Driving Minnie's Piano (8 page)

^{On another occasion, a pure
white dove, sitting atop the smoking chimney with a wood stove
alight below, swooned from the intoxicating aroma of burning spruce
wood, fell down the chimney and was retrieved by my daughter,
Sunyata, from the sooty depths below. Half black, half white, the
dove survived and became a great friend of the family, a mystical
bird that would fly down from the trees and alight on your hand or
sit on your shoulder.}

^{Porcupines have often been a
problem. One lived in the crawl space under my house and came out
at sunset to eat the bark off my ancient apple tree. Because he was
a slow-moving creature with naturally weak eyesight, you could
follow him across the yard or make him stop dead in his tracks and
lift his needles in defense. I was always afraid my overzealous
dog, Jody, would one day get a mouthful of porcupine quills. It
wouldn't be the first time I'd have to use pliers while a neighbour
held a frightened dog still so I could pluck the painful spikes
from its tongue and cheek.}

^{Unable to persuade one
belligerent porcupine that he was unwanted on the property, I held
a big green plastic trash can beneath him while he gnawed away at
my once-healthy crab apple tree. A visitor with a broom toppled the
spiky beast from his perch into the garbage can and I quickly
slammed the lid shut. I duct-taped it well and proceeded to drive
him to the wilderness, only to discover halfway there that he had
somehow lifted the lid and freed himself. He scrambled around the
inside of my station wagon as I let out a scream of terror. I
hastily pulled over, opened all the doors by the side of the road
and waited while he clambered from the back to the front seat,
eventually to sit down behind the steering wheel, unwilling to
venture out into the sunlight.}

^{The engine was still running,
the radio was on. He stood up on his hind legs and sniffed at the
air. Anyone driving by saw me standing on the opposite side of the
road looking over at my car. While the radio played on, a porcupine
sat in the driver's seat, peering above the steering wheel, until
he grew confident enough to climb out the door and head for the
woods.}

^{I've always envisioned myself
a great defender of wild things. My whole family was like that. My
youngest daughter, Pamela, relocated frogs from dried-up puddles to
lush ponds for survival. My wife spared unwanted spiders from
destruction by collecting them and moving them outside. My older
daughter, Sunyata, retrieved injured sea gulls and pigeons from
parking lots or roadways and we ushered them back to health. And I
have been known to act as crossing guard to reckless mother ducks
with tiny ducklings crossing major highways at rush
hour.}

^{Certainly we were a family of
tree huggers, animal lovers and environmentally friendly folk right
up to the time of the calamity.}

^{It was a cold, damp, somewhat
snowy February of 1998. On the thirteenth of that month, the north
winds shook the house, lifted the shingles and made the walls creak
and moan in the usual way. I was asleep with my wife at about five
in the morning when I heard a neighbour's cat screeching beneath
the house. There was hissing and the sound of animals fighting. My
wife and I were awakened by the noise and waiting for the battle to
end when it struck. The smell. The unmistakable overpowering
horrendous stench of skunk.}

^{Terry noticed it before I did.
I was recovering from a cold and my nose was stuffed up. I couldn't
smell very well and therein was some luck. For me at least. I
rolled over and tried to go back to sleep. I was supposed to leave
for the airport in one hour for a flight to Toronto and I wanted to
be well-rested for a long day ahead.}

^{But my attempt to drift
towards dreamland was interrupted by an elbow in my ribs. “You
can't go back to sleep,” Terry said. “The smell is
horrible.”}

^{“But there's nothing I can do.
Whatever happened, happened under the house. I'm not going down
there.”}

^{“Oh great. And you're going to
fly off to Toronto and leave me with the problem.”}

^{“I'll take care of it when I
get back,” I said. Which was four days away.}

^{My wife pinched her nose and
stared at the ceiling.}

^{Sunyata had stayed at a
friend's house that night and was spared the morning skunk attack.
But not Pamela.}

^{By 6:30, the smell had reached
her room. I was reawakened by her shouting, “Oh yuck! What is that
smell?” She opened the door to our bedroom and I tried to calmly
explain that there was a skunk under the house.}

^{“This is disgusting!” she
said.}

^{“The smell will go away after
a while,” I said confidently, trying to prevent family panic. “Get
ready for school.”}

^{“I'm getting out of this house
now,” she replied and raced off to her room to get
dressed.}

^{I gave up on sleep, got up and
had a bowl of granola and a cup of tea with my unhappy
wife.}

^{“I'll look under the house
before I go. Maybe I can do something.”}

^{“Like what?”}

^{“I don't know. I'll tell the
skunk to go somewhere else.”}

^“Great.”

^{Just then, Pamela ran past us
out the door. She was holding her nose. “I can't stand it,” she
screamed and ran off down the driveway, looking for fresh air and
heading for the bus to school.}

^{“The entire house smells like
skunk,” my wife said. She was taking this very
personally.}

^{“It's not that bad,” I said.
Despite the cold, the skunk odour had become overpowering. “Call
someone later. Maybe there's some kind of machine that gets rid of
the smell.”}

^{I did poke around outside in
the dim early morning light just to make it seem like I was doing
something about the problem. But there was nothing to be seen by
peering into the crawl space. Near the north end of my house - from
under the living room and bedroom - the aroma of skunk was powerful
enough to render a person unconscious. The skunk and cat war had
happened under there, and I wasn't about to get down on my hands
and knees and poke my head between the lose stones in the old
foundation only to come face to face with the creature with the
smelliest weapon on earth. I backed away slowly.}

