Driving Minnie's Piano (13 page)

^{He'd been chasing smelts into
the marsh down those little rivulets that I have named after
American rivers: the Delaware, the Hudson, the Potomac, and so
forth. He surfaced somewhere, got himself lost and decided to fall
asleep on the road. My daughter and I try to get him off the road
and onto the marshy ice. Big weepy eyes, a soft beautiful form and
a snow-coloured coat. We talk to the seal.}

^{My daughter
calls the seal names:
Katie,
Flipper, Buster. Get off the road, Katie. Come on Flipper. Move,
why don't you, Buster?
But she
can't seem to find a name the seal will recognize. I try busker
tactics to make him move but he'll have none of
it.}

^{So I drive home and return
with a flashlight, a plastic sled, a snow shovel and a can of tuna
fish. Trying to save the lives of living things often seems to
involve cans of tuna fish or sardines. Curious.}

^{Upon my return to the stranded
mammal, I splash some juice from the opened tuna can in the seal's
face but he seems uninterested. He shows his sharp teeth and hisses
at us.}

^{“Katie, why are you so nasty?”
my daughter asks the seal.}

^{My next attempt involves an
old army blanket that is in the trunk of my car. This is the very
blanket my mother used to sleep under when she was in the American
Coast Guard during World War Two. I wave the blanket like a matador
and the seal grabs it and I drag him a few inches each time over
and over until he's out of the road.}

^{An hour later, at home, trying
to eat dinner, I see car lights stopped at the end of the road and
know that the seal is in trouble again. It's minus twenty and windy
out. And bloody dark. The seal is on the edge of the paved road now
when I return and my neighbour is there pondering what to do.
Together he and I cover the seal in the blanket and shovel him
(gently, gently) into the frozen ditch with a snow shovel. We work
at it until he is out of harm's away again. In the morning he is
gone. And it appears that he scooted off across the snowy dunes
towards the sea and safety.}

^{I fell asleep that night
thinking about William Carlos Williams' short story “The Use of
Force,” in which a doctor is obliged to be physically coercive in
his attempt to diagnose and treat a very sick little girl who is
completely opposed to his intervention. I never liked the story,
but now I identify with the doctor.}

^{That night the stars blazed
like hard diamonds. Orion veritably crackled with the intensity of
its brilliance. The dark above the sea was clean hard obsidian. The
earth itself here in the depths of winter was as hard as ancient
boulders and about as forgiving. The clocks stopped at exactly 3:40
a.m. and time engaged again around five a.m. If it had been the end
of the world, I would have slept through most of it rather
peacefully.}

^{And in the morning the sun is
out, celebrating the hard blue and white world again. The sea, sky
and waves are rewarding me for my kindness the night before. I am
provided with waves, birds, DNA. Despite all the garbage clanking
around in the brain, I achieve a sense of being here and being now
and I am hanging on to it all as if my life depends upon
it.}

^{Elegy for a Surfer}

^{I was in Paris when
twenty-five-year-old Kevin Shawn Coker drowned while surfing near
my home at Lawrencetown Beach. When I arrived back in Nova Scotia,
exhausted from a series of airline misadventures and delays, I
learned of Kevin's death and I took it pretty
hard.}

^{I didn't know him very well
but I'd surfed with him once or twice. He was from Prince Edward
Island, drove an old Volvo station wagon, and seemed like a pretty
nice guy. He was relatively new to surfing and I gave him credit
for working through his learning curve during winter conditions. In
order to learn to surf well, you have to wipeout a lot. The dues
you pay for winter wipeouts in near-zero-degree salt water are
fairly stiff. Only the truly surf-addicted are willing to undergo
the punishment for the reward.}

^{On the day of Kevin's
accident, he was surfing alone. Back home here, I asked every
surfer I knew what the conditions were like that day. I had this
strong need to know every detail. I have this gut feeling that
every person who surfs at the beach where I live is somehow part of
my community or my extended family. So now one member of that
community had died tragically and I wanted to understand what went
wrong.}

^{The bare bones of the story
suggest that Kevin drove out to the beach on a pretty rugged day. A
strong northeast wind was roaring, the waves were not great surfing
waves - head-high, maybe a bit more, and gnarly. A lot of wind up
the face of a wave, a bit of a rip headed out past the point. Grey,
cold, gusty and pretty ugly. Not a great day to surf. But the guy
had made his trip to the beach, was hungry for waves - I'm guessing
here - and went surfing alone. Something happened while he was out
there and he didn't make it back to shore. He must have been far
enough out when it occurred and that sent him drifting, still
attached to his board by the leash, in the wind-driven current that
was pushing him away from the beach and west to where he was found
by the Coast Guard in Portuguese Cove on the other side of Halifax
Harbour.}

<sup>I've surfed plenty of times in
similar conditions and if I was home, I'd probably have waited for
better waves, more favourable winds, or surfed someplace else. This
is all a matter of comfort more than safety, I guess, so I don't
judge Kevin as being totally careless, or foolhardy. I've surfed
plenty of times alone - never something I'd advise anyone to do.
I've had more years of surfing experience than Kevin did but had it
been me out there that day - had I not had a book launch in France
- well, tide and timing could have done the same damned
thing.</sup>

^{So what to make of this
tragedy? Aside from feeling a personal loss of a member of my
tribe, this brotherhood/sisterhood of Nova Scotia surfing, I feel a
tremendous loss of innocence. No one had ever drowned here before
in a surfing accident. It's even extremely rare for anyone to get
hurt while surfing.}

