Driving Minnie’s Piano
Memoirs of a Surfing Life in Nova Scotia
By Lesley Choyce
Published by Pottersfield Press at Smashwords
Lawrencetown Beach, Nova Scotia, Canada
Copyright © 2006, 2011 Lesley Choyce
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or used or transmitted in any form or by any means - graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying - or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior, written permission of the publisher. Any requests for photocopying, recording, taping or information storage and retrieval systems of any part of this book shall be directed in writing to Access Copyright, The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario M5E 1E5. This also applies to classroom use.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Choyce, Lesley, 1951-
Driving Minnie's piano : memoirs of a surfing life in Nova Scotia / Lesley Choyce.
ISBN 978-1-897426-30-2
Choyce, Lesley, 1951-. 2. Authors, Canadian -- 20th century -- Biography. 3. Lawrencetown (Halifax, N.S.) -- Biography. 4. Surfing -- Nova Scotia -- Lawrencetown Beach (Halifax, N.S.) I. Title.
PS8555.H668Z464 2006 C818'.5409 C2006-903705-1
Ebook editor: Mary Ann Archibald
Cover photos: David Pu'u, istockphoto
Cover Design: Gail Leblanc
Pottersfield Press acknowledges the ongoing support of The Canada Council for the Arts, as well as the Nova Scotia Department of Tourism, Culture and Heritage, Cultural Affairs Division. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.
Pottersfield Press, 83 Leslie Road, East Lawrencetown, Nova Scotia, Canada, B2Z 1P8
###
Table of Contents
Winter Surfing and the Search for Sanity
Zen and the Art of Canadian Winter Surfing
Fools, Baseball and Beach Stones
Hair, Surfing and the Meaning of Life
Epilogue: The Piano on the Highway
Chuang-tzu, a Chinese sage and precursor to Zen ideas, says that “the man of character lives at home without exercising his mind and performs actions without worry.” Clearly, I am not Chuang-tzu's ideal man of character. Nor is any other man or woman that I know of. Lao-tzu, who preceded Chuang-tzu, included in his recipe for success this seemingly simple advice for a happy life: “Reduce desires.”
Not one but two electric heaters are at work in my office this morning in lieu of my wood stove, which is often fueled with pages from revised manuscripts and wood from the woodpile. It is a day of minus digits and wind. And snow. The lake before me is frozen, the marsh a great white expanse of round, small hills and valleys of snow. The ravens seem to barely be able to keep themselves stable on the electric wires, where the wind sings an ominous chord. In the distance, the Lawrence-town headland is a white wall against a blue-grey sky. Above the surface of the sea hangs a vast low blanket of mist that appears to be drifting east towards Ireland, to where my older daughter, Sunyata, will be moving within a week.
Having carved out a few hours to ponder just who I am now, I realize I am a kind of perfect Zen failure: absorbed, worried, lacking naiveté, strongly attached to my identity, my geography, my vanity and my striving. I am the sound of one hand clapping and it is the sound of a small, poorly tuned orchestra of chaos.
If I have any goal in sorting out autobiographical experience, it is to be neither linear nor complete. All of our lives can be retold in many fashions with numerous beginnings, middles and ends. The drama shifts with point of view and method of delivery. This story begins with snow and sea and cold but it shifts quickly to the past.
It is summer. I am three or four years old, and my father is building our house in New Jersey. The walls are made of cinder blocks, a common enough building material in those days. They are compressed blocks of refuse cinders from burning coal. The walls are built up to the second storey. My father has framed the inside walls and put rafters in place, spanning the twenty feet or so of empty air. Beneath is a sixteen-foot drop to the hard concrete floor of the basement. My father has been working all morning and takes a break. I have been sitting with a toy truck in a pile of sand in the yard, and when he climbs down the ladder to join my mother for coffee, I must have seemed content enough with what I was doing. But my eye was on the ladder.
I seem to have no choice but to climb up the ladder and venture out onto a single two-by-eight-inch beam of wood, a narrow path for sure but one begging for wear. When my father and mother see me there, I seem to be quite proud of my accomplishment. I wave and smile and am reaching for a hammer my father left up here. I stand up and begin to walk the two-inch-wide beam back towards the ladder as my father scrambles aloft. I meet him at the top of the ladder and he carries me down to the safety of the earth. I don't know why he's breathing so hard and why my mother looks like she's about to cry.
When I am thirteen or fourteen, I discover the art of self-hypnosis. I order a paperback advertised in a comic book and learn to use self-hypnosis to do well on math tests. I use it for various forms of self-improvement but discover it is of little value in making myself more attractive to girls.
Discouraged, I ask my grandmother, Minnie, why some things don't work out in life. “Sometimes you just have to sit back and wait and see what happens,” she says, opening a fresh pack of Juicy Fruit gum and handing me a stick. I follow her lead, unwrap it, fold it and place it in my mouth, where it makes my teeth ache because it is so sweet. Then she sits me down at her baby grand piano and sings the words in a warbled, old-fashioned voice to a song about a “bicycle built for two.” My grandfather has been out picking lima beans and, when he comes in the back door, he yells for a glass of iced tea. Minnie pretends she doesn't hear him and just keeps on singing.
A few years later when I am arrested for the first time - in the state of Delaware, over an argument with a state trooper at a beach where I was surfing - Minnie gives me the money to pay the fine and tells me that “these things happen.”
