterflies and birds and maybe it
would kill us if we weren't careful. It certainly came close to
killing my friend David. Those fogging trucks were causing other
accidents as well, as drivers sped down the road right into the
mosquito fog, carelessly smashing into other cars they couldn't
see.}

^{I was a Boy Scout back then
and concerned with doing “good deeds.” My interest in good deeds, I
know now, is why many of my friends were so dull, and why many
girls (several named Cathy) weren't interested in me. In order to
complete the civic awareness merit badge I had to perform many
hours of community service. You would have thought the troop leader
would have sent me to volunteer in a nursing home or maybe clean up
garbage at the school. Instead, I was “volunteered” to drop green
pellets of poisons into the storm sewers all over town. Their
contents would eventually end up in the Pennsauken Creek and drift
on into the Delaware River. But the idea was to kill more
mosquitoes. The people of New Jersey were dead set against
mosquitoes like no other people on the face of the
earth.}

^{Everybody
saw me dropping those deadly pellets into the street storm drains.
The poison probably would find its way into the drinking water
supply of half of South Jersey, but what did we care? We were
people in love with smells like kerosene and diesel exhaust. (I
still have a good, fuzzy feeling whenever I smell the exhaust of a
city bus, for example.) In the public's mind, I was an exemplary
citizen. The
Cinnaminson
Journal
even sent a reporter to
interview me and take my picture. A laudatory article was written
about what a fine youth I was but I received no fan mail from
Rachel Carson. In the photograph, I was wearing my Boy Scout
uniform, including the merit badge sash. I was standing over the
storm sewer drain on the side of Dorothy Drive with a bag of poison
pellets. And I was smiling.}

^{Mothers of girls who attended
the Moravian Church where I went to Sunday school were impressed
and had cut the article out of the paper. All of the Cathys and
Denises of my life thought I was a dork, as rightfully they should.
I received my civic awareness merit badge. But at a
cost.}

^{In the sanity and safety of my
grandmother's summer basement, as she chewed gum, snapped beans and
shelled peas and limas, Minnie told me stories about West Texas.
Her father had left Philadelphia to go there in search of gold, or
at least the collateral gold to be made from the enthusiasm of
people looking for gold. He was a cook for a while and then he ran
a small cowboy hotel in the dry dusty town of Davis. In the stories
there were always horses and pianos - pronounced “pianas.” She
liked talking about memories of other people playing piano as much
as she liked playing it herself.}

^{When she wasn't performing at
the baby grand piano in her living room or talking about pianos,
she told me stories about taking trains into and out of
Philadelphia and New York. I knew little about riding trains. My
parents were car people. My father was a truck mechanic. We had
almost no understanding of trains. But Minnie had come from a world
of trains. Her family had gone west in a train, returned in a
train. She herself had commuted to Philly, where she worked at
Merck, Sharp and Dohme, in a train that ran through Palmyra. But my
mother and father thought trains were just for people who couldn't
drive - people too poor or ignorant to know that in order to get
from point A to point B, you got in your car and drove
there.}

^{So Minnie taught me about
riding in trains, and she talked of horses - riding English and
sidesaddle and meeting up with boyfriends on horses out there in
the gold-hopeful days of West Texas. And, of course, there was the
baby grand piano upstairs, as there had always been pianos in my
grandmother's life down through the years.}

^{Because of the interest in
horses, trains and pianos, some considered my grandmother an
“artistic” type. She was probably about as bohemian as my
straitlaced family would allow. Certainly, my grandfather was not
an artist type unless you considered his ability to grow
extraordinary watermelons and flawless lima beans. When he wasn't
working, creative fun for my grandfather consisted of lying on the
couch in front of a big old floor model black and white TV watching
Ronald Reagan introducing Death Valley Days. Gaga was a big fan of
westerns. Zane Grey was his idea of great literature, Gunsmoke his
idea of high art.}

^{Minnie
played piano in the living room when the TV wasn't tuned
to
Sugarfoot, Cheyenne,
Maverick,
or, of course,
Gunsmoke. The piano strings were stretched tightly from post to
post inside the great wooden frame and these wires were obedient
and disciplined, completely unlike the incorrigible wire that
fought my grandfather and me in the lima bean fields of summer.
Sometimes Minnie played the “Daisy” song or something more
ambitious by Debussy while Gaga read Louis
L'Amour.}

^{Minnie read a few of Gaga's
cast-off westerns when she was desperate for something to read but
she had a more eclectic taste, dipping into popular mystery novels,
or reading books about the history of Mexico or even the poetry of
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.}

^{If I should
arrive on the scene on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, however,
Minnie would stop whatever she was doing - reading
Evangeline
or repairing some of Gaga's work clothes - and she would
return to the piano where she would play for me
The William Tell
Overture
, which I knew as the
theme music for the hit TV show
The Lone Ranger
. Or
sometimes she would perform my old childhood favourite, a piece
called “Oscar the Octopus,” as I listened with a kind of reverence
and my grandfather drifted out of his novel of the Old West and
into a blissful deep afternoon nap, despite Minnie's almost
athletic thumping of the piano keys.}

^{The Drowned Coast}

^{Even after living here for
more than twenty years I'm not one hundred percent sure that Nova
Scotia truly exists. It looms large in my imagination and it may be
more myth than fact.}

^{This ragged, rocky, foggy,
cold, dangerous, moody ghost of a coastline is, alas, a temporary
place. I live on what the geologists call a “drowned coast.” It's
literally drowning. The sea is rising up and taking it away, inch
by inch. The time frame is amazingly short. Whole headlands have
been and gone in single generations. During my short tenure here,
I've walked hills that have slipped into the sea and driven rocky
roads to fishing villages that are now swallowed by the waves. It's
this tenuous place that I call home.}

