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

1. 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 masters 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.

My grandfather swore the best when he was working with the wire that he put up for the lima beans. Most farmers in New Jersey thought lima beans weren't worth all the trouble. You had to plant the bean seeds, put up posts all along the row, install twin parallel lines of heavy gauge wire from one end of each row to the other, top and bottom, and then create a wavy V pattern up and down the entire length with binder twine. All so the finicky lima bean vines would grow tall and have something to hang onto. And eventually produce lima beans.

In order to put up the wire, my grandfather would park the 1949 Chevy truck at one end of a row with the wire mounted on a big spool on the back. He and I would take one end of the wire and walk it the length of the field and then hammer it onto the posts. It all wouldn't have been so bad except for the fact that, according to my grandfather, the wire had a mind of its own. And in that mind, it did not like him. He knew for certain that the wire was out to get him - trying to tangle itself in impossible metallic Gordian knots or snapping, kicking, jamming, jabbing and generally trying to poke out the eye of any human fool enough to come within its steely region.

So when things went wrong, Gaga cursed long and loud. Once, when an outstretched cable snapped mid-field, it whipped itself with ferocious force, attacking my grandfather and hurtling like a spring back in my direction where I was stationed at the spool in the truck. I threw myself onto the sandy soil and put my hands over my head as the wire thrashed at the truck cab. My grandfather had been whipped in the face, slashed across the hand and then knocked down.

It was the maddest I'd ever seen him and I too was now convinced the wire was out to get both of us. I wondered why he didn't give up on lima beans. The problem was that my grandfather loved to eat them. He had grown up near Chestertown, Maryland, with large platefuls of delectable lima beans and his was a lifetime commitment to growing and eating good beans. For those of you who have only bought them in a can at grocery stores, you'll never understand why one man can have such a passion for a mere bean. Good fresh lima beans are really pretty amazing. And my grandfather was willing to risk his life (and mine too) to wage war, year after year, with uncontrollable, even hateful (his word), wire, rather than forego good lima beans.

In contrast to the lima bean wire wars, World War One was like a long holiday at the Jersey Shore, Gaga said. On that perilous day when my grandfather had been attacked by the wire, he walked back to where I was at the truck. He was fuming. I was afraid that he was mad at me. But it was the wire. He cursed it up and down and sideways. He kicked at it, he spit at it, called it things my thirteen-year-old ears had never heard before or after.

We left the wire that day, left it there tangled in the greatest convoluted knot of madness ever conceived by the physical universe and we walked away. I was glad he wasn't mad at me but, in truth, I may have been responsible for not keeping the right tension on the stretched out wire. I dawdled at the wire spindle, daydreaming of all the things I would rather do than help stretch out lima bean wire. I often daydreamed about surfing my 9’6” Greg Noll slot-bottom noserider surfboard. It was either that or girls. Denise or Patty or Cathy. It was around this time that I discovered that every other one of my girlfriends (at least that was the term I used for girls I had a crush on) were named Cathy. My infatuation cycle would go like this: Cathy, Debbie, Cathy, Patty, Cathy, Denise and so forth. Sometimes it was Kathy with a K. And I identified heavily with the Everly Brothers' song of this time called “Cathy's Clown.” I believed “Cathy's Clown” was the best song ever written. Much better than anything Mozart, Beethoven or Bach could come up with.

And so the wire had defeated my grandfather that particular summer morning. But we came back to it later in the day and punished the wire until it was stretched onto the posts and hammered into place into a kind of lima bean wire crucifixion. Gaga, in better spirits from having had a large lunch of oysters sent up in a can from the Chesapeake Bay, said that all you really head to do was “chide” the wire and it would work for you. Before we had been “wrestling” with it, fighting it. My grandfather had realized he had to rise above the problem, not stoop to the level of the coiled wire. His newfound attitude was a complete success.

Later in the summer he would say that this was the best lima bean crop he'd ever seen. But the remainder of the New Jersey farming universe would mostly continue to believe that lima beans were not worth the effort.

Once the wire was firmly in place, Minnie and I wove the binder twine top to bottom on the parallel lines so that the vines would eventually thread around these improvised trellises. I loved the smell of binder twine but would later discover that the smell was actually a toxic preservative put on the twine to keep it from rotting. In my youth, I grew up loving the smell of all kinds of things that I would later learn were harmful, poisonous and deadly.

It's a long list, really, but some of the favoured smells on my hit list included leaded gasoline and binder twine preservative. Creosote was way up there. (Can anyone smell creosote without thinking of being a kid at the beach or sitting under a wooden bridge?) Most insecticides had an interesting smell. In those days, trucks drove around Cinnaminson Township spraying big misty clouds (that looked just like Lawrencetown fog) of toxic gases that were supposed to kill mosquitoes. Most of my friends and I loved the smell of that poisonous cloud. At least one ill-fated classmate made a hobby out of riding his bike around behind the mosquito truck, in his own private, sweet-smelling fogbank. He was admired for his audacity and loyalty to that special aroma but it led to disaster. He was hit and almost killed by a driver who couldn't see him. David was slammed into the truck, right near the nozzle dispensing the mist, and then fell onto the curb. But he lived to tell the tale and such a cataclysmic event garnered envy from many of the guys in my class.

It was everybody's tax money that went into mosquito control. I think it was DDT that was most popular in those days despite the fact Rachel Carson had warned everybody that it was killing butterflies and birds and maybe it would kill us if we weren't careful. It certainly came close to killing my friend David. Those fogging trucks were causing other accidents as well, as drivers sped down the road right into the mosquito fog, carelessly smashing into other cars they couldn't see.

I was a Boy Scout back then and concerned with doing “good deeds.” My interest in good deeds, I know now, is why many of my friends were so dull, and why many girls (several named Cathy) weren't interested in me. In order to complete the civic awareness merit badge I had to perform many hours of community service. You would have thought the troop leader would have sent me to volunteer in a nursing home or maybe clean up garbage at the school. Instead, I was “volunteered” to drop green pellets of poisons into the storm sewers all over town. Their contents would eventually end up in the Pennsauken Creek and drift on into the Delaware River. But the idea was to kill more mosquitoes. The people of New Jersey were dead set against mosquitoes like no other people on the face of the earth.

Everybody saw me dropping those deadly pellets into the street storm drains. The poison probably would find its way into the drinking water supply of half of South Jersey, but what did we care? We were people in love with smells like kerosene and diesel exhaust. (I still have a good, fuzzy feeling whenever I smell the exhaust of a city bus, for example.) In the public's mind, I was an exemplary citizen. The Cinnaminson Journal even sent a reporter to interview me and take my picture. A laudatory article was written about what a fine youth I was but I received no fan mail from Rachel Carson. In the photograph, I was wearing my Boy Scout uniform, including the merit badge sash. I was standing over the storm sewer drain on the side of Dorothy Drive with a bag of poison pellets. And I was smiling.

Mothers of girls who attended the Moravian Church where I went to Sunday school were impressed and had cut the article out of the paper. All of the Cathys and Denises of my life thought I was a dork, as rightfully they should. I received my civic awareness merit badge. But at a cost.

In the sanity and safety of my grandmother's summer basement, as she chewed gum, snapped beans and shelled peas and limas, Minnie told me stories about West Texas. Her father had left Philadelphia to go there in search of gold, or at least the collateral gold to be made from the enthusiasm of people looking for gold. He was a cook for a while and then he ran a small cowboy hotel in the dry dusty town of Davis. In the stories there were always horses and pianos - pronounced “pianas.” She liked talking about memories of other people playing piano as much as she liked playing it herself.

When she wasn't performing at the baby grand piano in her living room or talking about pianos, she told me stories about taking trains into and out of Philadelphia and New York. I knew little about riding trains. My parents were car people. My father was a truck mechanic. We had almost no understanding of trains. But Minnie had come from a world of trains. Her family had gone west in a train, returned in a train. She herself had commuted to Philly, where she worked at Merck, Sharp and Dohme, in a train that ran through Palmyra. But my mother and father thought trains were just for people who couldn't drive - people too poor or ignorant to know that in order to get from point A to point B, you got in your car and drove there.

So Minnie taught me about riding in trains, and she talked of horses - riding English and sidesaddle and meeting up with boyfriends on horses out there in the gold-hopeful days of West Texas. And, of course, there was the baby grand piano upstairs, as there had always been pianos in my grandmother's life down through the years.

Because of the interest in horses, trains and pianos, some considered my grandmother an “artistic” type. She was probably about as bohemian as my straitlaced family would allow. Certainly, my grandfather was not an artist type unless you considered his ability to grow extraordinary watermelons and flawless lima beans. When he wasn't working, creative fun for my grandfather consisted of lying on the couch in front of a big old floor model black and white TV watching Ronald Reagan introducing Death Valley Days. Gaga was a big fan of westerns. Zane Grey was his idea of great literature, Gunsmoke his idea of high art.

Minnie played piano in the living room when the TV wasn't tuned to Sugarfoot, Cheyenne, Maverick, or, of course, Gunsmoke. The piano strings were stretched tightly from post to post inside the great wooden frame and these wires were obedient and disciplined, completely unlike the incorrigible wire that fought my grandfather and me in the lima bean fields of summer. Sometimes Minnie played the “Daisy” song or something more ambitious by Debussy while Gaga read Louis L'Amour.

Minnie read a few of Gaga's cast-off westerns when she was desperate for something to read but she had a more eclectic taste, dipping into popular mystery novels, or reading books about the history of Mexico or even the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

If I should arrive on the scene on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, however, Minnie would stop whatever she was doing - reading Evangeline or repairing some of Gaga's work clothes - and she would return to the piano where she would play for me The William Tell Overture, which I knew as the theme music for the hit TV show The Lone Ranger. Or sometimes she would perform my old childhood favourite, a piece called “Oscar the Octopus,” as I listened with a kind of reverence and my grandfather drifted out of his novel of the Old West and into a blissful deep afternoon nap, despite Minnie's almost athletic thumping of the piano keys.

The Drowned Coast

Even after living here for more than twenty years I'm not one hundred percent sure that Nova Scotia truly exists. It looms large in my imagination and it may be more myth than fact.

This ragged, rocky, foggy, cold, dangerous, moody ghost of a coastline is, alas, a temporary place. I live on what the geologists call a “drowned coast.” It's literally drowning. The sea is rising up and taking it away, inch by inch. The time frame is amazingly short. Whole headlands have been and gone in single generations. During my short tenure here, I've walked hills that have slipped into the sea and driven rocky roads to fishing villages that are now swallowed by the waves. It's this tenuous place that I call home.

Sometimes in winter, when the great North Atlantic pulses with a dangerous temper that rages against these shores, I drive by the seawall at the nearby beach on the main road to Halifax. Megaton waves can slam up against the big rocks and spew foam and stones down onto the hood of your car. It's a great surprise on a dark night to be driving a familiar road and suddenly hear a shuddering explosion just past the driver's side of the car, then see rocks the size of seagull eggs pelting down on the hood of your Honda. More exciting yet are reports from one fellow surfer who claims to have been driving his old Chevette along the sea wall on a pale, broody winter's night when the cold, stormy sea conspired to throw a giant wave right over the entire road so that for a brief second or two his headlights reported back that he was driving inside the tube.

True or not, such is the stuff of legends in this mythical place.

More unlikely than the driveable wave, perhaps, is the undeniable fact that Nova Scotia was once part of Africa. The rock in my backyard comes from the Sahara Shield. To be more precise, what is now Nova Scotia was once part of a monster continent that had crashed into North America, then pulled away and drifted south to become Africa, leaving behind a big chunk of rock that is now the bulk of mainland Nova Scotia. The upright slate in my backyard is the exact same stuff you'd find if you flew to Morocco and got down on your hands and knees to dig through the sand until you hit something hard.

Our connection to Africa is more than just geological as well. The origin of some of our best waves are African. Storms spawned off Africa's west coast trek across the Atlantic to wreak havoc as hurricanes in the Caribbean, only to veer north with the Gulf Stream to visit ancestral African Nova Scotia. Our protective cold waters begin to destroy such tropical storms even as they pay homage to these shores, but not before Nova Scotian surfers find solace and ecstasy in surfing rare warm-water point break waves in front of remote headlands with cows grazing above them on the hillside.

The glaciers once plowed this province under and then retreated, leaving these silt and stone drumlins, the rounded headlands that immediately began to erode. This is a land sculpted by ice and by sea, and those of us living on this continental edge know our property deeds are nothing short of insignificant writs of permission to inhabit this fabled land for a few short generations until the seas rise and make all the old maps obsolete.

I took my first step onto a Nova Scotian beach in that summer of 1970 when Jack Parry and I drove up from New Jersey to escape - well, to escape New Jersey. (Before we left, Minnie tucked a ten dollar bill in my pocket while no one was looking. She said, “Spend it on yourself,” implying I should do something really frivolous with it.) Jack and I surfed our brains out - at all the wrong places as it turned out, but we didn't know that. We camped along the empty shores, time-tripping into the past. And then we returned to modern America to fall back into the usual frenetic addictions of modern American lives.

I ended up teaching university in New York City and stopped believing that places like Nova Scotia could still exist. I learned to live dull and ordinary and urban and, just before settling into something practical and permanent and predictable, I realized that escape was possible. I spent two summers here and discovered cold, clean water along with friendly, guileless surfers who became like family. Just about the time that Ronald Reagan was ascending to power, I knew it was time to flee career and money and what looked like a very unhappy decade ahead. After being turned down repeatedly by Canada Immigration, I pleaded something short of insanity to a suited man at the Canadian Consulate in a glass Manhattan tower and he let us in. I never fully understood why.

In an old brown Ford Econoline van, my wife and I clambered up the northeast coast and across the St. Croix River at Calais, Maine, into Canada. We had brought everything we could muster: rototiller and ancient refrigerator in the back, Chuck Dent 7 6_ surfboard on the roof. My motto was this: go where the money isn't.

And that was Nova Scotia.

Surfing, of course, was a big part of the mythology that drew me here. Think cold and clean and surfing with a few good buddies on a frosty morning with grey seal pups slipping up to stare at you in the sunrise. Think pure glassy walls of water, tall as my American refrigerator, lining up on rocky shelves, peeling a perfect right or left into deep green waters. But those are the rare, halcyon times that come after days or weeks of foul weather.

What saves these shores from the deluge of vacationers and swarming surfers and overpopulation and all the things that have ravaged both coasts of our continent is very simple: a cold, cold sea and some extremely bad weather. Or at least what most people think of as bad weather.

My first winter here, a snowstorm entombed my van in my driveway all except for the brown roof. But when the snow crusted up, I put on my heaviest wetsuit and walked across a snow-buried pasture to surf some head-high waves on a blue misty sea with the great spectacular crystal white world before me.

Whole summers have been swallowed by fog along the shore. The I-can't-see-my-hand-in-front-of-my-face type fog. Inland, the sun may shine but along the shore, the fog rules. Surfing in springtime fog is an instinctual thing. You can't see the wave coming. You have to feel it. You paddle in faith, tap in, make the drop, turn and tuck and hope for the best. It's like surfing in a dream. When you get really disoriented and can't tell which way the shore is, you listen and the sound of sea sucking on stones will guide you in.

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 plastic 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 allowed 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.

“I thought we were going to die,” I said to Pamela. It was one of those things you say in honesty to your kid that you almost immediately regret. Pamela had been less aware of how dangerous the situation was. I had never in my entire life found myself in a rainstorm like that one with rain so heavy that you couldn't see a thing. I never wanted to be in that situation again.

“But Minnie was there, right?” she said.

“I think so,” I said.

“I heard her playing the piano,” Pamela finally said out loud.

By the time we had bought ice cream and finished eating it, the car restarted beautifully and there wasn't a cloud in the sky.

At the tiny border crossing at Milltown, New Brunswick, a young uniformed woman from the customs office asked to look in the trailer and I showed her Minnie's piano. “It was my grandmother's piano,” I said. “I'm taking it to our home in Nova Scotia. She always played a song called 'Oscar the Octopus' on it when I was a little kid.”

“Is that her surfboard too?” she asked.

As if to test us again, New Brunswick offered up a heat wave and steep hills. My engine began to overheat badly as I crawled up one incline after the next. Before I had left home, my father had taken me aside after he had checked under my hood for oil leaks, brake fluid and fan belt wear. “Your radiator is shot,” he said.

“It hasn't been a problem in Nova Scotia. We're usually more concerned with keeping things warm than cooling them off.”

He nodded his head; he understood. “Keep an eye on your heat gauge. If it starts to go in the red, roll down the windows and put your heater on high. Turn the fan up full blast.”

Which is the only way we could have made it through New Brunswick. Windows fully open, heater on high. It must have seemed absurd to Pamela but she never complained. By keeping the interior heat on full blast, we were pulling heat off the engine and into the car. It was like driving through equatorial Africa but it kept the engine temperature just barely below critical.

It was a cool, drizzly and foggy day when I asked my neighbour, an overworked psychiatrist by profession, to come over with his two largest teenage sons to help me heft the piano into my house. All logical methods failed us. We needed to carry it up a steep hill and into the back door of a house never designed to allow for easy piano transport.

Standing it on its side with legs removed, we resorted to rolling it very gingerly end over end over rock and slippery moss and eventually into the back door. Legs were affixed and it was settled into place by a window facing south. Minnie's piano had arrived.

King of the Drumlins

On the first day of November there are no tourists at Lawrencetown Beach. On this early morning, the sky is grey, the sea is grey, and a daunting wind is pulling in from the northeast. Small sparrows cling to the sea oats and the dune grass is brown. It is a good time to be alone here and I have no regrets about the approach of winter.

There is no sand left upon the beach. Recent storms have washed it all offshore, where it has formed undersea dunes that actually protect what's left of the beach from being pummelled by the biggest waves. The sandbars diffuse the power of winter storm waves and when the storms of winter decrease, the sand migrates ashore to provide a warm white beach for summer swimmers to spread their towels upon.

I own a few acres of land on the headland at the west end of the beach. A few brave steepled spruce trees grow among the wild roses and grasses. Aside from the sparse spruce, the hills are mottled red and brown. If rose hips were dollars, I'd be a very wealthy man. Once a frame house stood on that land but there is nothing left of it except for a rubble of stone that was once a foundation and patches of tiger lilies planted long ago and eventually forgotten by all but me. Right now my goal is to do nothing with the land but pay my taxes on behalf of the roses and lilies and leave it otherwise alone, a geographical postcard of acreage I am sending intact into the next century.

The land and sea around me, the marsh and the bedrock hill my house sits upon - all counter my ambition. Back in New Jersey, light-years ago in my life, ambition blossomed in me and I took off on a wild pursuit. University degrees and knowledge and rebellion and craving and longing, jealousy and a kind of greedy desire to accomplish things took hold.

Ragged, sometime raging, ambition met the cold, clean heart of the North Atlantic and they hammered out a pact with one another. Years down the line, however, ambition would continue to muscle away at the large solemn truths of wind and wave and the deepening cold of the coming winter.

I am not sure how others remain sane but sanity for me is a gift of a great grey sky, the small satisfaction of ground-creeping juniper among old round rocks covered by green, yellow and orange lichen. Over the years, the lichen, most primitive of living things, has somehow leapt from the stones on the ground by the house and now grows in small patches on the asphalt shingles I nailed to my roof. How this is possible, I don't know. Each patch of roof lichen is a small garden feeding on rain and whatever sustenance available - motes of dust driven by a west wind, perhaps. What is the lifespan of lichen? I wonder. My guess is that the community of lichen here will live on long after I have given up my roost on this hill above the sea.

The ruin of e-mail is that information comes fast and often from all corners of the personal and impersonal world. News of a former classmate from high school, diminished to seventy pounds by bone cancer, dying in a bed in New Jersey not far from the town where I grew up. Her name was Karen and I can't say we were the best of friends or in love or any of that. We shared French class and Biology and English and she wore black-rimmed glasses like other girls back then. She was very smart and she was also a cheerleader, which doesn't seem to be the way it should fit together, but it did.

Our lives are compact and cluttered at once. We ferret out meaning in all the small details of the day and miss the important messages, I'm sure.

In the spruce forest above my house is a small graveyard of pets that have come and gone over the years. A dog, several parakeets, pigeons, hamsters, injured gulls, geese and seabirds that stayed with us until they died. Burying things beneath trees required skill at digging around important roots, cutting through lesser ones with pick axes, digging deep enough so roaming coyotes (there are a few here), bobcats or foxes won't dig up the small winged or furry dead.

The top layer of the forest floor is ten inches of decomposing spruce needles. Beneath that, the soil is black and compact with medallions of stones left behind by retreating glaciers. Not too far down - two feet, maybe three - is bedrock. Having dug animal graves and also a well for my old homestead, I can tell you what it feels like to drive a pick axe into solid bedrock. I can tell you it is an admonition that one has dug deep enough, that a digger is allowed to work away with hand tools at the thin layer of land above the rock, but he will stop when the tip of iron tries to puncture the solid bones of the earth.

Awful centuries of history are now part of who I am, a price paid by research and donning the cloak of occasional historian. I know more about the history of this province than I would like to and wish I could return to innocence. Arriving here for the first time in a summer in the early 1970s, I believed I had washed up on the shores of paradise. Years later, in flight from aforementioned ambition and the hostility of urban worlds, I held onto my mythology as long as I could. Even now, I prefer to ignore, if I can, the knowledge of this province's military past filled with inglorious battles between empires, scalping of Mi'kmaq people by British soldiers and all the remaining clouds of injustice that hover over this land.

Despite the beauty of this seemingly benign place, it is a coastline of nearly continual disaster of elemental proportions. That bedrock beneath my well is a scrap of massive rock left over from two continents in collision. The hills that bracket the beach are both drumlins - soils and stone left over by the retreat of immense, dispassionate glaciers that ravaged Nova Scotia. The drumlins themselves are eaten away year after year by sea and rain until they will one day disappear. I'm the world's biggest fan of drumlins and have written about them in magazines more than once. My only true cyberfame is this: if you do a search for information about drumlins on the Internet, you will quickly find your way to me. I've borrowed my knowledge from scientists but have gone on to make poetry, film and fiction about these seaside hills of glacial deposit until, in my own mind, I have become the king of the drumlins.

The spruce trees in my backyard repeat the same lesson over and over to deaf generations. Allowed to grow too close together, they reach tall and spindly into the salty air. Vast acreage of this shore is forested by sickly spruce trees with short lives due to the compacting born of an aggressive desire to survive and compete. But given room to grow, a black spruce, considered by many here to be a veritable weed of a tree, becomes a grand cathedral within a decade or two. It stands both broad and pinnacled, appearing almost royal and sentient on the hill behind my house, the topmost boughs blowing in the sou'west wind and the sound of the wind in the lower branches perfecting an Aeolian chant that could inspire poets from any generation.

Below these trees, I raised a family, taught two daughters the language of wave and stone, shared the code of living, which is the prerogative to save all living things, to protect what needs protecting and repair, through unceasing effort, the damage we do to our world and to ourselves.

Here in November, the waves shift from grim to majestic as the wind changes, and the sky turns from grey to mauve to blue. A morning of reflection gives way to an afternoon of surfing the backs of waves ushered in by Sable Island storms. Beyond that, the world will catch up with me. It will track me down by phone, fax and e-mail and keep me away from the marsh, the shore and the sea.

Although I feel myself a long way from my own demise, I have the occasional dream of a fine primitive burial for myself. Somewhere back up among the splendid spruce, I see someone whose arms look like my own digging into the soil, carving down to the hard smooth surface of the bedrock that was once Gondwana. I see someone taking great care to clean the bedrock surface until it appears as if it is the polished marble of some European cathedral floor. Then my body is placed flat upon the stone floor and I am at my final rest. I expect there are laws against such things, one statute or several, that says a man cannot be buried by his home above the sea, but the dream persists.

A few of us know the precise taste of a stone plucked from the shore and placed in the mouth or another one dug up from the bottom of a well, washed and set on the tongue. That taste of sea and stone, of wave and land, will always remind me of home.

A Stone’s Throw From the Sea

Awake at the sound of geese upwind in the open frigid waters where the inlet ice gives way to the channel of the salt sea. An honest winter day of skid ice in the driveway, heavy frost patterning the windows and three kinds of snow. And wind.

This room is cold, by choice, at night and it makes you hurry into old clothes and a fast run to the blossom of heat near the cookstove in the kitchen. The cookstove singing the only song it knows, a happy companion in this two-hundred-year-old kitchen where the dog, Jody, scratches against the door, eager to go outside.