Somewhere between the time of walking the beam and learning self-hypnosis, I became interested in surfing. It was pop music that would have introduced me to surf culture and my first stand-up ride on a surfboard. In “Surf City,” Jan and Dean promised there were “two girls for every boy.” And the Beach Boys assured me that if you could just “catch a wave,” you would be “sitting on top of the world.” The song lyrics even gave you advice about how you were to act and look. All you needed was a peroxide-bottle “bushy, bushy blond hair do” up top and huarache sandals, for the feet.
My first surfboard was a 9’6” Greg Noll slot-bottom nose-rider, which will not mean much to most folks but it meant a lot to me. It was a big board for a skinny kid. I would hold one end, my father the other, and we'd walk it to the shoreline. Then I would paddle out into the warm waters along the South Jersey Shore, and like those Zen masters before me, I could make time stand still. I discovered the past and future suddenly appeared to be false illusions. There was only a kind of timeless now once I learned to catch a wave, stand up, bottom turn and walk the length of my 9’ 6” Greg Noll surfboard as I became one with the wave.
One illuminating summer evening, I surfed truly hollow waves for the first time. The wind had suddenly come up off the land, smoothing the faces of the ragged walls of water and making them throw out - top to bottom - over the sandbar near shore. I could paddle, take off, drop down and tuck until I was truly inside the wave. My father watched me getting tubed, then hammered, slammed and eventually washed up on shore after each stunning wave, only to retrieve my board, paddle out and do it again. After the twelfth time, he made me stop. It looked like I was getting hurt. But I wasn't. I had passed through some invisible barrier and was now living in an altogether different space-time dimension.
I first arrived in Nova Scotia on a surfing trip with my friend and fellow surfer Jack Parry in the year 1970. We had created a band together - The Wipeouts - and we played surf music. But the surf music era was ending (or it was already over and we didn't know it). We were trying to hang onto something pure and simple like surfing while all around us the cauldron of American politics and war was drawing us into something much more serious, something much darker. We escaped from New Jersey for ten days in Nova Scotia and discovered the water was crystal clear here. You could see kelp and fish down below as you surfed. There were lobsters and crabs. Point breaks beckoned from every turn in the coastal road. We found empty beaches and endless stretches of uninhabited coastline - even here on the east coast of North America. The water was cold, damn cold, and it was either Jack or me who said it out loud for the first time in my life. “Cold is only a state of mind.” And I recited that anthem, shivering in my too-thin wetsuit, numb toes scraping on barnacles as we climbed out of the sea over the rocks. I was beginning to realize that many things were only a matter of attitude, what Minnie called “perspective.”
The Vietnam War gave me another perspective and on TV I saw young American men - kids like me, really - carrying guns through jungles. Still others were caught by the TV cameras literally running for the Canadian border to leave the U.S. so they would not be drafted to fight in those jungles. Border patrols from the American side were in pursuit while their Canadian counterparts ran to assist the draft evaders.
By then I could carry my own board to the water. The board was shorter, but the water not as clean as it had been on the Jersey Shore of my younger days and I carried some pretty heavy baggage in my head as I paddled out to surf those foamy sandbar waves.
In the dense mist
what is being shouted
between hill and boat
These were the words of an ancient Japanese haiku that I read late one night while taking a break from my job loading trucks on the night shift at North Penn Transfer. I'm pretty sure I was the only guy who read books on Zen Buddhism during the coffee breaks of the long night. Some guys studied Playboy, some ate sandwiches, a few dozed off while I read Alan Watts and D.T. Suzuki and came to the conclusion that I could learn all there was to learn about the world from anything I chose: skateboarding, philosophy, surfing or poetry. I did not discuss this with my co-workers, although I sometimes would ask them what they truly believed in.
Dave said he believed in No-Doz. It was the only thing that kept him awake and kept him going at the job. My partner, Mario, said he believed in God. He said if he didn't believe in God, his father would beat the shit out of him. Bill said he only believed in money. It was pretty straightforward and anyone who said otherwise was a fool or a liar.
For some reason, I believed in surfing, and I believed in being in love and I believed in Canada even though I didn't know much about Canada. I did not believe in America but I did believe in Walt Whitman. I believed in writing and I believed in the ideas of Zen even though I didn't always understand them - which is maybe why I liked Zen so much. I believed in Minnie playing the piano and my grandfather's ability to grow corn and lima beans. I believed in the love that my mother put into making homemade tomato juice and Sunday dinner. And I believed, foolishly or otherwise, that all things are possible.
But that was all a long time ago. I did not believe I would be here, still alive, when I was fifty. This was a conceit of my generation, but maybe a conceit of all young men and women. I had some kind of lofty goal of seeing directly into the true heart of the world, following a path created by words and ideas. It had a physical geography that would take me north and back to the coast explored by Jack Parry and myself not long before the demise of The Wipeouts.
Music and surfing led me here, as did politics and the advice of my grandmother Minnie. Minnie understood that if I stayed in New Jersey attempting to endure the Ronald Reagan dynasty, the life would be squeezed out of me. “Nova Scotia sounds wonderful,” she said. “All that coastline.”
It is obvious to most that the purpose of surfing is not to get from point A to point B. In fact, to think of surfing as having a goal or a true purpose at all is, well, pointless. The point, if there need be a point at all, is to be on the wave, to be riding it, to be in the present tense of the experience, tapping the energy and being fully aware of everything. If the air temperature happens to be minus twenty degrees, if the sea beneath you is littered with chunks of ice, if the wind in your numbed face is laced with small pellets of ice, this makes the scenario all that more intense and personal. This assures you that you are fully alive. And that is always a good reminder.
