Well, I do hustle but in this pivotal moment, I manage to obey both of the coach's injunctions. Let's rewind.
A runner is passing second base, headed towards third like greased lightning. The infield is helpless. The other two outfielders are running towards me as if I'm incapable of doing anything right in the game of baseball. I'm hearing a wall of verbal abuse from both teams but my coach sees me reaching for the ball. He still believes in me. “Lescargot! Take your time!” He means it.
I inhale oxygen at the request of my lungs. I firmly grasp the ball and focus on Bob Blomquist and his catcher's mitt, his hopeful leather sunflower held high up in the air. I remember that our coach has told his outfield over and over again not to gamble on the long-distance heave all the way to home plate under these dire circumstances. Relay the ball by way of the second baseman. But I've played second base before and know how many things can go wrong tossing a ball not once but twice before making it to home plate. My arm ratchets back as far as it can and I throw the ball with all the life force within this eleven-year-old's body.
Even as the ball leaves my grip, I have a small epiphany, a moment of clarity that has served me well all these ensuing years. I may not be good at baseball but I tend to recover well and quickly from my mistakes. (Later I would replace the word “baseball” with any multitude of nouns.)
The enemy coach is telling his runner to (what else?) hustle. Second base is looking up at the orbit of my throw. I wait for the director's slo mo camera to kick in again but there is none. Just a very fast runner heading for home plate. In my head I explain his speed: he's twelve, a full year older than me.
Bob Blomquist has his catcher's mask off now. He has the advantage of no sun in his eyes. My throw is good. I hear the satisfying smack of the ball into Bob's round cushion of leather. He hardly has to stretch for it. I allow the sound to replay itself like a euphoric echo inside my skull. The runner, whose name I cannot remember, slides at the request of his red-faced coach, an insurance salesman who drinks before each game. The kid is twelve and is used to pushing little eleven-year-olds around. Blomquist is eleven like me. We both had Miss Washington for a teacher this past year at Cinnaminson Memorial. But the Quist is tough, I know. That's why he is the catcher. He's got padding, a crotch protector and a chest protector. What could go wrong?
The grown-up runner kicks as he slides and even from this distance I can tell that he's kicking Bob Blomquist, my loyal teammate, in the balls. The plastic cup may protect Bob from permanent damage but he will not be able to maintain his balance. He trips backwards over home plate, the ball falls from his grip and rolls towards the backstop.
But I'm ecstatic. I guess I don't really care who wins or loses. All I know is that mine was a good throw. I'm a lousy catcher but an amazingly good thrower. Unfair negative attention will be leveled against Bob for dropping the ball. No one will believe him when he says he was kicked in the crotch by the runner. But at least, at this point, nobody, not even me, seems to care that I miffed my chance to make a heroic play. I tossed a good toss. The game continues, I settle back into a kind of meditative trance. Nobody hits another ball into right field for the rest of the game.
Later, when it's my turn at bat, I walk, then move on to second base before another teammate strikes out and invokes the wrath of other Glen Meade players, but not the coach. And soon the game is over. One adult, after the game, the father of one of my teammates, singles me out to say that I made a great throw to home plate. His comment matters.
Years spin by and I lose interest in baseball, couldn't even take a wild guess at who plays right field for any team. Not even the Phillies or the Yankees. I've recovered well from my blunders and I still have a good arm for tossing rocks into the sea.
I left most of my rock collection in New Jersey but brought some of the really good geodes and amethysts, and even some chunks of obsidian I once found, here to Nova Scotia, where they mingle outside or on the window sill with other rocks I pick up on the beach.
The worst insult to my beach stones, I suppose, is when I leave one on the kitchen table and somebody in my family cleans up the kitchen. If the stone looks really uninteresting to the family member, it is thrown into the trash and sent to the dump. That's one of the reasons I'm less prone to bring home every rock of interest to keep unless it is the fossil of a dinosaur footprint or a nugget of pure gold. The lesser rocks are carried for several yards or sometimes even miles along the empty shorelines of Nova Scotia where I walk and then I turn to the deep blue sea and I throw them far out into the water.
