Driving Minnie's Piano (4 page)

^{To prove the true rudeness of
the North Atlantic, the Labrador Current sneaks down in June or
July with water as cold as forty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. Maybe
colder. What seems to be a warm sunny day belies the cold winter
freight of the ocean. Overnight the water temperature can drop
dramatically and just listen to them howl, those Saturday morning
surfers, who show up without boots and gloves.}

^{Cold rules, and you learn to
love it or you leave. Winter is quintessential Nova Scotian
surfing. Canadian surfers may not be the best in the world but we
are the coldest. Gear is important. I'm a drysuit man come January,
when the air temp is zero on the Fahrenheit scale and the water
hovers just below freezing. A drysuit is really just a big
human-sized rubber bag with a neck seal. You wear layers of warm
clothing under it and sometimes you even stay dry.}

^{Salt water freezes on the
rocks and you have to crawl to the sea. The water is dense and the
riding of waves is much different than those light summer waves of
other shores.}

^{On a windless sunlit morning
in February, with sea wraiths dancing on the skin of the sea,
paddling to the point makes me laugh out loud. It's just so
beautiful and so completely surreal. Winter trains caution into you
quickly. A mere head dip can give you frozen needles of ice on your
eyelashes. A wipeout means an ice cream headache beyond your worst
nightmare. You crave at least one companion on a serious winter
surf.}

^{For such a magnificent place,
the history of Nova Scotia is full of greed, plunder, horror and a
legacy of bad decisions and ill-informed leaders. Despite the
beauty, this is a place of tragedy as well. Most of my favourite
surf breaks are locations where ships have foundered and men have
drowned. At one nearby break, the remains of an iron ship still
stick up out of the water near the waves and the sad old ship's
boiler is covered with barnacles near the
shoreline.}

^{I once
surfed waves generated by a horrific North Atlantic storm the
evening that the storm capsized the
Ocean Ranger
oil rig off
Newfoundland, killing all aboard. It had been a consummate winter
surf session and I thanked the gods all the way driving home, the
ice melting and salt water trickling down my face like happy tears
. . . until I heard the news about the Ocean
Ranger.}

^{In the late summer of 1998,
Swiss Air Flight 111 went down about fifty miles from here in the
sea off Peggy's Cove and I felt that small absurd comfort that it
wasn't me or my family on that plane and it wasn't in my backyard.
Until the wind blew west for several days and I found myself
surfing among bits of floating debris that was once the cabin wall
of the Swiss Air jet.}

^{Despite the tragedies - and
sometimes because of them- I feel connected to this place. Because
of the harsh and rugged shore losing its battle with the sea, I
feel rooted here. This is not a land of comfort. I did not come
here to feel ease and surround myself with the relentless, soothing
junk of consumer living. We remain a place apart, thanks to the
harshness of climate, the ruthlessness of a sea that is prepared to
steal our land and tear us apart at any time.}

^{Some waves are spawned south
of Greenland and they arrive on a steely grey morning. I put on my
drysuit and wetsuit hood, slide my board into the uninviting
grey-brown sea of winter and paddle out to surf. The wind is north
and conjures up a squall, spitting ice pellets so that when I take
off on my first wave, my face is stung by these small, savage
bullets. I shield my eyes so I can make the drop, turn, pull up
high onto a wall of dense winter wave. I tuck my head down to avoid
the assault and the wave allows me safe passage on a long smooth
face, steep and stiff in the offshore wind. If I'm lucky, I'm not
alone. As I kick out, I see an old friend of twenty years paddling
out towards me, a childlike goofy grin on his face. The sun breaks
through the onslaught of cloud and sleet for less than thirty
seconds and then it's gone. It won't make another showing for three
days until the nor'easter has spent itself. I paddle out for
another wave. The world has moved on without me, I know, and for
the time being I exist safely removed from time and
civilization.}