As I look out onto that colder world, snow sifts in like company waiting at the door. Then a sharp punch of cold to the lungs, as I watch the dog dive towards the swirling snow, whipping about in the wind. The hill out back with its cranberries frozen red and ripe into the depth of winter is covered over now with blankets of the cold souvenir of the season.

Jody barks at everything, anything - an exercise of opinion and sound, a soundtrack for the snow with the wind collaborating. The sky, a scud of grey-white clouds and the wind from the north, of course. A touch of east maybe, taking the dryness from the snow and giving it a subtle touch of weight and character.

The uninvited snow is cold against my bare ankles, then back inside to plug in a kettle and wait for the kids to find daylight, and slip groggy-eyed into the kitchen.

In front of the house, on the long frozen slab of lake, the snow does not settle but finds the slick flat pane of surface and races off south to clutch at the bushes in the marsh, to fashion white dunes to mimic the ones on the nearby beach.

The day will go slate-grey, dark like a bruise, or settle into something vivid if the blue behind the shroud above has the courage to save us. I pour the tea and settle into a near silent meal as I long for something from the past, some nameless thing that probably never was but it is there nonetheless. It mostly concerns time. The passage of time, the infinite loss of things slipping through my fingers this morning over a bowl of cornflakes, a mug of dark tea. Nothing, not a thing wrong here, just the fact that I can't hold onto any of it. Each day is flying away as this one will. I want to say this out loud but I remain silent, sipping at the steam above the cup like it is a vapour of hope.

And so the day begins. Winter in Nova Scotia. Two days before Christmas and I, for one, am glad this is not the holiday for I do not trust holidays. I trust the average day, the every day. The day like this with the dog barking now to come in and be fed. I test the cold again as I open the door, sense it is not as hostile as it first seemed. More snow pours in, the dog in tow, shaking herself from white back to black. Never have I seen a dog breathe with such enthusiasm. And we are back by the cookstove again. I almost touch the surface with my hands. Snow from petting the dog melts instantly, slips in drops to the flat black plates and hisses like a wild animal.

If I could only articulate the thing in the back of my throat. The necessity of stopping the flow of time. Of my plan to arrest the rapid succession of day after day. My plan is to lecture my two daughters: I'm sorry, but your mother and I have decided you are not allowed to grow up. You must stay like this for the rest of your lives. We are all going to stay just like this forever.

Outdoors, the pheasants arrive by the side of the old pigeon pen where our two pet pigeons huddled through the dark cold night: Rosa and Chez, waiting for me to bring cracked corn and fresh water. The male pheasant is scratching about in the snow, looking for the corn that is not there yet, the humbler female prancing about. Their feet leave beautiful delicate etchings in the snow and then the wind erases them, but the pheasants will come back to do it again.

And I am satisfied again that we are a long, long way from the shopping malls. I bundle up in my worst but warmest coat and pull the hood tight, tie it so it dents my chin and I gladly go out into the cold, booted, mitted, as warm as one can be on a day when wind drives reckless across the frozen lake and whips shingles from the roof of my house. The pigeons are glad to see me and the pheasants hover not far off in the thicket of leafless wild rose, an old, dead, bent and gnarled apple tree half sheltering them from the blast. Cracked corn for everyone, the caged and the free. When the sun strikes away the clouds, I'll open the door and let my birds ascend into the heavens, but now an eagle, big as any bird I've seen, is cruising low, riding the wind south from far up the lake. When he finds the coast he'll quit his downwind tour and make a slow, heavy tack north to find his mate. There will be mice to be had, despite the snow that hides them, but he will not have my pigeons today.

I walk up the hill among the well-spaced spruce trees and put bare fingers into the snow to find two frozen cranberries, toss them in my mouth and roll them around like marbles, then walk on further until I come to the forest that steals the sting from the wind. The grey wispy fungus known as old man's beard hangs from the trees, and star moss covers most of the stones. Snow stays mostly above, clinging to the boughs of green needles. If the wind shifts even two degrees to the east, the snow will become heavier and bend as it builds up on these branches, breaking some, sparing others. Right now, it still sifts through where the big trees have not stolen the sky.

It's quiet here and deep. And I will not dwell on stasis or permanence but go home and satisfy myself that it is two days before Christmas and there is nothing, nothing I am obliged to do with this day but live it for what it is.

The wind relents by eleven a.m. and my family spills out into the bright world. The dog rolls herself until she is a puffy white cloud with four legs, unrecognizable except for the teeth showing in her mouth and the yelp of adventure. My two daughters and I go out onto the frozen lake, and after the usual warfare of putting on skates in the cold outdoors, we skate on a smooth, hard surface hidden beneath the layer of snow that muffles the sound of our blades. The ice stretches north for nearly a mile to where the geese, at least a hundred of them, have gathered in the open water. We skate without speaking over soft white clouds until the wind begins to drop and Sunyata tells me she remembers this very moment from a dream she had last night.

And the geese decide just then it is time to leave because there will be hunters this afternoon. They rise up into the blue sky and flow our way, headed towards the sea and on to their next nighttime resting place. We stop skating altogether and look up, deafened by their voices, then stunned by this other thing we feel from their beating wings. It is something that tugs at you inside. Something elemental that pulls you half off the ice and up into the sky with them. When they pass and we three look at each other, Pamela asks me if I felt something trying to lift me. I nod yes but do not speak.

When the birds are gone, some new force of gravity makes us all lie down on the unmarked snow and leave an imprint of ourselves - arms outstretched, staring up at the sky. My daughters both immortalize themselves as angels but I do not. I settle for leaving a scarecrow behind, the mark of a man with long legs together and arms straight out at his sides, faceless beneath an empty blue sky.

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 vertical 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.

Terry noticed it before I did. I was recovering from a cold and my nose was stuffed up. I couldn't smell very well and therein was some luck. For me at least. I rolled over and tried to go back to sleep. I was supposed to leave for the airport in one hour for a flight to Toronto and I wanted to be well-rested for a long day ahead.

But my attempt to drift towards dreamland was interrupted by an elbow in my ribs. “You can't go back to sleep,” Terry said. “The smell is horrible.”

“But there's nothing I can do. Whatever happened, happened under the house. I'm not going down there.”

“Oh great. And you're going to fly off to Toronto and leave me with the problem.”

“I'll take care of it when I get back,” I said. Which was four days away.

My wife pinched her nose and stared at the ceiling.

Sunyata had stayed at a friend's house that night and was spared the morning skunk attack. But not Pamela.

By 6:30, the smell had reached her room. I was reawakened by her shouting, “Oh yuck! What is that smell?” She opened the door to our bedroom and I tried to calmly explain that there was a skunk under the house.

“This is disgusting!” she said.

“The smell will go away after a while,” I said confidently, trying to prevent family panic. “Get ready for school.”

“I'm getting out of this house now,” she replied and raced off to her room to get dressed.

I gave up on sleep, got up and had a bowl of granola and a cup of tea with my unhappy wife.

“I'll look under the house before I go. Maybe I can do something.”

“Like what?”

“I don't know. I'll tell the skunk to go somewhere else.”

“Great.”

Just then, Pamela ran past us out the door. She was holding her nose. “I can't stand it,” she screamed and ran off down the driveway, looking for fresh air and heading for the bus to school.

“The entire house smells like skunk,” my wife said. She was taking this very personally.

“It's not that bad,” I said. Despite the cold, the skunk odour had become overpowering. “Call someone later. Maybe there's some kind of machine that gets rid of the smell.”

I did poke around outside in the dim early morning light just to make it seem like I was doing something about the problem. But there was nothing to be seen by peering into the crawl space. Near the north end of my house - from under the living room and bedroom - the aroma of skunk was powerful enough to render a person unconscious. The skunk and cat war had happened under there, and I wasn't about to get down on my hands and knees and poke my head between the lose stones in the old foundation only to come face to face with the creature with the smelliest weapon on earth. I backed away slowly.

On the away to the airport I felt guilty that I had left my wife with a problem: a skunk under the house that might decide to cut loose again and a house that smelled like skunk in every room. Nonetheless, I breathed a little easier. I would deal with the problem when I came back home. I would do the honourable thing: catch the darn skunk in a live trap and have someone with a truck help me take him somewhere far away. I was pretty sure I didn't want the skunk actually in my car even for a short drive.

At the airport, I checked in and waited for my plane, sitting alone by the windows, looking out on the bleak winter runway, thinking unkind thoughts about wild creatures who took up residence under my old farmhouse. It seemed unfair. Me, the guy who was always kind to animals. Why would nature try to do such a nasty thing to me and my family?

My flight was called. I stood in line, entered the plane and proceeded down the aisle towards my seat, 21F. The plane was already three-quarters filled. I was one of the last passengers on. As I walked down the narrow aisle, my early-morning, fuzzy brain registered the fact that people were looking up at me, heads were turning my way as I shuffled forward. Some passengers were scrunching up their faces.

I stuffed my coat into the upper compartment and sat down. There was a kind of low churn of muffled voices in the quiet plane. And then I heard someone say outright to someone else, “Do you smell something that smells like . . . skunk?”

It seemed impossible. But within seconds everyone on the plane was sniffing the air and uttering sounds of dissatisfaction. The door to the plane was closed just then and that must have made things worse, because the passengers sniffed some more and then began to talk about it. The entire inside of the plane smelled like skunk and everyone knew it.

A man across the aisle leaned over towards me and said, “What do you think this smell is all about?”

“I don't know,” I lied. I hadn't noticed that I had carried the skunk smell with me - on my clothes, on me - out of my house, all the way to the airport and now, here in the closed cylinder of the plane, the smell was ominously pervasive.

I realized I had two choices. I could stand up and announce that the skunk smell was me. Or keep my mouth shut and not say a thing.

Now in most situations, I am an honest, forthright person. If I've done something wrong, I own up to it. If it's my fault, I am the first to confess. This trait has caused me more harm than good in life but it is part of my personality and I'm proud of it. I envisioned myself standing up and, in a jovial manner, telling everyone on the plane the skunk smell was me. I would tell them about the morning crisis of the skunk under the house. They would laugh and feel sorry for me, and everyone would feel okay about flying to Toronto with skunky air.

But it was still early in the morning. I don't confess well early in the morning. I felt my face going red. This was very embarrassing. I put on my glasses, opened up a book to read. It was Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth, and I pretended I had done nothing wrong.

Glasses and books are good to hide behind if you smell like a skunk on an airplane. I pretended I was invisible too. People were still sniffing and talking as the airline attendant handed out the newspapers. Another attendant was going up and down the aisle trying to pinpoint the smell, opening and closing luggage compartments, looking under the seats. Maybe she actually expected to discover one of the furry long-tailed black and white striped creatures. In my book, I travelled farther with Jules Verne towards the centre of the earth as she neared me. Miraculously, I was not discovered. My skunk smell had so thoroughly distributed itself around the cabin that the vortex of the evil stench seemingly could not be detected.

Failing to find the source, the attendant knocked on the pilot cabin's door and the co-pilot came striding down the aisle to see if his more highly trained co-pilot nose could detect the source of the stinkiness. In a very professional manner, he sniffed east and west on the plane, north and south, looking for a clue.

Just then, the pilot came on the intercom to announce that the flight would be a little delayed. “As you all probably know, there's a very unusual smell on the plane and we don't want to take off until we've discovered what it is.”

Oh boy, I thought. This is not looking good. The co-pilot was getting closer and closer to me. I was sure he had a good, precise nose and could tell that I was the culprit. Now they would put me off the plane, for sure. I would get into deep trouble. I could see the headlines in tomorrow's paper: “Man Smelling Like Skunk Tries to Fly to Toronto.”

I pretended I was not there at all but crawling through the caves toward the centre of the earth with Jules Verne.

That's when a woman three seats in front of me handed over the newspapers to the co-pilot. “Smell it,” she said.

The co-pilot, with the professional nose, smelled. I began to think that maybe he had even been trained for this as part of his schooling. What to do if your plane smells like skunk. In a hushed voice, the woman was explaining something about the newspapers that had been handed out by the airline attendant.

The co-pilot was nodding his head up and down. Other people were nodding their heads in agreement. They all thought the newspapers smelled like skunk. Why, I don't know. But the belief swept through the plane quickly and pretty soon everyone was handing their papers back to the attendants. The co-pilot, a smirk of satisfaction on his face, was returning to the cockpit.

I listened to the buzz of the other passengers, talking about how funny it all was. The guy across the aisle leaned over and said, “The newspapers had been sitting outside. They think a skunk came and did whatever it is skunks do - on the papers.”

Even though we were out on the runway, the door opened and a gust of frigid air swept into the plane. An airport worker ran out to the plane. The airline attendant leaned over and handed him the stack of supposedly stinky morning news-papers.

I'm sure the plane still smelled of skunk. After all, I was still on board. But everyone was satisfied that the mystery was over. We taxied and flew off to Toronto. I'm certain that along the way, more than one person with a keen nose figured out that I was the source of the skunk smell. But no one said a word, even the guy across the aisle from me who wanted to talk. He told me he was a lawyer and I bet lawyers have a way of figuring things like this out.

When the plane's door opened again in Toronto and we walked into the terminal, I watched the faces of the airport workers we passed. Some frowned, some squinched up their noses. I think that we all smelled a little bit like skunk by then and everywhere my fellow passengers went that day, the smell would be noticed. It's amazing how an early morning smell of skunk in Nova Scotia would turn up at lunches and business meetings and sporting events in Toronto, twelve hundred miles away that same day.

Back home in Nova Scotia, my family was having a worse time than me. I felt a certain pride in my success at flying all the way to Toronto without anyone pointing me out as the man who smelled like skunk. Fortunately, there is a piano in the airport in Toronto and I sat down and played Pachelbel's Canon and a couple of other songs to celebrate my achievement.

At that very moment, however, my daughter Pamela was crying in the principal's office at Ross Road School. Kids on school busses are never fooled about where skunk smells come from. Pamela got on the bus and immediately everyone knew. They made fun of her all the way to school and into school and she toughed it out until ten o'clock when she couldn't take it any more.

She called home and her mother came to rescue her from the cruel insults of her classmates. For weeks and months afterwards, unmerciful kids would remind everyone about the time Pamela came to school smelling like, well, you know what.

While Terry was picking up Pamela, Sunyata arrived home on this cold winter day to see all the doors and windows to the house were open and clothing strewn all over the entire lawn. She let out a scream and ran towards the house, assuming that some insane burglar had invaded her home, stealing things and leaving piles of unwanted clothes on the lawn. But as soon as she got inside, she realized it was worse than that. The house wreaked badly and Terry had distributed clothes outside to rid them of the smell.

An expensive machine was rented to supposedly kill the skunk aroma but it barely made a dent. The skunk, after all, was living under the house and even if he wasn't in full defense mode, he continued to let his presence be known. At night you could hear him scratching around in the dirt below. And his perfume pervaded everything and everywhere. It would hang around for a long time. Nearly two months later, I could open my old leather briefcase in the university classroom where I taught, and out would pour the olfactory signature of skunk.

I returned from Toronto a few days later to confront a family in rebellion. Because I had escaped skunk city for a few brief days, I felt the full wrath of two daughters and a wife who had been coping with the physical and psychological impact of a house under skunk siege. My wife walked around with tissue paper stuffed up her nose. Sunyata used a swimmer's nose plug. Pamela, whose bedroom was farthest from the skunk problem, kept the door to her room shut tightly and, when necessary, ran through the rest of the house holding her breath until she could get outside.

It seems that everyone had advice about how to get rid of skunks. Many advised killing them with poison, but I couldn't bring myself to do that. The skunks really meant us no harm. My favourite advice by someone who claimed success in skunk eviction was this. You wire up a bright light and a radio to play somewhere near where the skunk den is. It will scare them away.

I liked this non-violent method immensely. It meant that I had to go into the deeper part of the basement, however, and get as close to the crawl space as possible. I put on heavy protective clothes and safety glasses, climbed down the basement hatchway, ducked under and around the giant spiders that help protect my old house from unwanted insects. Then I found my way to the northeast corner. I shone a flashlight into the crawl space and could actually see branches, leaves and scraps of cloth all bunched up into something like a nest.

I didn't poke it or prod it or make too much in the way of loud noises. Instead, I ran an extension cord, plugged in the light and the radio, set the dial to the heavy rock station. The sounds of Metallica echoed around the cold frosty cellar. That would do it. The skunks would be annoyed by light, afraid of the heavy metal music and go somewhere else.

Two days passed and there was still the sound of scratching beneath the floor. The darned music was keeping us awake at night as well. It wasn't working at all. Instead of driving the skunks away, maybe they were thinking we liked them so much we decided to give them some creature comforts like a glowing light bulb and non-stop, around-the-clock entertainment in the form of loud guitars and smashing drums. The next day I pulled the plug on the frills for the skunk family.

The expensive odour-killing machinery was returned and the familiar smell continued on. I bought a handmade live skunk trap from a farm supply store but it didn't work. I baited it with mackerel and the skunk got away with the fish every time. So I bought a bigger trap. It turned out my skunk was a really big skunk that required a large wire cage called a Havaheart trap. On my third night back home, I set the big trap on the lawn, placed a fresh piece of haddock inside and slept fitfully. I had not really planned what to do if I caught a live skunk inside the cage.

It snowed that night and in the morning I awoke to a world of white. Everything was white, that is, except for the black parts of the skunk that were in my cage. He looked harmless enough, cute even. I had finally caught my skunk. Pretty soon our troubles would be over.

I wouldn't even approach the skunk until I found someone with a truck willing to help carry it away. I was turned down three times. One person said he'd be happy to help do just about anything but deal with a skunk. He'd heard stories of people dealing with skunks who never, ever got rid of the smell. Eventually, I called a young surfer friend named Glenn, who had a truck. He thought dealing with a skunk would be funny and interesting.

When Glenn arrived he saw me standing in my driveway in heavy rubber boots, zip-up white overalls, orange toque, heavy work gloves and safety glasses. I looked like someone about to deal with a melt-down at a nuclear reactor.

The first thing I did was throw an old blanket over the skunk cage. The skunk did not like this at all and took revenge by polluting the front yard with a toxic cloud. Glenn and I both ran for the bushes in retreat until the worst of the attack was over. Then there was nothing else to do but pick up the cage, skunk and all, hidden beneath the old blanket, and we set it in the back of the pickup.

We drove the skunk fifteen kilometres away because I had done some research and learned that skunks will return great distances to favoured “dens.” It was a remote location by a lake, just off a big highway. Nearby, a local artist had painted a giant green frog on a rock outcropping. There were no houses for at least two kilometres in any direction. It was a great, natural, safe place for a skunk to live out the rest of his days.

Far back from the road, Glenn and I looked at each other, wondering how to open the cage to free the skunk. It would be a dangerous deed. But it was my problem, my skunk. I pulled down on the toque, positioned the safety glasses in place, pulled on some rubber gloves and proceeded with great caution.

I gently raised the metal door and asked the skunk to leave. He refused. I begged and pleaded but he would have none of it. He wanted to go home, back to my house.

In desperation, I asked Glenn to tilt the back of the cage while I kept the door open. He tilted and still no skunk. The blanket still surrounded the trap. Maybe the skunk had somehow gotten out while we were driving. Like a fool, I put my head down to the open end of the cage and peered inside.

For a split second I was nose to nose with the skunk. Then he started to turn around - which meant disaster. I screamed something loud and horrible and Glenn dropped the cage. We both ran for the highway. But nothing happened. Five minutes later we returned to the cage and tried again. Door open, a gentle shake of the cage and, this time, he fled for the safety of the woods, black and white tail bobbing in the air like a flag.

We both smelled awful at that point but congratulated ourselves on the success. I thought the story was over.

My family slept blissfully that night, assured that the skunk problem was behind us. The night after that was also calm and quiet. But on the third night, I heard scratching beneath the floorboards and thought that the air smelled slightly stronger than the usual skunk odour that still hugged the walls of our home.

Had the visitor returned? Had he travelled across those many kilometres of frozen winter terrain? It seemed unlikely, but such is the intensity of a wild creature trying to find its way back “home.”

The next day I reset the trap and the following morning, sure enough, a skunk - or the skunk - was in the trap. I phoned Glenn, who thought it was a joke but he came right over. We performed the ritual again. I convinced myself the skunk was smaller than the other one. And this one didn't let fly with the deadly scent. We drove him to the same spot and let him go. The theory was this.

A pair of skunks had taken up residence beneath the floorboards and it would be unkind to deliver them to different locations. Instead, they would find each other in the wilderness by the lake near the painted green frog on the rock outcropping.

That night I was awakened by my sleepless wife. She jabbed me in the ribs. “Do you hear it?”

“It's impossible,” I said.

“Listen.”

I listened. “It's just the wind. Go back to sleep.”

“No. Listen.”

I listened.

And then I heard the familiar scratching of little clawed paws in the dirt beneath the house. And there was something like the scraping of tree branches - the nest. A skunk was still down there rearranging the furniture of its living space. Perhaps the happily married couple of skunks I had moved away had left behind a little one. If so, it would have to be reunited with its parents.

The next day the trap was set again and I caught my third skunk. Another successful catch, another call to Glenn.

“Impossible.”

“But true,” I said.

And so another skunk was driven to the lake by the green frog and somewhere in the woods yet another reunion took place.

News of the three skunks beneath our house spread up and down the shore and as far away as Halifax. It seemed that everyone loves to hear a story about another family afflicted with skunks. Three skunks! What bad luck.

I refused to believe that there could be more but my wife insisted I keep resetting the live trap until it remained empty for up to a week. I humoured her. I knew better. No way could there be yet another black and white scoundrel beneath those boards.

But a fourth one appeared in the morning like clockwork. This time Glenn politely let me know that he had done his duty as a surfing friend. Three skunks, he could take. But we were moving into the Twilight Zone territory here. He could not come over every morning to help me with my skunk problem. Besides, his truck had the perpetual smell of skunk. People were starting to notice. His girlfriend was refusing to ride in the cab. I was destroying his relationship.

So I was on my own.

I put on the overalls, cap, goggles, boots and gloves and sat down four metres from the skunk. I stared at him and began a one-sided conversation.

“What is this all about?”

“You're the last one, right?”

“I don't have a truck this time, you know.”

“You're going to have to ride on the roof of my station wagon.”

He looked at me with those beady little black eyes and sniffed the air. As if I was the one who might smell bad.

I gingerly dropped the old smelly blanket over him and carried him to the car, delicately set the cage on the roof rack and strapped it down with bungee cords. Next, I followed the familiar route to the distant lake and ushered another skunk back to where he belonged in the wilderness. His family awaited him.

Now, some people go their whole lives without ever encountering a skunk except in a children's cartoon. Sadly, no one in my family falls into that category. Some people around where I live even say that there are no skunks in Nova Scotia. That I must be mistaken. They are very convinced on this point and think I am a great liar. I dearly wish that such was the case.

It's true that, up until recent history, there were no skunks in my part of Nova Scotia. But they were obviously on the move and great at increasing the population every year.

Skunk number five turned out to be more docile. The whole skunk business had already turned me mildly insane and now I found myself sitting beside the cage of the new skunk, feeding him a hot dog out of my hand. He ate it with two delicate paws and I went inside the house to get him a second.

“What are you doing out there?” Sunyata asked.

“I'm feeding the new skunk.”

“We have another one?”

“Yep.”

As I closed the refrigerator door and stood there with a hot dog in my hand, I foolishly said, “This one is really cute. Maybe we can have that operation to remove the sacs and then we can keep him as a pet.”

My family just stared at me with glaring eyes.

So I hoisted the hot dog eating skunk to the roof of my station wagon and we went for a drive.

Skunk number six was an angry skunk who did not take kindly to me approaching him with hot dogs. I didn't get out of the way fast enough and had to bury my hazardous waste overalls and find new skunk gear.

Along my daily commute to the skunk lake, I passed two women out for a morning jog. I hadn't really noticed them before but they must have noticed me. They were jogging towards me when I rounded the bend. Suddenly, one of the women pointed at my car. It would have been pretty obvious that I was driving down the road with some kind of animal on my roof. But they must have caught the aroma on other days.

They quickly stopped running towards me and darted down a side street clutching their noses. I'm sure they could not figure out why a person in a station wagon drove down this road - almost every day - with a live skunk on the roof of his car.

With snow on the ground, there were several cold but clear days to follow. I discovered that the process was more streamlined if I set the live trap in an old plastic child's sled with a rope attached. In the morning, the skunk would be in the cage, in the sled and all I had to do was tow it to the car, set it on top, covered now by that incredibly odoriferous blanket. At the lake, I would tow the skunk sled to the woods for release. Day after day.

