Driving Minnie's Piano

by Lesley Choyce

  And although I was treated well in Paris, I felt disconnected and anonymous for the most part. Not a lot of eye contact and people spend way too much time just sitting around in cafés and bars drinking minuscule cups of coffee or glasses of red wine. I think that would lead to a sort of lethargy that is alien to the energized Nova Scotia creative mind.

  So I was glad to get back home. About a week after Kevin had drowned, I went surfing at the spot where he had disappeared and I caught some fine early morning waves in his honour. I apologized to the wind and the sea for not having been around to lend assistance or give advice. I knew the innocence of surfing here was gone for good but I still felt a strong, powerful bond with the sea, the indifferent sea that gives and takes. And it's almost a backhanded reminder that caution and caring are the greatest of human responsibilities that should not be shirked.

  Spring Surf

  Spring in Nova Scotia could be dull if it wasn't for the waves. The sky is a low, soft curtain of grey wool and the sea is the colour of gun metal as I pull my car to a stop at a small crescent pocket of sand on the shoreline of the Atlantic forty-five minutes from downtown Halifax.

  The snow on the ground is melting but some of the boulders along the shoreline are glazed with ice. I ease my surfboard out of the car, take a final tug on the zipper of my drysuit, inhale deeply, and then sprint across the sand and into the sea. Within seconds I've lost contact with mainland life and I'm back in my element.

  I take slow, easy strokes and watch the dreamy kelp undulate back and forth beneath me in the frigid clear water. I see my breath turn to smoke in the air. I watch a head-high wave form like a dark monument, sliding towards me, breaking from a perfect peak thanks to an unseen reef of rocks beneath the surface. I realize for the first time that when the wave hits the shallows of the reef it's laced with slivers of ice.

  This happens in the spring. The ice breaks up in a nearby inlet, sifts out to sea and then winds drive it back towards shore. No icebergs here. Just small sargassos of slush ice and infinite variations on the traditional refrigerator ice cube.

  I'm still paddling but safely out of reach of the wave as it goes critical, bowls out and then sends a shower of water and ice into an emphatic cascade. There's a hollow place forming big enough to squeeze a Nova Scotian surfer into if he had the right set of tools and I'm hoping I'll soon have a chance with this wave's cousin. When the frosty lip touches down on the mother sea, all that blitzkrieg of ice sounds like a box of fluorescent light bulbs dropped from a second-storey window.

  I find my destination: the middle of the cove just outside of the peak. I sit up on my board, scan the headlands still whitewashed in snow and genuinely grieve that winter and its frosty Nova Scotian sidekick, early spring, is just about gone. Summer is soft and easy here. Winter is hard and slick. I sometimes prefer the latter and I'm happy that the big bad Canadian winter doesn't give up without offering me this particular gift: a day of sea and ice.

  The water around me has soft cotton balls of melting slush mixed in the mosaic of dagger ice: some long and pointy like stilettos, other chunks cut clean like pizza slices. There is no wind to muck up the design, only waves pulling themselves up from the deep, waves that have trundled silently here to these shores from maybe three hundred miles away, from storms that will have no effect on these shores . . . except for their generous outpouring of waves.

  I study the waves, wait for company. It arrives as if on schedule. An adolescent harbour seal, little more than a pup, pokes his dark nose up a few metres away. He flicks his doglike head once and stares at me with those big obsidian puppy-dog eyes. Although I know he has sharp teeth capable of punching easy holes into my mortal flesh, I expect he's satisfied with whatever fishy breakfast he's already had and considers me an ally, or at least a curious diversion. He slips down into the water, passes like a dark shadow beneath me and comes up to survey me from the other side.

