Driving Minnie's Piano

by Lesley Choyce

Walking the shoreline in the mornings is an attempt to be accident prone. Satori is elusive in New Jersey, Nova Scotia or Japan but discovery remains available everywhere in small things. Some of those beach rocks - the rounded ones - remind me of curling stones, some of giant eggs. I displace only those that beg to be carried away. But every once in a while a stone of true spirit is found. I discovered one last year - it was brown, oblong, egg-like and smooth as porcelain, and it fit with such grace and density in the palm of my hand that I began to carry it around to calm my own erratic spirit. I could feel the weight, purpose and even spirit of this stone and enjoyed its companionship for reading, watching TV or even filing my taxes.

  I would have kept it except that I wanted to give it to my friend, Mike, formerly of Seaforth, Nova Scotia, who I would be staying with in Japan. At the airport, as the ticket agent hefted my heavy suitcase onto the luggage scale at the Air Canada counter, she said, “What do you have in this bag? Rocks?” She was right, of course, I had a few but only special ones imbued with the spirit of the coast.

  The extraordinary brown rock I left with Mike, to help carry him past certain bouts of homesickness for our coast - to be brought out when listening to old Stan Rogers songs was not quite enough. In return, Mike introduced me to a Shinto shrine where all the small stones in a sizeable courtyard had been lovingly groomed into wavelike patterns. In another lifetime, perhaps, the career of such a rock groomer might well satisfy me. Not far from the Meiji Park with the orderly stones, we walked through a part of Tokyo that was once levelled by American bombers during the Second World War. Not a shred of evidence of such violence existed today. Only polite people, modest homes, giggling school kids with short haircuts and cherry blossoms falling everywhere.

  The Thin Edge of the Wedge

  Wedge Island is barely discernible on a road map of Nova Scotia because there are no roads to get you there. Although it is not truly an island, its tether to the Eastern Shore is so tenuous that it remains remote and seemingly adrift. It has been so eroded by the forces of the North Atlantic that it remains a mere fragment of what once was a formidable headland. Within a lifetime, it will most likely be diminished to a rubble of stone, an insignificant reef at high tide.

  But for now, the Wedge exists, a reminder that nothing is permanent on this shore, this “drowned coast” that is eroding while we live our short lives. It has been disappearing for a long time. The Wedge is a good reminder of that.

  Something like a dinosaur's bony spine of boulders leads a wary hiker from the salt-bleached fish shacks at the end of the road. If it's a fine July day - blue sky, big and bragging above your head - you might slide your hand along the silky beards of sea oats as you leave solid land, then dance from rock to rock. Low tide is your best bet to make it there in one piece. Still, waves spank the rocks from both sides, slap cold salt water on your shoes and spit clean frothy Atlantic into your face.

  A good mile to sea and you arrive at this dagger-shaped remnant of land, a defeated drumlin known simply as Wedge Island. Smashed lobster traps, scraps of polypropylene rope as well as bones of birds and beasts litter the rocks near the shoreline but a hundred feet up the red dirt cliff sits a parliament of herring gulls peering down at you with some suspicion. If you scurry up the side of crumbling dirt, the gulls will complain loudly at your intrusion then take to the sky.

  Arriving at the top, you find yourself on a grassy peninsula a mere two feet wide where both sides have been sculpted away by rains and pounding seas. It's a place of vertigo and lost history but the land widens as you advance seaward onto this near-island of bull thistles, raspberry bushes and green grass that seems to be cropped short as a putting green on a golf course.

  Above, the circus begins. The gulls by the hundreds have taken full note of your advance as they circle and swoop threateningly. They chastise and chortle and announce that you are in their world. None truly attack but sometimes they congregate in numbers great enough to block out the sun.

  At your feet, hiding in the weeds or sometimes sitting in the full sun, are the young, pedestrian gulls - tan and dark brown speckled. They look nothing like their parents. Down-puffy chicks in ones and twos, they mostly sit passive as Buddhist priests, trusting in the world they have known for only a few weeks. Solicitude must be paramount to avoid stepping on them. Speckled eggs still lie in the bushes, some already hatched and abandoned.