I was pretty certain that number thirteen would be the last. I had now read up on skunk families and knew that they could have litters of ten or eleven skunk kittens. But it wasn't until I caught skunk number sixteen that I was through.

The final skunk had clearly been in a bad temper. He had chewed at the bars and tried to take a swipe at me with his paw. The last skunk gave one final, great spray of skunk juice to the old blanket to vent his anger at me. As Glenn would later say, “Guess that blanket's not going back on the bed.”

There was a heavy snowfall on the day I caught skunk number sixteen. The joggers were not out to watch as I took a corner too fast on a snow-slick surface and skidded off the road, missing a row of mailboxes by mere centimetres. I was headed towards the lake. My front wheels dangled over the edge of a drop-off, with a frozen lake below. My heart was pounding. I watched my breath in the frosty air as I opened the door.

It was a close call. The skunk and I were both shaken but not harmed and, after getting some assistance to get back on the road, I delivered the skunk to the designated location for the skunk family.

It was almost spring by now and it seemed downright odd to awake in the morning to see an empty skunk trap in front of my house. A big chunk of my morning every day had begun with talking to, and chauffeuring, skunks. I began to feel that something was missing from my life.

Life slowly returned to some semblance of normality in our household, although it took months before a visitor could come to our house and not detect some aroma of skunk. Even now, you can open a closet or peer into a cabinet and discover the smell has been somehow stored there from the past as if in some bizarre kind of skunk smell museum. Damp weather, too, brings back aromatic reminders of days gone by.

When summer approached I decided to drive to the drop-off point by the lake to the north and see if there was any evidence of the large family of skunks I had displaced. I began to think that this was probably how skunks migrated - how they moved into new territory. I had been responsible for increasing the range of skunks in Nova Scotia. Who knew what this would lead to? Skunks, it is said, because of their great defense, have no predators except for great horned owls that apparently have very little sense of smell. And we had very few great horned owls in this neck of the woods. Every other predator in the animal kingdom left skunks alone. Except for me. And I wasn't a real predator. I was just the operator of a skunk taxi service.

As I got out of my car and walked to the familiar spot of release, I could smell skunk, nothing dramatic, just the sightly heady scent of skunk presence. I was trying to do the math in my head. I had dropped off two parents and fourteen offspring - or so I guessed. If paired off, two offspring might each have up to fourteen more cute little baby skunks who would grow up to be adult skunks who might have more children. How long before there were ten thousand skunks in this beautiful wilderness forest? And what might that do to the environment?

That's when I noticed a newly constructed sign, just a short distance from my favoured freedom trail for skunks. It was over towards the big rock outcropping painted to look like a green frog. The sign announced that here was the future site of a major housing project. It showed a map with curved streets and housing lots all around the lake. “150 one acre housing lots now for sale at reasonable prices,” the sign boasted.

I was pretty sure that it would be a very interesting place to live for whomever was going to move into that neighbourhood. I felt bad that developers would carve away at this beautiful forest and put houses all around the lake and I worried about the fate of those generations of skunks to come. But I was pretty certain that they would adapt to life in backyards and find comfortable homes in sheds and garages. On the other hand, once word got around - and word about skunks travels pretty fast in these parts - there's a good chance that the houses won't ever be built and thus the wilderness will be spared. Maybe the skunks will save the forest and urge everyone to keep a safe distance. Skunks may not be smarter than people but they have a lot going for them.

The Final Draft

I had been living with this one for nearly six years. I didn't know what the original title was but now, on the verge of becoming a real book, the novel was titled Cold Clear Morning. It was either a clever, sharp title - a model of simple elegance - or it was a dull, stupid title for a book: mundane, flat, uninspiring. But it was the title that would appear on the cover nonetheless.

The problem with the novel was that I had rewritten it twelve times. It had been composed with inspiration and enthusiasm, but now, on the very cusp of publication, the author wanted nothing to do with it.

Every time I begin a new book (and I've been through this fifty-odd times before), I have to fool myself into believing it will all be fun and games. I will sit down and the words will pour out. The story will be true and vital and change the lives of all who read it. I feel the honesty of it welling up from deep within as I spill my soul into the keyboard. I doubt that it has any imperfections at all but if they should occur, I pretend that someone else will rewrite it, fix it up.

This is a great and sustaining myth that allows me to begin every new book. Without it, I would be silenced.

I can't remember what originally inspired Cold Clear Morning. I think it was actually a cold, clear morning. Standing by the shore of a harbour on that morning, I began thinking about a story that would begin just like this. But it was not to be a tale about me; instead, it was about Taylor Colby, a musician who had left this place, these sacred shores of Nova Scotia, to seek his destiny as a professional guitarist. There would be a girl, the love of his life. She goes away with him and she does not survive.

Taylor must eventually come back home, back to the harbour. And then stuff happens.

Well, the danger here is great - trying to explain the plot. I've begun to refuse answering the question, “What is your new book about?” Reducing novels to plots that make sense to your relatives is a bad business. What people want is a short blurb like the ones in your TV Guide for the movie Independence Day: “Aliens invade earth and are met with resistance.”

My novels often get reduced to something like that. “Man (or woman) tries hard at something but fails, then figures out how to succeed (or not).” Reductionism is not a healthy thing when it comes to novels. You could try it in headline form and it is equally disastrous. “Man beaten down by circumstance fights back.” Or my favourite (this one borrowed): “Man Bewildered by Woman.”

As a writer and an English professor, I also fail to possess the verbal apparatus to properly categorize my novel. My colleagues in the English department want to know if it is modern or postmodern. I haven't a clue. My neighbours here on the Eastern Shore want to know if it is a mystery or a thriller. Well, not really. People die but no one gets murdered. Murdering your characters seems unconscionably uncreative. I say that it is a contemporary story and that helps not at all. I say that it is a novel about “real” people - a boldface lie since it is fiction. I sometimes stumble and suggest it is a literary novel and the eyes glaze over.

What is it then?

It is a story about a man.

Taylor Colby came into my life on that cold clear morning six years ago. He had problems, sure. He whined a lot about his problems and, eventually, in the final draft, I did not let him whine and moan as much as he wanted to. He still feels sorry for himself and his losses, the way we all do. He is beaten down, despite his seeming success, and he doesn't have a clue as to what will save him. (And we all want to be saved by something, by someone, or by ourselves.)

To every pre-publication critic who read the manuscript, I defended the first thirty pages of my novel until it was finally submitted to its current publisher - Beach Holme Publishing. I was on the verge of mailing the manuscript to Michael Carroll, the editor there, when I looked at the stack of pages - all three hundred and twenty of them. I knew I had to eventually lop off the first three chapters. (Household critics had told me this so often before but I always liked those first thirty pages. Now they were smoked.)

The great thing about mailing off a manuscript is that you can fool yourself into thinking your work is over. Taylor Colby, with his guitar and his missing mother and dead wife, was gone for a while and I could rent out his room to some other protagonist.

So the novel was accepted. Nervous Nelly that I am, I said I would “go through it one more time” before the editor undertook his work. I wrestled with it, nipped and tucked and cut out more whining and complaining. Taylor Colby was learning to suffer (and heal) with fewer complaints. I told him not to repeat himself so often. I harangued the author for beating his reader over the head with a shovel each time a point was to be made.

I am an optimist so I can be a poor editor of my own work at times. I want to think that everything is okay - when it is not. So I hired a competent friend, an English professor named Julia Swan, to go at my manuscript before I shipped it back to Beach Holme.

She pencilled in quite a few changes and told me outright when a scene that I thought was dramatic was downright silly. And she was right. She found typos that had eluded me for six years. She corrected me about details that I had wrong. Timelines, for example. I get easily confused as to what year my story is taking place in. Anachronisms crop up. A minor character is thirty-four one day and somehow has turned forty within a month, as if she has stepped into a time machine.

So it was spat upon and polished and fired back to Beach Holme. Then there was a long hiatus where nothing happened. I often basked in such halcyon days. It was off my desk and on someone else's. I got on with other things - another novel about a woman with a bookstore who tried to apply Strunk and White's Elements of Style as a guidebook for living.

As hiatuses go, this one was ponderously long. Taylor Colby had fallen into a kind of cryogenic suspended animation due to catastrophes in the publishing and book selling world. Publishing seasons came and went and still Taylor Colby remained dormant.

I grew concerned and there was a preponderance of phone calls and e-mails over the plight of Cold Clear Morning and for a while it began to seem that dawn never would break over the harbour, that Taylor Colby and his tale of woe and healing would be left in its cryogenic numb slumber like Walt Disney's proverbial head.

And then one day, during a foggy, sodden noon hour here at Lawrencetown Beach, a Purolator truck appeared and my dog began barking as if we were being attacked by a pack of wolves. It was the first batch of manuscript pages with editorial corrections and suggestions - but mostly deletions.

It would be my job to say yea or nay to the changes suggested by the elusive Mr. Carroll. Without my glasses on, all I could achieve, at first, was a survey of the literary landscape before me. Unlike Julia Swan (who had a light, feminine touch with the pencil), Mr. Carroll had put a lot of wrist and elbow into the work. Sentences and sometimes paragraphs were crossed out in thick graphite lines. The page was like a battlefield where mines had gone off, bombs had been dropped. Words had been cut down where they stood. Sentences had fallen. Page after page, I saw carnage. Indignant, I went in search of my reading glasses.

Comments in the margins said things like, “I think we can cut this altogether, don't you?” and “Not necessary. We get the point.”

The editor admonished at one stage, “I think the self-pitying and soul-searching goes on too long.” Questions were put forward about baseball caps, water temperature, species of trees and politics.

At one point, I was challenged with the comment, “A bit purple? Let's cut it.” This, over a line about potatoes that went, “The potatoes had long, alien-like sprouts on them as it was that time of year when a potato goes to seed and self-destructs in its blind lunar thrust towards reproduction.”

Why would any sane man write such a thing? I guess I had been carried away in an unguarded moment of creative bliss. Clearly, the potato's “blind lunar thrust” had next to nothing to do with Taylor working out his destiny. I don't know why I thought describing potato sprouts was so important as to expend a couple of lines giving it a cosmic importance. What was I thinking?

Now my head was beginning to clear and I started to admit that Mr. Carroll was bloody right ninety-four percent of the time. He was slashing and burning and lopping off leggy potatoes for good reason. The problem was back on my desk.

I read every line, every word, with great care and caution now. Michael had done most of the work. I just had to agree that more wimpy lines, purple prose, whining and pontification, all had to go. And then I took a red pen and inked out some more.

My biggest fear was that after everything had been cut I might just end up with a longish short story. That's the way it felt. But with each stroke of the pen, I hoped, Cold Clear Morning was improving.

Reading my own novel for the twenty-third time was not much fun. This final rewrite was more painful than all the others and I wondered if other writers feel this way at this point. Was I learning to suffer like the best of them or was I just a bad writer trying to cobble together something printable?

There would be one final read of the page proofs and then, after another hiatus, the Purolator man would drive up, my dog would howl and a book would be delivered into my hands. If the entire book industry did not shut down, the novel would actually appear on the bookshelves of stores. It would be loved, hated, or ignored.

It's true that I would have to help “promote” the book and I would pretend that it all came together without any grief whatsoever. I wanted to hang onto that myth and fool the public because I didn't want them to feel sorry for me. I might even have to read from the book in public. I would pick short passages that were not about potatoes and I would tell long rambling stories like other writers do, rather than actually have to read directly from the text.

But for the most part, I would not read my book again. My work was over and I prayed that it all turned out well in the end. I was finished after all with the final draft.

I would hang onto the belief that somewhere in Canada, someone would be enticed by the cover of the book, by the blurb on the back cover - the one that should read, “Choyce is not really a bad writer, once you lop his first thirty pages, axe dozens of stupid sentences and a lot of unnecessary language.” I visualized some stranger actually buying the book, bending the spine and reading the first line: “I saw the boat before I even saw the house.” The reader would be transported thereafter to Nickerson Harbour and ultimately to that cold clear morning where the journey began. And a story would unfold.

Origins of the SurfPoets

A great array of irrational factors led me back to performing music after a lapse of nearly thirty years. Music has always brought out the best and the worst in me. I'm a mediocre singer, I admit, but have always assured myself that I have character in my voice if I use it properly. The world can thank Bob Dylan for this. People like me who can't hit the right notes figure out clever, insidious ways to do something with the words until it sounds, well, at least interesting.

Nonetheless, music was in me and it wanted some form of expression. Minnie was the one who had taught me my first few notes on the piano. “Chop Sticks” was the only tune in my repertoire for nearly eight weeks. And then, one day, not long after my sixth birthday, she sat me down at her baby grand piano. “Just hit the black notes,” she said, “in any order you like.” I did and the results were magnificent. That's when I realized music was not just memorization and structure but it had limitless random possibilities. The six-year-old me would not have expressed it this way but I felt it in my bones.

There was no particular logical path to my musical career and still there is none. It was a costly enterprise financially and even emotionally. It involved a lot of complicated equipment that could and would screw up. All of the cohorts involved in my brand of music seemed to be as complex, moody and unstable as I am. Sometimes it all turned to mush. Other times to shit. And then, every once in a while, the band slipped into some other universe entirely where the words and the music created their own rules, and their own beautiful codified enthusiasm for a celebration of life. And then we soared above our individual frail human limitations.

At the heart of the SurfPoets was a creative cocktail of three great elemental forces of the universe: music, poetry and surfing. While we did not emulate old surf music from the Sixties, we did have an underpinning of surf language, surf stories and surfer philosophy that carries the intellectual weight of the band's “message.” And I decided early on that our songs should mostly have just two or three chords repeated over and over. I get easily confused by too many chord changes.

Like all bands, ours evolved. We began in the basement of a recording studio on Gottingen Street in Halifax, six blocks up from Halifax Harbour. Halifax is the biggest surf town on the east coast of Canada, even though many people in Nova Scotia will still state with inaccurate bravado that “Nobody surfs in Nova Scotia.” Some ideas die hard and I think it's a generational thing. What they really mean is, “Nobody surfed in Nova Scotia in the nineteenth century.” Which was probably mostly true - the exception being the odd Mi'kmaq canoeist who put to sea and then caught a wave back to the beach on a warm summer day.

But people do surf in Nova Scotia and they also create surf poetry and record it on CDs for public consumption. This occurs even though there is a minuscule audience for surf poetry in Canada. In truth, most Canadians would tell you that there is no surfing in all of Canada. The problem there is that most Canadians live hundreds of miles from the three oceans.

Of course, the SurfPoets ignored all of these realities and went ahead and coalesced there in the basement on Gottingen Street in late February of 1993. Actually, there were only two surf poets coalescing: myself and Doug Barron, aka Hal Harbour. Doug had a keyboard that sampled beats and sounds. I had an electric guitar with a fuzz box and the masterful skill of strumming an A minor chord over and over again. Years later I would tell the press, “Life is like an A minor chord.” If you know what an A minor chord sounds like on an electric guitar, you'll know what I mean.

I also had sheaves of unpublished poetry, some of it even about surfing. Our first ever tune was called “Traction.” It was about cars, not surfing. Now the Beach Boys did surfing and then cars. We did cars first and then surfing. Brian Wilson, after coming out of a couple of decades of seclusion and mental illness, would explain to the media that the Beach Boys actually sat around trying to determine the next popular obsession to sing about after they milked surfing to death. Brian would say something like, “So we had done surfing and it worked, even though most of the country didn't have an ocean nearby. But then we realized that everybody had a car.”

And so the SurfPoets would begin with cars - a long surreal, hyperventilated spoken word poem about a nightmarish landscape that was automotive. It was all just one chord with a synthesized driving beat and an amazing embroidery of sampled sounds and voices that ranged from William Burroughs to a chanting Gregorian choir. I played some really frenetic high squeally notes that hurt the SurfPoets' ears if played too loudly in the basement.

Part of the lyric went like this:

Hands on the rim of all possibility, I'm haunted home

barricaded on four sides by darkness

while up above the universe, unhinged,

dazzles me like a rowdy all-night service station

with check-the-oil slingshot eyes

and how's-the-air-in-the-tire politeness.

I know this feeling, this comfortable bucket seat of longing

'cause I've been harnessed here before, heading home,

pistons lighting up underneath the hood like nova stars

burning tips off spark plugs down

inside the throat of my ambition.

So we had one song in our canon and no where to go but up. But we were not out of the basement yet. In my own head, I was formulating a “SurfPoet philosophy” in hopes that we might eventually become bigger than the Beach Boys or their arch-rival the Beatles and I'd actually have some profound ideas to share with the world. I was formulating surfing, poetry, music ideology and had configured love into it as well. Unlike the Beatles who proffered, “All you need is love,” I was offering a more complex recipe, something like, “All you need is love, poetry, music, and surfing.”

It was around that time that local radio was getting rid of DJs who were not at all cost effective and replacing them with walls of CD machines programmed to play music punctuated at plentiful intervals with commercials. DJs were being fired left, right and centre and that included a friend of Doug's named Stan Carew, a.k.a. A.J. Stanley. Stan became a local legend on his last shift of live radio at rock station Q104. Just as he was about to be replaced by twenty-five CD players, Stan gave a distinguished sermon on air about how pissed-off he was that automation was taking over and then he left the building, leaving the radio audience to sample ten minutes of dead air.

With loads of free time on his hands, Stan was lured into the SurfPoet conspiracy still hatching in the recording studio basement of the same building where a young alternative group called Sloan had cut their first recordings. Sloan was already huge in a Canadian alternative sort of way and we knew that soon we'd go upstairs and cut similar hits.

Now, Doug surfed a longboard he had brought down from Toronto, which is only a semi-surfing town, if you count surfing on Lake Ontario. Surfer kids who come to Nova Scotia from Ontario say they like to surf near the nuclear power plant back home “because it's warmer there.” Nova Scotia surfing, as you know, is very cold. And it's the cold surfing experience that is primal to SurfPoet music. Stan Carew, however, has never surfed. But he was a lead singer in a country band. He also played acoustic guitar and ushered in two new innovative concepts to the SurfPoets. The first was the idea of adding a second chord to our songs.

I was opposed to using a second chord at first. I thought A minor was fine. But not Stan. I wanted to kick him out of the band but Doug, usually a sombre, quiet keyboardist, was militant that Stan was “in.” I was afraid that shifting chords on my guitar while trying to recite my poetry would throw me and the audience off. The compromise was that one of the chords be A minor and the second one also a minor chord - an easy one: E minor.

I had decided that it would be a cliché if all the SurfPoet songs were about surfing - not that we'd done any songs yet about surfing, just the one about cars - so I decided to use a poem I had written called “Beautiful Sadness.” It was a bittersweet, melancholy love poem about the concept of beauty and sadness. Sad things can be beautiful, it seemed to say. It was, I argued, a very Celtic idea inspired by sad Cape Breton fiddle airs. So Doug found a sampled slow hip-hop loop, I found my two chords, Stan would strum acoustic and sing backup. Doug also had sampled recordings of women in a church singing the Lord's Prayer, which Doug added - only those recorded elements were played backwards, just like on the old Black Sabbath records.

And so emerged a kind of spoken word hip-hop love song that made you feel really sad - but good. During coffee break, Stan introduced one more concept that would revolutionize the SurfPoets forever. He took me aside and told me a song should have a chorus - if it was going to be a hit. It really should.

I told him in no uncertain terms that we were not in it for the money and if all he wanted was commercial success, he should get the hell out of the basement and out of the band. I actually camouflaged my anger and said this politely. But it was still a SurfPoet chastisement of monumental proportions. I saw the look on Stan's face and then I remembered that Stan had recently been fired after his public on-air stand against automated radio and, suddenly realizing I had hurt his feelings, I relented. Okay, we could try a chorus. “You mean like 'Help me Rhonda, Help, Help me Rhonda?'” I asked.

“Yeah,” Stan said. “Or 'Round, round get around, I get around.'”

We were talking sacred texts here.

I mulled and mired over it. I did not want us to be “like every other band” using a flashy elaborate number of chords, harmonies, and choruses up the ying yang. But I had a fairly small pool of talent and realized I needed my band members more than they needed me. Okay, I said again.

I went out onto the street then to breathe in the diesel fumes from a couple of buses going by and watch kids spray-painting their names on empty store fronts. In my poem, I had already configured beauty as a character: the abstract represented by an ideal. She was a shadowy, beautiful woman who herself was the embodiment of beauty and sadness at once. She was a kind of fatal attraction as well. The narrator in the poem was me-but-not-really-me: also a sad, but not beautiful, character. Deep down I envisioned myself as a very sad, lonely person even though I really wasn't. It was a pose like that of the public persona of so many other poets before me. Poets must really like to feel sorry for themselves even though they have nothing to feel sorry about.

The streets were slushy that day. Slush was good for musical melancholia. I would later enshrine that slush as well as my old car, an insanely unreliable Skoda, in the poem/song:

I was always afraid of Beautiful Sadness

Because I believed she was friends with despair and misery

But now, driving on the slushy Halifax street

I realize I want to know Beautiful Sadness.

I'm only driving a small Czechoslovakian car

But I want to stop and open all the doors to the beautifully lost

I want to drive them anywhere they want to go because someday

I know I'll be one of them and I want to know what it's like.

And so it was time to introduce a chorus. Something basic, Stan had said, something regular people could relate to. (I didn't know what he meant by regular - people who were not SurfPoets, I figured.) I'm in love with Beautiful Sadness? I'm a fool for Beautiful Sadness?

Back inside, Stan suggested, “A date with Beautiful Sadness . . . Got a date with Beautiful Sadness.”

I didn't know if people even still used the word “date.” I figured it came from the country music world Stan had been escaping to since he had stormed off the radio. Oh, what the hell. I gave in altogether. A chorus was born:

Got a date with Beautiful Sadness

Down by the corner of possible madness

Turn right at fear

In a desperate year.

A minor chord after that over and over into infinity.

We recorded those two tracks in Terry Pulliam's (upstairs) recording studio, Sound Market, and they became cornerstones for a CD called Long Lost Planet. I learned that in the recording studio you could make mistakes over and over and all you had to do was get it right once and get that one “take” on tape. And even if you couldn't get it right you could sometimes fix up your errors by a kind of cutting and pasting of sound.

We would eventually get back to the roots of surfing with a Ventures-like backdrop for “Big Left” and a rap-like Dylanesque “Nova Scotia Surf Scene Blues.” Over the years the SurfPoets would expand and contract, add and lose saxophones, fiddles, singers, drummers, dreamers and techno-artists. In our own small universe we exploded and imploded and got older all the while. Unlike other pop bands, we refused to ride the wave of other performers' success. Ours was to make our own wave and ride it like a thirty-foot Waimea motherlode. Carving our own path, intermingling music, surfing, poetry as only we knew how. This we would do even if our audience was small or even if we had no audience at all on the beach to watch.

(To listen to or download free SurfPoets tunes, go to www.lesleychoyce. com)

Zen and the Art of Canadian Winter Surfing

It's one of the final days of February. The air temperature is about minus ten degrees Celsius but it was much colder last night. The seawater temperature is, of course, below freezing but only the fresh water of the lakes, streams and potholes is frozen. All the local driveways are sheets of ice. But the sea is intent upon remaining its liquid self. It's salty and active and full of life. I'm sitting on its surface on my surfboard. The shoreline of Nova Scotia is only thirty metres in front of me. I'm staring at a ragged, snow-dusted headland.

Like an idiot, I'm thinking about mutual funds. Alone with a playful mind that's filled like an old junkyard full of useless scrap, I have nothing better to do than begin to think about mutual funds. As nature's direct response to this insult, the sea has ceased sending surfable waves my way and I bloody well deserve it.

So I stop thinking about mutual funds and say the mystical eastern word “Om” very loudly. I've been rereading and teaching Herman Hesse's twister again and so the word “Om” has good reason to be up there in my brain with the other iron scraps, memory shards and jagged heaps of information about retirement investment. A single “Om” seems to be good for a spectacular small but icy parade of near-perfect waves that afford several damn fine rides.

I talk to the waves, giggle a little. Hey, I'm alone and happy. At this very minute, it's possible I am the only person surfing in Canada. This, I realize, is another potential ego trap but I gloat on it for a minute, and then I let it go. The little ego blimp drifts off into the faultless empty blue sky and I try to keep my mind empty and pure, knowing that such a deed will conjure more exquisite winter waves.

My drysuit keeps me warm. The sun is on my face. There is little wind. Last night it howled long and hard enough to knock down the power lines and we were without electricity for an hour or so. But none of that matters now. Now is now. The eternal surfing present. No other place to be. Everything is indeed as it should be, unfolding.

