“I thought we were going to die,” I said to Pamela. It was one of those things you say in honesty to your kid that you almost immediately regret. Pamela had been less aware of how dangerous the situation was. I had never in my entire life found myself in a rainstorm like that one with rain so heavy that you couldn't see a thing. I never wanted to be in that situation again.
“But Minnie was there, right?” she said.
“I think so,” I said.
“I heard her playing the piano,” Pamela finally said out loud.
By the time we had bought ice cream and finished eating it, the car restarted beautifully and there wasn't a cloud in the sky.
At the tiny border crossing at Milltown, New Brunswick, a young uniformed woman from the customs office asked to look in the trailer and I showed her Minnie's piano. “It was my grandmother's piano,” I said. “I'm taking it to our home in Nova Scotia. She always played a song called 'Oscar the Octopus' on it when I was a little kid.”
“Is that her surfboard too?” she asked.
As if to test us again, New Brunswick offered up a heat wave and steep hills. My engine began to overheat badly as I crawled up one incline after the next. Before I had left home, my father had taken me aside after he had checked under my hood for oil leaks, brake fluid and fan belt wear. “Your radiator is shot,” he said.
“It hasn't been a problem in Nova Scotia. We're usually more concerned with keeping things warm than cooling them off.”
He nodded his head; he understood. “Keep an eye on your heat gauge. If it starts to go in the red, roll down the windows and put your heater on high. Turn the fan up full blast.”
Which is the only way we could have made it through New Brunswick. Windows fully open, heater on high. It must have seemed absurd to Pamela but she never complained. By keeping the interior heat on full blast, we were pulling heat off the engine and into the car. It was like driving through equatorial Africa but it kept the engine temperature just barely below critical.
It was a cool, drizzly and foggy day when I asked my neighbour, an overworked psychiatrist by profession, to come over with his two largest teenage sons to help me heft the piano into my house. All logical methods failed us. We needed to carry it up a steep hill and into the back door of a house never designed to allow for easy piano transport.
Standing it on its side with legs removed, we resorted to rolling it very gingerly end over end over rock and slippery moss and eventually into the back door. Legs were affixed and it was settled into place by a window facing south. Minnie's piano had arrived.
King of the Drumlins
On the first day of November there are no tourists at Lawrencetown Beach. On this early morning, the sky is grey, the sea is grey, and a daunting wind is pulling in from the northeast. Small sparrows cling to the sea oats and the dune grass is brown. It is a good time to be alone here and I have no regrets about the approach of winter.
There is no sand left upon the beach. Recent storms have washed it all offshore, where it has formed undersea dunes that actually protect what's left of the beach from being pummelled by the biggest waves. The sandbars diffuse the power of winter storm waves and when the storms of winter decrease, the sand migrates ashore to provide a warm white beach for summer swimmers to spread their towels upon.
I own a few acres of land on the headland at the west end of the beach. A few brave steepled spruce trees grow among the wild roses and grasses. Aside from the sparse spruce, the hills are mottled red and brown. If rose hips were dollars, I'd be a very wealthy man. Once a frame house stood on that land but there is nothing left of it except for a rubble of stone that was once a foundation and patches of tiger lilies planted long ago and eventually forgotten by all but me. Right now my goal is to do nothing with the land but pay my taxes on behalf of the roses and lilies and leave it otherwise alone, a geographical postcard of acreage I am sending intact into the next century.
The land and sea around me, the marsh and the bedrock hill my house sits upon - all counter my ambition. Back in New Jersey, light-years ago in my life, ambition blossomed in me and I took off on a wild pursuit. University degrees and knowledge and rebellion and craving and longing, jealousy and a kind of greedy desire to accomplish things took hold.
Ragged, sometime raging, ambition met the cold, clean heart of the North Atlantic and they hammered out a pact with one another. Years down the line, however, ambition would continue to muscle away at the large solemn truths of wind and wave and the deepening cold of the coming winter.
I am not sure how others remain sane but sanity for me is a gift of a great grey sky, the small satisfaction of ground-creeping juniper among old round rocks covered by green, yellow and orange lichen. Over the years, the lichen, most primitive of living things, has somehow leapt from the stones on the ground by the house and now grows in small patches on the asphalt shingles I nailed to my roof. How this is possible, I don't know. Each patch of roof lichen is a small garden feeding on rain and whatever sustenance available - motes of dust driven by a west wind, perhaps. What is the lifespan of lichen? I wonder. My guess is that the community of lichen here will live on long after I have given up my roost on this hill above the sea.
The ruin of e-mail is that information comes fast and often from all corners of the personal and impersonal world. News of a former classmate from high school, diminished to seventy pounds by bone cancer, dying in a bed in New Jersey not far from the town where I grew up. Her name was Karen and I can't say we were the best of friends or in love or any of that. We shared French class and Biology and English and she wore black-rimmed glasses like other girls back then. She was very smart and she was also a cheerleader, which doesn't seem to be the way it should fit together, but it did.
Our lives are compact and cluttered at once. We ferret out meaning in all the small details of the day and miss the important messages, I'm sure.