  The intruder must take great care here in this safe haven hatchery for the great gulls that rule this coast. Once you find visual focus on the first of the young gulls, others appear. As if by magic, concentrated vision undoes their camouflage.

  Further out, at the very tip of the island, bare ribs of bed- rock stick out into the sea. Beneath your feet is the very rock that was once part of the super-continent that dragged itself away to form Africa. These are Moroccan stones.

  Wedge Island is a forgotten domain on the edge of the continent and you feel the thrill of being at sea on a diminishing finger of land soon to be swallowed by the waves. In the pools between the rocky ridges, rockweed grows in abundance. If you wade ankle deep in the water, you can feel the icy sting, like sharp knives against your skin, and marvel at the colours: russet and rust, red and tawny dulse, golden golden fronds. White and black barnacles are rivetted to the tidal limits of the rocks and crawling everywhere along the edges is an infinity of patient periwinkles. Sea ducks sit twenty yards away, bobbing in the ocean swell as waves slap and suck at the pebbles in the little sandy cove tucked between two bedrock ribs that look like the protruding backs of giant beached whales.

  It is easy to imagine that no man or woman has ever been here before. You are the first, perhaps the last, but on the way back, the truth reveals itself on the western shore. Not ten feet from a vertical drop-off several storeys high is a circle of lichen-covered rocks flush with the grassy surface. A manmade well. The water is deep and dark with long-legged insects skimming along the obsidian surface. The well is full, nearly to the brim - this seems impossible given the fact that we are high on this attenuated wedge of narrow land. The edge of the cliff is not much more than an arm-span away.

  A survey of the surroundings now reveals two dents in the ground as if some giant has punched down twice onto a massive surface of dough. Two dents in the ground that were once the foundations of a house and barn long since abandoned. There was once a farm here. Fields grew cabbage and turnips. A family that lived on vegetables from the stony soil, cod and mackerel from the sea. No roads, no cars, but boats only for any commerce with the Halifax world. A way of life long gone.

  In a year or ten at the longest, the rains and seas will conspire to undo the ribbon of land left between fresh water and sky. The stones of the well walls will tumble. Geological time can be short on this coast. The drumlin's cliff will be pried by ice, and pocked by pelting rain. The sea will slip out stones from beneath the hill, the grassy turf will tumble up above and eventually the fresh water of the farmer's well will gush out of the heart of the headland and race down to meet the sea.

  Should the sun suddenly tuck itself behind a cloud, a shiver might run down your spine. The gulls will protest again as you retreat landward but allow you to pass, recognizing your caution with their offspring. Perhaps the tide has risen and you see that your path back to the mainland will be a wet one, hopping from one rock island to the next, ambushed by afternoon waves coming at you from both sides until you are drenched and chattering. And when your feet find their way back onto near-solid sand, you reckon that it is all only an illusion. Nothing is permanent on this shore. The gulls will hold the final lease on old farms and abbreviated real estate. Then sail off to safer shores to hatch their next generation of offspring when the time comes.

  A Short History of Fog

  I admit I am a fan of fog, a fog enthusiast of the highest order. Fortunately for me, I live on a fog-prone shore. The fog has kept the population thin and I thank the fog for that. It creates a dreamy environment that isolates a beach for you to be a
lone with your thoughts. This is a wonderful thing if you like to be alone with your thoughts. Some folks do not.

  Not everyone shares my zeal for fog. Fog makes ships run into things, sometimes each other. This happened more often in the old days before radar and global positioning devices. Sometimes people smash their cars up while driving in the fog. It can be pretty darned intrusive when it comes to vision. Fog doesn't really care if you or I can see a damned thing. Sometimes you can't see your proverbial hand in front of your face. That's some thick fog, or as the Newfoundlanders say, “some t'ick.”

  I don't know why I'm thinking so much about fog this morning except that it's foggy and I just walked my dog Jody on the beach. I was looking for waves, of course, and they were small, pitiful things but in a day or two we should have some waves from an approaching hurricane and we'll see how that pans out.

