I should tell you about yesterday morning, just to be fair. There was no fog, no wind. The sun was right where it wanted to be at 8:30 Atlantic Daylight Saving Time. The sea was flat, blue and uncommunicative at the reef - barely a ripple. A light north wind coming from the land gave the air a sweet flowery smell. Bees were harvesting sustenance from the zucchini flowers in my garden. The dill plants - tall, elegant and dignified like beautiful foreign women who you see on TV - were covered with dew. I was going to sit down and work on my novel about an imaginary character but decided that I would devote my efforts to real life this morning instead of fiction. Real-life experience is a fairly mild addiction I have developed which sometimes gets in the way of fiction writing. I may one day succumb to it altogether if I'm not careful but for now I try to limit my indulgence. I'm sure I can handle it if I'm careful.
So on this golden but fogless morning I drove my inflatable kayak to Rocky Run and set off paddling out to sea. The water was clear and deep in the channel and the tide was pushing inward so it was like a reverse river. I hugged the shore, trying to avoid the seaworthy thrust of salt water, then passed through the old railroad trestles and out towards the cliffs near The Wreck.
Everything was stunning. The rocks along the shoreline were having a party with those little dancing birds - plovers or sandpipers or some other name. Seaweed was rotting and there were seaweed flies that the birds were feasting on. I had one lone seal pop up nearby and I could still see him in the clear water when he dove back down ten feet beneath the surface. Little fish skidded by. Some of the dancing birds got paranoid about me and as soon as one flew, they all did in a manoeuvre like a big squadron of spacecraft in a Star Wars movie. I keep telling them I'm of no concern, not dangerous in the slightest, but they don't listen.
Against the incoming tide, I advanced slowly until the current diminished the closer I came to the headland. I was alone, happy, intensely public and private at once with my thoughts out here on my inflatable kayak. Just the day before, some local kids in their own sea kayak claimed to have seen a shark. Claimed that it bumped into their boat and nearly spilled them into the sea. I think it just has something to do with a couple of recent shark movies. I've never even seen a shark near shore in Nova Scotian waters. I refuse to worry about sharks. We all carry a list in our heads of things we will allow ourselves to worry about. I worry about my kids, the house burning down, getting stuck at really boring meetings, turning into a has-been writer, drowning, losing my mind and my car rusting out. But, as usual, today I refuse to worry about sharks.
Instead, I paddle out to where the waves are now breaking over the old wreck where I once ripped my wetsuit and I “park” by the jagged stump of metal. Here at the very tip of the headland I look at the tall dirt cliffs of nearby Terminal Beach. In the early morning light it is a beautiful but eerie moonscape piece of coastline scalloped by storms and erosion. Losing ground. Reddish soil silting down into the sea and shuttled off by currents to God knows where. But so beautiful. I fall in love with this place yet again. Music by Bach and Mozart begins in my head as I bob gently in my inflatable craft, refusing to worry about sharks here in these clear northerly waters.
This is probably as close to meditation as I can get. Communing with sea and drumlin, I realize that the Ice Age has left this coast as a gift. I'm reading it like one dog reading another dog's story in the sea oats at the beach. It's all there. Deposit and retreat. Let the sea do the rest.
An unexpected swelling of the sea jabs my Taiwanese rubber seacraft up against the jagged rusty shards of The Wreck itself and I pull myself back through millennia to who I am and where. Two thoughts occur simultaneously. Oddly enough, the first one concerns coffee. I would really like a cup of coffee. The second one is the life/death concern of an inflatable kayak getting a significant tear and deflation occurring. The Taiwanese designer has contrived only one air compartment. So if she goes, she goes. It would be a long swim to shore.
So now I gently push away from the wreck and paddle off towards the inlet that will lead me back into Rocky Run. I find the furrow in the narrow channel marked only by several long thin poles made from spruce trees. To my back, at sea, a fogbank has appeared. The north wind will hold it at bay only so long. By the time I find my way back to fiction, it will have come ashore, a cloud settling itself snugly over the land, allowing each of us to retreat into our small safe places to tap out our important messages for an unknown audience.