What follows is a narrative about a time and a place. I'm older than the narrator of this story now but not necessarily wiser. I continue to worry and I've maintained many of my desires, one of which is to attempt to record at least one version of the true world, even as it slips through my fingers.
Lesley Choyce
Lawrencetown Beach
Nova Scotia
At six o'clock on a hot, muggy South Jersey farm morning, my grandmother would put on the oldest, most beat-up clothes she owned, place a floppy straw hat on her head and go out into the field to pick peas, string beans or sometimes both. I would arrive at my grandparents' farm at about eight o'clock and Minnie had already put in a day's work. She hated midday heat like her worst enemy and would deprive the hot day of any satisfaction by sneaking out into the fields and working before the sun had hardly any chance at all to work up a sweat.
And so my grandmother, Minnie, won almost every battle with the New Jersey sun by being an early riser. Mid-morning in the cool asylum of my grandparents' voluminous basement with the satisfying smell of a smooth, damp summer concrete floor, she snapped beans and shelled peas for hours at a time. I understood why peas had to be released from their cases but never understood the business of breaking beans in half. I was only thirteen and there was so much I didn't understand that it probably didn't matter.
My grandfather, a stout, wonderfully opinionated man in his sixties, picked corn and sometimes tomatoes later in the day when the offending heat of the sun granted him permission to curse long and loud and with good reason. But peas and beans were a woman's work and I assumed that things had gone this way since the invention of agriculture.
I was relegated to menial teenager tasks like weeding pigweed from tomatoes or, worse yet, suckering corn. “Sucker” turned out to be a most appropriate term. The theory was that you cut off any side shoots from the main stalk of corn and the plant would put more energy into producing healthy ears of corn. The only good thing about this job was that I got to use a machete. And every thirteen-year-old boy is infatuated with machetes. As was I. But the rest of the suckering job sucked. It was hot, sweaty work and I sneezed a lot. I think my grandfather paid me fifty cents an hour. I learned to hate corn pollen and it turned out the only sucker in the cornfield was me. Years later, corn researchers in Iowa discovered that suckering did no good whatsoever to the corn. It even did more harm than good. Farmers no longer sucker their corn and teenagers are spared all that misery.
Some days I got sick of the work and retreated to sit in the basement with my grandmother and watch her snap beans in time with the snapping of the gum that she chewed. Nowadays, if I ever chew gum, I think of Minnie. Every time I pop a stick of gum to unclog my ears on an Air Canada flight to Toronto, there's Minnie shelling peas in the cool basement of my youth.
My grandfather went by the name of Gaga. Why he let the world call him that, I'll never know. It was the name that my brother and I called him before we had established a firm grip on the use of the English language. Minnie was short for Grandmom and Gaga was short for Grandpop. We must have had considerable authority in our early years because the names stuck fast. So Avery and Eva, their real names, became Gaga and Minnie. They never complained once, that I know of, about the name change and pretty soon everybody seemed to forget their real names.
My grandfather was the only member of my family that would genuinely curse out loud. He had an amazing amount of venom in his voice and a southern pent-up rage that came from growing up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Gaga had strong opinions about war and politics. World War One was the best thing that ever happened to him. Harry Truman became president because he couldn't run his own hardware store without going bankrupt. And John F. Kennedy - well, you didn't want his opinion on Kennedy.
But my grandfather did not usually swear outright about politicians unless they were township politicians trying to raise his taxes. Everyone in my extended family hated taxes so much that they spent much of their adult lives discussing the problem. But as far as I know, nobody ever actually did anything about it. I think that hating taxes was a kind of adhesive that kept both sides of my parents' families united. When I eventually grew up - it happened around the time I was twenty-seven - I decided to move to the country that had the second highest tax rate in the world. Go figure the logic in that. But now that I'm older, I've come to the conclusion that this is a good thing. The higher the taxes, the better the country is to live in. This logic will no doubt anger everyone in my family and I won't bring it up at the family reunion, but there it is, plain and simple.
My grandfather swore the best when he was working with the wire that he put up for the lima beans. Most farmers in New Jersey thought lima beans weren't worth all the trouble. You had to plant the bean seeds, put up posts all along the row, install twin parallel lines of heavy gauge wire from one end of each row to the other, top and bottom, and then create a wavy V pattern up and down the entire length with binder twine. All so the finicky lima bean vines would grow tall and have something to hang onto. And eventually produce lima beans.
In order to put up the wire, my grandfather would park the 1949 Chevy truck at one end of a row with the wire mounted on a big spool on the back. He and I would take one end of the wire and walk it the length of the field and then hammer it onto the posts. It all wouldn't have been so bad except for the fact that, according to my grandfather, the wire had a mind of its own. And in that mind, it did not like him. He knew for certain that the wire was out to get him - trying to tangle itself in impossible metallic Gordian knots or snapping, kicking, jamming, jabbing and generally trying to poke out the eye of any human fool enough to come within its steely region.
So when things went wrong, Gaga cursed long and loud. Once, when an outstretched cable snapped mid-field, it whipped itself with ferocious force, attacking my grandfather and hurtling like a spring back in my direction where I was stationed at the spool in the truck. I threw myself onto the sandy soil and put my hands over my head as the wire thrashed at the truck cab. My grandfather had been whipped in the face, slashed across the hand and then knocked down.