^{There were a couple of gashes
over the years when somebody drove their fin into somebody else
while dropping in on a wave. Most of us have been thrashed, thumped
and held down a bit too long by cold, unforgiving waves when we
least expected it. I remember getting smacked across the bridge of
my nose once when I kicked out of a wave. A great cinematic geyser
of blood poured all over my drysuit. I put my tooth through my lip
in last year's surf contest while crouched inside a mighty fine
beach break barrel. But up until this, surfing in Nova Scotia, even
during the blisteringly cold months of January and February, was
not a life and death thing.}

^{One haunting voice in my head
tells me that if I had not been playing poet in Paris that day, I
would have made a surf check or two at the beach as would be my
usual weekend thing to do. If I had run into Kevin suiting up in
his old Volvo, I would have told him to go to the cove in Seaforth
and save himself some pounding from the gloomy-looking waves.
Smaller waves but more protection from the wind, perhaps. Too late
for that now.}

^{People, surfers included,
don't tend to like other people who give unsolicited advice. But
I'll do it more often now to kids who look like they are about to
surf potentially dangerous waves. I'll do it even if they think I'm
an uptight old fart. I'll do it even if they laugh at me. Not a big
deal.}

^{No, this wasn't supposed to be
a rant about safety. Surfing, after all, is partly a business of
taking chances. Trying to do a thing you don't think you are
capable of doing. Throwing your board off the lip, squeezing tight
into a watery tube and then trying to make it out. Playing it a
little closer to the danger zone than the last time. The danger is
more in your head than in reality, but it feels good to push your
limits once in a while.}

^{A couple of years ago, a
visiting surfer from South Carolina (he said he was an unemployed
minister in a denomination I wasn't familiar with) stopped by my
house asking me if I'd rent him a board. The waves were huge that
day from a hurricane going by to the south. It was summer, though,
and the water was warm. I asked him first about how well he could
surf and he told me he was a real kahuna. I couldn't bring myself
to rent him a board but I loaned him one and told him where he
could surf. It was a place that I felt was safe for a foreigner.
Even though he was a supposed hotshot, he'd never surfed a coast
with actual rocks before. I told him not to surf the Big Left,
which was big and raging like a freight train that day, a place
that gets its kicks from sucking you over the meaty falls and then
pummelling you along the rocky shore mercilessly.}

^{The South Carolina surfing
minister disavowed my commandments and, looking for the bigger
thrill of danger, went straight to the place I told him to avoid.
He never even made it into the water. Instead, he stood in front of
a great sea-soaked boulder waiting for some slack between sets for
paddling out. Before that break arrived, he was targeted by the
biggest, meanest wave of the day that roared up and gave him a
forceful body slam up against the boulder. He took a fairly serious
ding to the head and ended up on my sofa, just shy of a trip to the
hospital. I decided never again to loan any of my old boards to
strangers who thought they understood the power of our
waves.}

^{One of the great unspoken
codes of surfing, and we have all sorts of unsaid primitive laws in
the republic of surfing, is that you always help out anybody in
trouble in the water. Surfers have hauled in maybe a dozen swimmers
over the years who found themselves in trouble at Larrytown. And if
I got smacked unconscious by my board while surfing, I trust that
even my meanest enemy in the water (if I had one) would haul my
sorry ass ashore and coax me back to consciousness with whatever it
might take. But, hey, it's a fairly sparsely populated coast and
it's hard not to surf alone if you only have yourself for company
and the waves are nifty six-footers peeling clean like crystalware
at your favourite secret spot.}

^{I have in recent years slacked
off on surfing what I consider to be big stupid waves. Cold winter
conditions with relentless overhead walls, big churning piles of
whitewater and no recognizable path to the lineup without punching
through a dozen senseless walls of winter wave. Winter surfing is
an inevitable package of pleasure and pain. Cold water, under
water, frigid salt water on the face for overly long seconds hurts
like hell. My advice to myself on that issue is always the same:
don't wipeout. Stay above the waterline. But it doesn't always work
that way.}

^{The physical
impact of very cold water on your body is generally hard to imagine
unless you've been there. I try to avoid all that physical pain but
without total success. Last winter my drysuit zipper came undone
while surfing on a minus-twenty-degree day. I flopped into the sea
after a good glassy ride and my suit sucked up half the Atlantic
Ocean. The sea was not my friend that day but it possessed no true
malevolence. I always have to remind myself that the sea is neither
cruel nor kind. It follows laws of weather, physics and hydraulics
or
El
Nino
logic, but it doesn't
decide to give pain or pleasure on a
whim.}

^{Feeling the stiletto sting of
bitter cold water and looking a little like the Michelin man, I
slowly floundered ashore, still attached to my board, crawled up on
the ice-capped rocks, lay down to drain the water out of my suit,
then stumbled like a numb survivor to my car and eventually a long
slow thaw in the shower.}

^{When I
watched all of those tragic victims of the
Titanic
dying in the icy waters of the movie with
the same name, I identified with their pain. I have had a good a
taste of what it must be like to drown at sea in the North
Atlantic. The actual intensity of the cold often seems to me to be
beyond reason but that's only because we were not cut out for this
climate. Seals and whales obviously have no gripes nor do those
little seabirds from the Arctic, the dovekies, who sometimes keep
me company in the ocean.}

^{So all I know is that I still
feel pretty badly about the death of this young guy who had been
surfing here at my beach. I care about who he was even though I
didn't know him very well and I feel diminished, as John Donne
would have said, by his death. I even feel a kind of
responsibility. On the surface that responsibility is illogical.
How could I have known something was going to happen and prepared
for it? Illogical, right? No, there is a fundamental logic here
that revolves around (corny as this sounds)
caring.}

^{So I guess this caring thing
means speaking up even when it's unwanted. Giving advice, feeling a
certain responsibility to other people. Complaining sometimes.
Whether I can change anything, give the right advice or whatever, I
should give it a shot. Other people's pain is, to some degree, my
pain and I'd like to minimize it if I can.}