That's when I notice the seagulls: about two hundred of them, directly in the air in front of me. They have gathered suddenly into a very precise formation. All kinds of gulls. Brownish ones, white and black ones, grey ones. Herring gulls and laughing gulls and all their cousins. They have found a thermal rising at the edge of the cliff and they are making it work for them. Thermals, of course, come from heat and the sea is somehow “warm” enough to stir the westerly breeze into a spiralling current of air that, up until this very moment, has been invisible - to me at least, but not to the gulls.

More gulls collect from along the coast and slip into the dance. A joyous, magical dance of birds in a gentle rising cyclone. Last night, before the power went off, I watched a TV version of the movie Twister with my kids for the third time. The gull wing thermal looks just like the Atlantic Ocean's version of an Oklahoma tornado. There's no one else around on the beach or headland to watch so this is my own personal sideshow and I realize that there's more here than meets the eye: I've seen this very image somewhere else. No, not in some damn movie. Something more ancient than that.

I squint, breathe in pure oxygen to regenerate lazy brain cells, coerce slothful nerve connections. Got it. Pure DNA.

The birds spiraling upward in perfect harmony before me have frozen into a pattern that is now recognizable as a DNA molecule. In the fourth grade, I built a DNA molecule for the science fair out of wood sticks spiraling upward with a vertical metal rod holding them all together. It was a bit static for a science display but I had a chance to become intimate with the names of all those chemicals that make up DNA. Leave it to the gulls to outdo anything I could have created with wood and metal in the fourth grade. So this day has conspired and triggered one hell of a DNA display as a reminder not to think about mutual funds while surfing. Zen lesson number twelve thousand.

I catch a wave, turn, race, tuck down, dip my hair into the frigid Atlantic, kick out and then look up. The gulls have given up the joyride. No doubt that thermal has ceased as quickly as it had begun. The gulls are now settling onto the rocks in front of me. Seaweed-bedraggled, glistening ocean stones, some with white frost toques of snow or ice. The gulls watch me surf for another twenty minutes, then spread their long salty wings and fly off in search of food.

Aside from the lesson about not thinking about mutual funds and the business with the seagulls skydancing DNA like a full-blown ballet, I'm not sure what other Zen things will come along. But they will. Winter surfing is a good anchor for everything that needs to be said because: 1) most people think it is absurd and, therefore, I too am absurd for doing it; 2) it's full of grand metaphysical and metaphorical possibilities; and, 3) it proves the lesson of some great Bodhisattvas who once said that enlightenment could be achieved from absolutely anything.

Anything I take to mean: great ponderous spiritual thoughts, deep meditation, years of self-actualization, studying a grain of sand, doing good deeds everyday of your life, being a really swift Parcheesi player or, herewith, surfing in the winter.

Time is a malleable thing, stretching and contracting and doing all sorts of maniacal things to us and I'll not let it tangle me up and tie me down like it often does. I'm reminded of Siddhartha learning lessons from an old man, Vasudeva, who lives by a river and ferries people across. Vasudeva is really fond of this river. He loves it and he knows the river can teach him, or anyone, anything he or she needs to know. Rivers - always moving, always different but always the same, always flowing.

Winter will probably lead to spring, as it should, even in a cold country like this. For now, I'll assume that the Zen I am talking about is simply this: being fully here when stuff (like the gull tornado) happens. Not being someplace else.

Last night, I was driving home from teaching my classes at the university. I picked up Pamela at a house far down one icy road and had just turned onto the road where I live - the old gravel lane skimmed over with two inches of frozen snow and ice. As soon as I turned onto the dark road, I slammed on the brakes because something was lying there in my path. At first I thought it was just a big chunk of ice that had fallen off the back bumper of a truck or something. But it turned out to be a seal. I've coaxed seals off this road before to keep them from getting run over. It's never an easy job.

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.

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.

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.

I saw this guy on TV from Carlsbad, California, talking about this thing that happened. He thought there was a problem with the bridge of an expressway. He heard an odd noise each time he drove over it. He thought something was wrong with the bridge but he let it go. One day, the bridge fell down and it killed someone who had been driving over it. He said he'd never keep his mouth shut again about something he thought was wrong. He became a great and tireless complainer in the high hopes that he could save someone else some grief.

I identify more with losers and victims and people with problems than I do with successful types and the obnoxious winners of the world - the sports stars, the Emmy-award-winning actors and the blatantly wealthy. But I'm not always good at following through with my altruistic nature.

Yet something about the death of Kevin Shawn Coker makes me feel more connected to people. And it's all tied in to feeling some personal loss of a fellow surfer, a member of my extended family of surfing.

But I wasn't even here that blustery Saturday. I was in Paris, staying at a cheap hotel on the Left Bank. I could spit into the Seine out my window if I wanted to (but I didn't). I was there as part of another tribe, one of writers and readers, part of some gargantuan book trade show called le Salon du Livre. I liked the family feeling of being embraced (well, at least acknowledged) by people whose lives were tied to writing creative thoughts down on paper and sharing them with an audience. And while in Paris, I hunkered down on a bench along the Seine and studied that brown, sluggish, depressed little river that has been so romanticized by novelists and filmmakers over the years. The river is imprisoned by high rock walls. The water moves along in a dreary European sort of way, without any real enthusiasm. It doesn't smell that good. But it was the only body of water available to me and so I mediated by its banks and felt homesick for Nova Scotia, for an animated ocean, for waves, for sweet-smelling sea air, for surging salt water and for my next chance to go surfing.

And although I was treated well in Paris, I felt disconnected and anonymous for the most part. Not a lot of eye contact and people spend way too much time just sitting around in cafés and bars drinking minuscule cups of coffee or glasses of red wine. I think that would lead to a sort of lethargy that is alien to the energized Nova Scotia creative mind.

So I was glad to get back home. About a week after Kevin had drowned, I went surfing at the spot where he had disappeared and I caught some fine early morning waves in his honour. I apologized to the wind and the sea for not having been around to lend assistance or give advice. I knew the innocence of surfing here was gone for good but I still felt a strong, powerful bond with the sea, the indifferent sea that gives and takes. And it's almost a backhanded reminder that caution and caring are the greatest of human responsibilities that should not be shirked.

Spring Surf

Spring in Nova Scotia could be dull if it wasn't for the waves. The sky is a low, soft curtain of grey wool and the sea is the colour of gun metal as I pull my car to a stop at a small crescent pocket of sand on the shoreline of the Atlantic forty-five minutes from downtown Halifax.

The snow on the ground is melting but some of the boulders along the shoreline are glazed with ice. I ease my surfboard out of the car, take a final tug on the zipper of my drysuit, inhale deeply, and then sprint across the sand and into the sea. Within seconds I've lost contact with mainland life and I'm back in my element.

I take slow, easy strokes and watch the dreamy kelp undulate back and forth beneath me in the frigid clear water. I see my breath turn to smoke in the air. I watch a head-high wave form like a dark monument, sliding towards me, breaking from a perfect peak thanks to an unseen reef of rocks beneath the surface. I realize for the first time that when the wave hits the shallows of the reef it's laced with slivers of ice.

This happens in the spring. The ice breaks up in a nearby inlet, sifts out to sea and then winds drive it back towards shore. No icebergs here. Just small sargassos of slush ice and infinite variations on the traditional refrigerator ice cube.

I'm still paddling but safely out of reach of the wave as it goes critical, bowls out and then sends a shower of water and ice into an emphatic cascade. There's a hollow place forming big enough to squeeze a Nova Scotian surfer into if he had the right set of tools and I'm hoping I'll soon have a chance with this wave's cousin. When the frosty lip touches down on the mother sea, all that blitzkrieg of ice sounds like a box of fluorescent light bulbs dropped from a second-storey window.

I find my destination: the middle of the cove just outside of the peak. I sit up on my board, scan the headlands still whitewashed in snow and genuinely grieve that winter and its frosty Nova Scotian sidekick, early spring, is just about gone. Summer is soft and easy here. Winter is hard and slick. I sometimes prefer the latter and I'm happy that the big bad Canadian winter doesn't give up without offering me this particular gift: a day of sea and ice.

The water around me has soft cotton balls of melting slush mixed in the mosaic of dagger ice: some long and pointy like stilettos, other chunks cut clean like pizza slices. There is no wind to muck up the design, only waves pulling themselves up from the deep, waves that have trundled silently here to these shores from maybe three hundred miles away, from storms that will have no effect on these shores . . . except for their generous outpouring of waves.

I study the waves, wait for company. It arrives as if on schedule. An adolescent harbour seal, little more than a pup, pokes his dark nose up a few metres away. He flicks his doglike head once and stares at me with those big obsidian puppy-dog eyes. Although I know he has sharp teeth capable of punching easy holes into my mortal flesh, I expect he's satisfied with whatever fishy breakfast he's already had and considers me an ally, or at least a curious diversion. He slips down into the water, passes like a dark shadow beneath me and comes up to survey me from the other side.

This whole scene has such a reverential quality to it that I'm in no big hurry to flip into hyper-surfer mode. I sniff the air, feel the cold seeping slowly into my feet from a sea that is still hovering near the zero Celsius mark. I close my eyes briefly and when I open them it's as if I've conjured things from the sky. I hear them first. The squadron of Canada geese is skirting the coast, travelling west to east before turning north at the Canso Strait for Labrador. They come in low and loud with their wonky chant until, passing directly above me, they stop honking so the seal and I can only hear the thud of heavy wings beating through the air. As they pass immediately overhead, I'm staring straight up like when I was a teenager sitting near the end of an airport runway, watching the big winged machines taking off above.

I scoop a trapezoidal pane of ice from the sea and bite into it. Fresh water, a clatter of cold on my teeth until they ache. And now I'm ready to dance on the half-frozen sea.

I let three waves slide beneath me, waiting for the sun to line up with a rift in the clouds. When the light bolts down suddenly from above, everything changes colour. The sea is a hard surface of blue. The snowy headlands scream out blinding white. The sandy wet shoreline glows with some inner life and the cove of ice and water where I sit takes on the quality of a stained glass window.

Nothing for it but to paddle. Shoreward. Through the exotic debris. Three deep strokes and I match the speed of the incoming wave, feel its power beneath my board. I stand as the wave sets up a long clean wall with its own clever graffiti of ice and slush pronouncing the singular beautiful artistry of the Atlantic.

As I drop down the face of the sea, I feel the old adrenaline rush of a smooth descent. I sense the abundant power looming above me but glide dreamlike in silence except for the hip-hop staccato of hard chunks of ice clanking against my board. At the bottom of the wave is a curdled bed of soft slush and I feel the tug of its density as I carve a bottom turn and then argue against gravity, arcing back up high onto the wall of the wave.

I'm travelling east now with serious intent, gaining speed, almost parallel to the wave whose back I am riding. Behind me the wave has begun to pitch forward. The crack of breaking ice mixes with the slurp of sea dragging up the softer stuff, a sound that might seem ominous if I didn't have speed as an ally.

But I'm free and feeling fine and temporarily indomitable as I slip through the vertical icefield, a wall of water filled with heirlooms, knick-knacks and memorabilia of the season gone by. Behind me the wave has grown hollow and the sun has allowed it to show its true colours of blue mixed with green commingled with those blazing diamonds. I'm a little too dazzled by it all and lose my focus, allowing my board to slow just a hair. I tip up on one foot and tilt back towards the maw of the wave but recover my balance quickly and shift my weight forward to increase speed.

All my early morning confidence is suddenly shaken as I realize the wave is spitting ice cubes from the lip now. All a body can do is tuck in low, keep one's head down and watch the wall get steeper and steeper up ahead. I decide to trust instinct over reason and stay tucked, assess the locomotive cave of sea and ice that is consuming me and hope for the best.

The best would be a quick trip back to sunlight but instead the sea decides to have its way with me. My feet are still dutifully planted on my board as the lip of the wave, dense with the memory of a brutal winter, takes a broadside punch at my wetsuit-hooded head. I feel myself cartwheeling forward into the drink and suddenly am reminded what freezing seawater does to the fully exposed human face. First, I feel the small razors of wafer ice slicing at me as I connect with the surface. Then I slip under and hear the magnificent stereo whump of a wave in triumph over a mortal surfer. I'm held under for mere seconds that expand exponentially in a world where time is truly mutable. Then I surface, gasping for good air and feeling the very identifiable pain of a short but volcanic headache brought on by a Canadian wipeout.

When the wave is through with me, I scramble back onto my board, paddle for the safety of deeper water and take deep clean gulps of air until I can focus again. Another formation of geese takes possession of the sky above and the young seal pops up again nearby to blink at me in innocent wonder.

April

Sunyata, not long after she gets her driver's license, drives her car into a ditch in Eastern Passage and calls home an hour after midnight. She is okay. The car has a big dent and some scratches. While it is being towed out, somebody steals her wallet. The next day she doesn't want to drive. In fact, nearly a week goes by before she considers driving again.

That same week, I meet with a cartoon channel executive to pitch an animated series idea based on a kid's book of mine called Famous At Last. “Fun, not dark” is what she wants. Fun and happy and maybe the slightest bit (but not too much) meaningful.

But especially, not dark. There are way too many dark cartoons out there, she says. My idea is fun and happy and has lots of personality and it means something but, oops, I inadvertently suggest it even has an “educational element.”

“We're not about education,” the executive says immediately.

“I didn't exactly mean educational.”

“We aren't into moralizing.”

Neither is Fred, the protagonist of my book, who wants to be a Saturday morning cartoon character. He is just a kid trying to cope with the heavy-duty, complex adult world.

And, of course, then it dawns on me. Fred is me. I am Fred. I am still nine years old. Although this is a problem for the cartoon channel because of their target audience. Fred is going to have to grow up for them and become twelve.

“Fred's very sophisticated for a nine-year-old,” I say in his defence, implying that in his own head he is almost twelve. I realize I'm bending over for the media. I make poor little Freddie lose three very valuable years of his life, just like that, for a TV executive.

But part of me truly is still nine, or maybe twelve. I have not figured out the adult world at all even though I play the games. I play games well despite the fact that most of the time I ignore the rules. But, after all, isn't that what a kid has to do to survive in a world ruled by adults?

I would not like someone to change my script and make me lose three years. I want to hang onto these three years. I don't want to have to grow up that quickly.

Yet, at this age, I begin to wonder. What exactly do I want to do with my life from here on?

I am this man with this situation. I do not want more money, more freedom, more anything in particular. I spend a lot of time by myself with my hopes and fears and then, sometimes I go surfing and I feel a whole lot better. Or I go out into the woods and make trails.

Making trails is a good thing, I think, for a guy like me. I am leading myself somewhere into the wilderness and the trail means I can find my way home and then come back again on another day and pick up where I left off.

Why do I get a certain amount of pleasure from cutting dead branches off a tree in the middle of a forest? Creating a trail that doesn't go anywhere, a trail whose ends are its own means? In truth, I don't even need a trail. I'm happy to be wandering aimlessly in that spruce wilderness behind my house. I love the plush undergrowth: moss, moss, moss. Soft on everything. Moss has this job of making a dead forest look alive in the winter if there is no snow. Moss turns a boulder into a sleeping green bear. Moss is velvety and deep and bounces back. I wish I were the one who invented moss.

Once I'm not around to trim and lop, the forest will grow back over my trails with sheep sorrel and Labrador tea and long delicate necklaces of wintergreen. Yes, wintergreen grows out there. And whenever I die, which I hope is later in the century, somewhere after the invention of the holodeck, I want to be covered over with moss. Nova Scotia soil is very rocky and unforgiving, so at least give me good moss for a roof.

Today I need to do some more revision on my cartoon script. I'm working with some computer whiz kids who are going to make Fred move. Fred is getting up off the page of a book and he's going to make TV commercials in my cartoon. That's how he becomes famous. Fred is more famous than me. People take notice of me sometimes because I wrote a bunch of books, I surf in the winter and I play electric guitar, sing (well, actually I talk, since I don't sing well) and make music videos. Even the word “music” is questionable here, but no one is complaining.

Fred will decide that TV commercials are not worth throwing away his life for. I will decide what? So far, I've only come up with moss this morning. I'm feeling really good about the existence of moss in this world.

In twenty minutes, after I finish tweaking my script, I will go to the Arctic again. That is to say, I go back to my writing about Arctic explorers. I signed a contract to write a book about the coastline of Canada and its history. I'm up to my eyeballs in snow and ice for this one as I write about brave explorers who were overly zealous and optimistic. Sometimes they were starving, though, or freezing to death, or, at minimum, having their gums swell from scurvy until they pull their teeth out one by one with their fingers. I'm not sure, but I think they could have eaten lichen to avoid that problem. I've eaten it and not died. It was the kind of staghorn lichen that grows on the side of trees. At least I think it was lichen. Then there is the lichen that grows on rocks. Some of it is orange. Really beautiful in a glistening fog.

On TV, singer Jann Arden tells me she has three, maybe four good days a week. Much of the rest of them she's depressed. Wow. Nobody sings better than Jann Arden. Nobody has more angst in her songs and I guess she has to be depressed sometimes to sing them so damn good. Think on it. She is actually working during those days when she is maybe doing nothing but napping and feeling depressed. It is part of her art. She could not get on stage or go to the recording studio and do it right unless she was depressed. The other performance stuff may be a piece of cake for her. Her real work is working through that depression. I'm onto it and feeling a little lightened by it.

Two weeks ago I gave my first final exam at the university in over twenty years of teaching. It was a big gym and my class was in there suffering with three other classes. I wanted to walk around and apologize to everyone in that room. Final exams suck the big winds of vile empty places. I accepted the final exam papers at the end and smiled a docile smile. I did not openly apologize, but I tried to show it in my face. One student, who was not prepared, wrote me an explanation and her own apology explaining why she was not prepared. The whole thing began, “I can't lie to you . . . ”

Others launched into long blathering essays about Whitman and Wordsworth. One student wrote three pages about the daffodils poem, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” the one I had told everyone to avoid. Skip the daffodils, I had said. Go straight for “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” But still they went for daffodils on the final exam. Sometimes, you have to work with what you know and this guy knew daffodils and nothing else when it came to Wordsworth.

Some wrote a whole lot about almost nothing at all. Some retold a poem or explained the plot of a short story.

Don't worry, I didn't flunk anyone. Not even Daffodils. No, I'm sorry. I did flunk some students who never came to class. I mean never. Just handed in papers. These were the wraiths of English 1000. They weren't around for my metaphorical discussion involving poetry, surfing, telepathic ravens and star moss. Only they deserved to fail.

But who am I to judge even them? I'd prefer not to. I play the adult game of giving grades very poorly. About the exam: the only good thing to say is that I think most of my students felt happy and relieved when it was over. The sun was out that day, the birds were singing - well, not exactly singing, but at least chattering, on University Avenue and down by the English Department on Henry Street. I felt somewhat metaphysical after the damn examination, just to be free of the old Studley Gymnasium where it took place.

Not one person got up to go to the bathroom during the two-hour exam. Think on it. Conditioned. Sitting in rows with their university IDs out on the desk. This was so someone, me presumably, could check to see that a real student had not sent a replacement student, someone with an amazing IQ who had known Whitman and Wordsworth personally, to sit and write the exam. No, better to just wax eloquent on daffodils and be done with it. I can't imagine a replacement student working in my class. It wouldn't fly.

So they all sat there and didn't go to the bathroom for two hours. Some of the classes were in there for three, the poor devils. Makes you want to take a bulldozer to Studley Gym or to the university itself. Tear it down and let the moss grow over the rubble. And it would if you gave it time and enough moisture.

My father, I think, taught me what I know about making the best of a bad situation. When things broke down, you just worked with whatever you had around to fix it until it was good and fixed, or fixed good enough to get you where you were going with it in the first place.

My life is cobbled together from bits and pieces of who knows what. No master plan, no logical scheme. Fix 'er up as she goes along. I was a semi-unhappy teenager and a bit morose about being an early-twenties person. I hated the government, didn't trust the police, despised much of what my civilization believed in. I rejected a ton of it and, for one summer, moved north to Canada to live in a shack. This would be my first extended foray into the great north.

I was really happy in my shack in Canada, with a Boy Scout tent for an outhouse and almost no money and no store-bought food. I ate fresh fish and edible wild plants a lot in those days. I don't recall eating a lot of lichen, but that was before I knew Farley Mowat. The old previously abandoned house we lived in had lots of old junk left around from which to improvise daily necessities.

Somehow, I evolved from being unhappy, “bummed out” as we used to say, and sometimes depressed, into being almost happy.

Almost, because I never fully trusted being happy. But I was much happier after I had rejected suburban life and moved into that hovel in the wilderness behind Chezzetcook. Good surf was just down the road, free food growing from the berry bushes and nearly free fish from the sea. And there were about a billion square miles of wilderness just beyond the junk pile outside my back door. And all the important stones on the forest floor were covered with moss from there to the Arctic Circle.

Summer lasted for six months in those days. I had an eight-track cassette player that ran on a big twelve-volt truck battery that stayed charged all summer until one night it finally gave out in the middle of a song by Poco. I also had a wood stove I had bought for fifteen dollars, rolled end over end up a long steep driveway, for proper placement in the kitchen of our house.

There were gods or angels watching over me. I was good to the world and it was good to me. When things went wrong, however, like getting my van suckered into the bottomless muck of the lower reaches of the driveway, I thought it was the end of the world but it wasn't. Oliver Murphy, an Acadian with a four-wheel-drive truck and an uncanny likeness to Fidel Castro, would come haul it out for a couple of bucks and I'd give him a bottle of Moosehead beer that he would drink in one swallow.

Although I would return to New Jersey in the fall, I had become unstuck from my unhappiness and saw much light at the end of the tunnel, light that eventually directed a move to Nova Scotia for good.

I learned back then that I didn't want to spend too much of my life alone. I had been pretty sure I was a character in a bunch of old Neil Young songs up to that point. But I was wrong, as I had been about so many things. (I would also later learn that there are good cops and that some things governments do are worthwhile. I believed exams were evil back then, however, and I still do.)

Being wrong is where you learn stuff. You almost never learn a damn thing by being right. Fred, the boy in my cartoon project who is either nine or twelve, is famously wrong on some things, which I hope will make him interesting to those kids watching Saturday morning cartoons. He wants to be rich and famous but hates the sacrifices he made to become so. He has five-hundred-dollar running shoes but he doesn't have time to daydream through social studies or roll on the ground with his dog.

Fred thinks he's smarter than he actually is and so do I. That's why, like Fred, I keep making interesting mistakes. But I still daydream through part of the day and roll on the ground with my dog.

These days, I don't eat nearly as many edible wild plants as I used to except for cattails, wintergreen, cranberries, blueberries and wild peas. I haven't given up those.

I am interested in all the ragged loose ends of my life and do a poor job of tying things all together. The tidy ending of things never works well for me, but the loose ends are out there like whipping spruce branches or frayed nerve endings or out-of-control electric wires trying to grab onto something, trying to flag down fragments of real life as time, like a raging north wind in winter, whips it away.

My daughter driving her car off the road into a ditch in Eastern Passage makes her pensive, reflective and even appreciative for a few days. The seat belt saved her from smacking into the windshield. I can still remember when the seat belt law first came into effect and there was a hue and cry against such common-sense legislation.

So there: government did this one good thing, right? To hell with the libertarian fools who think you shouldn't enforce something to make people safe. I have a feeling those who protest seat belts are the same ones who oppose gun legislation. Freedom, they cry. Freedom, of, duh, what? And the right to blow the brains out of yourself or maybe your neighbour mistaken for a moose as he hikes through the forest.

Do you believe how far I've come? I once sat in Students for a Democratic Society meetings with fellow radicals discussing whether we should burn down the ROTC building on our American campus. The next thing you know, I'm spouting platitudes about seatbelts and gun legislation.

Well, let me and my kids drive ourselves into a steep and muck-filled ditch every once in a while. Yes. Let's do these things and dent up the machine. Then cry, feel bad, and then get up, walk away, go home and get pensive about life, the meaning of danger, of freedom. All those things.

Soon, I'm back to the ice caps of history and the endless mistakes of Arctic explorers. An Irish/English legislator from the nineteenth century named Arthur Dodd, who had never been to the Arctic, believed there were fertile, temperate islands up there and an easy route through the north to China. He professed this despite the fact that he had not the slightest bit of evidence. I applaud his naive optimism, but unfortunately, he kept sending zealous, ill-prepared British explorers north and west to die or at the very least lose fingers and toes to frostbite. Dodd was an enterprising, idea-fixated yapper who had a great following. The politician bribed surviving Arctic sailors to say he was right about the Northwest Passage and the swell living conditions up north.