  This whole scene has such a reverential quality to it that I'm in no big hurry to flip into hyper-surfer mode. I sniff the air, feel the cold seeping slowly into my feet from a sea that is still hovering near the zero Celsius mark. I close my eyes briefly and when I open them it's as if I've conjured things from the sky. I hear them first. The squadron of Canada geese is skirting the coast, travelling west to east before turning north at the Canso Strait for Labrador. They come in low and loud with their wonky chant until, passing directly above me, they stop honking so the seal and I can only hear the thud of heavy wings beating through the air. As they pass immediately overhead, I'm staring straight up like when I was a teenager sitting near the end of an airport runway, watching the big winged machines taking off above.

  I scoop a trapezoidal pane of ice from the sea and bite into it. Fresh water, a clatter of cold on my teeth until they ache. And now I'm ready to dance on the half-frozen sea.

  I let three waves slide beneath me, waiting for the sun to line up with a rift in the clouds. When the light bolts down suddenly from above, everything changes colour. The sea is a hard surface of blue. The snowy headlands scream out blinding white. The sandy wet shoreline glows with some inner life and the cove of ice and water where I sit takes on the quality of a stained glass window.

  Nothing for it but to paddle. Shoreward. Through the exotic debris. Three deep strokes and I match the speed of the incoming wave, feel its power beneath my board. I stand as the wave sets up a long clean wall with its own clever graffiti of ice and slush pronouncing the singular beautiful artistry of the Atlantic.

  As I drop down the face of the sea, I feel the old adrenaline rush of a smooth descent. I sense the abundant power looming above me but glide dreamlike in silence except for the hip-hop staccato of hard chunks of ice clanking against my board. At the bottom of the wave is a curdled bed of soft slush and I feel the tug of its density as I carve a bottom turn and then argue against gravity, arcing back up high onto the wall of the wave.

  I'm travelling east now with serious intent, gaining speed, almost parallel to the wave whose back I am riding. Behind me the wave has begun to pitch forward. The crack of breaking ice mixes with the slurp of sea dragging up the softer stuff, a sound that might seem ominous if I didn't have speed as an ally.

  But I'm free and feeling fine and temporarily indomitable as I slip through the vertical icefield, a wall of water filled with heirlooms, knick-knacks and memorabilia of the season gone by. Behind me the wave has grown hollow and the sun has allowed it to show its true colours of blue mixed with green commingled with those blazing diamonds. I'm a little too dazzled by it all and lose my focus, allowing my board to slow just a hair. I tip up on one foot and tilt back towards the maw of the wave but recover my balance quickly and shift my weight forward to increase speed.

  All my early morning confidence is suddenly shaken as I realize the wave is spitting ice cubes from the lip now. All a body can do is tuck in low, keep one's head down and watch the wall get steeper and steeper up ahead. I decide to trust instinct over reason and stay tucked, assess the locomotive cave of sea and ice that is consuming me and hope for the best.

  The best would be a quick trip back to sunlight but instead the sea decides to have its way with me. My feet are still dutifully planted on my board as the lip of the wave, dense with the memory of a brutal winter, takes a broadside punch at my wetsuit-hooded head. I feel myself cartwheeling forward into the drink and suddenly am reminded what freezing seawater does to the fully exposed human face. First, I feel the small razors of wafer ice slicing at me as I connect with the surface. Then I slip under and hear the magnificent stereo whump of a wave in triumph over a mortal surfer. I'm held under for mere seconds that expand exponentially in a world where time is truly mutable. Then I surface, gasping for good air and feeling the very identifiable pain of a short but volcanic headache brought on by a Canadian wipeout.

  When the wave is through with me, I scramble back onto my board, paddle for the safety of deeper water and take deep clean gulps of air until I can focus again. An
other formation of geese takes possession of the sky above and the young seal pops up again nearby to blink at me in innocent wonder.

  April

  Sunyata, not long after she gets her driver's license, drives her car into a ditch in Eastern Passage and calls home an hour after midnight. She is okay. The car has a big dent and some scratches. While it is being towed out, somebody steals her wallet. The next day she doesn't want to drive. In fact, nearly a week goes by before she considers driving again.