Fools, Baseball and Beach Stones
There are two kinds of fools: the ones who know they are and the ones who are fooling themselves. I'm the former, although there are moments of delusion when I think I'm the other one. But I'm not. All I have going for me are a few good hunches and a lot of luck.
In the spring around here some fools still set fire to the last year's dried grass, often claiming that it improves this year's growth. I don't think that research bears this out. I think they just like to see something burn. Fire is attractive whether it's out of control or in control. And often, these grass fires do go out of control and burn down barns, sheds and even houses. It's a messy business and I'm convinced fools should not set anything on fire.
I'm not the fire-fool type but I do indulge in things that most respectable people think of as foolish. As previously noted, I am a big fan of rocks. I like some rocks more than I like some people, I'd have to admit. Even if a stone falls off the side of the drumlin onto you, you don't really think it was intentional. You can't say that about people. People will purposefully chew away at a thing until the whole side of the mountain caves in on you. I know. It's happened to me and I've seen it done to others.
But I don't want to say mean things about people. The intention of this fool is to take you back to the beach for a minute. Let's say you are walking on the sand and find a stone that fits into the palm of your hand. You're gazing up at a Seaforth blue sky wondering why the damn stone feels so right. Fortunately for the stone, there's no need to discuss the matter. See, anything involving people involves discussion and differences of opinion. True, some people can make you feel as good as that sun-soaked warm, oblong milky quartz in your paw, but then, sooner or later, you're apt to have complications. And that's where the stone you found on the beach has one up on people. It doesn't get any more or less complicated than it was when you found it.
I have a habit of carrying the stone for a while in my right hand, passing it to my left and then doing one of two things: putting it in my pocket and taking it home or throwing it in the ocean. In retrospect, I can say in all honesty (at least as much as a self-acknowledged fool can do) that the stone is probably better off with the ocean option, number two. See, if I take it home and put it on the window sill or kitchen table, someone might move it to get it out of the way of dinner. Or I might leave it outside my back door with all those other stones I brought home from the beach - as if I had some grand plan, some secret purposeful intention of what to do with those stones. But I don't and I know damn well that when it comes to doing something with all those stones I felt so strongly about, I'll probably just seize up with idleness and do nothing more than admire them on my way out the door.
Now, years are not a big worry to stones. They have time and a kind of patience that could teach most of my friends a thing or two. But the toss and gravity drop into the big blue salty sea is probably quite exciting to a stone that has been sitting on a beach for several thousands or millions of years.
There's a satisfactory arc, up into the air when I throw it, thanks to the fact that I once played second base when I was eleven for a baseball team called Glen Meade, named for a housing development in my community. Actually, I was a lousy second baseman. I daydreamed a lot and second base, as you probably know, is a sorry place to daydream. The outfield was where I belonged and, sure enough, I eventually ended up in right field. In those days, nobody hit into the outfield so it was a daydreamer's paradise.
Before or after the games, when the coaches were not aro
und, some of my friends, the ones who looked for trouble, hit stones instead of baseballs with bats as a kind of practice. I was already a fan of stones back then but I was not a stone hitter. I called stones “rocks” or the fancy ones I called “minerals.” And I didn't like to see incorrigible friends hit them with bats. Rocks and bats led to several things: broken bats, broken car windows, kids hit in the head with rocks in backyards. And I didn't think the rocks and minerals liked the abuse.
During a game every once in a while, after what seemed like a millennium, someone on the team currently opposing Glen Meade, a lefty at the plate, would hit a ball into right field. I was idling away my time thinking about my rock collection at home, daydreaming abut finding a geode maybe or a piece of amethyst (uncommon but not impossible to be found on a suburban lawn) and lo and Beholden Caulfield, here comes a high flying hardball into the outfield. Why they let us play with hardballs, I'll never know, because I had once been playing catch with Warren King, who would one day be a New Jersey State Patrolman, and the hardball Warren was throwing hit me square in the nose. There was blood and pain. I didn't mind the blood. In fact, every boy privately enjoys seeing himself bleeding because of the great ruby red theatrical nature of it all.