It was the maddest I'd ever seen him and I too was now convinced the wire was out to get both of us. I wondered why he didn't give up on lima beans. The problem was that my grandfather loved to eat them. He had grown up near Chestertown, Maryland, with large platefuls of delectable lima beans and his was a lifetime commitment to growing and eating good beans. For those of you who have only bought them in a can at grocery stores, you'll never understand why one man can have such a passion for a mere bean. Good fresh lima beans are really pretty amazing. And my grandfather was willing to risk his life (and mine too) to wage war, year after year, with uncontrollable, even hateful (his word), wire, rather than forego good lima beans.
In contrast to the lima bean wire wars, World War One was like a long holiday at the Jersey Shore, Gaga said. On that perilous day when my grandfather had been attacked by the wire, he walked back to where I was at the truck. He was fuming. I was afraid that he was mad at me. But it was the wire. He cursed it up and down and sideways. He kicked at it, he spit at it, called it things my thirteen-year-old ears had never heard before or after.
We left the wire that day, left it there tangled in the greatest convoluted knot of madness ever conceived by the physical universe and we walked away. I was glad he wasn't mad at me but, in truth, I may have been responsible for not keeping the right tension on the stretched out wire. I dawdled at the wire spindle, daydreaming of all the things I would rather do than help stretch out lima bean wire. I often daydreamed about surfing my 9’6” Greg Noll slot-bottom noserider surfboard. It was either that or girls. Denise or Patty or Cathy. It was around this time that I discovered that every other one of my girlfriends (at least that was the term I used for girls I had a crush on) were named Cathy. My infatuation cycle would go like this: Cathy, Debbie, Cathy, Patty, Cathy, Denise and so forth. Sometimes it was Kathy with a K. And I identified heavily with the Everly Brothers' song of this time called “Cathy's Clown.” I believed “Cathy's Clown” was the best song ever written. Much better than anything Mozart, Beethoven or Bach could come up with.
And so the wire had defeated my grandfather that particular summer morning. But we came back to it later in the day and punished the wire until it was stretched onto the posts and hammered into place into a kind of lima bean wire crucifixion. Gaga, in better spirits from having had a large lunch of oysters sent up in a can from the Chesapeake Bay, said that all you really head to do was “chide” the wire and it would work for you. Before we had been “wrestling” with it, fighting it. My grandfather had realized he had to rise above the problem, not stoop to the level of the coiled wire. His newfound attitude was a complete success.
Later in the summer he would say that this was the best lima bean crop he'd ever seen. But the remainder of the New Jersey farming universe would mostly continue to believe that lima beans were not worth the effort.
Once the wire was firmly in place, Minnie and I wove the binder twine top to bottom on the parallel lines so that the vines would eventually thread around these improvised trellises. I loved the smell of binder twine but would later discover that the smell was actually a toxic preservative put on the twine to keep it from rotting. In my youth, I grew up loving the smell of all kinds of things that I would later learn were harmful, poisonous and deadly.
It's a long list, really, but some of the favoured smells on my hit list included leaded gasoline and binder twine preservative. Creosote was way up there. (Can anyone smell creosote without thinking of being a kid at the beach or sitting under a wooden bridge?) Most insecticides had an interesting smell. In those days, trucks drove around Cinnaminson Township spraying big misty clouds (that looked just like Lawrencetown fog) of toxic gases that were supposed to kill mosquitoes. Most of my friends and I loved the smell of that poisonous cloud. At least one ill-fated classmate made a hobby out of riding his bike around behind the mosquito truck, in his own private, sweet-smelling fogbank. He was admired for his audacity and loyalty to that special aroma but it led to disaster. He was hit and almost killed by a driver who couldn't see him. David was slammed into the truck, right near the nozzle dispensing the mist, and then fell onto the curb. But he lived to tell the tale and such a cataclysmic event garnered envy from many of the guys in my class.
It was everybody's tax money that went into mosquito control. I think it was DDT that was most popular in those days despite the fact Rachel Carson had warned everybody that it was killing butterflies and birds and maybe it would kill us if we weren't careful. It certainly came close to killing my friend David. Those fogging trucks were causing other accidents as well, as drivers sped down the road right into the mosquito fog, carelessly smashing into other cars they couldn't see.
I was a Boy Scout back then and concerned with doing “good deeds.” My interest in good deeds, I know now, is why many of my friends were so dull, and why many girls (several named Cathy) weren't interested in me. In order to complete the civic awareness merit badge I had to perform many hours of community service. You would have thought the troop leader would have sent me to volunteer in a nursing home or maybe clean up garbage at the school. Instead, I was “volunteered” to drop green pellets of poisons into the storm sewers all over town. Their contents would eventually end up in the Pennsauken Creek and drift on into the Delaware River. But the idea was to kill more mosquitoes. The people of New Jersey were dead set against mosquitoes like no other people on the face of the earth.
Everybody saw me dropping those deadly pellets into the street storm drains. The poison probably would find its way into the drinking water supply of half of South Jersey, but what did we care? We were people in love with smells like kerosene and diesel exhaust. (I still have a good, fuzzy feeling whenever I smell the exhaust of a city bus, for example.) In the public's mind, I was an exemplary citizen. The Cinnaminson Journal even sent a reporter to interview me and take my picture. A laudatory article was written about what a fine youth I was but I received no fan mail from Rachel Carson. In the photograph, I was wearing my Boy Scout uniform, including the merit badge sash. I was standing over the storm sewer drain on the side of Dorothy Drive with a bag of poison pellets. And I was smiling.
