I don't usually do things like that but I can blame it on the fact that it was a holiday and that my kids were going away. My subconscious mind was screaming the headlines that life was changing in some big way and I should go back my car - my new car - into a tree in the middle of the forest. In that quirky subliminal way, it probably even makes sense. At the time, though, we were all shocked. Wham. Tree.
The rear window was dusty and the sun blurred the vision in that direction, making the tree, I suppose, invisible. It wasn't there when I went past the picnic site and decided to back up. It appeared out of nowhere and I slammed the rear end of my car into it. I was looking straight at it with my head twisted around even as I connected but it just wasn't visible to me.
So I have this big dented plastic bumper now. I think the old metal bumpers would have reacted differently. But nowadays cars have a lot of plastic in them. The tree was probably glad it was plastic and not metal with shiny chrome like the old Fords and Chevies and Edsels had. After I dislodged my car from the tree and ate the greasy fish and chips (now an $800 meal) I studied the tree to see if it would reveal the mystery of its shrouding mechanism. It looked like an average forty-foot tall spruce tree that had been hanging around a Nova Scotia forest all its life. But it had other scars, I noticed. Other drivers had driven into this tree before.
I spent the afternoon trying to urge the bumper back into its proper shape with minimal success. And that was pretty much the end of my holiday.
The week leading up to this Labour Day was also eventful. A powerful hurricane, Cindy, sat off the coast, generating great surf - big, boomy waves. In nearby Herring Cove, a father and daughter were swept off the cliffs and drowned. I surfed with some friends at a remote spot on waves like the ones you read about in magazines. The water was warm, the take-off on the waves was like dropping down an elevator shaft. There were some tubes to be had. Sometimes the wave would lurch up and pull itself over my head as I raced across the face of it. I started in sunlight, faded back into a big dark tube of green ocean and then slipped myself back out into daylight. Screaming. I like to scream when good things happen to me. This is something you can do when out surfing with your friends. You can scream. You can rinse your mouth out with sea water, too. You can even pee in the ocean. But if you think about the latter two together, you might want to consider avoiding rinsing your mouth out with seawater.
On the previous Sunday, a week before Labour Day, I surfed my brains out. The mind was limp by about seven in the evening, my arms noodled from all that paddling. I had seawater in my ears from the wipeouts and every once in a while I did this odd little one-foot jig with my head tilted to the side to try and flush small quantities of the Atlantic Ocean from my left ear.
In fact, that's what I was doing - the seawater-in-the-ear-dance - while standing on the headland overlooking Stoney Beach, just watching the ocean because I like watching waves when I'm not riding them. The waves were even bigger now than some I'd ridden earlier - two-to-three-metre range, maybe some larger. That's when I noticed two kayakers in the ocean, swamped and in trouble. They were at the precise place where the Lawrencetown River empties into the open ocean. It was low tide, which meant the river was rushing out while the waves were rushing in. It's a big bad washing machine under these circumstances.
Because of the river current, unwary swimmers have been sucked out to sea here and some have drowned. In 1984 I swam to sea and pulled a woman, a mother of four, to shore but my efforts had been in vain. She had stopped breathing and her heart had stopped and she couldn't be revived. This happened on a holiday, of course - Canada Day. I've never trusted Canada Day - or any other holiday, for that matter, since. The drowning has haunted me for years.
So now the river and sea - and my big boomy, beautiful thrusting, heaving, heavenly waves - were conspiring to drown two more victims. At first I tried to convince myself that these may be veteran kayakers who knew what they were doing. But it soon became obvious that such was not the case. They were in the raging waters, hanging onto their kayaks which were completely filled with water. Maybe they would simply get washed shoreward. I watched and waited for five minutes until I realized they were in that most impossible zone: the river tugging outward while incoming waves slammed down hard over them, pushing them towards shore. The end result was that they could not get in to shore nor could they drift out to sea beyond the crashing waves to deeper water. They were stuck. One of the men started to yell and wave his paddle in the air until another wave slammed over top of him and he got chundered for maybe the thirtieth time.
