Eventually, we follow the long thread of our skated trail straight back home. Why not go another route, arc out across the ice? But there is something about seeing your own home there on the far hill, capped in snow, car buried in the driveway, the sound of your dog barking at the back door. Why is it that this makes you skate straight and fast when the cold has found your fingers and thumbs?
Small catastrophes of removing skates and putting on rubber boots with frozen toes before walking the final leg to the house. Red cheeks, cold fingers, a glove lost in the snow. And as we stumble, stiffened with numb feet, across the frozen marsh near the garden, it seems appropriate that I am the only one to fall through an air pocket into the little stream below and scoop icy December water into my boot. My daughters are pleased to hear me howl and I pretend to be angry but, in truth, there's something invigorating about falling through ice when it grabs only a foot and an ankle.
Inside, I wade through the jumble of skates and boots and snowsuits. The kids have already retreated to another part of the house to phone calls and books, and I pull off my wet socks and howl a second time as the pain of thaw sets in, then bang my big toe trying to put my leg into the mouth of the oven of the old cookstove that still sings.
I build a fire in the living room wood stove: bunched newsprint, thin kindling, some splints of maple and quartered logs turning quickly to flame. A brief pause of coffee and toast, then I find dry clothes and winter boots. I'm off again to walk alone to the shoreline of the Atlantic.
There are ships at sea and sparrows clinging to what remains of last summer's sea oats. The dunes fall away beneath me as I arrive at the empty beach where the sand has been bullied into the sea by winter storms. We are left with rocks, each covered with snow and some with ice where salt water has frozen into caps and other odder shaped hats that might have been fashionable in Napoleon's time. The sea ghosts of morning are gone but thin filaments of mist still lift from the surface and drift into nothingness in the diminishing breeze.
On the rocky reef beyond the shore I see shoulder-high waves forming, becoming steep as they catch the offshore wind, leaping ahead of themselves to create immaculate hollow tunnels. Gulls swoop in low and nearly touch wing tips to the faces of an unbroken wave and then, somehow, as if drawing energy from the wave itself, arc back up into the sky, circle and then do it again.
On the shoreline, melting snow and ice give a pile of kelp and seaweed an otherworldly glistening quality in the sunlight, like it is a monstrous tendrilled sea creature, beached but still alive. I take off my gloves and lift a long belt of kelp to the sun before tossing it back into the sea.
With my back to the wind, my face to the sun, it almost feels warm but when a sudden belligerent cloud steals the light, I feel the haunting return of the sadness and loss I felt this morning.
I look west to where the cliffs are magnified five times their height: illusory, massive, steep and white. The sun soon regains its power over the sea, the beach and the dunes as I turn around to go home on this empty and extraordinary day, approaching Christmas on the Eastern Shore of Nova Scotia.
Winter Surfing and the Search for Sanity
Winter surfing in the Atlantic Ocean in Nova Scotia is both a sane and beautiful thing, and I rely on it to keep me clearheaded in what often seems to be an insane world. Nonetheless, when my business associates across the country and beyond learn that I go out into the ocean, midwinter, paddling my surfboard offshore to ride the face of waves generated by winter storms, they often observe that I must be crazy. But they are very far from the truth.
I run a small book publishing business out of an office in my home at Lawrencetown Beach. From the window of my office, I look out over a salt marsh, sand dunes and, beyond, the often steely grey-green expanse of a vast body of water. Our coastline faces south and slightly west so the sea before me stretches from here to Morocco with nothing much in between except Bermuda and possibly the Azores. On a cold morning in February I walk upstairs to my office, put some kindling in the wood stove and proceed to get some work done. I make phone calls, send faxes and fire off a handful of e-mails across Canada since we're awake here before most business is underway in parts west. Up until now, it has been cloudy, with a blasting west wind that sucks the heat up the chimney and away.