Mothers of girls who attended the Moravian Church where I went to Sunday school were impressed and had cut the article out of the paper. All of the Cathys and Denises of my life thought I was a dork, as rightfully they should. I received my civic awareness merit badge. But at a cost.
In the sanity and safety of my grandmother's summer basement, as she chewed gum, snapped beans and shelled peas and limas, Minnie told me stories about West Texas. Her father had left Philadelphia to go there in search of gold, or at least the collateral gold to be made from the enthusiasm of people looking for gold. He was a cook for a while and then he ran a small cowboy hotel in the dry dusty town of Davis. In the stories there were always horses and pianos - pronounced “pianas.” She liked talking about memories of other people playing piano as much as she liked playing it herself.
When she wasn't performing at the baby grand piano in her living room or talking about pianos, she told me stories about taking trains into and out of Philadelphia and New York. I knew little about riding trains. My parents were car people. My father was a truck mechanic. We had almost no understanding of trains. But Minnie had come from a world of trains. Her family had gone west in a train, returned in a train. She herself had commuted to Philly, where she worked at Merck, Sharp and Dohme, in a train that ran through Palmyra. But my mother and father thought trains were just for people who couldn't drive - people too poor or ignorant to know that in order to get from point A to point B, you got in your car and drove there.
So Minnie taught me about riding in trains, and she talked of horses - riding English and sidesaddle and meeting up with boyfriends on horses out there in the gold-hopeful days of West Texas. And, of course, there was the baby grand piano upstairs, as there had always been pianos in my grandmother's life down through the years.
Because of the interest in horses, trains and pianos, some considered my grandmother an “artistic” type. She was probably about as bohemian as my straitlaced family would allow. Certainly, my grandfather was not an artist type unless you considered his ability to grow extraordinary watermelons and flawless lima beans. When he wasn't working, creative fun for my grandfather consisted of lying on the couch in front of a big old floor model black and white TV watching Ronald Reagan introducing Death Valley Days. Gaga was a big fan of westerns. Zane Grey was his idea of great literature, Gunsmoke his idea of high art.
Minnie played piano in the living room when the TV wasn't tuned to Sugarfoot, Cheyenne, Maverick, or, of course, Gunsmoke. The piano strings were stretched tightly from post to post inside the great wooden frame and these wires were obedient and disciplined, completely unlike the incorrigible wire that fought my grandfather and me in the lima bean fields of summer. Sometimes Minnie played the “Daisy” song or something more ambitious by Debussy while Gaga read Louis L'Amour.
Minnie read a few of Gaga's cast-off westerns when she was desperate for something to read but she had a more eclectic taste, dipping into popular mystery novels, or reading books about the history of Mexico or even the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
If I should arrive on the scene on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, however, Minnie would stop whatever she was doing - reading Evangeline or repairing some of Gaga's work clothes - and she would return to the piano where she would play for me The William Tell Overture, which I knew as the theme music for the hit TV show The Lone Ranger. Or sometimes she would perform my old childhood favourite, a piece called “Oscar the Octopus,” as I listened with a kind of reverence and my grandfather drifted out of his novel of the Old West and into a blissful deep afternoon nap, despite Minnie's almost athletic thumping of the piano keys.
Even after living here for more than twenty years I'm not one hundred percent sure that Nova Scotia truly exists. It looms large in my imagination and it may be more myth than fact.
This ragged, rocky, foggy, cold, dangerous, moody ghost of a coastline is, alas, a temporary place. I live on what the geologists call a “drowned coast.” It's literally drowning. The sea is rising up and taking it away, inch by inch. The time frame is amazingly short. Whole headlands have been and gone in single generations. During my short tenure here, I've walked hills that have slipped into the sea and driven rocky roads to fishing villages that are now swallowed by the waves. It's this tenuous place that I call home.
Sometimes in winter, when the great North Atlantic pulses with a dangerous temper that rages against these shores, I drive by the seawall at the nearby beach on the main road to Halifax. Megaton waves can slam up against the big rocks and spew foam and stones down onto the hood of your car. It's a great surprise on a dark night to be driving a familiar road and suddenly hear a shuddering explosion just past the driver's side of the car, then see rocks the size of seagull eggs pelting down on the hood of your Honda. More exciting yet are reports from one fellow surfer who claims to have been driving his old Chevette along the sea wall on a pale, broody winter's night when the cold, stormy sea conspired to throw a giant wave right over the entire road so that for a brief second or two his headlights reported back that he was driving inside the tube.
True or not, such is the stuff of legends in this mythical place.
More unlikely than the driveable wave, perhaps, is the undeniable fact that Nova Scotia was once part of Africa. The rock in my backyard comes from the Sahara Shield. To be more precise, what is now Nova Scotia was once part of a monster continent that had crashed into North America, then pulled away and drifted south to become Africa, leaving behind a big chunk of rock that is now the bulk of mainland Nova Scotia. The upright slate in my backyard is the exact same stuff you'd find if you flew to Morocco and got down on your hands and knees to dig through the sand until you hit something hard.
Our connection to Africa is more than just geological as well. The origin of some of our best waves are African. Storms spawned off Africa's west coast trek across the Atlantic to wreak havoc as hurricanes in the Caribbean, only to veer north with the Gulf Stream to visit ancestral African Nova Scotia. Our protective cold waters begin to destroy such tropical storms even as they pay homage to these shores, but not before Nova Scotian surfers find solace and ecstasy in surfing rare warm-water point break waves in front of remote headlands with cows grazing above them on the hillside.