There were no phones and no assistance to be had. I raced home and quickly returned in five minutes with my surfboard. Then I put in at Stoney Beach and paddled out the river. My heart was thumping in my ears. At first, I had convinced myself this would be easy: I had a wetsuit on, which helps to float me. I had my trusty nine-foot surfboard. I understood the mechanics of what was going on with the river. I understood waves. But when I reached the washing machine zone, I realized that I too was immediately stuck there as badly as they were. And I was getting slammed by overhead waves.
Here were two men, exhausted, hanging on to two kayaks filled to the brim with water. One guy, gulping water, tried to say he was glad to see me. He was trying to pretend he wasn't scared. It was only then that it occurred to me that I had fully committed myself to saving them and I began to worry that I may not be capable of helping either one of them.
Just then, another surfer, sixteen-year-old Chris Meuse, appeared on the scene. He was a kid I sometimes surfed with. A good kid who understood waves. Although it was comforting to have his assistance, I also felt a greater sense of responsibility. Whether I liked it or not, I was in charge here.
Even as I was getting slapped by another wall of water, I decided on the way I would try to play this scene. I couldn't pretend to be brave or gutsy or fearless; I just didn't have it in me. So I decided to play it cheerful. Cheerful defiance is something I learned somewhere - a tool to use when life throws you a grenade. And I felt like I had been handed a big wet one about to go off each time a new set of waves rolled on top of us.
I urged the weaker of the two men to let go of the kayak, get on my board and I'd swim alongside, attached by my surf leash. Chris followed my lead with the other guy, but not before one of the fibreglass kayaks slammed into them and punched a hole in Chris's board. Ouch.
I had a plan. Try to paddle across the current and eventually come ashore on the rocks of the headland.
The plan didn't work.
We were still trapped in the push-pull of river and wave. And the waves were slamming over us now with cruel and regular ferocity. We all struggled until we finally succeeded in getting away from the kayaks but we still couldn't make any headway in any direction.
My Plan B was to not fight anything. Just get away from the breaking waves. Let the river pull us all out to sea and wait for the rescue zodiac to arrive. (The zodiac, as it turned out, was not about to arrive. It showed up at the wrong beach.) So we had our kayakers, one on each board, as Chris and I wallowed in the waves until it seemed the waves were pushing us more towards the sandy shores of Conrad Beach on the west side of the river. Nothing to do but go with the flow. At this point, those once nasty waves were in their own way kinder than the river. They helped us get to shore. Heavy breathing all around.
One of the kayaks was eventually pulled straight out to sea and never seen again. The other eventually washed in. Names and handshakes: Tom and John, if I remember correctly. One was bleeding from the face but nothing critical. They thanked us profusely and offered to buy us beer and steak. Chris said that he was too young to drink. I said I was a vegetarian, which was only partially true. I think they offered to reward us in some other way but we both just shook our heads and paddled across the inner mouth of the river to tell the fireman's rescue team (without the zodiac) that had just arrived that it was all over.
Later I would learn that the only reason Chris sho
wed up was because he saw a woman who he thought was his mother waving from the shore. It wasn't. It was a woman directing him to help the drowning kayakers. And so there he was. I was on the scene only because I wanted one more look at the ocean and the waves before the sun went down. And the sun did go down, less than an hour after we all stumbled ashore.
I surfed on into the week on slightly smaller but elegant waves as Cindy turned towards Newfoundland where the colder waters of the Labrador Current drained its tropical strength to naught.
Somewhere in the middle of the week leading up to Labour Day, I completed a small obligation I had made to a local theatre company. Willpower Theatre had commissioned playwrights David French, Mary Colin Chisholm and Ed Thomson to each write a short play on the morning of the very day that series of plays would be staged. I had been chosen as the guest writer to write the first line that all of them would use. Each would take my opening sentence, write an entire play that would be cast, rehearsed and performed that same evening at the posh Neptune Theatre in downtown Halifax.