All too soon, the rest of the world is waking up and I find myself wrestling with printer software that isn't working, a phone call from an author about translation rights, news about a truck headed east from Winnipeg with freshly printed books that has broken down somewhere near Thunder Bay. My accountant phones to let me know about a small tax problem, the Internet service provider tells me my Web site has some glitch that he refers to as “fatal,” and on the voice mail is a message about a book project that I was hoping would come my way but has found a home with a larger publisher. It's not shaping up to be a very good day.
And then the wind switches from west to north. The ice pellets falling from the sky vanish and the sun appears. I look away from my computer screen to discover the sea no longer has a military colour. Because of the shifting lighting, it's several shades of magnificent blue. And I see the light north wind tossing back the tops of waves into plumes of pure white wonder. Clearly, it's time to forget about work and go surfing.
Now, I don't exactly need to wear a three-piece suit at my publishing job (in fact, in the summer, it's a t-shirt and shorts), but as I transform from small businessman into Canadian surfer, there is a sort of Clark Kent/Superman thing going on. I shed clothes, put on long underwear and get swallowed up by my drysuit and wetsuit hood, then wade out into the snow. I stash my board in my station wagon and drive a short distance to where the waves are breaking.
The headlands are covered with white, the spruce trees on top of the hills are green and the icy rocks I have to slip and slide over to get myself into the sea are glistening like jewels.
The water is cold (who would have guessed?) - just hovering below freezing. February and March have the coldest water of the year. The air temperature is a semi-tropical minus ten Celsius. (I'll surf down to minus twenty but after that I find that my face muscles freeze and I start talking funny.)
I push off into the blue sea, knee-paddling while above gulls swoop and arctic ducks fluff up their wings as they float on the surface.
I take long, deep strokes into the sea and pull clean winter salt air into my lungs. Soon, a couple of friends will join me, but right now, I'm alone in the sea with a big smile on my face. Even though my journey to the place where the waves are breaking takes eight minutes of paddling, I feel like I'm a million miles from the claustrophobia of mainland North America. The high cliffs of Chebucto Head, far to the west, shimmer on the horizon, bolstered to near triple their height by the mirage effects of the winter sea. A container ship leaving Halifax Harbour also appears magnified like some huge extraterrestrial vessel. I myself am a tiny speck on this immense ocean, overwhelmed by how perfect it feels to be here, now, ready to tap the immaculate energy and grace of the sea.
These waves have travelled hundreds of kilometres from a brutal North Atlantic storm now wreaking havoc on fishermen unlucky enough to be working the tail of the Grand Banks. But here each wave is a work of perfection. I've paddled to my take-off point and sit for minute, watching my breath make small clouds in the clear air.
The waves are about two metres high - “head high,” as we'd say. They roll towards me, then arch up into perfect peaks as the offshore wind pushes up the face of the waves, making them steep and smooth until they cascade forward, top to bottom, some creating hollow sections big enough to tuck a surfer into.
I wait, dwelling upon the euphoria of it all. I've abandoned the warm inside-world of work and life tied to the continent. Now I am drawn into this other plane of existence. I see my own version of the perfect wave headed my way. Three deep strokes and I'm off, dropping down the smooth, angled hill of water, an easy take-off at first but then the wind pumps hard against me as the wave goes vertic
al and I pull myself up onto my feet. I'm jamming a bottom turn just as the tip of the overhead wave blocks out the morning sun.
I go left and pull up higher onto the wave as it begins to feather. Then I do the usual: tuck down as the lip of the wave starts to spill forward, a pure two-metre waterfall. I'm shrewd, cunning and all powerful, a small sea god in my endorphin-charged brain as I speed across the face of this blue-green wall of water.
But for some reason, I discover I'm not as clever as I believed. Sure, I've escaped from my office, left the troubled and vexing world of publishing behind me for now, but the sea would like to remind me that I am only a vulnerable guest in this winter domain. I am a player in the game but have no real control over the rules that can change at any time.
I discover that my speed does not match the speed of the wave collapsing behind me from the peak. I tuck lower, adjust my position on the face of the wave for maximum warp only to discover that I'm too high up and fading too far back into the hollow bowl of the wave.