But I was not a fan of pain in those days. It was a short, sharp pain that would psychologically damage me forever. It helped turn me from being a reckless, clumsy second baseman who daydreamed a lot into a daydreaming right fielder who privately hoped no one would hit a ball into his territory. So, as you can imagine, when someone would finally pop up a good one in my direction, and coaches, teammates and assorted alert family members in the bleachers began to shout my name (as if from far, far away in deep space) my brain would kick in with the memory of Warren King driving a fastball into my nose and my brain told me I should be nowhere in the vicinity of where the fly ball was going to land. So I never developed a great reputation as a right fielder for Glen Meade.
I was a fool in those days but not a total waste. I didn't know I was a fool because I was just a kid and figured that some day I would be older and wiser. (Fat chance of that, I now realize.) But there was much to assess at that critical moment when the ball was arriving at its apogee. And me, alert, paranoid, and, above all, feeling protective of my physical self, especially any part of it having to do with my face, my neck or my groin. You see, I already knew exactly what it would feel like to get hit in the nose and figured getting hit in the eye could be worse. I had experienced a nightmare already about being hit by a hardball in the Adam's apple and a nightmare was as good as a real-life experience in those days, maybe better. And there were theories circulating among my peers about what it would feel like to get hit hard with a hardball down there in the crotch.
Catchers were the ones who most openly discussed what it would feel like to get slammed into with a fast pitch right in the balls. That's why they had the luxury of wearing a cup. They liked to tap on it sometimes, especially the catcher for our team, my good friend, Bob Blomquist.
But outfielders as a rule did not wear cups. Sure, I know what baseball fans are thinking: the odds of a high fly ball whacking into your family jewels is very low. But I was only eleven. I had not had a university course in statistics under my belt, so to speak. I had my emotionally-scarring Warren King experience and I had my phobias well under cultivation.
In baseball, you are given a baseball glove to defend yourself with. Catchers get that big padded sunflower of upholstered leather to fend off injuries from young pitchers with lightning arms. But I just had an old six-finger thin leather glove from Sears. Yes, six fingers; one was an empty, a flaccid leather flap of a finger for that gap between thumb and first digit. I had saved my money long and hard for that glove and I bought it from the Sears store where they had cardboard cut-out stand-up replicas of Ted Williams. I had thought Ted Williams was only a baseball player, an old one at that, but apparently he also fished and played golf. I didn't mind fishing at that point in my life because it had a certain macho element - a kind of contact sport with nature. Hooks drew blood when you were lancing worms and threading their carcasses onto them. But golf sucked big time and always would in my book.
Well, way out there in the outfield with the ball about to come careening down out of the sky you can imagine how much faith I had in my glove. The sun was directly in my eyes out there in right field. People were shouting my name - all of the accurate and not-so-accurate renditions of my labels-for-life: Les! Lesley! Choyce, comin' at ya! Heads up, Lester! It's yours, Lestoil! You got it, Lesman! And so forth.
As you already know, I would have preferred to be back home with my rock collection, labeling new samples: shale, gneiss, schist, mica. But I was, instead, in the hot spot and wondered why I played baseball at all. I had one good sun-blinding peek up into the sky and realized there was absolutely nothing to be seen of a baseball coming down in the midst of the full optic weight and velocity of solar radiation. It had occurred to me before that I should wear sunglasses in the outfield (better to hide behind) but I had had second thoughts, imagining that if you did get hit in the glasses with a baseball, glass and/or plastic would get smashed and lodged in your eyes and you'd be in worse shape than if the evil rawhide-covered orb just pancaked your eyeball.
“Lescargot, take your time!” That was the coach. He was always telling us to take our time, which I never understood. When someone was running from second to third, he'd yell, “Take your time!” When you were at bat, when the pitcher, Don Hildreth, was about to send a searing fastball into his catcher's leather sunflower. When you were about to attempt the impossible and catch a high pop fly in an outfield so blasted with solar radiation that the grass was dying under your feet.