As I make my pitch of selected stone into the sea, I know that there is part of me sailing through the sky with this object, a stone somewhat less in size than a hardball but larger than a chicken egg. I follow the trajectory with my eye, and as I watch, it instinctively welds together all the things I've done right in my life, and diminishes somehow all the things I've done wrong. I hear the satisfying ker-plunk into the sea and then imagine it settling into the clear, pure north Atlantic water, drifting towards the bottom and settling in among other stones with headgear of exotic golden, brown and green seaweed. I've returned the stone to the sea from where it once emerged and I head on home, my lungs feasting on pure seaside air, feeling all the better for it, fool that I am.
Ravens
It's a warm morning in August by the sea. At eight a.m. I walk the rim of the headland high above the water with the warm mists flowing upward from below. The Gulf Stream has finally brought us warm water. My dog Jody runs and sniffs at the air. The familiar fog is soft and warm around us.
Suddenly, from above, two giant ravens drop out of the sky as if produced by some magician. I feel them before I see them. When I look up I realize they are dancing on the wind, riding the updraft of air rushing up the face of the cliff, swooping left, then right, down, and back up almost as if they are performing to music.
I expect it will be a momentary thing and they will move on but I'm wrong. As Jody and I walk along, they stay with us, arcing upward and then back down until they are quite close to my head. They swoop close to the ground and, for an instant, I think they might be ready to attack my dog. Jody barks once, twice, spins around ready to defend us but the ravens simply continue on doing what they're doing. And it is quite magnificent.
The rush of southerly air pushes straight up the escarpment of the headland and pours up into the sky. The two ravens are working the wind the same way I use the power of the wave when I surf. These black beauties are much more graceful than I, however, and live each day learning to use the tug and pull, the push and power, of the waves of invisible air.
Today must be a singularly good day for this surf-dancing with the wind. And they want an audience. Any species might do, but preferably one or two with good eyes and some sense of admiration.
I believe the ravens to be a pair, although I have no way of knowing. They swoop quickly and effortlessly again, dropping to below eye level along the cliff edge where they hover wing tip to wing tip, then scoop the updraft again with a powerful thrust of their wings and rocket vertically twenty metres into the sky before tucking their wings and dropping like twin black missiles before us. Jody pulls herself back again into a defensive crouch but I'm too hypnotized to care for my own well-being. I am looking up at the great beak of the bird as it plummets, then the wings explode outward and I feel the full blast of compressed air used to change the vector. The raven has come so close to my face that I can smell his scent.
Ravens have a powerful musk, much more so than any other bird I know. And it is, to me, a familiar smell. In my early Nova Scotia years, I once had a raven for a pet, although the word is not quite accurate. Jack had been hauled from the sea, a wounded creature with a broken wing. A vet set his wing, I saw to his recuperation and retrained him to fly. Like this pair above me, his wingspan was the same as my own outstretched arms. And he was as stubborn as me and as determined to live his life by his own rules.
Once Jack had learned to fly,
he remained near the house and ate from my hand - dog food and fish scraps - and haunted me with the memory of his friendship for years after he was killed by reckless goose hunters on the nearby frozen lake.
I had a notion that Jack had a secret mate somewhere in the wild that he was spiriting my dog food away to, for often he would stuff his mouth to overflowing and then fly away beyond my sight. My notion of the secret mate persisted beyond his demise and I believe that Jack's progeny are still out there in the world around me.
I even have private notions that they are out there keeping an eye on me and my family, somehow protecting us or providing day-to-day good luck. This is a silly assumption, I suppose, with little basis in fact, but it persists as do many other significant myths that shape my day-to-day life.
There is little doubt, though, that the ravens sitting on the electric line when I appear in the morning to feed the pigeons are there to gather the cracked corn for their own sustenance. One sits on the telephone pole at the bottom of the driveway and when I emerge from the house, he announces it to the others - six of them at least, scattered around the marsh. They all converge within minutes and make themselves known with raucous discussion about my arrival.