  At the beach my dog was sniffing out the urine poems and fecal stories left by other dogs. This doesn't sound like a lot of fun to me but since dogs can't write or read, I figure they communicate through (a) barking, the obvious vocal/verbal mode and (b) urinating and defecating on grass, posts, tall weeds and tires among other things.

  I think that the translation of most barking comes down to some kind of statement of existence. “Hey, I'm here. You're there,” if one dog is barking at another dog. Or maybe, “Hey, I see something and I'm gonna make some noise.” In the fog, dogs bark at anything. They're not sure if anything is there or not so they just bark in case. They don't care if they're wrong.

  Sometimes my dog barks because she hears things. She barks at distant thunder and helicopters. Jody really dislikes helicopters, for some reason. I guess just because they're up above her making that racket for no obvious reason and someday one could crash into the house so she's barking to say, “Get the hell away! Go fly that damn contraption somewhere else.” On clear days, military helicopters fly overhead a lot. They fly way too low but it's because they're pretending to be doing important work like looking for boats that smashed up on the rocks in yesterday's fog. But in the summer, they have the side door open, these big noisy Sea King helicopters which are about a hundred years old and break down a lot. They're always losing oil pressure, for some reason. A Sea King will be flying over at a height not much more than the top of the power pole and two men in military uniforms will be sitting with the door open, dangling their legs like it's a ride at an amusement park. Sometimes they're eating sandwiches.

  If I'm out surfing, I wave and they wave back. I figure it must look pretty cool from up there looking down at a lone guy on his surfboard. So I paddle and catch a wave and I guess I would have done that anyway - helicopter or no helicopter. The sound of this old Sikorsky-built helicopter, though, always reminds me of Vietnam. I didn't fight in Vietnam but know people who did. I watched a lot of movies about Vietnam and remember the TV news footage. And there was always helicopter noise. That wonka, wonka sound that makes me want to start shouting out protests against the war: “Hell no, we won't go!” “Impeach Nixon!” “U.S.A. out of Vietnam!” That sort of thing. Even though it's now Nova Scotia and several decades later, I still feel this way.

  The helicopters don't fly much in the fog because it would be no fun for the guys sitting by the open side door. They couldn't see a blasted thing. Or maybe they don't fly because they might bump into stuff and you don't want to do that with a hundred-year-old helicopter, low oil pressure and two buddies dangling legs over the side, eating sandwiches.

  I don't know if those guys are strapped in but they seem pretty casual. I think you get cocky about unsafe stuff if you do it long enough. And that's probably a good reason not to do any one thing for a really long time. There are two types of cocky going around: old and cocky or young and cocky. This is a man's thing, by the way. Women don't get cocky. I don't know what they do, but it's something else.

  About this falling out of flying machines - not far from where I surf is a big shallow kind of bay called Cole Harbour. It's sometimes misspelled in magazines as Coal Harbour but there is no coal there. It's right next to Cow Bay and everyone expects there's a story about a cow to go with it. But there isn't. A family named Cowie once owned the whole place. They called the place Cowie Bay but they all died or moved to Boston or something and people got tired of a two-syllable name for a place so it became Cow Bay. In the 1950s a man with an obsession for building life-size statues of concrete animals moved to Cow Bay and guess what kind of statue he created right on the ocean beach of Cow Bay?

  You guessed it, a moose. It's still there and sometimes the waves are good for surfing right by the statue. In fact, the locals who surf there call the break “The Moose.” Of course, there haven't been any moose in the environs of Cow Bay since the nineteenth century. They were all killed off by men who like to kill animals with guns. Harold Horwood, the late Newfoundland writer, was convinced that killing things with guns is a sexual perversion of some sort. I think he's right, but I have yet to express my opinion on this matter to all those bastard hunters who show up in my marsh each year to shoot ducks and deer.