I realize this just as the lip of the wave connects with the left side of my face. It's cold, numbing and as powerful as a Mike Tyson punch to the jaw. I'm sure I release a colourful syllable but nothing more as I lose my footing and pitch forward into a chundering mass of whitewater as the collapsing wave throws its salty weight from on high down upon me.
I hit the surface spread-eagled and then get slammed by the impact of a ton of winter water. Just for the record, water is more dense in the winter. When it hits you, it carries more tonnage. If it could get much more dense than this, it would be frozen and then it would hurt worse.
Winter wipeouts are not pleasant but they are temporary. The trick to minimizing damage when working your karma through a winter wipeout is to dive deep and then come up quick. The idea is to let the wave go past you while you sink beneath the vector of energy.
The only problem with this is that you have a sudden craving for oxygen and the cold water on your face is causing your brain to seek asylum elsewhere. When you come up gasping for air, your lungs hurt and you feel the first sign of the brain-wrenching ice cream headache that is exploding inside your skull. Evolution has not prepared the unprotected human face for even seconds of immersion in water below the freezing point.
I gulp air, tough out the minute or so of the brain implosion and then get back up on my board and paddle back out towards the sea. I go through the checklist: I'm alive, I'm surfing, I will be a little more cautious on the next wave.
Right about then, a great army of grey clouds advances from the north and I see the squall advancing from the land. The sun is swallowed and it begins to snow. Because of the strength of the wind, the snow does not really fall to earth. This is horizontal snow, blowing straight into the waves, straight into my face.
I can no longer see the headland and can barely discern the next set of waves approaching. I let two slide under me and then paddle for the third. Paddle, stand, drop, bottom turn and then slide up into the pocket again, only this time, going right instead of left. All I can see is snow pelting me in the face. It's cold, wet and creates a crazy visual kaleidoscope since I can only see about three feet in front. It makes the whole event that much more interesting. I have to feel the wave and use intuition to decide what it will do next. Luke Skywalker on a surfboard. In winter.
Amazingly, it works. I get the buzz, I lose myself, I slide off the end of the wave onto flat water close to a couple of pintailed ducks who have flown a thousand miles south from the Arctic. I greet them with enthusiasm, puff hard into the flakes of snow driving into my face.
There are more waves and a pair of other middle-aged surfers who join me to regain their sanity the same way I do. By the time I come ashore, there are great icicles of salt water hanging from my shaggy hair that protrudes from my wetsuit hood. My lips are bluish and my fingers are nearly too numb to work the key into the ignition.
But the clouds are gone, the sun has reappeared, the world is a glistening white. I'll return to my office, plug myself back into the so-called real world. I'll hammer out a few problems, wrestle some numbers to the ground, maybe even write a few paragraphs.
And then, by late afternoon, having done six hours of work in three, I'll put on my drysuit again. The wind will have died down. The sun will be sinking in the west, setting the water on fire. I'll be back in the winter sea dropping down the face of a smooth, elegant wave, the one that has been destined and waiting for me to arrive. I will go left again and discover I am tucked into a hollow green room of water advancing towards its own destruction on the shallow rocky shores. The setting sun will be in the open doorway at the end of this graceful tunnel as I close my eyes briefly, then open them again and slide back out into the world of oxygen and frozen dreams.
The Year of the Skunk
My two-hundred-year-old farmhouse was built with the wood of barns torn down and of timber scavenged from the beached remains of ships that wrecked in terrible storms off the coast. In the winter, otters slip and slide over the wind-whipped dunes of snow on the frozen marsh, seals come ashore and sometimes sprawl on the gravel road until I chase them back towards the sea for their own safety. In summer, great blue herons stand on one leg in the shallow pools in front of my home and deer invade my garden to savour my peas and Swiss chard until I erect scarecrows from old orange shirts and red pants.