Once I let my pigeons free to fly, the ravens compete for the corn that I scatter on the ground. The watch raven, when approached, will look me in the eye and, if the contact is too personal, he will fly away. It's not a matter of physical proximity but something else. A trickster must be cautious with bridging psychic distance with beings as dangerous as we are.
Technically known as Great Northern Ravens, many of Jack's distant relatives appear to me wherever I travel. They stand beside the highway each time I drive to the airport. They caw from treetops on any coast of this province I hike. I sat on a bare springtime hilltop in a remote village once - Mutton Bay, along Quebec's Lower North Shore of the St. Lawrence, just south of Labrador - and a raven dropped out of the sky, landed on a rocky outcropping by me and studied me as he preened himself in the sun.
Ravens attended to my loneliness, walking along an empty city street in Sudbury on a cold November morning. A raven woke me up in Tokyo each morning I was there, perched on the metal railing outside, raucously reminding me as it broke my sleep that I may have travelled far but I was still living in the dominion of the great black birds.
We read a lot into birds. At least I do. Eagles appear when important things are about to happen. Hummingbirds make their exquisite arrival outside my window each summer to suckle from jewelweed and I don't realize I have stopped breathing. They shift my mood from confusion to peace and then they disappear.
Hawks and egrets materialize for me when people die. I know this to be true, although I announce it to others who show scepticism. Small birds dart in front of my car and some die despite my attempt to swerve or slam on the brakes. They too, perhaps, are there to remind me of my own flimsy grasp on mortality. I grieve for their loss and stop to retrieve them from the road, even though the guilt is worse when confronted with the carcass of my crime.
I try to help all injured birds. I carry wounded Canada geese home from the sea. Only minutes after I brought a January goose home from Seaforth, a harrier hawk dropped from the sky and snatched one of my pigeons from the roof. My daughter and I ran after the hawk, because we were outside attending to the wounded goose. We screamed at the hawk as we ran down the road after it. The hawk was startled and the pigeon was set free. Had we not been outside at that moment, the pigeon, the one called China, would have been lost.
I have this instinctive feeling that all acts of kindness to wild creatures are rewarded in this life or the next. But that doesn't seem to be enough to satisfy me because I sometimes find myself talking about my acts of kindness - okay, it's a kind of bragging about them, I suppose. Like the ducks on Main Street.
I am on my way to give a talk at a school on the other side of the harbour. It is morning rush hour in Dartmouth on the four lanes of Main Street. Late spring in the rain, I'm stopped at a traffic light. A mother mallard duck is entering the highway from the parking lot of Chebucto Ford, walking out into the traffic followed by twelve baby ducks.
Within seconds they are all in the middle of the road. The light changes as I see the crisis and I leap from the driver's seat and charge out into the oncoming traffic. I put out my arms in both directions - the ducklings' crossing guard - and discover I have perfect command of all the drivers on the road.
They see me; they see the ducks. They watch a shaggy-haired poet ushering a brood of tiny ducks across a major traffic artery. No one hits their car horn. Everyone is patient. Commuters sit through a second red light until the tiny creatures, some too small to easily climb up over the curb on the far side, are trundling off into the relative safety of a suburban lawn.
I'm soaking wet by the time I arrive at my school and already boasting about my good deed. I've written large novels that have provided me with no more satisfaction nor reason to strut my own accomplishment.
The ravens dance above my head, and continue to perform above us rather than chasing the updraft east along the cliff. Over and over, they come perilously close to me as they allow themselves to seemingly hurtle like rocks out of the sky before stretching their wings and arcing upward.
And then they begin to do something else.
As they ascend on a powerful gust of wind, one raven rolls over onto its back and stretches out its talons. The other raven stretches out its own feet until - for a split instant - the talons grip and they begin to tumble. I've only seen anything like this once before - a pair of eagles, near Inverness in Cape Breton.