^{Driving Minnie’s Piano}

^{My daughter, Pamela, and I
drove down to New Jersey one hot August day when she was seven
years old. My parents told me that Minnie's piano, which was now in
my brother's living room, was mine if I wanted it. I didn't know
much about lugging pianos from one country to another but I was
sure I wanted Minnie's piano in Nova Scotia.}

^{My grandparents were both long
gone. New Jersey was often a sad, remote place for me and it was
going to be hot and hellish in late summer. I had an old Aries K
car station wagon with a radiator that had most of those little
fins rusted away. It was a winter car really. Keeping the engine
cool in Canada usually wasn't much of a problem. I drove towards
New Brunswick watching the engine temperature gauge needle rise to
the three-quarter mark and then hang there.}

^{I stopped often to buy junk
food, something I never do except on long trips that demand it. We
ate at McDonald's. I sipped coffee, Pamela downed Seven-Up. As we
left the province, we drove across the wide Tantramar Marsh. I
always feel a little afraid of this place and I'm not sure why. I
know that the Saxby Gale washed through here in October of 1869,
sweeping everything away. Barns and houses floated twenty miles or
more. A woman saved herself by gliding out a second-storey window
in a coffin used as her own rescue boat. Another man survived by
floating around for hours on a haystack that miraculously stayed
intact. It was a Noah's Ark kind of flood and maybe that's why I
never fully trusted the Tantramar. But it might have been something
else.}

^{Crossing the Tantramar meant
leaving Nova Scotia. New Brunswick was not such a scary place
except for the fact that it was flush up against the United States.
I don't remember much about the drive south to the border except
for when we were in Saint John. We were down near the harbour when
Pamela saw a huge pile of road salt, a giant pyramid of the stuff,
three stories high.}

^{“What is it?”}

^{“Salt,” I
said.}

^{“I'd like to climb up the side
of a mountain of salt.”}

^{“You'd slide back down and
your skin would taste salty for days.”}

^{She kept looking back at the
salt pile as we headed towards the bridge over the harbour. After a
few minutes' silence, she announced, “That must be what they put in
the ocean.”}

^{I hadn't been following her
train of thought.}

^{“What do you
mean?”}

^{“The salt. It must be what
they put in the ocean to make it salty.”}

^{I smiled. Yes, that's what it
is. I would never admit otherwise.}

^{In New Jersey, we ate fresh
corn and tomatoes from my father's garden. I had long conversations
with my mother in the kitchen while she cooked. The tall angular
locust trees still shaded the house and yard from the wrath of the
summer sun. Pamela swam in the pool with warm, clear, chlorinated
water so unlike the cold dark waters of Nova Scotia lakes or the
frothy turbulence of the icy ocean at Lawrencetown
Beach.}

^{Once a small quiet grove in a
farming community, my parents' home was now a triangle of
whittled-down land, surrounded by three roads with heavy traffic.
Strip malls were north and south of here, across highways with
raging, relentless vehicles. I must have had to explain to Pamela a
dozen times that cars would not necessarily give the right of way
to pedestrians in this fevered land.}

^{One afternoon, I spent an hour
picking up the trash that had blown onto my parents' property from
the strip malls and from the carefree drivers on the nearby
highways. Beer bottles and coffee cups and endless empty bags of
potato chips and torn silver lottery tickets and bank envelopes
with no cash and flyers for dry-cleaning, Coke cans and Pepsi cans
and plastic bags and torn pieces of clothing.}

^{All that litter taking over my
old backyard made me come close to crying - as it always did - and,
after I had bagged it all in green garbage bags and stumbled
soul-weary back into the house, my mother made me a glass of iced
tea and realized how hard the job had really been. “You don't have
to do that, you know. We've tried before but it will all be back in
a couple of days. There's really no stopping it.”}

^{It was one of those wars that
would never be won. I envisioned coming home one day to see my old
house nearly swallowed in a pile of litter, garbage heaped high
around the windows and up onto the roof.}