^{On the away to the airport I
felt guilty that I had left my wife with a problem: a skunk under
the house that might decide to cut loose again and a house that
smelled like skunk in every room. Nonetheless, I breathed a little
easier. I would deal with the problem when I came back home. I
would do the honourable thing: catch the darn skunk in a live trap
and have someone with a truck help me take him somewhere far away.
I was pretty sure I didn't want the skunk actually in my car even
for a short drive.}

^{At the airport, I checked in
and waited for my plane, sitting alone by the windows, looking out
on the bleak winter runway, thinking unkind thoughts about wild
creatures who took up residence under my old farmhouse. It seemed
unfair. Me, the guy who was always kind to animals. Why would
nature try to do such a nasty thing to me and my
family?}

^{My flight was called. I stood
in line, entered the plane and proceeded down the aisle towards my
seat, 21F. The plane was already three-quarters filled. I was one
of the last passengers on. As I walked down the narrow aisle, my
early-morning, fuzzy brain registered the fact that people were
looking up at me, heads were turning my way as I shuffled forward.
Some passengers were scrunching up their faces.}

^{I stuffed my coat into the
upper compartment and sat down. There was a kind of low churn of
muffled voices in the quiet plane. And then I heard someone say
outright to someone else, “Do you smell something that smells like
. . . skunk?”}

^{It seemed impossible. But
within seconds everyone on the plane was sniffing the air and
uttering sounds of dissatisfaction. The door to the plane was
closed just then and that must have made things worse, because the
passengers sniffed some more and then began to talk about it. The
entire inside of the plane smelled like skunk and everyone knew
it.}

^{A man across the aisle leaned
over towards me and said, “What do you think this smell is all
about?”}

^{“I don't know,” I lied. I
hadn't noticed that I had carried the skunk smell with me - on my
clothes, on me - out of my house, all the way to the airport and
now, here in the closed cylinder of the plane, the smell was
ominously pervasive.}

^{I realized I had two choices.
I could stand up and announce that the skunk smell was me. Or keep
my mouth shut and not say a thing.}

^{Now in most situations, I am
an honest, forthright person. If I've done something wrong, I own
up to it. If it's my fault, I am the first to confess. This trait
has caused me more harm than good in life but it is part of my
personality and I'm proud of it. I envisioned myself standing up
and, in a jovial manner, telling everyone on the plane the skunk
smell was me. I would tell them about the morning crisis of the
skunk under the house. They would laugh and feel sorry for me, and
everyone would feel okay about flying to Toronto with skunky
air.}

^{But it was
still early in the morning. I don't confess well early in the
morning. I felt my face going red. This was very embarrassing. I
put on my glasses, opened up a book to read. It was Jules
Verne's
Journey to the Centre
of the Earth
, and I pretended I
had done nothing wrong.}

^{Glasses and books are good to
hide behind if you smell like a skunk on an airplane. I pretended I
was invisible too. People were still sniffing and talking as the
airline attendant handed out the newspapers. Another attendant was
going up and down the aisle trying to pinpoint the smell, opening
and closing luggage compartments, looking under the seats. Maybe
she actually expected to discover one of the furry long-tailed
black and white striped creatures. In my book, I travelled farther
with Jules Verne towards the centre of the earth as she neared me.
Miraculously, I was not discovered. My skunk smell had so
thoroughly distributed itself around the cabin that the vortex of
the evil stench seemingly could not be detected.}

^{Failing to find the source,
the attendant knocked on the pilot cabin's door and the co-pilot
came striding down the aisle to see if his more highly trained
co-pilot nose could detect the source of the stinkiness. In a very
professional manner, he sniffed east and west on the plane, north
and south, looking for a clue.}

^{Just then, the pilot came on
the intercom to announce that the flight would be a little delayed.
“As you all probably know, there's a very unusual smell on the
plane and we don't want to take off until we've discovered what it
is.”}

^{Oh boy, I thought. This is not
looking good. The co-pilot was getting closer and closer to me. I
was sure he had a good, precise nose and could tell that I was the
culprit. Now they would put me off the plane, for sure. I would get
into deep trouble. I could see the headlines in tomorrow's paper:
“Man Smelling Like Skunk Tries to Fly to Toronto.”}

^{I pretended I was not there at
all but crawling through the caves toward the centre of the earth
with Jules Verne.}

^{That's when a woman three
seats in front of me handed over the newspapers to the co-pilot.
“Smell it,” she said.}

^{The
co-pilot, with the professional nose, smelled. I began to think
that maybe he had even been trained for this as part of his
schooling.
What to do if your
plane smells like skunk
. In a
hushed voice, the woman was explaining something about the
newspapers that had been handed out by the airline
attendant.}

^{The co-pilot was nodding his
head up and down. Other people were nodding their heads in
agreement. They all thought the newspapers smelled like skunk. Why,
I don't know. But the belief swept through the plane quickly and
pretty soon everyone was handing their papers back to the
attendants. The co-pilot, a smirk of satisfaction on his face, was
returning to the cockpit.}

^{I listened to the buzz of the
other passengers, talking about how funny it all was. The guy
across the aisle leaned over and said, “The newspapers had been
sitting outside. They think a skunk came and did whatever it is
skunks do - on the papers.”}

^{Even though we were out on the
runway, the door opened and a gust of frigid air swept into the
plane. An airport worker ran out to the plane. The airline
attendant leaned over and handed him the stack of supposedly stinky
morning news-papers.}

^{I'm sure the plane still
smelled of skunk. After all, I was still on board. But everyone was
satisfied that the mystery was over. We taxied and flew off to
Toronto. I'm certain that along the way, more than one person with
a keen nose figured out that I was the source of the skunk smell.
But no one said a word, even the guy across the aisle from me who
wanted to talk. He told me he was a lawyer and I bet lawyers have a
way of figuring things like this out.}