  That same week, I meet with a cartoon channel executive to pitch an animated series idea based on a kid's book of mine called Famous At Last. “Fun, not dark” is what she wants. Fun and happy and maybe the slightest bit (but not too much) meaningful.

  But especially, not dark. There are way too many dark cartoons out there, she says. My idea is fun and happy and has lots of personality and it means something but, oops, I inadvertently suggest it even has an “educational element.”

  “We're not about education,” the executive says immediately.

  “I didn't exactly mean educational.”

  “We aren't into moralizing.”

  Neither is Fred, the protagonist of my book, who wants to be a Saturday morning cartoon character. He is just a kid trying to cope with the heavy-duty, complex adult world.

  And, of course, then it dawns on me. Fred is me. I am Fred. I am still nine years old. Although this is a problem for the cartoon channel because of their target audience. Fred is going to have to grow up for them and become twelve.

  “Fred's very sophisticated for a nine-year-old,” I say in his defence, implying that in his own head he is almost twelve. I realize I'm bending over for the media. I make poor little Freddie lose three very valuable years of his life, just like that, for a TV executive.

  But part of me truly is still nine, or maybe twelve. I have not figured out the adult world at all even though I play the games. I play games well despite the fact that most of the time I ignore the rules. But, after all, isn't that what a kid has to do to survive in a world ruled by adults?

  I would not like someone to change my script and make me lose three years. I want to hang onto these three years. I don't want to have to grow up that quickly.

  Yet, at this age, I begin to wonder. What exactly do I want to do with my life from here on?

  I am this man with this situation. I do not want more money, more freedom, more anything in particular. I spend a lot of time by myself with my hopes and fears and then, sometimes I go surfing and I feel a whole lot better. Or I go out into the woods and make trails.

  Making trails is a good thing, I think, for a guy like me. I am leading myself somewhere into the wilderness and the trail means I can find my way home and then come back again on another day and pick up where I left off.

  Why do I get a certain amount of pleasure from cutting dead branches off a tree in the middle of a forest? Creating a trail that doesn't go anywhere, a trail whose ends are its own means? In truth, I don't even need a trail. I'm happy to be wandering aimlessly in that spruce wilderness behind my house. I love the plush undergrowth: moss, moss, moss. Soft on everything. Moss has this job of making a dead forest look alive in the winter if there is no snow. Moss turns a boulder into a sleeping green bear. Moss is velvety and deep and bounces back. I wish I were the one who invented moss.

  Once I'm not around to trim and lop, the forest will grow back over my trails with sheep sorrel and Labrador tea and long delicate necklaces of wintergreen. Yes, wintergreen grows out there. And whenever I die, which I hope is later in the century, somewhere after the invention of the holodeck, I want to be covered over with moss. Nova Scotia soil is very rocky and unforgiving, so at least give me good moss for a roof.

  Today I need to do some more revision on my cartoon script. I'm working with some computer whiz kids who are going to make Fred move. Fred is getting up off the page of a book and he's going to make TV commercials in my cartoon. That's how he becomes famous. Fred is more famous than me. People take notice of me sometimes because I wrote a bunch of books, I surf in the winter and I play electric guitar, sing (well, actually I talk, since I don't sing well) and make music videos. Even the word “music” is questionable here, but no one is complaining.

  Fred will decide that TV commercials are not worth throwing away his life for. I will decide what? So far, I've only come up with moss this morning. I'm feeling really good about the existence of moss in this world.

  In twenty minutes, after I finish tweaking my script, I will go to the Arctic again. That is to say, I go back to my writing about Arctic explorers. I signed a contract to write a book about the coastline of Canada and its history. I'm up to my eyeballs in snow and ice for this one as I write about brave explorers who were overly zealous and optimistic. Sometimes they were starving, though, or freezing to death, or, at minimum, having their gums swell from scurvy until they pull their teeth out one by one with their fingers. I'm not sure, but I think they could have eaten lichen to avoid that problem. I've eaten it and not died. It was the kind of staghorn lichen that grows on the side of trees. At least I think it was lichen. Then there is the lichen that grows on rocks. Some of it is orange. Really beautiful in a glistening fog.