^{Sometimes in
winter, when the great North Atlantic pulses with a dangerous
temper that rages against these shores, I drive by the seawall at
the nearby beach on the main road to Halifax. Megaton waves can
slam up against the big rocks and spew foam and stones down onto
the hood of your car. It's a great surprise on a dark night to be
driving a familiar road and suddenly hear a shuddering explosion
just past the driver's side of the car, then see rocks the size of
seagull eggs pelting down on the hood of your Honda. More exciting
yet are reports from one fellow surfer who claims to have been
driving his old Chevette along the sea wall on a pale, broody
winter's night when the cold, stormy sea conspired to throw a giant
wave right over the entire road so that for a brief second or two
his headlights reported back that he was driving
inside the
tube
.}

^{True or not, such is the stuff
of legends in this mythical place.}

^{More unlikely than the
driveable wave, perhaps, is the undeniable fact that Nova Scotia
was once part of Africa. The rock in my backyard comes from the
Sahara Shield. To be more precise, what is now Nova Scotia was once
part of a monster continent that had crashed into North America,
then pulled away and drifted south to become Africa, leaving behind
a big chunk of rock that is now the bulk of mainland Nova Scotia.
The upright slate in my backyard is the exact same stuff you'd find
if you flew to Morocco and got down on your hands and knees to dig
through the sand until you hit something hard.}

^{Our connection to Africa is
more than just geological as well. The origin of some of our best
waves are African. Storms spawned off Africa's west coast trek
across the Atlantic to wreak havoc as hurricanes in the Caribbean,
only to veer north with the Gulf Stream to visit ancestral African
Nova Scotia. Our protective cold waters begin to destroy such
tropical storms even as they pay homage to these shores, but not
before Nova Scotian surfers find solace and ecstasy in surfing rare
warm-water point break waves in front of remote headlands with cows
grazing above them on the hillside.}

^{The glaciers once plowed this
province under and then retreated, leaving these silt and stone
drumlins, the rounded headlands that immediately began to erode.
This is a land sculpted by ice and by sea, and those of us living
on this continental edge know our property deeds are nothing short
of insignificant writs of permission to inhabit this fabled land
for a few short generations until the seas rise and make all the
old maps obsolete.}

^{I took my first step onto a
Nova Scotian beach in that summer of 1970 when Jack Parry and I
drove up from New Jersey to escape - well, to escape New Jersey.
(Before we left, Minnie tucked a ten dollar bill in my pocket while
no one was looking. She said, “Spend it on yourself,” implying I
should do something really frivolous with it.) Jack and I surfed
our brains out - at all the wrong places as it turned out, but we
didn't know that. We camped along the empty shores, time-tripping
into the past. And then we returned to modern America to fall back
into the usual frenetic addictions of modern American
lives.}

^{I ended up teaching university
in New York City and stopped believing that places like Nova Scotia
could still exist. I learned to live dull and ordinary and urban
and, just before settling into something practical and permanent
and predictable, I realized that escape was possible. I spent two
summers here and discovered cold, clean water along with friendly,
guileless surfers who became like family. Just about the time that
Ronald Reagan was ascending to power, I knew it was time to flee
career and money and what looked like a very unhappy decade ahead.
After being turned down repeatedly by Canada Immigration, I pleaded
something short of insanity to a suited man at the Canadian
Consulate in a glass Manhattan tower and he let us in. I never
fully understood why.}

^{In an old brown Ford Econoline
van, my wife and I clambered up the northeast coast and across the
St. Croix River at Calais, Maine, into Canada. We had brought
everything we could muster: rototiller and ancient refrigerator in
the back, Chuck Dent 7 6_ surfboard on the roof. My motto was this:
go where the money isn't.}

^{And that was Nova
Scotia.}

^{Surfing, of course, was a big
part of the mythology that drew me here. Think cold and clean and
surfing with a few good buddies on a frosty morning with grey seal
pups slipping up to stare at you in the sunrise. Think pure glassy
walls of water, tall as my American refrigerator, lining up on
rocky shelves, peeling a perfect right or left into deep green
waters. But those are the rare, halcyon times that come after days
or weeks of foul weather.}

^{What saves these shores from
the deluge of vacationers and swarming surfers and overpopulation
and all the things that have ravaged both coasts of our continent
is very simple: a cold, cold sea and some extremely bad weather. Or
at least what most people think of as bad weather.}

^{My first winter here, a
snowstorm entombed my van in my driveway all except for the brown
roof. But when the snow crusted up, I put on my heaviest wetsuit
and walked across a snow-buried pasture to surf some head-high
waves on a blue misty sea with the great spectacular crystal white
world before me.}

^{Whole summers have been
swallowed by fog along the shore. The
I-can't-see-my-hand-in-front-of-my-face type fog. Inland, the sun
may shine but along the shore, the fog rules. Surfing in springtime
fog is an instinctual thing. You can't see the wave coming. You
have to feel it. You paddle in faith, tap in, make the drop, turn
and tuck and hope for the best. It's like surfing in a dream. When
you get really disoriented and can't tell which way the shore is,
you listen and the sound of sea sucking on stones will guide you
in.}

^{Summer is
almost always a slow time - fewer storms, fewer waves. Since most
inland Nova Scotians visit beaches only in the heart of the summer,
they rarely see anyone surfing significant size waves. Ask your
average Bluenoser about surfing here and they will sometimes tell
you with great confidence that no one surfs in Nova Scotia. Summer,
for me, however, is about small beach break jewels. Me and a couple
of ducks on an empty beach at sunset. Not much excitement if you're
watching from the beach. But to paraphrase the Yogi,
surfing is ninety-nine percent half
mental
.}