Driving Minnie's Piano

by Lesley Choyce

  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.

  Driving Minnie’s Piano

  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 plas
tic 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.

  By afternoon, we found ourselves in a torrential downpour on the Maine Turnpike. We were driving along, a bit too fast, on a one-lane section of the highway under repair. I was in a line of cars, all of us going nearly sixty miles an hour when the skies opened up. Rain poured down so hard and fast that the windshield wipers did next to nothing to improve visibility. I tapped the brakes ever so slightly and it felt like there was nothing there at all. I knew I had a tractor trailer behind me, right behind my own trailer. I knew there was a car just ahead. There was no shoulder to pull off onto. And I noticed that Pamela had taken off her seat belt the last time she had reached behind her for crayons.

  I tapped the breaks again ever so slightly and screamed to Pamela to put on her seat belt. I scared her. “Please,” I added but I was still yelling.

  A sudden wind came up and I could feel the trailer behind me sway. Then the rain was blowing up under the hood of my K car and the engine began to sputter. Still, there was no way to turn off. The truck driver was bearing down behind me, hitting his air horn, either complaining about my decreased speed or warning that he was having a hard time slowing his rig. We were all driving blind into this madness. I was sure that if I were to stall right then, there would have been a calamity. I couldn't comprehend how I had allow
ed myself to put us in such an uncontrolled and unsafe situation. The rain and wind conspired disaster and we were walled by concrete, left and right. The engine faltered, sputtered again and I waited for it to stop altogether. Already my mind was racing as to what was safest. Stay put and pray the trucker behind us had good brakes and good driving skills or, when the car went dead, grab the kid and run for safety in the torrential downfall.

  That's when I heard a small arpeggio of sound coming from behind. Three or four distinct notes, barely discernible above the wind and drumming of rain on the roof.

  “Did you hear that?” I asked my daughter.

  “The music?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Why is the piano playing music?” Pamela asked.

  “It's Minnie,” I said.

  And as quickly as the rain had begun, it ceased. The engine continued to falter. I waited for the red light to come on to tell me the engine had stalled but, instead, it just soldiered on. The thundershower was gone and the sun came out. Somewhere, I'm sure there was a rainbow but my eyes were glued to the road ahead, my hands compressing the ring of the steering wheel. The truck was still just inches behind the trailer, obviously driven by the devil himself, moonlighting as a road hog in a big rig in central Maine.

  There was no one ahead of me now. The cars had moved on while my failing engine was holding back half the northbound traffic on the highway. And then, at last, we were out of the construction zone and I saw the exit ramp. We got off the turnpike and came to a stop in the parking lot of a nearby Sears.