But he never went to the Arctic himself and when the great leaders of Great Britain got fed up with Dodd's foolishness and lies, they sent him off to become governor of the American colony of North Carolina, just before George Washington and Thomas Jefferson decided to light fire to a revolution.

As far as history goes, lies seem to have been more effective than truth in motivating any given population to: a) explore the unknown; b) kill the king; c) go off to war; and d) start a revolution.

Listen up. This will probably be on the final exam.

Locust Blossoms

Athletes sometimes talk about a semi-altered state of consciousness that occurs when they are “in the zone.” Magical, amazing feats are achieved at this point when you become un-self-conscious. In other words, you don't have to think about what you are doing yet your body and mind are totally integrated into the activity, and then zonk. You just are.

This happens for me when I write. Sometimes. It also happens when I surf. Sometimes. It requires practice and repetition and a unique state of grace. Sometimes, ironically, you can arrive there by being hyper-aware of who you are and being so self-conscious that you break through some invisible barrier and the division between you and your environment evaporates. You can just be part of whatever is going on. I remember, long ago, reading Ray Bradbury's neat little book called Zen and the Art of Writing wherein he suggests that the best way to write is this: don't think.

Tell that to your grade seven English teacher. But Ray was correct about this, of course. Maybe we can learn all kinds of stuff by stopping our thought process and just doing it.

A few years ago I was in Beverly Hills visiting with the movie director Dan Petrie. He had an office in a building where other creative types had offices and Dan pointed out to me Ray Bradbury's office. The walls were all cracked from a recent earthquake and I imagined all these creative types - poets, science fiction writers, screenwriters and independent directors - gathering in the hallway there while the walls were cracking, having a grand old dramatic time of it as they scrambled down to street level.

I've only experienced two small earthquakes. One little ripple that rattled some stones free from the Hollywood Hills and another while I was asleep on a tatami mat in a Tokyo apartment at five a.m. These were polite little earthquakes that did no damage and I enjoyed both immensely. They made me feel sensationally alive. As long as no one gets hurt, I enjoy most of the primal activities of the planet - the elemental things like big waves or heavy winds or thunderstorms, hurricanes, and the like. As a civilization, our own self-consciousness often prevents us from the basic contact we need with the earth. So we need reminders on a regular basis.

Tim McCarver, the baseball player, suggested that “the mind's a great thing as long as you don't have to use it.” I assume he was referring to his own sport and how much thought can get in the way of playing well. It's one of those great paradoxes and gentle ironies of life. We suggest to our kids, think before you act and that makes perfect sense. But when we do this to the extreme and let it rule our lives, we lose the joy of the action in the self-consciousness of the act.

I'm reminded again of my grandmother, Minnie, back in that cool mid-morning summer basement. I can still hear the snapping sound of beans as she broke them in half for cooking and then freezing. Exactly why she had to break a string bean in half for cooking still eludes me but she took great joy in it. I was just a little kid then, wearing a raccoon cap on my head because I was a fan of Davy Crockett as portrayed by Walt Disney. Minnie had made me the cap by cutting chunks out of a full-length raccoon coat she had worn in the 1920s.

I don't know why I was elevated by the early morning bean snapping but I was and I think Minnie was transformed too in her own way. She had moved into a special zone then just as she had earlier while out in the dewy morning fields harvesting the beans planted by my grandfather. Moving into that zone, the transcendental one, happens in many ways, but I think part of it may involve preparation, ritual and repetition. This is why breathing becomes a big part of meditation. You wouldn't think someone really needs to teach you to breathe. But sometimes it helps.

In surfing, you paddle each stroke, you watch and you listen and you ultimately feel the power of the wave under you. Once you are moving, things happen quickly. There is no time to think or you get whacked in the head here in Nova Scotia by a mightily cold North Atlantic fist of sea. But in order to do it right, whatever it happens to be, you must love the act of doing it. And you have to love the wave, love the words or love the beans. If there ain't love in it, it's not gonna snap.

In New Jersey this spring, the black locust trees at my parents' house where I grew up were splendid with white flowers, big clumps of them, and when the wind rose, they showered down like fluffy popcorn. Three weeks earlier I had been showered by cherry blossoms in Tokyo and I felt blessed by all the flowers falling on my head that year. My parents were growing great curtains of bamboo along the roads to try and shield out the raucous noises of progress that surrounded them. “You can watch the shoots grow inches by the hour,” my father told me and he wasn't lying. I felt that link again with Japan where the bamboo trees flourish and it seemed unlikely but significant that New Jersey and the neighbourhoods of Tokyo had so much in common. No bombs had ever fallen on this part of Jersey, though.

My old backyard is a beautiful grove where the shade of the tall, crooked but somewhat elegant black locust trees makes a haven in the midst of the near-urban chaos. Every trip back here robs me of my adult identity and I am twelve years old again, freezing my tongue to the icy iron of the back step railing before tearing it off and screaming from the pain of severed taste buds.

That and many other mistakes made up my youth, but it was mostly a happy one, punctuated by bouts of self-doubt, loneliness and a kind of anxiety-driven terror that dulled with time until I realized I was more or less just like everyone else.

The land on which my parents house sits is a triangle, a place where two roads converge. Once they were rural cart paths, then gravel roads, then county connector roads; now they are highways. The locusts and the bamboo continue to offer some wilderness protection from traffic but it is never enough. In the mornings now when I wake up there, the house shakes and windows rattle just like my first morning in Tokyo, only it is traffic, not the quaking of the earth that makes the house tremble. Trucks slamming into manhole covers at 5:30 a.m. instead of tectonic plates shifting beneath the earth. Amazingly, the feeling is much the same.

Back in Nova Scotia, the wind and the sea rule the day, although I've known days where the combined efforts of both create a sound precisely like that of highway traffic in the distance. If I am in bed and not yet fully awake, I am fooled into believing I am still twelve years old, still living in New Jersey. Before my current self can overtake the boy I once was, I have at least a brief shuddering theory flick through my brain that Nova Scotia and all the rest, the surfing included, is something I conjured up, dreamed into being. But by the time I've planted my two good feet on the floor, I've wrestled myself back into the present and my identity is confirmed by the fact that my clothes seem to fit my current body.

Alive

Summer arrives grudgingly slow here in Nova Scotia. April and May breed hostilities against the sluggishness. Rebellions break out and we want to know why we live in such a climate. Then the sky cracks into blue, the winds abate and I discover again this can be a quiet, beautiful land. I walk the shoreline of the Atlantic and rediscover the serenity and power of this deep sea at our doorstep.

It has been a productive, successful and even adventurous year for me and also one that has stirred the deeper, darker fears. I am not without clues but I am probably not much closer to finding the great truths.

Satisfied that the great truths are yet far off, I occupy myself with trying to formulate a few good questions. Some are old and stale. Why am I here? What am I doing? Am I making the best use of my time? How can I be happier? How can I be of more value to the world? Or simply, what should I do next?

Why is it that the satisfaction I get from earning money, writing books, receiving awards and congratulatory handshakes for all my professional deeds is not nearly as fulfilling as simply walking along the sand at the very edge of the sea on a calm, even cloudy morning? The simple answer is that so much involving accomplishments pulls me away from anything that is essential. Follow your intuition and settle for simple things, seems to be the clue, but not the answer.

The road back to Nova Scotia and sanity, for me, often begins with the trip away to somewhere else. Banff, Paris or Tokyo and then New Jersey. After my father's radiation treatment for prostate cancer, I flew down there to check up on how he was doing. Any return visit to the house where I grew up is fraught with emotional peril but also blessed with sweet visions from my past. Somewhere in my thirties, I think I finally outgrew my nostalgia for my youth but I expect it will creep back into my consciousness within a decade or so.

On the two-hour hop from Halifax to Newark, I sat beside a New Jersey State Trooper. A six-foot-two, 280-pound Black man with an infectious laugh, Kenny Wilkins confessed that he travelled to meet women, lots of them, and that he found himself attracted to women who were not American. “American women want too much,” he said. “They're too demanding.” So he had a girlfriend in Vancouver, one in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, one in Norway, one in Morocco and he was hoping to enlist one in Spain. He was flying home to his Turnpike job, however, from Newfoundland, where he had struck out. Or as he put it, “I wasn't there long enough to get my bearings.”

Truth is, Kenny was not a sexist creep. In fact, he was a very nice guy, reluctant to the extreme to admit that he was a Jersey trooper. Most kids growing up in New Jersey had a distinct hatred for state troopers who would bust you for everything from hitchhiking to smoking pot to going five miles over the speed limit. So here I was sitting next to what should have been a loathsome individual and I found myself liking him immensely.

I told him I was a writer and nearly begged for Turnpike stories, for surely this guy who had logged over a hundred thousand miles of driving on the Pike had stories to tell. “I seen it all,” was the best I could get out of him. No colourful details. And then we talked about growing up in New Jersey, about high school even and about parents. Kenny was very proud of the fact that he had just bought a “small” house. “It only has four bedrooms.” It was small and old (twenty years) by the standard of his friends, he said, who were all buying new and monstrous houses with extensive mortgages that no one ever expected to actually pay off.

For some reason, I told Kenny about my ancient history days of hitchhiking and doing other illegal things on the Jersey Turnpike. Now that I was older and respectable (well, sort of) and even ten years older than this guy, I felt like I could flaunt it in his face. Which is really pretty dumb of me but there it is.

“Anything bad ever happen to you?”

“Not on the Turnpike,” I admitted. Suddenly I realized nothing bad ever did happen to me all those times thumbing up and down the Pike from Exit 4 to Exit 8 as I attended Livingston College. No trooper ever hassled me because I only caught rides outside the tollbooth. I was a rebel but I wasn't stupid. I also told him about the Marine with the case of Budweiser, just back from the horrors of Vietnam, who gave me a very scary ride; the other drunk on a highway in North Carolina; and the time I was stuck at an Interstate in Alabama - a northerner with hair down to my armpits in a sea of rednecks. I gave it up when Kenny's eyes began to glaze over.

Kenny asked me about writing. He asked if I had any of my books with me. I didn't. At that point, I don't think he believed that I actually wrote books. Not that it's a big deal. It's just that unless you can show the goods, sometimes people think you're just trying to impress them by being a writer. All I had was other people's writing: a Kevin Major novel, a manuscript about riding a bicycle around Cameroon by Neil Peart (the drummer from Rush), a book by Leo Buscagila (wonderfully corny and profound) that I'd been meaning to read and a magazine put out by the Buddhists called the Shambhala Sun. On the cover of this issue was the provocative question: “What Happens After You Die?”

I actually broached that very subject with Kenny. But he didn't want to talk about death. I think he'd seen too much of it in the cruelest forms. I was thinking about my father and the cancer and admitted I was flying down to see if my father was telling me the truth - that the radiation treatment had gone quite fine and that he was doing well.

So I sidelined the discussion onto gun control and asked my state trooper friend how come Americans were so screwed up that they couldn't get any decent gun control going. It's about this time in any of my Canadian-American conversations that I foolishly start boasting about Canada and how far ahead of the U.S. we are in areas such as gun control and socialized medicine, all the while realizing that some of our advances are just holding on by a thin, frayed thread of tradition and hope.

“Everybody carries guns these days,” Kenny said out loud, too loud, just as the aircraft was circling Newark and getting ready to land. We did that nice little forty-five degree tilt where I got to see the skyline of New York, then the suburbs and oil refineries of my native state in a splendid skewed angle. By the time we landed, I had Kenny ranting about all the deadly hardware that people on the Turnpike packed these days and how, when he stepped out of his cruiser, he expected to confront any form of fire power from a cap gun to a rocket launcher. “You gotta be ready to respond to either one with the appropriate measures.”

On our way off the plane, Kenny was still talking about guns real loud. I was the only one on board who knew he was a cop, but everybody else just saw a large Black man who looked like he'd been on steroids and they gave us a fairly wide berth as we ambled up to Immigration.

My brother is waiting for me at the airport and we drive south to Cinnaminson. Once beyond the blight of the industrial wastelands of northern New Jersey, the trees are tall and green with new leaves. A powerful sadness washes over me as the landscape softens. If only we could turn back the clock for New Jersey to somewhere in the middle of the nineteenth century, I could live happily in such an idyllic natural environment. But that world is gone. You can't bring back the New Jersey that once was.

In Nova Scotia, the marsh remains brown well into the warmer days. The blessing of green is hard won by the warmth that is kept at bay by the sea and by cold northern nights. My garden sits on the edge of the wide marsh just a few feet above sea level. In May, I roll the ancient rototiller from the dilapidated Acadian shed and she starts on the second tug. One to pull gas into the carburetor and a second to ignite the spark. It's one of those rare miracles of a mechanical contrivance, a rattletrap beast that functions more on sheer spirit than physics.

Pamela asked me recently about what is alive and what isn't. This query was prompted by the fact that I talk to things that don't appear to be alive - things like rocks and cars and rototillers. And houses. I fumbled with an answer. “Well, I talk to things that aren't necessarily alive but I am sure they have some sort of spirit,” I said.

“How can a rock have spirit?”

“I don't know. I just think it does.”

“And a car?”

“Yeah, in a certain kind of way. I think a car carries some of the spirit of the people who have driven it.”

We recently sold the old 1987 Aries station wagon that we'd driven for ten years. Damn, if I didn't feel saddened by losing that old friend. I suppose it was because the beast had served the master well and I felt a sense of betrayal in trading it in on something newer. “This car was used in my first music video,” I told the used car dealer. I could still picture perfectly the great mandala-like swirling image of the front left wheel spinning, creating an optical illusion of going backwards. The whole idea of using one of the world's least sexy cars in a music video had appealed to me.

“No kidding,” said the large, cigar-smoking salesmen, Jack Boutlier. He thought I was making it up. “Better tell me of anything wrong with 'er, so I can fix things up for the next owner.”

Suddenly I was relieved. Jack would actually improve the car, sell it to someone who needed it. I was off the hook. “It's a little bouncy,” I said. Our deal was already done. But I couldn't bring myself to tell him that the shocks and struts were totally shot from bouncing up and down over potholes on the road where I live.

Cars know when you are about to sell them. They sense it and get depressed and then things start to go wrong with them. That's partly how I know they are alive. My rototiller always starts on the second pull even though it's older than me - because it intrinsically knows I will arrive one May morning and expect it to start. It sits in the drafty old wooden shed all winter waiting for the big moment. It will not let me down.

When I walk through the spruce forest and feel the comfortable thick carpet of moss beneath my feet, when my eyes feast on the healthy green of the seemingly endless repetitive floor of this coastal forest, I talk to it as well. I tell it how great it looks. “Way to go.” “Brilliant.” “Keep it up.” Does it hear me? My kids hear me talking to it. My dog hears me and none of them thinks I'm crazy. On the beach, the lichen covers the rocks and offers up bewitching yellows, oranges, and pale greens or greys and I smile and laugh like I am the audience at a dazzling stage performance. Is lichen alive? Of course, it's alive and it is stunning and perhaps proud of its life.

The lichen also grows on my roof and must have some kind of acid that eats away at asphalt shingles. While this is an annoying truth when it comes to home repair, it is a comforting thought that the lichen is a slow but persistent harbinger of natural cycles. I've seen bright yellow lichen on ancient fishermen's sheds reducing shingle and wood back to a powdery dust that floats away at high tides into fine sediments drifting east towards the Grand Banks.

I don't know about the lifespan of the various lichens or about their individuality but I know that they have a kind of peacock aura for me, strutting their stuff on roof or rock. And what can I say, but “Hello, how is it going? Keep it up.” And, of course, I cling to the comfort of knowing that I can eat lichen if I am ever lost in the wilderness and starving. Canada is full of lichen. If Farley Mowat is right, and he damned well better be, then all I have to do is munch away like a kid with a bag of potato chips. Bring on the tundra, the great northern forests, the rugged, craggy coasts. The sumptuous feast is waiting.

I have tried it on occasion and found it wanting. But I think it needs to be soaked in water, salt water preferably, to soften it up and make it more palatable.

Recently on a trip to Tokyo, I attended an extremely formal lunch with the mayor of one of the city boroughs of Tokyo, Itabashi. In the lacquered box before me was an assortment of what Sunyata would have called Klingon food - seaweed, tentacled things, mushrooms of extremely odd colours and a black fungal-looking delicacy that turned out to be pickled, well, tree fungus. Where I come from, people only pickle fish parts or garden crops. The black fungus, however, was delicious and I devoured it with chop sticks like I'd been hanging out in Japanese noodle parlours all my life. If my Japanese had been better, I would have told the mayor about lichen. Instead, we talked at length about singing Enya songs Karaoke style.

One of the “assignments” I had given to myself for my trip to Japan was to have several satori experiences. Awareness. Discovery, eye-openers for the mind and soul. There was no genuine satori at the lacquered box lunch where I had to bring “official greetings from my people.” I had not expected that. The mayor had done a formal greeting to me and I was expected to return the favour. I was a little taken aback. Who were my people? Lawrencetowners, Nova Scotians, Maritimers? Canadians? I had no time to consider who my people were so I said, “I bring you the warmest greetings from my people to everyone here in Itabashi and I know that we have so much in common.” My translator must have elaborated on this because her translation was a long eloquent event that pleased the mayor immensely.

The slightly off-kilter, counterpoint conversation that followed through my harried interpreter moved on to a discussion of Karaoke and food, especially seaweed. I boasted of the fact that I could collect seaweed from the waters where I surfed. I could eat it fresh from the sea while surfing or take it home and dry in the sun. “Most of my countrymen,” I said, because I kept reminding myself that I should speak for my people, not just me, “scoff at seaweed but I myself am a huge fan of dulse, Irish moss, certain chewy forms of kelp and rockweed.”

I think my long-winded remark lost something in the translation, for the mayor looked puzzled and consulted with his several deputy mayors sitting on his side of the table. I tried to restore the comradery with the innocuous remark, “The sea is such a wonderful provider,” and a quick translation brought smiles all around. I decided to become less loquacious and nibbled heartily at my fungus, making satisfactory noises that needed no translation.

A Zen master once said, “Enlightenment is an accident but some activities make you accident prone.” Like celebrating simple life forms such as lichen. So whenever I hike across the beautiful rubble of boulders near the east end of Lawrencetown Beach and the lichen is out in full plumage on the grey stones, I celebrate the possibilities. If I was far, far away from home and starving, I'd have plenty of hope. Because I celebrate, I have made psychic contact with lichen friends and I may be crazy but I am happy. Lichen makes me happy, I admit it. In a world where you have the choice between being happy, feeling disgruntled or having no feeling at all, I prefer to be happy. Lichen happy. What do I have to lose? If you find joy in a thing, it probably has a spirit (a life, if you prefer) or else, perhaps, your joy in it has given it a spirit.

And what about rocks then? Are they alive? For the sake of argument, I'll say yes. Most rocks have good spirits - if you want them to. I'll tell you first about one bad rock, though. I was twelve, a pubescent mineralogist, a collector and namer of rocks. I had a great rock collection all my own with glued numbers on every specimen and a notebook with a list of corresponding numbers and names - milky quartz, slate, amethyst, the fickle shiny flaked mica, granite (rockhounds repeat the age-old pun about this one whenever possible. “I'm not a hundred percent sure what it is but we'll take it for granite.”), on and on into the more exciting geodes and the ignominious slag. My father wasn't sure if slag was something you could consider a rock. “Slag is what's left over after you burn coal.” There was a lot of slag in New Jersey in those days. I liked slag, however, because of its asteroid-like quality. It was like something that would be left lying around after a nuclear blast destroyed the world and, at twelve, I thought war, any kind of war, was cool.

One day, fellow rock fan Bobby Yeager and I, while hiking through the sandy South Jersey fields, came across a hard white rock that looked like a golf ball. It wasn't in our identification book so we called it a moon rock because we deduced through no logic whatsoever that it had come from the moon. It was perfectly round, white, heavy and hard. Bobby wanted to throw it at something. A wall or a window. He wasn't a real rockhound like me but preferred to find rocks and throw them at things, usually in hopes of breaking something. Vandalism was in his nature and unlike the Zen master, happy to simply sit and be with a rock, or me who wanted to catalogue it and keep it in an egg carton like a prize, Bobby wanted to destroy something with it. Bobby was a really nice guy, older than me, who had taught me to smoke cigarettes and look at topless women through a miniature picture device on his father's key chain. All I had to offer back in friendship for these gifts was knowledge about rocks and minerals and, of course, slag.

The moon rock fit nicely in the palm of the hand and I held onto it tightly, realizing that Bobby could probably not hold back from throwing it at a passing car or a bird or the glass insulator on the power lines. After some more hiking around in the early afternoon sweltering heat of a southern New Jersey summer day, I discovered I had a headache. “I think I better go home,” I said.

“It's the rock, man,” Bobby said. “It's an evil rock. It gave you the headache. Let me see it.”

I reluctantly handed it over. Within minutes Bobby had a headache too. The moon rock was doing something weird and evil to our brains. I had never encountered this problem with all the other benign rocks I had collected in my youthful days. Perhaps there was an alien life form inside the rock or some Russian mind control device. I was twelve; anything was possible and even likely.

“We have to break it so it won't destroy our minds,” Bobby said. Smacking things or breaking them was his solution to most problems. Breakage was his favourite form of creative communication next to throwing things.

“I don't know,” I said. “What if breaking it open unleashes some awful force upon the world?” My headache had suddenly intensified as if the rock knew what Bobby was suggesting. I could tell from the grimace on Bobby's face that he was hurting as well.

“Yeah, but what if we don't break it open and the headaches get worse?”

“Why don't we just leave it? Or just throw it in the pond?” I suggested, pointing toward the lily pads and muddy water of Steele's Pond.

“We can't take that chance,” Bobby said with great certainty. I didn't know what chance he meant. “Let's go to your house and get a hammer.”

“Okay,” I said. Bobby was older than I was. I often naively assumed he must know what he was doing. And anyway, my head hurt and I was tired of thinking.

In the cool basement of my house, we failed at cracking the moon rock open with a normal claw hammer and I rooted around my father's tool bench until I came across a really serious looking ball-peen hammer. I still had an inkling that if we actually cracked open the rock it might just destroy the world, but that in itself didn't seem like a big thing any more. Bobby was certain that our headaches would go away if we busted open the rock. Besides, we had to see what was inside. It was an experiment. Maybe no one had ever cracked open a moon rock before. Or found one. We were in uncharted mineralogical territory here.

Wham! The ball-peen hammer came down hard on the moon rock, caught it square on its round head, and made it shoot off across the basement like the golf ball that it appeared to be. It took several minutes of searching through the hanging steel vines of my father's winter tire chains in the darkest corner of the basement to find it again.

“It's a good thing it didn't break a window,” Bobby said but I know he didn't mean it.

“Maybe it's too hard to crack with any normal tools,” I offered, in hopes that Bobby would give up. “It might take something stronger, like a nuclear blast to do the job.” I watched a lot of 1950s science fiction movies in those days and whenever something wasn't working out with alien invasions, nuclear weapons were discussed as a solution.

“We can't give up,” Bobby said. “Do you still have a headache?”

“Yeah,” I admitted.

Wham! The hammer came down harder this time and the rock fractured with a deafening sound. The moon rock had been breached. I waited for the unleashing of a horrendous evil force and the end of the world. Everybody expected the world to end any day during those times, from one cause or another.

“Wow, my headache's gone,” Bobby said. “We've freed ourselves from the moon rock's power.”

“Yeah,” I said, although, in truth, I think my headache was worse after the godawful noise of smashing the rock. My ears were ringing. “Look, it's like glass inside.”

The inside of the moon rock was a dark opaque brownish reddish colour and not at all like the white skin. It had cracked into three pieces. Now that it was no longer perfectly spherical, however, it seemed less exotic, less potent and less interesting. “You keep one piece and I'll keep one piece. That way it can't have any power over us any more.”

I agreed. But there were three pieces. “I'll throw the third piece in the pond,” Bobby said. “That way, the rock can never get its power back because no one will be able to put it back together.” We were still acting through a classic SF plot that was perfectly familiar to us. Bobby was certain we had saved the world but we were both somewhat disappointed now that the rock had “lost its powers.” I labelled my piece of the moon rock as number 89 and in my notebook wrote, “moon rock.” A few days later I learned that Bobby had tossed the third piece in the pond as promised but then later got distracted and lost track of his fragment of the stone. He was probably lying because he was congenitally incapable of carrying anything in his hand for any length of time without throwing it at something.

