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
www.pottersfieldpress.com
###
Table of Contents
Introduction
The Tuning of Summer
The Drowned Coast
Driving Minnie's Piano
King of the Drumlins
A Stone's Throw From the Sea
Winter Surfing and the Search for Sanity
The Year of the Skunk
The Final Draft
Origins of the SurfPoets
Zen and the Art of Canadian Winter Surfing
Elegy for a Surfer
Spring Surf
April
Locust Blossoms
The Thin Edge of the Wedge
A Short History of Fog
Fools, Baseball and Beach Stones
Ravens
China and Other Possibilities
Class Reunion
Hair, Surfing and the Meaning of Life
Epilogue: The Piano on the Highway
Introduction
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 master
s 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
The Turning of Summer
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.
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