What I came up with was this: “I may appear angry on the outside but it's just a necessary disguise for the happiness I feel within.”
I don't know who that “I” was for sure but I think some part of it is me. Maybe that's why I drove my car backwards into a tree but I will not pursue that thread of logic further. To the world, I believe, I rarely appear angry, nervous, frightened or full of despair. Sometimes I appear downright competent. I even convince people that I know what I'm doing. Chris and the kayakers were fairly convinced that I had a workable plan out there in the heaving sea. Such a “necessary disguise” was useful in those circumstances. But the truth is that I spend a lot of time floundering, awash in the briny turmoil pummelling each of us on a daily basis. My theatrical alter ego would counter this with genuine anger - as good an engine as any to help him make it through the day. My other self who ambulates through the waking world adopts the cheerful defiance approach to carry him through holidays and family departures, car disasters, sea calamities and the morning sadness of a pigeon named China with three toes.
Class Reunion
I had not been planning on going to a high school class reunion. Not even the approaching thirty-year reunion. But, one night in a dream, the late great bearded poet of Fredericton, Alden Nowlan, appeared to me. He was standing in front of an old floor-model TV set, adjusting the antenna - the portable V-type unit that was once referred to as rabbit ears. Alden knew I was in the room and, as the black and white picture shifted from fuzzy grey snow to clarity, he smiled at me. I don't know why I was there in the room or why Alden was watching TV. Nor can I think of any reason why I would be dreaming Alden back into existence on this particular night.
The scene shifted right away in that clever but confusing way that dreams often shift. Alden and I were now someplace else and we were talking about two thousand dollars. Why we were talking about two thousand dollars is a mystery. Why that number? Why money at all?
In the next shift, we were looking at an old rusty car engine block - his or mine, probably mine. The exhaust manifold was cracked and a chunk of the iron had fallen out. Alden was pointing this out to me.
In real life, I had once fixed - or thought I'd fixed - that exact problem in one of my many old cars. I had simply patched it up with wood stove cement, a solution not recommended by anyone who knows anything about automotive repair. It was an old Toyota engine and it was during that longish phase in my life where I had almost no money. I did the best thing I could under the circumstances: I swabbed a big whack of stove cement on my problem and just kept driving the car. It was quiet at first and then got noisy and the engine misfired a lot, but I decided not to look under the hood to see if my patch had cracked and fallen out. I kept driving the car in the belief that I had fixed it and that was enough to keep it running until I could make some money to pay someone to properly fix the problem.
Now anyone who has never heard of Alden Nowlan or never read his poetry should do so right away. Even people who think they hate poetry. I was never a personal friend of Nowlan but he was around when I moved to Canada. Alden, through his writings, made me believe in the power of words and the possibility of writing unpretentious and great stuff. I met him a couple of times and he was always large, uncomfortable, shy, awkward, difficult to understand and sometimes drunk. When receiving an award one night in the Neptune Theatre he gave a memorable thank you speech that rambled around in the backwoods of confusion, good intentions, alcohol and nervousness until he got around to saying something like this: “And so I'd like to quote from something that the great Nova Scotian writer, Will R. Bird, said on the occasion of receiving an award much like this, words that have always stayed with me to this day . . . 'thank you very much.'” Alden had either forgotten what Will R. Bird had said in receiving his award or that was exactly what Bird had said. The audience would never know but we all clapped and cheered as my literary hero, stoop-shouldered and inebriated, lumbered off the stage with some assistance from Greg Cook, who would one day write a biography of the poet.
Alden Nowlan was a bashful and sometimes awkward man - or at least he seemed so. In that regard, at least, he was of my tribe. Although I present a good face to the world on most public occasions, part of me remains the shy, insecure and somewhat awkward boy that I once was. Maybe the reason the dead poet was fussing with the rabbit ears in my dream was because he was trying to get me to tune in to something I need to know. He believed I needed to point my antenna in the right direction, find focus. I still haven't figured out the two thousand dollars but the cracked manifold, I think, suggested that something in the engine that was driving my life down the road needed fixing.