My moon rock chunk became dull and uninteresting but later that week I heard on the news that President Kennedy got mad at the Russians for shipping missiles into Cuba. Adults got all fired up over this and it sounded like we were ready to go to war: nuclear war, of course. At school, I asked Bobby Yeager if he was scared. He said he wasn't, that things were pretty boring and at least a war “would be different.” I tried really hard to get worried about a nuclear war but I couldn't see what the big deal was. The Russians already had missiles they could launch from far away to blow us up and we had missiles to blow them up. President Kennedy had issued some kind of ultimatum and we Americans thought that was pretty cool. In retrospect, of course, it was pretty dumb, with the stakes being what they were. But fortunately for us all, the Russian leader, Nikita Khrushchev, who we all thought was really evil, decided he wasn't willing to sacrifice the world for the sake of a few missiles in Cuba, so we all didn't die that year. Which was fine by me because I was only a kid and hadn't grown up yet.

I stopped hanging out with Bobby Yeager when I realized that his ambitions for getting into trouble were much larger than mine. He eventually moved to Idaho and then Alaska and then Hawaii and back to Idaho and I wonder if he remembers the moon rock at all. I moved to Nova Scotia where the shoreline is like one endless ribbon of rocks of all shapes and sizes. On cold but still spring mornings I keep my eyes down as I walk the shoreline and look for interesting rocks. Some of my current favourites are sculpted smooth sandstone pieces that have delicate markings like Japanese artwork naturally tattooed into their surface - veins of other minerals, actually, that create amazing, graceful images that have been shifting as the rock erodes over thousands of years. I offer the rocks special compliments as I pick them up and ask if they mind going home with me. At my farmhouse some rest on windowsills in the sunlight.

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 alone 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 things 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.

I should tell you about yesterday morning, just to be fair. There was no fog, no wind. The sun was right where it wanted to be at 8:30 Atlantic Daylight Saving Time. The sea was flat, blue and uncommunicative at the reef - barely a ripple. A light north wind coming from the land gave the air a sweet flowery smell. Bees were harvesting sustenance from the zucchini flowers in my garden. The dill plants - tall, elegant and dignified like beautiful foreign women who you see on TV - were covered with dew. I was going to sit down and work on my novel about an imaginary character but decided that I would devote my efforts to real life this morning instead of fiction. Real-life experience is a fairly mild addiction I have developed which sometimes gets in the way of fiction writing. I may one day succumb to it altogether if I'm not careful but for now I try to limit my indulgence. I'm sure I can handle it if I'm careful.

So on this golden but fogless morning I drove my inflatable kayak to Rocky Run and set off paddling out to sea. The water was clear and deep in the channel and the tide was pushing inward so it was like a reverse river. I hugged the shore, trying to avoid the seaworthy thrust of salt water, then passed through the old railroad trestles and out towards the cliffs near The Wreck.

Everything was stunning. The rocks along the shoreline were having a party with those little dancing birds - plovers or sandpipers or some other name. Seaweed was rotting and there were seaweed flies that the birds were feasting on. I had one lone seal pop up nearby and I could still see him in the clear water when he dove back down ten feet beneath the surface. Little fish skidded by. Some of the dancing birds got paranoid about me and as soon as one flew, they all did in a manoeuvre like a big squadron of spacecraft in a Star Wars movie. I keep telling them I'm of no concern, not dangerous in the slightest, but they don't listen.

Against the incoming tide, I advanced slowly until the current diminished the closer I came to the headland. I was alone, happy, intensely public and private at once with my thoughts out here on my inflatable kayak. Just the day before, some local kids in their own sea kayak claimed to have seen a shark. Claimed that it bumped into their boat and nearly spilled them into the sea. I think it just has something to do with a couple of recent shark movies. I've never even seen a shark near shore in Nova Scotian waters. I refuse to worry about sharks. We all carry a list in our heads of things we will allow ourselves to worry about. I worry about my kids, the house burning down, getting stuck at really boring meetings, turning into a has-been writer, drowning, losing my mind and my car rusting out. But, as usual, today I refuse to worry about sharks.

Instead, I paddle out to where the waves are now breaking over the old wreck where I once ripped my wetsuit and I “park” by the jagged stump of metal. Here at the very tip of the headland I look at the tall dirt cliffs of nearby Terminal Beach. In the early morning light it is a beautiful but eerie moonscape piece of coastline scalloped by storms and erosion. Losing ground. Reddish soil silting down into the sea and shuttled off by currents to God knows where. But so beautiful. I fall in love with this place yet again. Music by Bach and Mozart begins in my head as I bob gently in my inflatable craft, refusing to worry about sharks here in these clear northerly waters.

This is probably as close to meditation as I can get. Communing with sea and drumlin, I realize that the Ice Age has left this coast as a gift. I'm reading it like one dog reading another dog's story in the sea oats at the beach. It's all there. Deposit and retreat. Let the sea do the rest.

An unexpected swelling of the sea jabs my Taiwanese rubber seacraft up against the jagged rusty shards of The Wreck itself and I pull myself back through millennia to who I am and where. Two thoughts occur simultaneously. Oddly enough, the first one concerns coffee. I would really like a cup of coffee. The second one is the life/death concern of an inflatable kayak getting a significant tear and deflation occurring. The Taiwanese designer has contrived only one air compartment. So if she goes, she goes. It would be a long swim to shore.

So now I gently push away from the wreck and paddle off towards the inlet that will lead me back into Rocky Run. I find the furrow in the narrow channel marked only by several long thin poles made from spruce trees. To my back, at sea, a fogbank has appeared. The north wind will hold it at bay only so long. By the time I find my way back to fiction, it will have come ashore, a cloud settling itself snugly over the land, allowing each of us to retreat into our small safe places to tap out our important messages for an unknown audience.

Fools, Baseball and Beach Stones

There are two kinds of fools: the ones who know they are and the ones who are fooling themselves. I'm the former, although there are moments of delusion when I think I'm the other one. But I'm not. All I have going for me are a few good hunches and a lot of luck.

In the spring around here some fools still set fire to the last year's dried grass, often claiming that it improves this year's growth. I don't think that research bears this out. I think they just like to see something burn. Fire is attractive whether it's out of control or in control. And often, these grass fires do go out of control and burn down barns, sheds and even houses. It's a messy business and I'm convinced fools should not set anything on fire.

I'm not the fire-fool type but I do indulge in things that most respectable people think of as foolish. As previously noted, I am a big fan of rocks. I like some rocks more than I like some people, I'd have to admit. Even if a stone falls off the side of the drumlin onto you, you don't really think it was intentional. You can't say that about people. People will purposefully chew away at a thing until the whole side of the mountain caves in on you. I know. It's happened to me and I've seen it done to others.

But I don't want to say mean things about people. The intention of this fool is to take you back to the beach for a minute. Let's say you are walking on the sand and find a stone that fits into the palm of your hand. You're gazing up at a Seaforth blue sky wondering why the damn stone feels so right. Fortunately for the stone, there's no need to discuss the matter. See, anything involving people involves discussion and differences of opinion. True, some people can make you feel as good as that sun-soaked warm, oblong milky quartz in your paw, but then, sooner or later, you're apt to have complications. And that's where the stone you found on the beach has one up on people. It doesn't get any more or less complicated than it was when you found it.

I have a habit of carrying the stone for a while in my right hand, passing it to my left and then doing one of two things: putting it in my pocket and taking it home or throwing it in the ocean. In retrospect, I can say in all honesty (at least as much as a self-acknowledged fool can do) that the stone is probably better off with the ocean option, number two. See, if I take it home and put it on the window sill or kitchen table, someone might move it to get it out of the way of dinner. Or I might leave it outside my back door with all those other stones I brought home from the beach - as if I had some grand plan, some secret purposeful intention of what to do with those stones. But I don't and I know damn well that when it comes to doing something with all those stones I felt so strongly about, I'll probably just seize up with idleness and do nothing more than admire them on my way out the door.

Now, years are not a big worry to stones. They have time and a kind of patience that could teach most of my friends a thing or two. But the toss and gravity drop into the big blue salty sea is probably quite exciting to a stone that has been sitting on a beach for several thousands or millions of years.

There's a satisfactory arc, up into the air when I throw it, thanks to the fact that I once played second base when I was eleven for a baseball team called Glen Meade, named for a housing development in my community. Actually, I was a lousy second baseman. I daydreamed a lot and second base, as you probably know, is a sorry place to daydream. The outfield was where I belonged and, sure enough, I eventually ended up in right field. In those days, nobody hit into the outfield so it was a daydreamer's paradise.

Before or after the games, when the coaches were not around, some of my friends, the ones who looked for trouble, hit stones instead of baseballs with bats as a kind of practice. I was already a fan of stones back then but I was not a stone hitter. I called stones “rocks” or the fancy ones I called “minerals.” And I didn't like to see incorrigible friends hit them with bats. Rocks and bats led to several things: broken bats, broken car windows, kids hit in the head with rocks in backyards. And I didn't think the rocks and minerals liked the abuse.

During a game every once in a while, after what seemed like a millennium, someone on the team currently opposing Glen Meade, a lefty at the plate, would hit a ball into right field. I was idling away my time thinking about my rock collection at home, daydreaming abut finding a geode maybe or a piece of amethyst (uncommon but not impossible to be found on a suburban lawn) and lo and Beholden Caulfield, here comes a high flying hardball into the outfield. Why they let us play with hardballs, I'll never know, because I had once been playing catch with Warren King, who would one day be a New Jersey State Patrolman, and the hardball Warren was throwing hit me square in the nose. There was blood and pain. I didn't mind the blood. In fact, every boy privately enjoys seeing himself bleeding because of the great ruby red theatrical nature of it all.

But I was not a fan of pain in those days. It was a short, sharp pain that would psychologically damage me forever. It helped turn me from being a reckless, clumsy second baseman who daydreamed a lot into a daydreaming right fielder who privately hoped no one would hit a ball into his territory. So, as you can imagine, when someone would finally pop up a good one in my direction, and coaches, teammates and assorted alert family members in the bleachers began to shout my name (as if from far, far away in deep space) my brain would kick in with the memory of Warren King driving a fastball into my nose and my brain told me I should be nowhere in the vicinity of where the fly ball was going to land. So I never developed a great reputation as a right fielder for Glen Meade.

I was a fool in those days but not a total waste. I didn't know I was a fool because I was just a kid and figured that some day I would be older and wiser. (Fat chance of that, I now realize.) But there was much to assess at that critical moment when the ball was arriving at its apogee. And me, alert, paranoid, and, above all, feeling protective of my physical self, especially any part of it having to do with my face, my neck or my groin. You see, I already knew exactly what it would feel like to get hit in the nose and figured getting hit in the eye could be worse. I had experienced a nightmare already about being hit by a hardball in the Adam's apple and a nightmare was as good as a real-life experience in those days, maybe better. And there were theories circulating among my peers about what it would feel like to get hit hard with a hardball down there in the crotch.

Catchers were the ones who most openly discussed what it would feel like to get slammed into with a fast pitch right in the balls. That's why they had the luxury of wearing a cup. They liked to tap on it sometimes, especially the catcher for our team, my good friend, Bob Blomquist.

But outfielders as a rule did not wear cups. Sure, I know what baseball fans are thinking: the odds of a high fly ball whacking into your family jewels is very low. But I was only eleven. I had not had a university course in statistics under my belt, so to speak. I had my emotionally-scarring Warren King experience and I had my phobias well under cultivation.

In baseball, you are given a baseball glove to defend yourself with. Catchers get that big padded sunflower of upholstered leather to fend off injuries from young pitchers with lightning arms. But I just had an old six-finger thin leather glove from Sears. Yes, six fingers; one was an empty, a flaccid leather flap of a finger for that gap between thumb and first digit. I had saved my money long and hard for that glove and I bought it from the Sears store where they had cardboard cut-out stand-up replicas of Ted Williams. I had thought Ted Williams was only a baseball player, an old one at that, but apparently he also fished and played golf. I didn't mind fishing at that point in my life because it had a certain macho element - a kind of contact sport with nature. Hooks drew blood when you were lancing worms and threading their carcasses onto them. But golf sucked big time and always would in my book.

Well, way out there in the outfield with the ball about to come careening down out of the sky you can imagine how much faith I had in my glove. The sun was directly in my eyes out there in right field. People were shouting my name - all of the accurate and not-so-accurate renditions of my labels-for-life: Les! Lesley! Choyce, comin' at ya! Heads up, Lester! It's yours, Lestoil! You got it, Lesman! And so forth.

As you already know, I would have preferred to be back home with my rock collection, labeling new samples: shale, gneiss, schist, mica. But I was, instead, in the hot spot and wondered why I played baseball at all. I had one good sun-blinding peek up into the sky and realized there was absolutely nothing to be seen of a baseball coming down in the midst of the full optic weight and velocity of solar radiation. It had occurred to me before that I should wear sunglasses in the outfield (better to hide behind) but I had had second thoughts, imagining that if you did get hit in the glasses with a baseball, glass and/or plastic would get smashed and lodged in your eyes and you'd be in worse shape than if the evil rawhide-covered orb just pancaked your eyeball.

“Lescargot, take your time!” That was the coach. He was always telling us to take our time, which I never understood. When someone was running from second to third, he'd yell, “Take your time!” When you were at bat, when the pitcher, Don Hildreth, was about to send a searing fastball into his catcher's leather sunflower. When you were about to attempt the impossible and catch a high pop fly in an outfield so blasted with solar radiation that the grass was dying under your feet.

“It's an easy one, Lescargot.” Coach had a smattering of French or he liked to eat French food or something and I could only wish that he had not coined his nickname for me after edible snails. But it was not a matter openly discussed during his pep talks and strategy sessions. “Take your time, boys. Use your brain, the one God gave you. Don't let anything fluster you out there. For every game we win, I'll buy you all ice cream sodas.” He held true to his promise but only had to spill the cash twice that season.

He continued to shout at me. “Focus on the ball. Take your time.”

I noticed that all the other coaches yelled and screamed at their teams to run faster, play harder. Hurry! Even running onto the field or off the field, where it didn't matter. “Wha's a matter? You got lead in your pants?” they'd yell at a lolly-gagging player, the one with pants made from old dentist's x-ray blankets. And there was often the familiar chant of “Hustle, hustle, hustle!” (Eventually, the “Hustle” would become a popular dance for a short season while I was in high school.)

But my coach would never utter the H-verb. He was from the relaxed, maybe even meditative, school of baseball and believed that taking things at a slow pace increased your enjoyment and ability. Concerning batting, for example, he would say, “Lean into it,” whatever that meant, as opposed to other more virulent coaches screaming for their eleven-year-olds to slam it, massacre it, or bash it out of the park. Now that I think about it, it could have been the snails he ate.

“Lescargot, get under it. Take your time, that's it.”

Every time I see one of those slow-motion movie scenes of a high flyball heading toward an inept little league outfielder I understand the truth captured by the film footage. The beauty of such cinematography is that the viewer would not care one iota if a tornado lay waste to all the family members sitting in the stands watching the team. We would not care if a nuclear war leveled half the planet just then. We just want the puny little kid to catch the goddamn baseball.

Like in those films, I'm frozen there in the outfield, paralyzed by fear of injury to the aforementioned parts of my anatomy, trying to take my time. (What else is there to do?) I'm blinded by the sun, the ball is hanging somewhere in space above me as if gravity has been suspended, as if the Hollywood director is making a test case out of this one to see just how long he can drag out the emotion and the suspense, the infinite hopes of millions of would-be viewers.

Then the world goes mute. There is no sound around me but I can hear the blood pumping in my ears, as if beating out some muffled Morse code with instructions to stick my six-finger Ted Williams glove up into air. My arm, oddly enough, is willing to respond. If nothing else, it will shield me from getting hit. Amazingly, I'm optimistic. I've seen this done before. On TV Phillies games and even in real life. The ball will be like a magnet to the certainty of an outstretched glove. How could it be otherwise?

For an instant, the world has become a more hospitable place. I've forgotten about my rock collection and can think only of willing the ball out of the sky and into the glove. I'm moving forward even, expectant, my legs seemingly knowing where to go to meet the ball. I'll take my time, of course, I'll lean into it. As if worshipping an ancient primitive god, I find myself going down on one knee. I've seen a pro player, Richie Ashburn of the Philadelphia Phillies, do this. We're still operating on slo mo. Decades are passing.

And then the ball hits with a dull thud into the dead grass three, possibly four, feet behind me. A shudder of disbelief rips my confidence away and I realize that my optimism had been a short-lived but highly potent drug that had curdled my brain. The world has conspired against me and I was not man (or boy) enough to grapple with the vindictive cruel reality of modern baseball.

The coach is no longer yelling, Take your time. He has now borrowed from his adversaries in such a desperate moment. “Hustle!”

I hustle. I know I have failed as only a fool can fail. And at least that means I am in familiar territory. A ball aloft in the sky is terra incognita, but a baseball sitting on the ground, inert, not moving, is familiar psychological real estate. I hustle. (I bugaloo, I swim, I monkey, I twist.) I spin around, sprint, grab the ball and throw. Hard.

Well, I do hustle but in this pivotal moment, I manage to obey both of the coach's injunctions. Let's rewind.

A runner is passing second base, headed towards third like greased lightning. The infield is helpless. The other two outfielders are running towards me as if I'm incapable of doing anything right in the game of baseball. I'm hearing a wall of verbal abuse from both teams but my coach sees me reaching for the ball. He still believes in me. “Lescargot! Take your time!” He means it.

I inhale oxygen at the request of my lungs. I firmly grasp the ball and focus on Bob Blomquist and his catcher's mitt, his hopeful leather sunflower held high up in the air. I remember that our coach has told his outfield over and over again not to gamble on the long-distance heave all the way to home plate under these dire circumstances. Relay the ball by way of the second baseman. But I've played second base before and know how many things can go wrong tossing a ball not once but twice before making it to home plate. My arm ratchets back as far as it can and I throw the ball with all the life force within this eleven-year-old's body.

Even as the ball leaves my grip, I have a small epiphany, a moment of clarity that has served me well all these ensuing years. I may not be good at baseball but I tend to recover well and quickly from my mistakes. (Later I would replace the word “baseball” with any multitude of nouns.)

The enemy coach is telling his runner to (what else?) hustle. Second base is looking up at the orbit of my throw. I wait for the director's slo mo camera to kick in again but there is none. Just a very fast runner heading for home plate. In my head I explain his speed: he's twelve, a full year older than me.

Bob Blomquist has his catcher's mask off now. He has the advantage of no sun in his eyes. My throw is good. I hear the satisfying smack of the ball into Bob's round cushion of leather. He hardly has to stretch for it. I allow the sound to replay itself like a euphoric echo inside my skull. The runner, whose name I cannot remember, slides at the request of his red-faced coach, an insurance salesman who drinks before each game. The kid is twelve and is used to pushing little eleven-year-olds around. Blomquist is eleven like me. We both had Miss Washington for a teacher this past year at Cinnaminson Memorial. But the Quist is tough, I know. That's why he is the catcher. He's got padding, a crotch protector and a chest protector. What could go wrong?

The grown-up runner kicks as he slides and even from this distance I can tell that he's kicking Bob Blomquist, my loyal teammate, in the balls. The plastic cup may protect Bob from permanent damage but he will not be able to maintain his balance. He trips backwards over home plate, the ball falls from his grip and rolls towards the backstop.

But I'm ecstatic. I guess I don't really care who wins or loses. All I know is that mine was a good throw. I'm a lousy catcher but an amazingly good thrower. Unfair negative attention will be leveled against Bob for dropping the ball. No one will believe him when he says he was kicked in the crotch by the runner. But at least, at this point, nobody, not even me, seems to care that I miffed my chance to make a heroic play. I tossed a good toss. The game continues, I settle back into a kind of meditative trance. Nobody hits another ball into right field for the rest of the game.

Later, when it's my turn at bat, I walk, then move on to second base before another teammate strikes out and invokes the wrath of other Glen Meade players, but not the coach. And soon the game is over. One adult, after the game, the father of one of my teammates, singles me out to say that I made a great throw to home plate. His comment matters.

Years spin by and I lose interest in baseball, couldn't even take a wild guess at who plays right field for any team. Not even the Phillies or the Yankees. I've recovered well from my blunders and I still have a good arm for tossing rocks into the sea.

I left most of my rock collection in New Jersey but brought some of the really good geodes and amethysts, and even some chunks of obsidian I once found, here to Nova Scotia, where they mingle outside or on the window sill with other rocks I pick up on the beach.

The worst insult to my beach stones, I suppose, is when I leave one on the kitchen table and somebody in my family cleans up the kitchen. If the stone looks really uninteresting to the family member, it is thrown into the trash and sent to the dump. That's one of the reasons I'm less prone to bring home every rock of interest to keep unless it is the fossil of a dinosaur footprint or a nugget of pure gold. The lesser rocks are carried for several yards or sometimes even miles along the empty shorelines of Nova Scotia where I walk and then I turn to the deep blue sea and I throw them far out into the water.

As I make my pitch of selected stone into the sea, I know that there is part of me sailing through the sky with this object, a stone somewhat less in size than a hardball but larger than a chicken egg. I follow the trajectory with my eye, and as I watch, it instinctively welds together all the things I've done right in my life, and diminishes somehow all the things I've done wrong. I hear the satisfying ker-plunk into the sea and then imagine it settling into the clear, pure north Atlantic water, drifting towards the bottom and settling in among other stones with headgear of exotic golden, brown and green seaweed. I've returned the stone to the sea from where it once emerged and I head on home, my lungs feasting on pure seaside air, feeling all the better for it, fool that I am.

Ravens

It's a warm morning in August by the sea. At eight a.m. I walk the rim of the headland high above the water with the warm mists flowing upward from below. The Gulf Stream has finally brought us warm water. My dog Jody runs and sniffs at the air. The familiar fog is soft and warm around us.

Suddenly, from above, two giant ravens drop out of the sky as if produced by some magician. I feel them before I see them. When I look up I realize they are dancing on the wind, riding the updraft of air rushing up the face of the cliff, swooping left, then right, down, and back up almost as if they are performing to music.

I expect it will be a momentary thing and they will move on but I'm wrong. As Jody and I walk along, they stay with us, arcing upward and then back down until they are quite close to my head. They swoop close to the ground and, for an instant, I think they might be ready to attack my dog. Jody barks once, twice, spins around ready to defend us but the ravens simply continue on doing what they're doing. And it is quite magnificent.

The rush of southerly air pushes straight up the escarpment of the headland and pours up into the sky. The two ravens are working the wind the same way I use the power of the wave when I surf. These black beauties are much more graceful than I, however, and live each day learning to use the tug and pull, the push and power, of the waves of invisible air.

Today must be a singularly good day for this surf-dancing with the wind. And they want an audience. Any species might do, but preferably one or two with good eyes and some sense of admiration.

I believe the ravens to be a pair, although I have no way of knowing. They swoop quickly and effortlessly again, dropping to below eye level along the cliff edge where they hover wing tip to wing tip, then scoop the updraft again with a powerful thrust of their wings and rocket vertically twenty metres into the sky before tucking their wings and dropping like twin black missiles before us. Jody pulls herself back again into a defensive crouch but I'm too hypnotized to care for my own well-being. I am looking up at the great beak of the bird as it plummets, then the wings explode outward and I feel the full blast of compressed air used to change the vector. The raven has come so close to my face that I can smell his scent.

Ravens have a powerful musk, much more so than any other bird I know. And it is, to me, a familiar smell. In my early Nova Scotia years, I once had a raven for a pet, although the word is not quite accurate. Jack had been hauled from the sea, a wounded creature with a broken wing. A vet set his wing, I saw to his recuperation and retrained him to fly. Like this pair above me, his wingspan was the same as my own outstretched arms. And he was as stubborn as me and as determined to live his life by his own rules.

Once Jack had learned to fly, he remained near the house and ate from my hand - dog food and fish scraps - and haunted me with the memory of his friendship for years after he was killed by reckless goose hunters on the nearby frozen lake.

I had a notion that Jack had a secret mate somewhere in the wild that he was spiriting my dog food away to, for often he would stuff his mouth to overflowing and then fly away beyond my sight. My notion of the secret mate persisted beyond his demise and I believe that Jack's progeny are still out there in the world around me.

I even have private notions that they are out there keeping an eye on me and my family, somehow protecting us or providing day-to-day good luck. This is a silly assumption, I suppose, with little basis in fact, but it persists as do many other significant myths that shape my day-to-day life.

There is little doubt, though, that the ravens sitting on the electric line when I appear in the morning to feed the pigeons are there to gather the cracked corn for their own sustenance. One sits on the telephone pole at the bottom of the driveway and when I emerge from the house, he announces it to the others - six of them at least, scattered around the marsh. They all converge within minutes and make themselves known with raucous discussion about my arrival.