In the spruce forest above my house is a small graveyard of pets that have come and gone over the years. A dog, several parakeets, pigeons, hamsters, injured gulls, geese and seabirds that stayed with us until they died. Burying things beneath trees required skill at digging around important roots, cutting through lesser ones with pick axes, digging deep enough so roaming coyotes (there are a few here), bobcats or foxes won't dig up the small winged or furry dead.
The top layer of the forest floor is ten inches of decomposing spruce needles. Beneath that, the soil is black and compact with medallions of stones left behind by retreating glaciers. Not too far down - two feet, maybe three - is bedrock. Having dug animal graves and also a well for my old homestead, I can tell you what it feels like to drive a pick axe into solid bedrock. I can tell you it is an admonition that one has dug deep enough, that a digger is allowed to work away with hand tools at the thin layer of land above the rock, but he will stop when the tip of iron tries to puncture the solid bones of the earth.
Awful centuries of history are now part of who I am, a price paid by research and donning the cloak of occasional historian. I know more about the history of this province than I would like to and wish I could return to innocence. Arriving here for the first time in a summer in the early 1970s, I believed I had washed up on the shores of paradise. Years later, in flight from aforementioned ambition and the hostility of urban worlds, I held onto my mythology as long as I could. Even now, I prefer to ignore, if I can, the knowledge of this province's military past filled with inglorious battles between empires, scalping of Mi'kmaq people by British soldiers and all the remaining clouds of injustice that hover over this land.
Despite the beauty of this seemingly benign place, it is a coastline of nearly continual disaster of elemental proportions. That bedrock beneath my well is a scrap of massive rock left over from two continents in collision. The hills that bracket the beach are both drumlins - soils and stone left over by the retreat of immense, dispassionate glaciers that ravaged Nova Scotia. The drumlins themselves are eaten away year after year by sea and rain until they wi
ll one day disappear. I'm the world's biggest fan of drumlins and have written about them in magazines more than once. My only true cyberfame is this: if you do a search for information about drumlins on the Internet, you will quickly find your way to me. I've borrowed my knowledge from scientists but have gone on to make poetry, film and fiction about these seaside hills of glacial deposit until, in my own mind, I have become the king of the drumlins.
The spruce trees in my backyard repeat the same lesson over and over to deaf generations. Allowed to grow too close together, they reach tall and spindly into the salty air. Vast acreage of this shore is forested by sickly spruce trees with short lives due to the compacting born of an aggressive desire to survive and compete. But given room to grow, a black spruce, considered by many here to be a veritable weed of a tree, becomes a grand cathedral within a decade or two. It stands both broad and pinnacled, appearing almost royal and sentient on the hill behind my house, the topmost boughs blowing in the sou'west wind and the sound of the wind in the lower branches perfecting an Aeolian chant that could inspire poets from any generation.
Below these trees, I raised a family, taught two daughters the language of wave and stone, shared the code of living, which is the prerogative to save all living things, to protect what needs protecting and repair, through unceasing effort, the damage we do to our world and to ourselves.
Here in November, the waves shift from grim to majestic as the wind changes, and the sky turns from grey to mauve to blue. A morning of reflection gives way to an afternoon of surfing the backs of waves ushered in by Sable Island storms. Beyond that, the world will catch up with me. It will track me down by phone, fax and e-mail and keep me away from the marsh, the shore and the sea.
Although I feel myself a long way from my own demise, I have the occasional dream of a fine primitive burial for myself. Somewhere back up among the splendid spruce, I see someone whose arms look like my own digging into the soil, carving down to the hard smooth surface of the bedrock that was once Gondwana. I see someone taking great care to clean the bedrock surface until it appears as if it is the polished marble of some European cathedral floor. Then my body is placed flat upon the stone floor and I am at my final rest. I expect there are laws against such things, one statute or several, that says a man cannot be buried by his home above the sea, but the dream persists.
A few of us know the precise taste of a stone plucked from the shore and placed in the mouth or another one dug up from the bottom of a well, washed and set on the tongue. That taste of sea and stone, of wave and land, will always remind me of home.
A Stone’s Throw From the Sea
Awake at the sound of geese upwind in the open frigid waters where the inlet ice gives way to the channel of the salt sea. An honest winter day of skid ice in the driveway, heavy frost patterning the windows and three kinds of snow. And wind.
This room is cold, by choice, at night and it makes you hurry into old clothes and a fast run to the blossom of heat near the cookstove in the kitchen. The cookstove singing the only song it knows, a happy companion in this two-hundred-year-old kitchen where the dog, Jody, scratches against the door, eager to go outside.
As I look out onto that colder world, snow sifts in like company waiting at the door. Then a sharp punch of cold to the lungs, as I watch the dog dive towards the swirling snow, whipping about in the wind. The hill out back with its cranberries frozen red and ripe into the depth of winter is covered over now with blankets of the cold souvenir of the season.
Jody barks at everything, anything - an exercise of opinion and sound, a soundtrack for the snow with the wind collaborating. The sky, a scud of grey-white clouds and the wind from the north, of course. A touch of east maybe, taking the dryness from the snow and giving it a subtle touch of weight and character.