  On TV, singer Jann Arden tells me she has three, maybe four good days a week. Much of the rest of them she's depressed. Wow. Nobody sings better than Jann Arden. Nobody has more angst in her songs and I guess she has to be depressed sometimes to sing them so damn good. Think on it. She is actually working during those days when she is maybe doing nothing but napping and feeling depressed. It is part of her art. She could not get on stage or go to the recording studio and do it right unless she was depressed. The other performance stuff may be a piece of cake for her. Her real work is working through that depression. I'm onto it and feeling a little lightened by it.

  Two weeks ago I gave my first final exam at the university in over twenty years of teaching. It was a big gym and my class was in there suffering with three other classes. I wanted to walk around and apologize to everyone in that room. Final exams suck the big winds of vile empty places. I accepted the final exam papers at the end and smiled a docile smile. I did not openly apologize, but I tried to show it in my face. One student, who was not prepared, wrote me an explanation and her own apology explaining why she was not prepared. The whole thing began, “I can't lie to you . . . ”

  Others launched into long blathering essays about Whitman and Wordsworth. One student wrote three pages about the daffodils poem, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” the one I had told everyone to avoid. Skip the daffodils, I had said. Go straight for “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” But still they went for daffodils on the final exam. Sometimes, you have to work with what you know and this guy knew daffodils and nothing else when it came to Wordsworth.

  Some wrote a whole lot about almost nothing at all. Some retold a poem or explained the plot of a short story.

  Don't worry, I didn't flunk anyone. Not even Daffodils. No, I'm sorry. I did flunk some students who never came to class. I mean never. Just handed in papers. These were the wraiths of English 1000. They weren't around for my metaphorical discussion involving poetry, surfing, telepathic ravens and star moss. Only they deserved to fail.

  But who am I to judge even them? I'd prefer not to. I play the adult game of giving grades very poorly. About the exam: the only good thing to say is that I think most of my students felt happy and relieved when it was over. The sun was out that day, the birds were singing - well, not exactly singing, but at least chattering, on University Avenue and down by the English Department on Henry Street. I felt somewhat metaphysical after the damn examination, just to be free of the old Studley Gymnasium where it took place.

  Not one person got up to go to the bathroom during the two-hour exam. Think on it. Conditioned. Sitting in rows with their university IDs out on the desk. This was so someone, me presumably, could check to see that a real student had not sent a replacement studen
t, someone with an amazing IQ who had known Whitman and Wordsworth personally, to sit and write the exam. No, better to just wax eloquent on daffodils and be done with it. I can't imagine a replacement student working in my class. It wouldn't fly.

  So they all sat there and didn't go to the bathroom for two hours. Some of the classes were in there for three, the poor devils. Makes you want to take a bulldozer to Studley Gym or to the university itself. Tear it down and let the moss grow over the rubble. And it would if you gave it time and enough moisture.

  My father, I think, taught me what I know about making the best of a bad situation. When things broke down, you just worked with whatever you had around to fix it until it was good and fixed, or fixed good enough to get you where you were going with it in the first place.

  My life is cobbled together from bits and pieces of who knows what. No master plan, no logical scheme. Fix 'er up as she goes along. I was a semi-unhappy teenager and a bit morose about being an early-twenties person. I hated the government, didn't trust the police, despised much of what my civilization believed in. I rejected a ton of it and, for one summer, moved north to Canada to live in a shack. This would be my first extended foray into the great north.

  I was really happy in my shack in Canada, with a Boy Scout tent for an outhouse and almost no money and no store-bought food. I ate fresh fish and edible wild plants a lot in those days. I don't recall eating a lot of lichen, but that was before I knew Farley Mowat. The old previously abandoned house we lived in had lots of old junk left around from which to improvise daily necessities.