Once I let my pigeons free to fly, the ravens compete for the corn that I scatter on the ground. The watch raven, when approached, will look me in the eye and, if the contact is too personal, he will fly away. It's not a matter of physical proximity but something else. A trickster must be cautious with bridging psychic distance with beings as dangerous as we are.

Technically known as Great Northern Ravens, many of Jack's distant relatives appear to me wherever I travel. They stand beside the highway each time I drive to the airport. They caw from treetops on any coast of this province I hike. I sat on a bare springtime hilltop in a remote village once - Mutton Bay, along Quebec's Lower North Shore of the St. Lawrence, just south of Labrador - and a raven dropped out of the sky, landed on a rocky outcropping by me and studied me as he preened himself in the sun.

Ravens attended to my loneliness, walking along an empty city street in Sudbury on a cold November morning. A raven woke me up in Tokyo each morning I was there, perched on the metal railing outside, raucously reminding me as it broke my sleep that I may have travelled far but I was still living in the dominion of the great black birds.

We read a lot into birds. At least I do. Eagles appear when important things are about to happen. Hummingbirds make their exquisite arrival outside my window each summer to suckle from jewelweed and I don't realize I have stopped breathing. They shift my mood from confusion to peace and then they disappear.

Hawks and egrets materialize for me when people die. I know this to be true, although I announce it to others who show scepticism. Small birds dart in front of my car and some die despite my attempt to swerve or slam on the brakes. They too, perhaps, are there to remind me of my own flimsy grasp on mortality. I grieve for their loss and stop to retrieve them from the road, even though the guilt is worse when confronted with the carcass of my crime.

I try to help all injured birds. I carry wounded Canada geese home from the sea. Only minutes after I brought a January goose home from Seaforth, a harrier hawk dropped from the sky and snatched one of my pigeons from the roof. My daughter and I ran after the hawk, because we were outside attending to the wounded goose. We screamed at the hawk as we ran down the road after it. The hawk was startled and the pigeon was set free. Had we not been outside at that moment, the pigeon, the one called China, would have been lost.

I have this instinctive feeling that all acts of kindness to wild creatures are rewarded in this life or the next. But that doesn't seem to be enough to satisfy me because I sometimes find myself talking about my acts of kindness - okay, it's a kind of bragging about them, I suppose. Like the ducks on Main Street.

I am on my way to give a talk at a school on the other side of the harbour. It is morning rush hour in Dartmouth on the four lanes of Main Street. Late spring in the rain, I'm stopped at a traffic light. A mother mallard duck is entering the highway from the parking lot of Chebucto Ford, walking out into the traffic followed by twelve baby ducks.

Within seconds they are all in the middle of the road. The light changes as I see the crisis and I leap from the driver's seat and charge out into the oncoming traffic. I put out my arms in both directions - the ducklings' crossing guard - and discover I have perfect command of all the drivers on the road.

They see me; they see the ducks. They watch a shaggy-haired poet ushering a brood of tiny ducks across a major traffic artery. No one hits their car horn. Everyone is patient. Commuters sit through a second red light until the tiny creatures, some too small to easily climb up over the curb on the far side, are trundling off into the relative safety of a suburban lawn.

I'm soaking wet by the time I arrive at my school and already boasting about my good deed. I've written large novels that have provided me with no more satisfaction nor reason to strut my own accomplishment.

The ravens dance above my head, and continue to perform above us rather than chasing the updraft east along the cliff. Over and over, they come perilously close to me as they allow themselves to seemingly hurtle like rocks out of the sky before stretching their wings and arcing upward.

And then they begin to do something else.

As they ascend on a powerful gust of wind, one raven rolls over onto its back and stretches out its talons. The other raven stretches out its own feet until - for a split instant - the talons grip and they begin to tumble. I've only seen anything like this once before - a pair of eagles, near Inverness in Cape Breton.

My own dark eagles repeat the act. I can't tell one from the next, they look so perfectly the same. I wonder what exactly it means, what it takes for a bird to dare to turn on its back, far above the sea, to grip its taloned mate, testing itself or the other or the natural forces of gravity versus wind.

Or maybe they are performing for an audience this daring act in a sea-misted sky, celebrating the warm summer air driven north from the tropics a week before the first great hurricane of the season, a wind that will breed waves tall enough for me to carve graceful turns and swoops across a giant wall of moving water in my own imperfect imitation of the masters.

China and Other Possibilities

Many people think pigeons have three toes, if they've ever thought about it. But they're wrong. Pigeons should have four toes. Three up front and one out back, which makes for pretty good balance. One of my pigeons, however, somehow ripped off one of his toes last night on the wire in his pigeon cage. When I let them out to fly around this morning I noticed he had blood dripping as he flew into the sky. I caught him and washed his pigeon foot and treated the wound with hydrogen peroxide, which I hope was the right thing to do.

And then I started in on feeling sorry for him and ultimately myself. It was the seventh day of September and September can breed small pockets of sorrow. And now I had a pigeon with three toes on one leg. I was fairly sure he would be all right. The name of this pigeon is either Butterscotch or China. Sunyata had picked him up from the middle of a highway near Dartmouth. He was white and tan and not real smart but a very likeable pigeon all around. Sunyata had to jump out of her friend's car in traffic to save him. This runs in our family. I have many times jumped out of cars to save snakes, turtles, small birds, a dog once and so forth.

We're a family that defies automotive death to animals where possible, putting a small dent into a sometimes dispassionate universe. Sunyata was seventeen then and a new driver. She took the pigeon to a veterinarian, who said simply that the bird was “stunned” and later, upon the pigeon's recovery from being stunned, the same vet suggested that the bird “probably isn't all that smart.”

So we took home the pigeon with the low IQ and it turned out to be a great mate for Rosa, our lone surviving pigeon. For a while, my name, China, stuck and the kids would ask, “How are things with China today?” and I would say, “China's doing pretty good.” And then they started calling China Butterscotch because of his colour. I didn't think Butterscotch was a very masculine name for a bird but kids don't seem to give a hoot about that.

So now China was down to three toes on one foot and he was like many of those city pigeons you see who have lost or damaged pigeon toes. Rosa was married, so to speak, to China and they have had two young pigeons that looked more like Rosa than China. They all enjoyed flying around and around the sky in the morning and Rosa would come to the garden to eat fresh garden peas from my hand or when I gripped one between my teeth. I wrote a song about her, called “The Wings of Rosa,” and performed it with The SurfPoets. It's about flying and freedom and that sort of thing and has three chords: F, G, and A minor. I always like sneaking in an A minor chord.

And so this seventh day of the ninth month, this recent third place surfing competitor was wrestling with September insanity. I think it had to do with the usual end of summer stuff but also the fact that Sunyata, now nineteen and Pamela, now thirteen, were both about to go away to school. Sunyata to Scotland, Pamela to Wolfville. Doors were opening and closing. Nothing could save me from feeling those changes deep down in my bones.

Calamity collects around holidays, as I'm sure you know. Labour Day weekend was fraught with the usual disasters. In Ontario, nearly forty vehicles piled up on the 401, reminding us of the madness of automobiles. In Nova Scotia, two drunk men on a very long late night walk home went to sleep on the highway and one got run over and killed. The other slept through it all and survived. It's probably worth staying off the roads altogether on holidays. Especially if you want to sleep.

On Labour Day, I took my two daughters out to buy really greasy fish and chips from a mobile-home-style take-out. I paid for the greasy food and we drove off to a provincial park to eat in the forest by Porters Lake. In the process of backing into a picnic site, I smacked the rear of the car into a tree. That's right. It wasn't even a small tree. It was a really big tree and I backed right into it quite hard.

I don't usually do things like that but I can blame it on the fact that it was a holiday and that my kids were going away. My subconscious mind was screaming the headlines that life was changing in some big way and I should go back my car - my new car - into a tree in the middle of the forest. In that quirky subliminal way, it probably even makes sense. At the time, though, we were all shocked. Wham. Tree.

The rear window was dusty and the sun blurred the vision in that direction, making the tree, I suppose, invisible. It wasn't there when I went past the picnic site and decided to back up. It appeared out of nowhere and I slammed the rear end of my car into it. I was looking straight at it with my head twisted around even as I connected but it just wasn't visible to me.

So I have this big dented plastic bumper now. I think the old metal bumpers would have reacted differently. But nowadays cars have a lot of plastic in them. The tree was probably glad it was plastic and not metal with shiny chrome like the old Fords and Chevies and Edsels had. After I dislodged my car from the tree and ate the greasy fish and chips (now an $800 meal) I studied the tree to see if it would reveal the mystery of its shrouding mechanism. It looked like an average forty-foot tall spruce tree that had been hanging around a Nova Scotia forest all its life. But it had other scars, I noticed. Other drivers had driven into this tree before.

I spent the afternoon trying to urge the bumper back into its proper shape with minimal success. And that was pretty much the end of my holiday.

The week leading up to this Labour Day was also eventful. A powerful hurricane, Cindy, sat off the coast, generating great surf - big, boomy waves. In nearby Herring Cove, a father and daughter were swept off the cliffs and drowned. I surfed with some friends at a remote spot on waves like the ones you read about in magazines. The water was warm, the take-off on the waves was like dropping down an elevator shaft. There were some tubes to be had. Sometimes the wave would lurch up and pull itself over my head as I raced across the face of it. I started in sunlight, faded back into a big dark tube of green ocean and then slipped myself back out into daylight. Screaming. I like to scream when good things happen to me. This is something you can do when out surfing with your friends. You can scream. You can rinse your mouth out with sea water, too. You can even pee in the ocean. But if you think about the latter two together, you might want to consider avoiding rinsing your mouth out with seawater.

On the previous Sunday, a week before Labour Day, I surfed my brains out. The mind was limp by about seven in the evening, my arms noodled from all that paddling. I had seawater in my ears from the wipeouts and every once in a while I did this odd little one-foot jig with my head tilted to the side to try and flush small quantities of the Atlantic Ocean from my left ear.

In fact, that's what I was doing - the seawater-in-the-ear-dance - while standing on the headland overlooking Stoney Beach, just watching the ocean because I like watching waves when I'm not riding them. The waves were even bigger now than some I'd ridden earlier - two-to-three-metre range, maybe some larger. That's when I noticed two kayakers in the ocean, swamped and in trouble. They were at the precise place where the Lawrencetown River empties into the open ocean. It was low tide, which meant the river was rushing out while the waves were rushing in. It's a big bad washing machine under these circumstances.

Because of the river current, unwary swimmers have been sucked out to sea here and some have drowned. In 1984 I swam to sea and pulled a woman, a mother of four, to shore but my efforts had been in vain. She had stopped breathing and her heart had stopped and she couldn't be revived. This happened on a holiday, of course - Canada Day. I've never trusted Canada Day - or any other holiday, for that matter, since. The drowning has haunted me for years.

So now the river and sea - and my big boomy, beautiful thrusting, heaving, heavenly waves - were conspiring to drown two more victims. At first I tried to convince myself that these may be veteran kayakers who knew what they were doing. But it soon became obvious that such was not the case. They were in the raging waters, hanging onto their kayaks which were completely filled with water. Maybe they would simply get washed shoreward. I watched and waited for five minutes until I realized they were in that most impossible zone: the river tugging outward while incoming waves slammed down hard over them, pushing them towards shore. The end result was that they could not get in to shore nor could they drift out to sea beyond the crashing waves to deeper water. They were stuck. One of the men started to yell and wave his paddle in the air until another wave slammed over top of him and he got chundered for maybe the thirtieth time.

There were no phones and no assistance to be had. I raced home and quickly returned in five minutes with my surfboard. Then I put in at Stoney Beach and paddled out the river. My heart was thumping in my ears. At first, I had convinced myself this would be easy: I had a wetsuit on, which helps to float me. I had my trusty nine-foot surfboard. I understood the mechanics of what was going on with the river. I understood waves. But when I reached the washing machine zone, I realized that I too was immediately stuck there as badly as they were. And I was getting slammed by overhead waves.

Here were two men, exhausted, hanging on to two kayaks filled to the brim with water. One guy, gulping water, tried to say he was glad to see me. He was trying to pretend he wasn't scared. It was only then that it occurred to me that I had fully committed myself to saving them and I began to worry that I may not be capable of helping either one of them.

Just then, another surfer, sixteen-year-old Chris Meuse, appeared on the scene. He was a kid I sometimes surfed with. A good kid who understood waves. Although it was comforting to have his assistance, I also felt a greater sense of responsibility. Whether I liked it or not, I was in charge here.

Even as I was getting slapped by another wall of water, I decided on the way I would try to play this scene. I couldn't pretend to be brave or gutsy or fearless; I just didn't have it in me. So I decided to play it cheerful. Cheerful defiance is something I learned somewhere - a tool to use when life throws you a grenade. And I felt like I had been handed a big wet one about to go off each time a new set of waves rolled on top of us.

I urged the weaker of the two men to let go of the kayak, get on my board and I'd swim alongside, attached by my surf leash. Chris followed my lead with the other guy, but not before one of the fibreglass kayaks slammed into them and punched a hole in Chris's board. Ouch.

I had a plan. Try to paddle across the current and eventually come ashore on the rocks of the headland.

The plan didn't work.

We were still trapped in the push-pull of river and wave. And the waves were slamming over us now with cruel and regular ferocity. We all struggled until we finally succeeded in getting away from the kayaks but we still couldn't make any headway in any direction.

My Plan B was to not fight anything. Just get away from the breaking waves. Let the river pull us all out to sea and wait for the rescue zodiac to arrive. (The zodiac, as it turned out, was not about to arrive. It showed up at the wrong beach.) So we had our kayakers, one on each board, as Chris and I wallowed in the waves until it seemed the waves were pushing us more towards the sandy shores of Conrad Beach on the west side of the river. Nothing to do but go with the flow. At this point, those once nasty waves were in their own way kinder than the river. They helped us get to shore. Heavy breathing all around.

One of the kayaks was eventually pulled straight out to sea and never seen again. The other eventually washed in. Names and handshakes: Tom and John, if I remember correctly. One was bleeding from the face but nothing critical. They thanked us profusely and offered to buy us beer and steak. Chris said that he was too young to drink. I said I was a vegetarian, which was only partially true. I think they offered to reward us in some other way but we both just shook our heads and paddled across the inner mouth of the river to tell the fireman's rescue team (without the zodiac) that had just arrived that it was all over.

Later I would learn that the only reason Chris showed up was because he saw a woman who he thought was his mother waving from the shore. It wasn't. It was a woman directing him to help the drowning kayakers. And so there he was. I was on the scene only because I wanted one more look at the ocean and the waves before the sun went down. And the sun did go down, less than an hour after we all stumbled ashore.

I surfed on into the week on slightly smaller but elegant waves as Cindy turned towards Newfoundland where the colder waters of the Labrador Current drained its tropical strength to naught.

Somewhere in the middle of the week leading up to Labour Day, I completed a small obligation I had made to a local theatre company. Willpower Theatre had commissioned playwrights David French, Mary Colin Chisholm and Ed Thomson to each write a short play on the morning of the very day that series of plays would be staged. I had been chosen as the guest writer to write the first line that all of them would use. Each would take my opening sentence, write an entire play that would be cast, rehearsed and performed that same evening at the posh Neptune Theatre in downtown Halifax.

What I came up with was this: “I may appear angry on the outside but it's just a necessary disguise for the happiness I feel within.”

I don't know who that “I” was for sure but I think some part of it is me. Maybe that's why I drove my car backwards into a tree but I will not pursue that thread of logic further. To the world, I believe, I rarely appear angry, nervous, frightened or full of despair. Sometimes I appear downright competent. I even convince people that I know what I'm doing. Chris and the kayakers were fairly convinced that I had a workable plan out there in the heaving sea. Such a “necessary disguise” was useful in those circumstances. But the truth is that I spend a lot of time floundering, awash in the briny turmoil pummelling each of us on a daily basis. My theatrical alter ego would counter this with genuine anger - as good an engine as any to help him make it through the day. My other self who ambulates through the waking world adopts the cheerful defiance approach to carry him through holidays and family departures, car disasters, sea calamities and the morning sadness of a pigeon named China with three toes.

Class Reunion

I had not been planning on going to a high school class reunion. Not even the approaching thirty-year reunion. But, one night in a dream, the late great bearded poet of Fredericton, Alden Nowlan, appeared to me. He was standing in front of an old floor-model TV set, adjusting the antenna - the portable V-type unit that was once referred to as rabbit ears. Alden knew I was in the room and, as the black and white picture shifted from fuzzy grey snow to clarity, he smiled at me. I don't know why I was there in the room or why Alden was watching TV. Nor can I think of any reason why I would be dreaming Alden back into existence on this particular night.

The scene shifted right away in that clever but confusing way that dreams often shift. Alden and I were now someplace else and we were talking about two thousand dollars. Why we were talking about two thousand dollars is a mystery. Why that number? Why money at all?

In the next shift, we were looking at an old rusty car engine block - his or mine, probably mine. The exhaust manifold was cracked and a chunk of the iron had fallen out. Alden was pointing this out to me.

In real life, I had once fixed - or thought I'd fixed - that exact problem in one of my many old cars. I had simply patched it up with wood stove cement, a solution not recommended by anyone who knows anything about automotive repair. It was an old Toyota engine and it was during that longish phase in my life where I had almost no money. I did the best thing I could under the circumstances: I swabbed a big whack of stove cement on my problem and just kept driving the car. It was quiet at first and then got noisy and the engine misfired a lot, but I decided not to look under the hood to see if my patch had cracked and fallen out. I kept driving the car in the belief that I had fixed it and that was enough to keep it running until I could make some money to pay someone to properly fix the problem.

Now anyone who has never heard of Alden Nowlan or never read his poetry should do so right away. Even people who think they hate poetry. I was never a personal friend of Nowlan but he was around when I moved to Canada. Alden, through his writings, made me believe in the power of words and the possibility of writing unpretentious and great stuff. I met him a couple of times and he was always large, uncomfortable, shy, awkward, difficult to understand and sometimes drunk. When receiving an award one night in the Neptune Theatre he gave a memorable thank you speech that rambled around in the backwoods of confusion, good intentions, alcohol and nervousness until he got around to saying something like this: “And so I'd like to quote from something that the great Nova Scotian writer, Will R. Bird, said on the occasion of receiving an award much like this, words that have always stayed with me to this day . . . 'thank you very much.'” Alden had either forgotten what Will R. Bird had said in receiving his award or that was exactly what Bird had said. The audience would never know but we all clapped and cheered as my literary hero, stoop-shouldered and inebriated, lumbered off the stage with some assistance from Greg Cook, who would one day write a biography of the poet.

Alden Nowlan was a bashful and sometimes awkward man - or at least he seemed so. In that regard, at least, he was of my tribe. Although I present a good face to the world on most public occasions, part of me remains the shy, insecure and somewhat awkward boy that I once was. Maybe the reason the dead poet was fussing with the rabbit ears in my dream was because he was trying to get me to tune in to something I need to know. He believed I needed to point my antenna in the right direction, find focus. I still haven't figured out the two thousand dollars but the cracked manifold, I think, suggested that something in the engine that was driving my life down the road needed fixing.

And then Alden Nowlan cleared his throat and looked at me. He told me that I should go to my class reunion. I should do this thing and not make up any excuses to avoid it.

And so I did.

On the days leading up to this pivotal event, Nova Scotia was gifted with a solid week of waves generated by another hurricane. Warm water and head-high waves thundered past the tip of every headland. I sidled into a routine of surfing, writing, teaching and more surfing. It was a blissful kind of existence punctuated by the occasionally embarrassing sinus drain. If you don't spend a lot of time in salt water, you may need an explanation.

Wiping out repeatedly in fresh, clean, salt water and getting chundered by energetic high-impact waves means that salt water gets forced into several, if not all, orifices of your body. Sometimes you get enough saline solution shoved up your nostrils so that much later, at some unpredictable moment hours later, well after the surf session is over, your sinuses let go with a long clear flow of something that is half ocean, half you. Sometimes it's a long, clear nasal drool that hangs halfway to the floor and sways there like trapeze artist. But more often it's a small Niagara that happens during a job interview or, in my case, while I'm teaching my university students about Walt Whitman or while I'm interviewing an almost famous writer on my TV show. My camera man is now prepared for the telltale sniffle leading up to a major sinus drain and is hair-triggered to cut to the guest.

Some surfers visiting from California for the waves, including David Pu'u, a legendary in-the-water surf photographer, who wanted to get some shots of me for his magazine. It was one of those things I had once dreamed about while growing up as a surf geek in New Jersey.

On the fourth day of the hurricane waves, I was trying to shed my middle-age caution for teenage abandon on six-to-eight foot waves that were forming perfect barrels within a few feet of the bouldered shoreline of Seaforth. Steep, fast and clean as a whistle. I would slide back into the tube and allow the wave to cover me. Some granted me a quick return to daylight as I scooted out of the tunnel while other waves had me for lunch. But the water was warm and I was enjoying the capture nearly as much as the release.

David appeared as this floating head with a camera on the steepest part of the wave. In order to get the shot he wanted he urged me to “drive straight for the camera. Don't worry about me.” He claimed he had his instincts honed. He'd drop beneath the sea at the last second to avoid getting slammed in the head by my board. I trusted him enough to aim straight for him, but I always cut back away in time, just in case he miscalculated.

Not long after David got the shot he was looking for, my first big glossy magazine crack at California surf mag immortality, I began to get cocky. I took off later, deeper in the pocket. I slipped back into the tube farther than before and then I slid back out into the golden evening sunlight. I did this over and over, surfing beyond my usual ability and expectations, with grace and precision.

And it was about then that I stopped expecting things to go wrong. In other words, I broke rank with my tribe. I was no longer the shy, the awkward, the insecure fourteen-year-old boy who maintained residence in my middle-aged body. I felt like I had achieved some kind of state of grace.

That's also when I was plundered by one of the finest oversize walls of cyclonic energy ever to knock me off my board. The wave had its way with me, slamming me hard, nose first, pitch-poling my board, giving me three excellent concessive hammerings that suggested the ocean was trying to tear my limbs from their sockets. And I came up sucking for that precious commodity of Nova Scotia air only to discover another surfer dropping down the face of an overhead and equally tubular wall of water. I was down in the water, still tethered to my board while Rob Spicer was already in a critical drop with no way out of a collapsing wall of water.

I yelled something monosyllabic. (Who has time for two syllables when you are about to have your skull parted by your friend's exquisitely sharp and knife-like fin?) Rob countered with a familiar monosyllable of his own. He was still on his feet and hopelessly trying to avoid me as I dove deep, looking for the sanctity of sea floor in this great time of need.

Rob avoided shredding my carcass but failed to avoid my own surfboard, which he skewered with that razor fin of his, slicing fibreglass and foam of what was recently a pristine new custom board. The waves swallowed him for his foul deed and I retrieved my board, sulked briefly and remembered old surfing algebra that seemed to factor in standard payments for excellent sessions. Over the years I had replaced the “ding the body not the board” with the reverse anthem. Fibreglass repair used to seem expensive compared to Band-Aids and bruises but times had changed.

The waves of September gave way to airplane wings to New Jersey in October and that reunion with the Class of '69 from Cinnaminson High School. Here were guys I had begun surfing with when I was thirteen, girls I had kissed in kindergarten (I had very early romantic instincts). Ignoring the more formal trappings of the event, I was eager to explore the pains and passions of youth.

Kids who were once picked on by bullies were now designing nuclear power plants. Old chums who used to steal cars were in charge of chemical factories in South America. There were architects and lawyers and investment bankers and some were “into retail.” When one former classmate, a girl (now a woman) with two-storey hair, asked me what I did, I told her I “live in Canada and write books.” Her response was, “No, I mean really.”

Bodies had changed and so had a few souls. I found communion among old allies and enemies and I'm sure I was not the first to admit we had not changed the world significantly. (How could we have failed, this class of 1969?) Nor was I the first to feel overwhelmed by the slippage of time. Tim Stack, former class president, had a photo of himself and his kids on the beach with his old 9v6 Dewey Webber. Old half-true adventures were recounted even as spouses of graduates sat glassy-eyed and removed.

Tim Stack would point across the room to the president of a multinational corporation and say, “We used to make fun of him in school.” Motive enough for success - an American's healthiest form of revenge.

Paramount on my personal agenda that night was a heart-to-heart talk with Cherie Devlin. My ninth grade failed relationship with Cherie was something that had haunted me for decades. And a class reunion is all for naught if it is not the place to spew words of unstated truth buried in the archival vault of the heart.