My house sits on a loose stone foundation with a damp basement dug by hand by men who wrestled away rocks the size of basketballs. Beneath the living room, there is bedrock that reaches down to the molten core of the earth. The bedrock allows only for a crawl space, providing a warm, welcoming shelter for creatures from the wilderness. And that's the beginning of my story and the beginning of my problem.
An old house with crawl spaces, cracks in the floorboards and drafty slits in the walls is a great invitation for creatures of the wild. Some years, mice arrive by the dozens, invading the kitchen cabinets, consuming cornflakes, candy bars, and raisins. Their pestering presence pushes my family beyond reason. I catch the mice in small plastic traps that do no harm. A smudge of peanut butter on a kind of teeter-totter lures them inside and triggers a door to drop. I drive them to the beach and set them free in the dunes, wishing them well but requesting they not return to my abode.
Weasels appear once or twice a year. My wife, Terry, found one - pure white in his winter garb - lounging casually on our sofa one morning as if he belonged there. He had stepped on the remote control that turned on the television. It was as if he'd come inside to watch his favourite show. Terry screamed and the weasel fled. Another arrived one spring day and toured the house several times, until he returned to the kitchen. Here, he danced around in the cabinet of dishes and bowls, making a great fanfare about his presence, unconcerned with the leaping and barking of my dog.
On another occasion, a pure white dove, sitting atop the smoking chimney with a wood stove alight below, swooned from the intoxicating aroma of burning spruce wood, fell down the chimney and was retrieved by my daughter, Sunyata, from the sooty depths below. Half black, half white, the dove survived and became a great friend of the family, a mystical bird that would fly down from the trees and alight on your hand or sit on your shoulder.
Porcupines have often been a problem. One lived in the crawl space under my house and came out at sunset to eat the bark off my ancient apple tree. Because he was a slow-moving creature with naturally weak eyesight, you could follow him across the yard or make him stop dead in his tracks and lift his needles in defense. I was always afraid my overzealous dog, Jody, would one day get a mouthful of porcupine quills. It wouldn't be the first time I'd have to use pliers while a neighbour held a frightened dog still so I could pluck the painful spikes from its tongue and cheek.
Unable to persuade one belligerent porcupine that he was unwanted on the property, I held a big green plastic trash can beneath him while he gnawed away at my once-healthy crab apple tree. A visitor with a broom toppled the spiky beast from his perch into the garbage
can and I quickly slammed the lid shut. I duct-taped it well and proceeded to drive him to the wilderness, only to discover halfway there that he had somehow lifted the lid and freed himself. He scrambled around the inside of my station wagon as I let out a scream of terror. I hastily pulled over, opened all the doors by the side of the road and waited while he clambered from the back to the front seat, eventually to sit down behind the steering wheel, unwilling to venture out into the sunlight.
The engine was still running, the radio was on. He stood up on his hind legs and sniffed at the air. Anyone driving by saw me standing on the opposite side of the road looking over at my car. While the radio played on, a porcupine sat in the driver's seat, peering above the steering wheel, until he grew confident enough to climb out the door and head for the woods.
I've always envisioned myself a great defender of wild things. My whole family was like that. My youngest daughter, Pamela, relocated frogs from dried-up puddles to lush ponds for survival. My wife spared unwanted spiders from destruction by collecting them and moving them outside. My older daughter, Sunyata, retrieved injured sea gulls and pigeons from parking lots or roadways and we ushered them back to health. And I have been known to act as crossing guard to reckless mother ducks with tiny ducklings crossing major highways at rush hour.
Certainly we were a family of tree huggers, animal lovers and environmentally friendly folk right up to the time of the calamity.
It was a cold, damp, somewhat snowy February of 1998. On the thirteenth of that month, the north winds shook the house, lifted the shingles and made the walls creak and moan in the usual way. I was asleep with my wife at about five in the morning when I heard a neighbour's cat screeching beneath the house. There was hissing and the sound of animals fighting. My wife and I were awakened by the noise and waiting for the battle to end when it struck. The smell. The unmistakable overpowering horrendous stench of skunk.
Driving Minnie's Piano Page 5