The glaciers once plowed this province under and then retreated, leaving these silt and stone drumlins, the rounded headlands that immediately began to erode. This is a land sculpted by ice and by sea, and those of us living on this continental edge know our property deeds are nothing short of insignificant writs of permission to inhabit this fabled land for a few short generations until the seas rise and make all the old maps obsolete.
I took my first step onto a Nova Scotian beach in that summer of 1970 when Jack Parry and I drove up from New Jersey to escape - well, to escape New Jersey. (Before we left, Minnie tucked a ten dollar bill in my pocket while no one was looking. She said, “Spend it on yourself,” implying I should do something really frivolous with it.) Jack and I surfed our brains out - at all the wrong places as it turned out, but we didn't know that. We camped along the empty shores, time-tripping into the past. And then we returned to modern America to fall back into the usual frenetic addictions of modern American lives.
I ended up teaching university in New York City and stopped believing that places like Nova Scotia could still exist. I learned to live dull and ordinary and urban and, just before settling into something practical and permanent and predictable, I realized that escape was possible. I spent two summers here and discovered cold, clean water along with friendly, guileless surfers who became like family. Just about the time that Ronald Reagan was ascending to power, I knew it was time to flee career and money and what looked like a very unhappy decade ahead. After being turned down repeatedly by Canada Immigration, I pleaded something short of insanity to a suited man at the Canadian Consulate in a glass Manhattan tower and he let us in. I never fully understood why.
In an old brown Ford Econoline van, my wife and I clambered up the northeast coast and across the St. Croix River at Calais, Maine, into Canada. We had brought everything we could muster: rototiller and ancient refrigerator in the back, Chuck Dent 7 6_ surfboard on the roof. My motto was this: go where the money isn't.
And that was Nova Scotia.
Surfing, of course, was a big part of the mythology that drew me here. Think cold and clean and surfing with a few good buddies on a frosty morning with grey seal pups slipping up to stare at you in the sunrise. Think pure glassy walls of water, tall as my American refrigerator, lining up on rocky shelves, peeling a perfect right or left into deep green waters. But those are the rare, halcyon times that come after days or weeks of foul weather.
What saves these shores from the deluge of vacationers and swarming surfers and overpopulation and all the things that have ravaged both coasts of our continent is very simple: a cold, cold sea and some extremely bad weather. Or at least what most people think of as bad weather.
My first winter here, a snowstorm entombed my van in my driveway all except for the brown roof. But when the snow crusted up, I put on my heaviest wetsuit and walked across a snow-buried pasture to surf some head-high waves on a blue misty sea with the great spectacular crystal white world before me.
Whole summers have been swallowed by fog along the shore. The I-can't-see-my-hand-in-front-of-my-face type fog. Inland, the sun may shine but along the shore, the fog rules. Surfing in springtime fog is an instinctual thing. You can't see the wave coming. You have to feel it. You paddle in faith, tap in, make the drop, turn and tuck and hope for the best. It's like surfing in a dream. When you get really disoriented and can't tell which way the shore is, you listen and the sound of sea sucking on stones will guide you in.
Summer is almost always a slow time - fewer storms, fewer waves. Since most inland Nova Scotians visit beaches only in the heart of the summer, they rarely see anyone surfing significant size waves. Ask your average Bluenoser about surfing here and they will sometimes tell you with great confidence that no one surfs in Nova Scotia. Summer, for me, however, is about small beach break jewels. Me and a couple of ducks on an empty beach at sunset. Not much excitement if you're watching from the beach. But to paraphrase the Yogi, surfing is ninety-nine percent half mental.
To prove the true rudeness of the North Atlantic, the Labrador Current sneaks down in June or July with water as cold as forty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. Maybe colder. What seems to be a warm sunny day belies the cold winter freight of the ocean. Overnight the water temperature can drop dramatically and just listen to them howl, those Saturday morning surfers, who show up without boots and gloves.
Cold rules, and you learn to love it or you leave. Winter is quintessential Nova Scotian surfing. Canadian surfers may not be the best in the world but we are the coldest. Gear is important. I'm a drysuit man come January, when the air temp is zero on the Fahrenheit scale and the water hovers just below freezing. A drysuit is really just a big human-sized rubber bag with a neck seal. You wear layers of warm clothing under it and sometimes you even stay dry.
Salt water freezes on the rocks and you have to crawl to the sea. The water is dense and the riding of waves is much different than those light summer waves of other shores.
On a windless sunlit morning in February, with sea wraiths dancing on the skin of the sea, paddling to the point makes me laugh out loud. It's just so beautiful and so completely surreal. Winter trains caution into you quickly. A mere head dip can give you frozen needles of ice on your eyelashes. A wipeout means an ice cream headache beyond your worst nightmare. You crave at least one companion on a serious winter surf.
For such a magnificent place, the history of Nova Scotia is full of greed, plunder, horror and a legacy of bad decisions and ill-informed leaders. Despite the beauty, this is a place of tragedy as well. Most of my favourite surf breaks are locations where ships have foundered and men have drowned. At one nearby break, the remains of an iron ship still stick up out of the water near the waves and the sad old ship's boiler is covered with barnacles near the shoreline.