The uninvited snow is cold against my bare ankles, then back inside to plug in a kettle and wait for the kids to find daylight, and slip groggy-eyed into the kitchen.
In front of the house, on the long frozen slab of lake, the snow does not settle but finds the slick flat pane of surface and races off south to clutch at the bushes in the marsh, to fashion white dunes to mimic the ones on the nearby beach.
The day will go slate-grey, dark like a bruise, or settle into something vivid if the blue behind the shroud above has the courage to save us. I pour the tea and settle into a near silent meal as I long for something from the past, some nameless thing that probably never was but it is there nonetheless. It mostly concerns time. The passage of time, the infinite loss of things slipping through my fingers this morning over a bowl of cornflakes, a mug of dark tea. Nothing, not a thing wrong here, just the fact that I can't hold onto any of it. Each day is flying away as this one will. I want to say this out loud but I remain silent, sipping at the steam above the cup like it is a vapour of hope.
And so the day begins. Winter in Nova Scotia. Two days before Christmas and I, for one, am glad this is not the holiday for I do not trust holidays. I trust the average day, the every day. The day like this with the dog barking now to come in and be fed. I test the cold again as I open the door, sense it is not as hostile as it first seemed. More snow pours in, the dog in tow, shaking herself from white back to black. Never have I seen a dog breathe with such enthusiasm. And we are back by the cookstove again. I almost touch the surface with my hands. Snow from petting the dog melts instantly, slips in drops to the flat black plates and hisses like a wild animal.
If I could only articulate the thing in the back of my throat. The necessity of stopping the flow of time. Of my plan to arrest the rapid succession of day after day. My plan is to lecture my two daughters: I'm sorry, but your mother and I have decided you are not allowed to grow up. You must stay like this for the rest of your lives. We are all going to stay just like this forever.
Outdoors, the pheasants arrive by the side of the old pigeon pen where our two pet pigeons huddled through the dark cold night: Rosa and Chez, waiting for me to bring cracked corn and fresh water. The male pheasant is scratching about in the snow, looking for the corn that is not there yet, the humbler female prancing about. Their feet leave beautiful delicate etchings in the snow and then the wind erases them, but the pheasants will come back to do it again.
And I am satisfied again that we are a long, long way from the shopping malls. I bundle up in my worst but warmest coat and pull the hood tight, tie it so it dents my chin and I gladly go out into the cold, booted, mitted, as warm as one can be on a day when wind drives reckless across the frozen lake and whips shingles from the roof of my house. The pigeons are glad to see me and the pheasants hover not far off in the thicket of leafless wild rose, an old, dead, bent and gnarled apple tree half sheltering them from the blast. Cracked corn for everyone, the caged and the free. When the sun strikes away the clouds, I'll open the door and let my birds ascend into the heavens, but now an eagle, big as any bird I've seen, is cruising low, riding the wind south from far up the lake. When he finds the coast he'll quit his downwind tour and make a slow, heavy tack north to find his mate. There will be mice to be had, despite the snow that hides them, but he will not have my pigeons today.
I walk up the hill among the well-spaced spruce trees and put bare fingers into the snow to find two frozen cranberries, toss them in my mouth and roll them around like marbles, then walk on further until I come to the forest that steals the sting from the wind. The grey wispy fungus known as old man's beard hangs from the trees, and star moss covers most of the stones. Snow stays mostly above, clinging to the boughs of green needles. If the wind shifts even two degrees to the east, the snow will become heavier and bend as it builds up on these branches, breaking some, sparing others. Right now, it still sifts through where the big trees have not stolen the sky.
It's quiet here and deep. And I will not dwell on stasis or permanence but go home and satisfy myself that it is two days before Christmas and there is nothing, nothing I am obliged to do with this day but live it for what it is.
The wi
nd relents by eleven a.m. and my family spills out into the bright world. The dog rolls herself until she is a puffy white cloud with four legs, unrecognizable except for the teeth showing in her mouth and the yelp of adventure. My two daughters and I go out onto the frozen lake, and after the usual warfare of putting on skates in the cold outdoors, we skate on a smooth, hard surface hidden beneath the layer of snow that muffles the sound of our blades. The ice stretches north for nearly a mile to where the geese, at least a hundred of them, have gathered in the open water. We skate without speaking over soft white clouds until the wind begins to drop and Sunyata tells me she remembers this very moment from a dream she had last night.
And the geese decide just then it is time to leave because there will be hunters this afternoon. They rise up into the blue sky and flow our way, headed towards the sea and on to their next nighttime resting place. We stop skating altogether and look up, deafened by their voices, then stunned by this other thing we feel from their beating wings. It is something that tugs at you inside. Something elemental that pulls you half off the ice and up into the sky with them. When they pass and we three look at each other, Pamela asks me if I felt something trying to lift me. I nod yes but do not speak.
When the birds are gone, some new force of gravity makes us all lie down on the unmarked snow and leave an imprint of ourselves - arms outstretched, staring up at the sky. My daughters both immortalize themselves as angels but I do not. I settle for leaving a scarecrow behind, the mark of a man with long legs together and arms straight out at his sides, faceless beneath an empty blue sky.
Driving Minnie's Piano Page 4