And then Alden Nowlan cleared his throat and looked at me. He told me that I should go to my class reunion. I should do this thing and not make up any excuses to avoid it.
And so I did.
On the days leading up to this pivotal event, Nova Scotia was gifted with a solid week of waves generated by another hurricane. Warm water and head-high waves thundered past the tip of every headland. I sidled into a routine of surfing, writing, teaching and more surfing. It was a blissful kind of existence punctuated by the occasionally embarrassing sinus drain. If you don't spend a lot of time in salt water, you may need an explanation.
Wiping out repeatedly in fresh, clean, salt water and getting chundered by energetic high-impact waves means that salt water gets forced into several, if not all, orifices of your body. Sometimes you get enough saline solution shoved up your nostrils so that much later, at some unpredictable moment hours later, well after the surf session is over, your sinuses let go with a long clear flow of something that is half ocean, half you. Sometimes it's a long, clear nasal drool that hangs halfway to the floor and sways there like trapeze artist. But more often it's a small Niagara that happens during a job interview or, in my case, while I'm teaching my university students about Walt Whitman or while I'm interviewing an almost famous writer on my TV show. My camera man is now prepared for the telltale sniffle leading up to a major sinus drain and is hair-triggered to cut to the guest.
Some surfers visiting from California for the waves, including David Pu'u, a legendary in-the-water surf photographer, who wanted to get some shots of me for his magazine. It was one of those things I had once dreamed about while growing up as a surf geek in New Jersey.
On the fourth day of the hurricane waves, I was trying to shed my middle-age caution for teenage abandon on six-to-eight foot waves that were forming perfect barrels within a few feet of the bouldered shoreline of Seaforth. Steep, fast and clean as a whistle. I would slide back into the tube and allow the wave to cover me. Some granted me a quick return to daylight as I scooted out of the tunnel while other waves had me for lunch. But the water was warm and I was enjoying the capture nearly as much as the release.
David appeared as this floating head with a camera on the steepest part of the wave. In order to get the shot he wanted he urged
me to “drive straight for the camera. Don't worry about me.” He claimed he had his instincts honed. He'd drop beneath the sea at the last second to avoid getting slammed in the head by my board. I trusted him enough to aim straight for him, but I always cut back away in time, just in case he miscalculated.
Not long after David got the shot he was looking for, my first big glossy magazine crack at California surf mag immortality, I began to get cocky. I took off later, deeper in the pocket. I slipped back into the tube farther than before and then I slid back out into the golden evening sunlight. I did this over and over, surfing beyond my usual ability and expectations, with grace and precision.
And it was about then that I stopped expecting things to go wrong. In other words, I broke rank with my tribe. I was no longer the shy, the awkward, the insecure fourteen-year-old boy who maintained residence in my middle-aged body. I felt like I had achieved some kind of state of grace.
That's also when I was plundered by one of the finest oversize walls of cyclonic energy ever to knock me off my board. The wave had its way with me, slamming me hard, nose first, pitch-poling my board, giving me three excellent concessive hammerings that suggested the ocean was trying to tear my limbs from their sockets. And I came up sucking for that precious commodity of Nova Scotia air only to discover another surfer dropping down the face of an overhead and equally tubular wall of water. I was down in the water, still tethered to my board while Rob Spicer was already in a critical drop with no way out of a collapsing wall of water.
I yelled something monosyllabic. (Who has time for two syllables when you are about to have your skull parted by your friend's exquisitely sharp and knife-like fin?) Rob countered with a familiar monosyllable of his own. He was still on his feet and hopelessly trying to avoid me as I dove deep, looking for the sanctity of sea floor in this great time of need.
Driving Minnie's Piano Page 16