I once surfed waves generated by a horrific North Atlantic storm the evening that the storm capsized the Ocean Ranger oil rig off Newfoundland, killing all aboard. It had been a consummate winter surf session and I thanked the gods all the way driving home, the ice melting and salt water trickling down my face like happy tears . . . until I heard the news about the Ocean Ranger.
In the late summer of 1998, Swiss Air Flight 111 went down about fifty miles from here in the sea off Peggy's Cove and I felt that small absurd comfort that it wasn't me or my family on that plane and it wasn't in my backyard. Until the wind blew west for several days and I found myself surfing among bits of floating debris that was once the cabin wall of the Swiss Air jet.
Despite the tragedies - and sometimes because of them- I feel connected to this place. Because of the harsh and rugged shore losing its battle with the sea, I feel rooted here. This is not a land of comfort. I did not come here to feel ease and surround myself with the relentless, soothing junk of consumer living. We remain a place apart, thanks to the harshness of climate, the ruthlessness of a sea that is prepared to steal our land and tear us apart at any time.
Some waves are spawned south of Greenland and they arrive on a steely grey morning. I put on my drysuit and wetsuit hood, slide my board into the uninviting grey-brown sea of winter and paddle out to surf. The wind is north and conjures up a squall, spitting ice pellets so that when I take off on my first wave, my face is stung by these small, savage bullets. I shield my eyes so I can make the drop, turn, pull up high onto a wall of dense winter wave. I tuck my head down to avoid the assault and the wave allows me safe passage on a long smooth face, steep and stiff in the offshore wind. If I'm lucky, I'm not alone. As I kick out, I see an old friend of twenty years paddling out towards me, a childlike goofy grin on his face. The sun breaks through the onslaught of cloud and sleet for less than thirty seconds and then it's gone. It won't make another showing for three days until the nor'easter has spent itself. I paddle out for another wave. The world has moved on without me, I know, and for the time being I exist safely removed from time and civilization.
My daughter, Pamela, and I drove down to New Jersey one hot August day when she was seven years old. My parents told me that Minnie's piano, which was now in my brother's living room, was mine if I wanted it. I didn't know much about lugging pianos from one country to another but I was sure I wanted Minnie's piano in Nova Scotia.
My grandparents were both long gone. New Jersey was often a sad, remote place for me and it was going to be hot and hellish in late summer. I had an old Aries K car station wagon with a radiator that had most of those little fins rusted away. It was a winter car really. Keeping the engine cool in Canada usually wasn't much of a problem. I drove towards New Brunswick watching the engine temperature gauge needle rise to the three-quarter mark and then hang there.
I stopped often to buy junk food, something I never do except on long trips that demand it. We ate at McDonald's. I sipped coffee, Pamela downed Seven-Up. As we left the province, we drove across the wide Tantramar Marsh. I always feel a little afraid of this place and I'm not sure why. I know that the Saxby Gale washed through here in October of 1869, sweeping everything away. Barns and houses floated twenty miles or more. A woman saved herself by gliding out a second-storey window in a coffin used as her own rescue boat. Another man survived by floating around for hours on a haystack that miraculously stayed intact. It was a Noah's Ark kind of flood and maybe that's why I never fully trusted the Tantramar. But it might have been something else.
Crossing the Tantramar meant leaving Nova Scotia. New Brunswick was not such a scary place except for the fact that it was flush up against the United States. I don't remember much about the drive south to the border except for when we were in Saint John. We were down near the harbour when Pamela saw a huge pile of road salt, a giant pyramid of the stuff, three stories high.
“What is it?”
“Salt,” I said.
“I'd like to climb up the side of a mountain of salt.”
“You'd slide back down and your skin would taste salty for days.”
She kept looking back at the salt pile as we headed towards the bridge over the harbour. After a few minutes' silence, she announced, “That must be what they put in the ocean.”
I hadn't been following her train of thought.
“What do you mean?”
“The salt. It must be what they put in the ocean to make it salty.”
I smiled. Yes, that's what it is. I would never admit otherwise.
In New Jersey, we ate fresh corn and tomatoes from my father's garden. I had long conversations with my mother in the kitchen while she cooked. The tall angular locust trees still shaded the house and yard from the wrath of the summer sun. Pamela swam in the pool with warm, clear, chlorinated water so unlike the cold dark waters of Nova Scotia lakes or the frothy turbulence of the icy ocean at Lawrencetown Beach.
Once a small quiet grove in a farming community, my parents' home was now a triangle of whittled-down land, surrounded by three roads with heavy traffic. Strip malls were north and south of here, across highways with raging, relentless vehicles. I must have had to explain to Pamela a dozen times that cars would not necessarily give the right of way to pedestrians in this fevered land.
One afternoon, I spent an hour picking up the trash that had blown onto my parents' property from the strip malls and from the carefree drivers on the nearby highways. Beer bottles and coffee cups and endless empty bags of potato chips and torn silver lottery tickets and bank envelopes with no cash and flyers for dry-cleaning, Coke cans and Pepsi cans and plastic bags and torn pieces of clothing.
All that litter taking over my old backyard made me come close to crying - as it always did - and, after I had bagged it all in green garbage bags and stumbled soul-weary back into the house, my mother made me a glass of iced tea and realized how hard the job had really been. “You don't have to do that, you know. We've tried before but it will all be back in a couple of days. There's really no stopping it.”
It was one of those wars that would never be won. I envisioned coming home one day to see my old house nearly swallowed in a pile of litter, garbage heaped high around the windows and up onto the roof.