“It's an easy one, Lescargot.” Coach had a smattering of French or he liked to eat French food or something and I could only wish that he had not coined his nickname for me after edible snails. But it was not a matter openly discussed during his pep talks and strategy sessions. “Take your time, boys. Use your brain, the one God gave you. Don't let anything fluster you out there. For every game we win, I'll buy you all ice cream sodas.” He held true to his promise but only had to spill the cash twice that season.
He continued to shout at me. “Focus on the ball. Take your time.”
I noticed that all the other coaches yelled and screamed at their teams to run faster, play harder. Hurry! Even running onto the field or off the field, where it didn't matter. “Wha's a matter? You got lead in your pants?” they'd yell at a lolly-gagging player, the one with pants made from old dentist's x-ray blankets. And there was often the familiar chant of “Hustle, hustle, hustle!” (Eventually, the “Hustle” would become a popular dance for a short season while I was in high school.)
But my coach would never utter the H-verb. He was from the relaxed, maybe even meditative, school of baseball and believed that taking things at a slow pace increased your enjoyment and ability. Concerning batting, for example, he would say, “Lean into it,” whatever that meant, as opposed to other more virulent coaches screaming for their eleven-year-olds to slam it, massacre it, or bash it out of the park. Now that I think about it, it could have been the snails he ate.
“Lescargot, get under it. Take your time, that's it.”
Every time I see one of those slow-motion movie scenes of a high flyball heading toward an inept little league outfielder I understand the truth captured by the film footage. The beauty of such cinematography is that the viewer would not care one iota if a tornado lay waste to all the family members sitting in the stands watching the team. We would not care if a nuclear war leveled half the planet just then. We just want the puny little kid to catch the goddamn baseball.
Like in those films, I'm frozen there in the outfield, paralyzed by fear of injury to the aforementioned parts of my anatomy, trying to take my time. (What else is there to do?) I'm blinded by the sun, the ball is hanging somewhere in space above me as if gravity has been suspended, as if the Hollywood director is making a test
case out of this one to see just how long he can drag out the emotion and the suspense, the infinite hopes of millions of would-be viewers.
Then the world goes mute. There is no sound around me but I can hear the blood pumping in my ears, as if beating out some muffled Morse code with instructions to stick my six-finger Ted Williams glove up into air. My arm, oddly enough, is willing to respond. If nothing else, it will shield me from getting hit. Amazingly, I'm optimistic. I've seen this done before. On TV Phillies games and even in real life. The ball will be like a magnet to the certainty of an outstretched glove. How could it be otherwise?
For an instant, the world has become a more hospitable place. I've forgotten about my rock collection and can think only of willing the ball out of the sky and into the glove. I'm moving forward even, expectant, my legs seemingly knowing where to go to meet the ball. I'll take my time, of course, I'll lean into it. As if worshipping an ancient primitive god, I find myself going down on one knee. I've seen a pro player, Richie Ashburn of the Philadelphia Phillies, do this. We're still operating on slo mo. Decades are passing.
And then the ball hits with a dull thud into the dead grass three, possibly four, feet behind me. A shudder of disbelief rips my confidence away and I realize that my optimism had been a short-lived but highly potent drug that had curdled my brain. The world has conspired against me and I was not man (or boy) enough to grapple with the vindictive cruel reality of modern baseball.
The coach is no longer yelling, Take your time. He has now borrowed from his adversaries in such a desperate moment. “Hustle!”
I hustle. I know I have failed as only a fool can fail. And at least that means I am in familiar territory. A ball aloft in the sky is terra incognita, but a baseball sitting on the ground, inert, not moving, is familiar psychological real estate. I hustle. (I bugaloo, I swim, I monkey, I twist.) I spin around, sprint, grab the ball and throw. Hard.
Driving Minnie's Piano Page 14