^{The cars and trucks roared by
outside, semis slamming into potholes, young guys with boom boxes
thumping away loud enough to loosen the mortar in the basement
foundation. My parents had both lost a good deal of their hearing
and they had the luxury of turning off the traffic by simply
turning down their hearing aids. My own defenses were not yet in
place.}

^{After the trash and the iced
tea, I went for a walk in the nearby park and gave applause to the
lush, green skunk cabbage that still ruled the marshes. I saluted
the stalwart carp that fed along the scummy bottom of Steele's
Pond, once a natural tidal body of water. Now it was the last link
in a chain of road drainage systems that eventually emptied into
the Pennsauken Creek that poured into the wide, brown Delaware
River which fed into Delaware Bay to eventually connect with my own
Atlantic Ocean.}

^{When I was a kid, I used to
walk through those six-foot- high underground drainage pipes during
the summer. It was cool and damp and only a trickle of water slid
beneath my feet. Sometimes I took a flashlight and sometimes I
didn't, walking in almost total darkness beneath the suburban
avenues from one street drain to another. The light would filter
down through the grates and I would look up at the blue summer sky,
feeling like a visitor from a world below. Occasionally I'd find
baseball cards and even skateboards that had fallen in and
sometimes I'd hear kids above me sitting on the curb talking. It
was calm and pleasant down there and I felt strangely at home. I
even felt safe underground like this, although I can't say
why.}

^{I encountered a couple of rats
and even an injured bat that I took home with me. Fear of rabies
drove my parents to make me give it up and let it die on its own in
an old Keddy's shoebox beneath a fallen willow tree by Steele's
Pond. Most parents back then were scared their kids would die from
rabies or tetanus. Wild animals would deliver infectious rabies
bites and rusty nails would give you tetanus. I think there were
greater dangers to be feared, as I never once knew a kid who got
rabies or tetanus but maybe that's because we were careful as the
result of our parents drilling warnings into our
heads.}

^{My own children accuse me of
being obsessed with safety. This is an odd truth for someone who
has lived a fairly reckless life - or so it seems in retrospect. I
fear for their lives when it comes to automobiles and water. At
Lawrencetown Beach, someone drowns every few years and my kids at
least know better than to swim in the river on an outgoing tide.
Motorcycles I do not speak well of and even bicycles require
helmets. If my kids said they wanted to go walking around beneath
ground in a large round concrete pipe for the afternoon, I would
probably utter an ultimatum against it. But, for me, as a
twelve-year-old boy, it seemed like the most natural thing to do. I
was a kind of suburban spelunker. The last vestiges of my childhood
wilderness had been plowed under by bulldozers, and houses were
built where once we had tree forts. There was nothing left to do
but to go underground.}

^{The adult stood at the opening
to the childhood cave and wondered again at how the past was
tethered to the present. But they did not seem truly connected. If
it were to rain tomorrow and the streets were to gorge with
curbside streams that would empty into the storm drain, a torrent
of water would flow out the lip of the pipe into the pond. If I had
a surfboard I might throw myself into the current, ride it like a
murky tidal bore into the pond, then drift on to the sluice gate
and over into the creek, paddling to match the speed of the
outgoing current and into the Delaware, just north of Camden, Walt
Whitman's home. A long drift south and then turn north at the tip
of Cape May. If, through some celestial stroke of rare luck, there
were waves breaking just right I could surf one after the other,
going north, each ride taking me further and further up the
coastline, perhaps catching part of the tidal bore near the narrow
parts of Fundy Basin and then finally paddle along my own shoreline
until I was home at Lawrencetown Beach. Then I would understand. I
would feel the necessary unity that would unite the boy at the
mouth of the storm sewer pipe with the befuddled man who walks the
Nova Scotian beach at sunrise.}

^{Moving a piano required
logistics. I rented a U-Haul trailer and had a bumper hitch
installed. Things did not go well. The trailer lights were wired
wrong and the trailer itself had a broken leaf spring. We would
never make New York, let alone Nova Scotia.}