The cars and trucks roared by outside, semis slamming into potholes, young guys with boom boxes thumping away loud enough to loosen the mortar in the basement foundation. My parents had both lost a good deal of their hearing and they had the luxury of turning off the traffic by simply turning down their hearing aids. My own defenses were not yet in place.
After the trash and the iced tea, I went for a walk in the nearby park and gave applause to the lush, green skunk cabbage that still ruled the marshes. I saluted the stalwart carp that fed along the scummy bottom of Steele's Pond, once a natural tidal body of water. Now it was the last link in a chain of road drainage systems that eventually emptied into the Pennsauken Creek that poured into the wide, brown Delaware River which fed into Delaware Bay to eventually connect with my own Atlantic Ocean.
When I was a kid, I used to walk through those six-foot- high underground drainage pipes during the summer. It was cool and damp and only a trickle of water slid beneath my feet. Sometimes I took a flashlight and sometimes I didn't, walking in almost total darkness beneath the suburban avenues from one street drain to another. The light would filter down through the grates and I would look up at the blue summer sky, feeling like a visitor from a world below. Occasionally I'd find baseball cards and even skateboards that had fallen in and sometimes I'd hear kids above me sitting on the curb talking. It was calm and pleasant down there and I felt strangely at home. I even felt safe underground like this, although I can't say why.
I encountered a couple of rats and even an injured bat that I took home with me. Fear of rabies drove my parents to make me give it up and let it die on its own in an old Keddy's shoebox beneath a fallen willow tree by Steele's Pond. Most parents back then were scared their kids would die from rabies or tetanus. Wild animals would deliver infectious rabies bites and rusty nails would give you tetanus. I think there were greater dangers to be feared, as I never once knew a kid who got rabies or tetanus but maybe that's because we were careful as the result of our parents drilling warnings into our heads.
My own children accuse me of being obsessed with safety. This is an odd truth for someone who has lived a fairly reckless life - or so it seems in retrospect. I fear for their lives when it comes to automobiles and water. At Lawrencetown Beach, someone drowns every few years and my kids at least know better than to swim in the river on an outgoing tide. Motorcycles I do not speak well of and even bicycles require helmets. If my kids said they wanted to go walking around beneath ground in a large round concrete pipe for the afternoon, I would probably utter an ultimatum against it. But, for me, as a twelve-year-old boy, it seemed like the most natural thing to do. I was a kind of suburban spelunker. The last vestiges of my childhood wilderness had been plowed under by bulldozers, and houses were built where once we had tree forts. There was nothing left to do but to go underground.
The adult stood at the opening to the childhood cave and wondered again at how the past was tethered to the present. But they did not seem truly connected. If it were to rain tomorrow and the streets were to gorge with curbside streams that would empty into the storm drain, a torrent of water would flow out the lip of the pipe into the pond. If I had a surfboard I might throw myself into the current, ride it like a murky tidal bore into the pond, then drift on to the sluice gate and over into the creek, paddling to match the speed of the outgoing current and into the Delaware, just north of Camden, Walt Whitman's home. A long drift south and then turn north at the tip of Cape May. If, through some celestial stroke of rare luck, there were waves breaking just right I could surf one after the other, going north, each ride taking me further and further up the coastline, perhaps catching part of the tidal bore near the narrow parts of Fundy Basin and then finally paddle along my own shoreline until I was home at Lawrencetown Beach. Then I would understand. I would feel the necessary unity that would unite the boy at the mouth of the storm sewer pipe with the befuddled man who walks the Nova Scotian beach at sunrise.
Moving a piano required logistics. I rented a U-Haul trailer and had a bumper hitch installed. Things did not go well. The trailer lights were wired wrong and the trailer itself had a broken leaf spring. We would never make New York, let alone Nova Scotia.
The trailer was exchanged for a better one after some arguing. A hot, muggy afternoon provided the backdrop for my father, brother and me hefting the piano out of my brother's house and into the back of the trailer.
All the while we wrestled the piano towards the U-Haul, there were opinions from the bystanders as to whether it would fit, this baby grand piano made by the Miller Piano Company in 1929. Clearly, the U-Haul was not designed for objects not rectangular. And what if it shifted while going around a turn? Or what if my mere four-cylinder engine didn't have the capacity to haul such weight? If you've never tried to move a baby grand piano, you have no idea as to the mass of the cast-iron frame inside nor the awkwardness and delicacy of this musical instrument.
We blocked it well and buffered it with an amazing array of old blankets, rags and cast-off clothing. In the bundle of old clothes left around in the basement was my grandmother's and grandfather's old bathrobes that were put into service to swaddle the piano bench. We kept the weight positioned low and balanced in the U-Haul.
Before I locked the door to the trailer I added a New Jersey-bought surfboard to keep the piano company. Surfboards were hard to come by in Canada and I had bought this one at a used sporting goods store for a song.
In the morning, we climbed the New Jersey Turnpike north with the commuters and my eye was wary of the heat gauge, now inching its way towards the red but graciously remaining a hairbreadth below. I told Pamela stories about my grandmother and explained that she had died shortly after Sunyata had been born. Minnie had been in the hospital as we drove south from Nova Scotia through a white-knuckle ice and snow storm but we did not arrive in time to say goodbye. I frightened Pamela by revealing my belief that I was sure the spirit of Minnie was with us in the trailer, somehow connected to her piano and perfectly content to share the space with a six-foot surfboard. Minnie would understand about the surfboard.