My own dark eagles repeat the act. I can't tell one from the next, they look so perfectly the same. I wonder what exactly it means, what it takes for a bird to dare to turn on its back, far above the sea, to grip its taloned mate, testing itself or the other or the natural forces of gravity versus wind.
Or maybe they are performing for an audience this daring act in a sea-misted sky, celebrating the warm summer air driven north from the tropics a week before the first great hurricane of the season, a wind that will breed waves tall enough for me to carve graceful turns and swoops across a giant wall of moving water in my own imperfect imitation of the masters.
China and Other Possibilities
Many people think pigeons have three toes, if they've ever thought about it. But they're wrong. Pigeons should have four toes. Three up front and one out back, which makes for pretty good balance. One of my pigeons, however, somehow ripped off one of his toes last night on the wire in his pigeon cage. When I let them out to fly around this morning I noticed he had blood dripping as he flew into the sky. I caught him and washed his pigeon foot and treated the wound with hydrogen peroxide, which I hope was the right thing to do.
And then I started in on feeling sorry for him and ultimately myself. It was the seventh day of September and September can breed small pockets of sorrow. And now I had a pigeon with three toes on one leg. I was fairly sure he would be all right. The name of this pigeon is either Butterscotch or China. Sunyata had picked him up from the middle of a highway near Dartmouth. He was white and tan and not real smart but a very likeable pigeon all around. Sunyata had to jump out of her friend's car in traffic to save him. This runs in our family. I have many times jumped out of cars to save snakes, turtles, small birds, a dog once and so forth.
We're a family that defies automotive death to animals where possible, putting a small dent into a sometimes dispassionate universe. Sunyata was seventeen then and a new driver. She took the pigeon to a veterinarian, who said simply that the bird was “stunned” and later, upon the pigeon's recovery from being stunned, the same vet suggested that the bird “probably isn't all that smart.”
So we took home the pigeon with the low IQ and it turned out to be a great mate for Rosa, our lone surviving pigeon. For a while, my name, China, stuck and the kids would ask, “How are things with China today?” and I would say, “China's doing pretty good.” And
then they started calling China Butterscotch because of his colour. I didn't think Butterscotch was a very masculine name for a bird but kids don't seem to give a hoot about that.
So now China was down to three toes on one foot and he was like many of those city pigeons you see who have lost or damaged pigeon toes. Rosa was married, so to speak, to China and they have had two young pigeons that looked more like Rosa than China. They all enjoyed flying around and around the sky in the morning and Rosa would come to the garden to eat fresh garden peas from my hand or when I gripped one between my teeth. I wrote a song about her, called “The Wings of Rosa,” and performed it with The SurfPoets. It's about flying and freedom and that sort of thing and has three chords: F, G, and A minor. I always like sneaking in an A minor chord.
And so this seventh day of the ninth month, this recent third place surfing competitor was wrestling with September insanity. I think it had to do with the usual end of summer stuff but also the fact that Sunyata, now nineteen and Pamela, now thirteen, were both about to go away to school. Sunyata to Scotland, Pamela to Wolfville. Doors were opening and closing. Nothing could save me from feeling those changes deep down in my bones.
Calamity collects around holidays, as I'm sure you know. Labour Day weekend was fraught with the usual disasters. In Ontario, nearly forty vehicles piled up on the 401, reminding us of the madness of automobiles. In Nova Scotia, two drunk men on a very long late night walk home went to sleep on the highway and one got run over and killed. The other slept through it all and survived. It's probably worth staying off the roads altogether on holidays. Especially if you want to sleep.
On Labour Day, I took my two daughters out to buy really greasy fish and chips from a mobile-home-style take-out. I paid for the greasy food and we drove off to a provincial park to eat in the forest by Porters Lake. In the process of backing into a picnic site, I smacked the rear of the car into a tree. That's right. It wasn't even a small tree. It was a really big tree and I backed right into it quite hard.
Driving Minnie's Piano Page 15