  The point about Cole Harbour and cockiness is this. In 1942, the armed forces were training young men to fly planes for the war in Europe. They'd take off from Shearwater Air Base over at Eastern Passage and fly out over the future site of The Moose and then scoot around in the skies over Cole Harbour because it was nearby, unpopulated, and I guess maybe because it was not as deep as the nearby Atlantic Ocean. One day, a young cocky pilot was out over the marsh practising loop-de-loops for no clear reason. It wasn't like he was going to be able to go over to Germany, get in a dog fight and show off his loop-de-loops to scare the enemy away. But there you have it, anyway. It was a two-seater plane with open cockpits. Open cockpits are notoriously bad places to be cocky.

  They had seat belts to strap them in but you know how your old Uncle Ed doesn't use seat belts because he doesn't “believe in them.” He thinks it's a Communist plot, an invasion of his rights and freedoms and he figures that if he ever drove his truck off the road in the winter and through the ice on Porters Lake, the damned thing would keep him trapped in his truck cab and he'd drown there listening to his Tom T. Hall tape on the cassette player.

  Well, the passenger of the plane wasn't expecting any loop-de-loops that afternoon over Cole Harbour. He might even have been eating a sandwich when the pilot flying the plane took her vertical, and then fully upside down. Buddy riding shotgun wasn't holding onto anything but maybe his sandwich and a whole bagful of bad luck. He fell out of the upside-down plane into the shallow waters of Cole Harbour and didn't survive.

  In a local history book, the writer has written a whole chapter about “Air Tragedies at or Near Lawrencetown Beach.” This chapter, however, is nothing compared to the shipwrecks. We're working on three centuries of shipwrecks at or near Lawrencetown Beach. In fact, one of the places I like to surf on a good southeast swell is called “The Wreck.” Only the boiler is left sticking up. I tore a hole in my wetsuit once on the jagged metal of it as I caught a glassy little summer wave out there. It was a foggy morning and I knew the stump of metal was there. I just didn't see it in time. The wetsuit ripped but it protected me from being cut too badly. If I had started bleeding, it could have attracted those great white sharks that supposedly lurk off our coast. They could sneak right up on you in a good Atlantic fog.

  So it can be a very dangerous place here or near where I live. Even the winds and salt air have taken a heavy toll on the concrete moose, so a fund is being set up at the local Royal Bank for people to donate to the “Save the Moose” fund. I'm in favour of every community having at least one person whose job it is to create something grand and ridiculous for their town. Monuments to moose or giant raspberries, a three-storey wooden replica of a bottle of Moosehead beer. Those sorts of things. A couple of decades after the creation of these masterpieces, future residents can have fundraisers to save them and that will build community spirit.

  I'm in favour of saving thi
ngs in general, I guess. Oceans, whales, beaches, rivers, trees, clean air. Fog even. It's possible that global warming will destroy the fog in Nova Scotia. It's also possible that it will create more of it, but that would only be temporary until the oceans evaporate and come down as rain on Arizona and Libya and Mongolia. I don't want people to mess around with fog. I like it the way it is and in the quantity that it is dished out. I say to those who don't like fog - the ones who think it is clammy, cold and a general nuisance - I say to heck with you. Stay inland for all I care. But I apologize for suddenly sounding militant and Greenpeace-ish about it. Call me a fog hugger, if it makes you feel any better.

  Fog is a useful form of punctuation between clear sun-filled days and stormy wind-whipped days. I'm not opposed to what most people think of as good weather but I just admire the imperative of a good fog. Some days I can hear the fog horn at the mouth of Halifax Harbour. And so can my dog. She'll bark at the wall when she hears it as if there is a great bellowy sea monster inside that wall with the old eel grass insulation.

  Being convinced that dogs communicate fairly complex ideas to each other by way of urine, I expect that my dog, when she pees on a patch of sea oats at the beach, is leaving a kind of epic story about scaring off helicopters or alerting my family to the presence of sea monsters. I don't know what all those other peeing dogs are communicating about - probably cars without mufflers, dirt bikers, annoying cats and garbage trucks. Jody herself has an intense dislike for garbage trucks. She would chase a garbage truck and dive right into the tires if she could. It makes no sense but is probably related to a previous incarnation. I think that she once chased wooly mammoths as they thundered across the tundra making the same sound as the local garbage truck when it slams into the potholes on my road.