My first attempt to breach the barricade of years failed. At first I didn't even recognize her. An insult, I suppose. We had the polite drill about jobs and kids and geography. She had two children, did some acting and TV commercial work and lived in Phoenix, Arizona. Soon we were swallowed by the crowd and I kept getting absorbed into conversations with accountants who had once been high school basketball players.

Bobby Carr was there. We'd been friends from the time we were four. Our mothers had revealed to us that we had even been in the same hospital room together after our births, our birthdays a mere two days apart. We had been blood brothers at seven - in those pre-AIDS halcyon days of innocence where we actually cut our fingers with knives and bled into each other's wound. We had drifted apart in high school but now here we were, recounting Tarzan swings, Boy Scout adventures in the Pine Barrens and trying to fill in the three absentee decades with a five-minute synopsis.

I danced with a girl who claimed to have had a crush on me from the first to the fourth grade. But I never knew. I reminisced with cheerleaders who had ignored me through high school. I pretended to remember others who I could not place at all. These things you do at such events.

But it was after midnight and I was working my way back to Cherie. Her husband was tall and mute and looked as uncomfortable as I would have been in such a situation. He was looking forward to getting the hell out of Jersey and home to Arizona, I'm sure.

As the crow flies, New Jersey is only about eight hundred miles from Nova Scotia. Psychologically - for me at least - it's light-years. I was shocked to rediscover how American everybody was. The obvious truth had eluded me: if you are born in the United States, grow up there, go to school there, settle down there and raise kids, work at a job there - you end up being an American. I'm a slow learner in many respects.

It was getting late and I had given up on unfinished business with Cherie. I was waylaid by a high school acquaintance who I would politely refer to as a kid who was once a cruel, masochistic, small-minded son of a bitch. I'll call him Larry. Now he looked like someone who had been knocked around but he also seemed like a rather gentle person. This, after a pair of heart attacks and enough physical therapy to put him back on his feet to attend a high school reunion.

“Was I ever mean to you?” he asked me out of the blue.

Mean would be putting it mildly. “Not really.”

“No, come on. Tell me the truth. Was I ever insulting or nasty?”

In the mid 1960s he had taught me how simple everyday words could be laced with emotional hydrochloric acid. “It was a long time ago,” I said.

“This is important to me,” he insisted. “Did you ever see me go after somebody just to be cruel and rotten?”

I could have kept a logbook. “Don't worry about it.”

“It's okay. Tell the truth. I was rotten to people, wasn't I?”

“Maybe sometimes.”

He looked at me, swallowed hard and said, “I don't know why I was like that back then. I can't understand it.”

“We were kids.”

“I was an asshole.”

“Yeah, well . . . ”

“No, I just wanted to say I'm sorry to you or to anyone else I might have hurt.” He was shouting it now. And I was deeply moved. We were each of us here for a reason. Larry was here to apologize to everyone he'd hurt and I thanked him for that, told him all was forgiven as far as I was concerned. But I'd never been the worst victim. In an odd way, he had even given me strength. We had wrestled each other in gym class. On the street he would have had me face down on the pavement, bloody-nosed, lips kissing oil stains from Ed Gressick's old '57 Pontiac. But in a gym class with rules, I pinned Larry and shocked his friends. One small step for man.

I left Saul on the road to Damascus and headed down the hall to the bar to see who was left. Most of my old classmates had vanished into the same Camden County night air that had allowed them to materialize.

I found Cherie, however, and, after a bit of small talk, I found myself holding out my hands in front of me like a preacher would. Or like they were pages from a book I was reading. I told her that I had really been in love with her in the ninth grade. “I was never able to express it,” I said, “and it's haunted me ever since.”

I would not come out and wallow in telling her what a truly hurting soul I was back then: insecure, awkward, shy and somehow way too self-aware of how inept I was in making contact with the world, especially the world of a girl whom I wanted to be deeply involved with.

“There was that party at Lynn Dunn's, remember?” I said.

“Yes.”

“It was the night that you and I were going to be together, really together for the first time.”

“Everybody knew.”

“You didn't show up. It was just a stupid kids' party. Records on the stereo in Lynn's basement, dancing. Kids showing off, nothing serious.”

“I wanted to be there,” Cherie said.

“The other girls knew why you didn't come but they didn't tell me. They felt sorry for me and some of them danced with me. But I was mad at you. For not showing up.”

“I can understand that.”

“And then I called you,” I said. “I had to stretch the phone line out of the kitchen to sit on the steps to the basement. My hands were sweating. It took me two days to get up the nerve to call. I was really in love with you. But I couldn't understand why you weren't there at that party. I was mad at you.”

“And I really cared for you but . . . ”

I interrupted her, I don't know why. It was my Ancient Mariner thing. This part of the story had to be told by me. “It was really awkward. I know I sounded pissed off. And then you told me on the phone why you weren't at the party. None of the girls who knew would tell me. Your brother had been killed in Vietnam.”

“It took me a long while to recover.”

“And I didn't know how to deal with it.”

“That's not your fault.”

I had been a Boy Scout in those days and had a merit badge for everything from corn-farming to public safety. But what I was really an expert at was an inability to rise above my own petty self-consciousness and communicate with another human being. Someone I cared deeply for.

“When you came back to school you seemed okay. You were cheerful, friendly. You were always kind to everyone,” I reminded her.

“It was just my way of covering it up.”

“I wish you could have let me know how I could have helped.”

“You seemed to be ignoring me.”

“You were nice to me but you were the type who was nice to everybody. I was afraid I was reading too much into it.”

“I rode my bike past your house,” she told me, “just so that maybe I would see you.”

I had ridden past Cherie's house dozens of times myself for a similar purpose. Two ships in a deadly storm trying to save each other but failing to understand the signals.

We slowly and painfully pieced together the tragic series of errors that kept us apart. It's painfully obvious that I could have been of monumental help to her in the darkest days of her life had I only the most rudimentary ability to communicate, to rise up out of my own silly adolescent insecurity and self-loathing to tell her how much I cared and how I would have done anything to help her.

And she had read my infirmity as a kind of aloof nonchalance.

The death of her brother had powerful consequences on Cherie's life. In many ways, it was also a tragedy for me. I believe that if had achieved that single mutual romantic relationship with a girl back then, it would have changed my life. If Cherie had openly expressed her feelings toward me and if I had found the courage to show real affection back then, and had her brother not been killed in Vietnam, had she been at that party . . . well, I would have evolved as a different person. A less confused kid. A more complete person. Maybe this change would have affected me just through high school. Maybe for the rest of my life.

By the end of our high school days, Cherie had decided to go to college to major in the new field of peace studies, to work at conflict resolution on a global level. But something sidetracked her from that calling along the way.

The death of Cherie's brother was the first awakening for me to the stupidity of the American involvement in the Vietnam War. I went on to actively oppose the war in writing and demonstrations and eagerly confronted riot police in street action from New York to Washington and once even found myself marching into Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in a demonstration led by Jane Fonda, urging army recruits to refuse to participate in the conflict that had killed Cherie's brother.

Somewhere in the early 1970s, I had explored the possibility of escape to Canada should I get drafted. Having the luck of the draw of a high number in the lottery, I avoided the draft, but was trained by Quaker anti-war counsellors to teach others how to make the move to Canada without getting caught if need be to avoid becoming fodder for the war. My own brother came perilously close to being drafted and I had explored an alternative for him: Montreal, maybe Nova Scotia. But he never had to execute the escape plan.

After Cherie and I had unravelled the threads of the failed relationship I embraced her and walked away to my room in the motel stunned by the revelations, angry at myself - or at least that diminutive fourteen-year-old self. I tried to blame adolescence or the times we had lived in for my inability to communicate but I could not. It was like so much else I had learned about history in my research for writing books about the United States and Nova Scotia and Canada. Our lives are shaped by our inabilities at least as much as our abilities. History, personal or otherwise, is the product of ill-informed decisions, wrong-headed action or no action at all.

I wished that I could somehow gather up Cherie's high school pain and suffering with my own ancient anguish of those days and turn it into something of beauty and truth, something more than a haunting echo within both of us.

The lives of our many selves from the past do not disappear as the days cascade into a future which becomes another chapter of the past. But the past is geography as well. There is a small nation that still exists and it is inhabited by Cherie and myself and dozens of other people who were part of my life back there in the sixties. Maybe I am the faulty president of that small, sad commonwealth, and like all of the citizens there, we fumble badly with the information that filters our way. We barely recognize each other and we are forever at war with the belligerent enemy states that surround us.

Amazingly, no one that I knew from my graduating class of 1969 was killed in the war, despite the fact that it raged on and consumed many American young men. It had something to do with us being white and middle class and heading off to colleges of our choosing. Cherie's brother was an anomaly but he was not alone. During my war protest days, I became a great fan of Canada as a haven of draft dodgers and, partly because of this, it would one day loom large as the real estate that would suit me well for my republic of the future. My perfect art of the inarticulate, that great crushing skill that had stifled me back then, made me appear, of all things, to be aloof. It evolved, I suppose, into a mad and chronic desire to communicate, to write, to get it all down on a page. To make sense of the incomprehensible as best I could.

The last time I saw the late great bearded, socially befuddled but brilliant writer, Alden Nowlan, was the day he died. I was not in the hospital room in New Brunswick where he was losing his battle with throat cancer. I was in my garden and Alden appeared to me as an elegant white bird, a cattle egret. It was spring and I was scratching at the ground and planting seeds of chard and kale and spinach. The cattle egret, rare for Nova Scotia, is a stork-like creature with long thin legs and a long pointy beak and a tuft of yellowish feathers on its neck.

The hair stood up on my own neck and, as the egret followed me around the garden in my humble pursuit of planting, I knew that something profoundly significant was going down somewhere. Later, I learned that this event occurred at the very time Alden was dying. I didn't even know he was in the hospital.

After the news of Alden's death arrived, I remembered the poem he had sent me for the magazine I was editing - the one where he took the persona of a large white bird flying through the clouds. Really good poets have a way of making metaphors work, I guess, because there he was in my garden, still kind of shy and awkward, but now a beautiful, graceful white winged creature watching me plant the seeds that would grow into lush green plants as the days grew longer and the sun warmed the rich, dark summer soil.

Hair, Surfing and the Meaning of Life

I like hair, lots of it. Hair on the head, at least. I like long hair on men and women. I'm an enemy of fashion unless the current trend is to endorse long, natural, full-flowing hair.

My interest in hair is long and complex and I have strong opinions on this subject. I think short hair is a disappointment on just about anyone. Baldness is forgivable and if a man grows a beard it's an indication to me that if he could, he'd have a big long wonk of hair on the top of his head too. People have aimed accusations of sexism at me for my disapproval of short hair on women but then I don't seem to have much effect on short hair trends, anyway, so consider me more concerned about the hair issue than gender commentary. I've taken my lumps for my hair opinions already and should know better. For example, I wanted to name my band “Downtown Lesbian Haircut” as a kind of rueful rock and roll statement but I was nearly booted out of the band. So I'm well aware that I'm on shaky ground but some things have to be said.

As far as I can tell, the first significant long hair statement in my life was made by Jesus Christ. Now, I don't have a clue as to what the real Jesus Christ looked like, but at the Palmyra Moravian Church where I went to Sunday school and sometimes even a tedious but sincere church service, there was this floor-to-ceiling painting of Him on the wall behind the pulpit. There was Jesus H. with a flock of sheep. It had a slightly Maxfield Parrish feel to it, as I reflect upon the image now. Jesus was holding a lamb and his sheep had those really cool ethereal sheep faces that made me have early thoughts on vegetarianism.

I had grown up with that image of Jesus with his flock in what appeared to be the Valley of Darkness from the Lord's Prayer. Jesus had really long, flowing hair. There were, however, no men in the congregation with hair like that, certainly not the minister or my father. At that point in my life - I was twelve, it was 1963 - I'd never even met a man with long hair around Cinnaminson, New Jersey.

My own hair was pretty close to what they call a buzz cut today. It was my mother's idea. She was way ahead of her time. The haircut itself was always perpetrated upon me in our basement beneath fluorescent lights near my mother's African violets. I hated getting my hair cut. I kept asking over and over why it was necessary and there was a veritable concordance of lame answers to this. None of which made the slightest bit of sense.

The litany went something like this. You needed short hair in the summer because long hair was hot. In the winter, well, it was matter of looking neat. Long hair was dirty or it made me you “look like a girl.” That phrase was one of the great emasculators of my day. And definitions of masculinity were pretty narrow in those regimented days of the early 1960s. Guys had short hair. Girls had long. How could such a dictum be questioned by mere youth? Sometimes there were even religious arguments. Aside from a few of my contemporaries who were prone to steal bikes and smoke cigarettes, the only person who was willing to approve of longish hair was my grandmother, Minnie. While my grandfather hated long hair nearly as much as he hated Democrats or the black fungus that grew on his summer corn, Minnie approved of the wildness in appearance that went along with ill-trimmed hair.

The church hated long hair through the fifties and sixties even though everywhere you turned you bumped into another painted portrait of a long-haired saviour.

The big church painting of Jesus clearly portrayed him with long locks. Oh, those were different times, some said. No scissors, no knives? What? No barber shops or mothers with noisy hair sheers in their basements? I think someone tried to tell me once that there was an error in the painting and here's why. The big Jesus with his flock in the Valley of the Shadow of Death was painted during the Depression by a bum - or at least a guy with no money or home. In those days, even nice people looked like bums (possibly with long dirty hair) so you tried to be nice to them. So this artist, let's call him Van Gogh just for the sake of the story, is looking for a hot meal and a place to sleep for the night where he won't get rained on. He is walking down Route 130 - called the Camden Pike in those days - and he stops by the manse of the Palmyra Moravian Church. He goes into the church to pray and sees they have this big empty wall staring him in the face and he wants at it.

A deal is struck and Van Gogh paints Jesus as he thinks Jesus looks. And it is very, very Biblical and the sheep have those cool loving eyes and, although it's not wildly original (Moravians would not have approved of a Dali or a Magritte - both would have been turned away without a crumb), it's a fine job.

Van Gogh received some small financial reward and went on his way, presumably to paint another Jesus in another church - maybe the same image, I don't know. During the thirties apparently, people weren't worrying about the long hair/short hair issue. There was joblessness, starvation, economic ruin and a Dust Bowl to keep everyone occupied.

But skip foreword to the fifties and those of us trying to grow up in ensuing decades where fifties ideas would not suffer decline. By the 1960s, I had considerable ambitions: I wanted to grow up, spend a lot of time surfing and making out with girls and letting my hair grow to whatever length it wanted to. Fortunately, there was already a vanguard of forward-thinking individuals who would forge a path in the wilderness, so to speak, to make my dreams come true. I'm referring to surfers, beatniks, college radicals and the general anti-establishment rebels.

By the time I started surfing, I had convinced my parents to allow me to grow my hair long enough to cover the tops of my ungainly ears and, in the front, to let it cascade halfway down to my eyebrows. I had to keep explaining to my brother that I did not have “bangs.” Even with such modest hair fervour, I took abuse from the less radical tribe in my gym class or on the street. But I was sussing out secrets codes in the Beach Boy songs I was listening to on my record turntable. The lyrics may seem banal to most. “Round round get around, I get around,” or “Let's go surfing now, everybody's learning how, come on a surfari with me . . . ,” but when I saw those California singers on TV and they had hair dangling down over their eyes, I knew my hair could do that, too, if it only had half a chance.

So I slid downhill in the eyes of the community after that. I bought clam digger pants (a pawn to the fashion industry), a couple of “bleeding“ Madras shirts and I steadfastly refused to go down to the basement and get sheared among the African violets. I bought the 9’ 6” Greg Noll surfboard on Long Beach Island and I learned to surf small choppy waves. I could knee paddle, take off, turn left (but not right) on a wave and cruise. I learned to walk the nose and do a Quasimodo and eventually a head dip. Hair is a very important part of a head dip.

What, you might ask, is a head dip? It is thus. While you are voyaging across the face of the wave - in my case a three-footer - as the wave begins to break in front of you, you walk to the nose of your long board and tuck your head down, under the lip of the wave. The wave then smacks you upside the head but you don't mind. When you come back onto the shoulder of the wave, your hair is soaked in seawater and if you have long locks they are hanging down in your eyes so you can't see a damn thing. Then you artistically flip your hair out of your face, flinging droplets of seawater in the sunlight and you smile because you know this is all very, very cool. The more hair you have to fling back, the more stunning the move is to anyone or no one who happens to be watching.

I was extremely good at this charismatic but fatuous little surfing manoeuvre and did it over and over as I grew into a better and older surfer until I had really long hair and actually began to somehow do injury to nerves in my neck as a result of flicking my heavy sea-laden hair out of my eyes.

The paradoxical thing about long hair and surfing is that the longer the hair is in the front - the more you allow your bangs to grow - the harder it is to see. Your hair is always falling down in your face and getting in the way. But you don't care because it's your long hair and you'd rather die than admit that short hair is more “practical.”

Now that I'm older and much wiser, I see some of the absurdity and the follies of my youth, but it doesn't mean I'm about to change them. Although my hair is considerably shorter than in my glory days of the early seventies, I have a healthy mop of it that still hangs in my eyes during summer surfing at the beach. In the winter when I surf, I tuck most of it into my wetsuit hood so that I look like the most certifiable dork on the Eastern Shore. Not all of it stays tucked in, however, and, as a result, it gathers salt water and - you guessed it - freezes. I have to brush frosty locks out of my eyes but I allow the rest of it to form elegant, dangling icicles, some reaching down as far as my Adam's apple. It's like some exotic winter jewellery. The sun glints off it in a spectacular way and it is only a minor inconvenience as it dangles against my cheek when I scoot across a wave. I've discovered, however, that a head dip in subarctic conditions is not a really smart move.

In my extensive research on the subject, I've noted the historical and literary importance of hair. When someone wanted to rob Samson of his strength, who do you think they called? Yes, Delilah and her scissors or whatever they used in those days. Walt Whitman had long hair and so did a bunch of other dead poets. So long hair and creativity were a match. During those storied days of the late sixties and early seventies, it was a sure thing that long hair made you play the guitar better. That even worked for me. For example, picture me at thirteen, with something not much better than a flattop with a little fringe around the ears. I'm playing my Silvertone (from Sears) single pickup electric guitar through a Danelectro thirty-watt amp. I'm hitting the A note on the high E string enthusiastically - over and over. Not much to get lathered up about, eh?

Then fast forward to me at twenty. Hair hanging down to my belly button, hitting that same high A note over and over and shaking my freak flag. It's like a whole different universe of hair/music euphoria.

This same celebratory hair, however, meant you got stopped by the police more often. Did they really sit in their patrol cars and say stuff like, “Joe, you see that carload of long hair punks? Should we go get 'em and nail their sorry asses for whatever dope we can find in the car?” Did they really say stuff like that to each other? Yes, I'm certain they did.

But I was never caught at anything truly illegal, just stopped for my hair or maybe a burnt-out bulb in a tail light. When I went to college in North Carolina, though, I had a redneck refuse to sell me gas at a gas station outside Greenville. He looked at me, my shag, my 1962 Ford Galaxie convertible with the surfboard and the New Jersey plates. He sized me up good for what I was as if I had a big magnetic Day-glo painted sign on the side of my car: FREAKIN' NEW JERSEY HIPPIE SURFER. He took his time silently sizing me up, looking directly at me, creating a substantial, hovering North Carolina hiatus right there in the humid afternoon after I had requested service. “Ten bucks of regular, please,” was all I said. And I said it politely. His response when he finally got around to one was to slap a lock onto the gas pump and say, “Sorry, we're all out.”

I had a feeling that what he was doing was somehow against the law but decided to go the discretion route and I drove out of there, my long mane of hair floating freely and passionately in the southern breeze.

I cut my hair for a job once and I cut it again before I immigrated to Canada. Did I really think someone would turn me back at the border for the length of my hair? Could be. I wasn't taking chances. The hair grew back and I felt that I had successfully hoodwinked the Canadian immigration authorities.

Hair sits on top of your head and keeps you warm in winter. It keeps mosquitoes and black flies off your skull in summer. Hair is politics and perseverance. It hides your flaws and at the same time makes you somehow larger than life. Hair should be left raw, trimmed slightly, or fuzzy. Clean but free. Hair is freedom and promotes a lack of concern for all the pestering conduits of fashion, conformity and upright pretentious browbeating.

One should not dismiss, however, the dangers of long hair. Even today you are probably more likely to be pulled over by police and searched if your mop is shaggy. Carry nothing illegal. The other car problem was first outlined for me in the 1967 classic How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive for the Compleat Idiot. There were quite a few of us complete idiots in those days and John Muir, the author, sold a big whack of books to us. His classic line in his how-to book on Volkswagen repair went something like this: “Be sure you don't yank your hank!” And he had a very good point. He admonished never to work on your VW engine while it was running - your long hair could easily get caught in the fan belt looped through those two pulleys. Muir assured his readers he'd seen one of his hippie brothers lose a big fistful of hair this way and it was not a pretty picture.

The world moves on, I know, and this year's flat top fad gives way to next year's mop top. People with long raw hair are not necessarily happier or smarter than their counterparts with shorter locks. Someday soon, long hair may become fashionable again beyond the mere drone of lead-singing alternative music icons. If it becomes fashionable, I will feign some indifference lest I be considered another convert of a current fashion.

And therein lies a conundrum. If long, unkempt hair becomes universally fashionable on men, do I cut my hair to endorse my role as “enemy number one of the fashion industry” or do I keep it long and let people think I am completely up-to-date and trendy? My guess is that I will ignore the paradox altogether - as we should always ignore paradoxes - and go surfing. I'll scoot across the face of a six-foot green wall of northern water, do a good old head dip for old times' sake and be careful when I fling the salt water from my locks so as not to injure my neck.

Epilogue: The Piano on the Highway

While driving Minnie's piano to Nova Scotia, I was also carrying other important cargo. There was Pamela, of course, and the surfboard. My mother had also given me some scarlet runner beans to plant in the damp cold Nova Scotia soil. There were money plant seeds and sprouted bamboo shoots. In my yard in South Jersey where I grew up, those tall bamboo trees had flourished, dividing the yard from the traffic like majestic oriental guardians that swayed in the summer winds. Japanese immigrants sometimes stopped and asked my mother for new shoots just like the ones I was taking into Canada.

I was also carrying some baseball cards to Canada. Baseball cards from when I was a kid - a Mickey Mantle rookie card, a Roger Maris from the year he hit all those home runs, a couple of Hank Aarons and a pair of Stan Musials. Others too. According to the book for card collectors, my handful of baseball cards was worth more than the car I was driving. They were worth more than all the royalties I received in total from the first six or seven books I wrote. Some of those books took a couple of years to complete.

During the rainstorm in Maine, I was carrying a heavy responsibility and a bit of fear. The fear was gone by the time we were driving past Lake Utopia in New Brunswick. But the responsibility had been there when I left Canada and headed south and it was still with me when I got back home. It would be with me for the rest of my life and I would continue to carry it with as much dignity as I could muster.

The responsibility came with the territory of having two daughters and keeping the house and cars fixed, food on the table and trying to keep everyone warm and happy. And in some ways, it was a losing battle, I knew, because . . . well, I just knew.

There was a lot I did not declare at customs going to and from the U.S. I carried images of the sea on a summer morning when the waves were perfectly formed and there was no wind. Surfers called those waves “glass.” Glass was ruined by the wind. Glass never lasted but if you could sneak in a few waves before the wind came up, then you had something to carry around in your head to ward off negative thoughts.

I carried morning glass in my head all the time, not just to New Jersey and back. I always took it to the dentist's office and it carried me through drilling and gum work.

On the road north I carried in my wallet an ID card I had bought in college. I had sent away five bucks and received official credentials from the Universal Life Church stating that I was a minister and had the right to marry people as well as “all the rights and privileges accorded to a minister of the Universal Life Church.” The card was signed by the Reverend Tony Diamond, DD. Why I still carried this card was a bit of a mystery but there it was.

I also carried the soft, beautiful secrets of a spring forest in Nova Scotia: dew on the fists of fiddleheads, spider webs crystalline in the morning sun, sagging with the weight of the night's damp caress.

I carried a sense of urgency, which I had conjured up sometime in high school. I had a gut feeling that life would slip away from me if I didn't snag it and hang on for all that it was worth. There wasn't much time to sit by the side of the turnpike and let your engine idle. Sure, get the heck off the road if the downpour turns hellish but get back in the flow and get moving as soon as the sun comes out and your plugs dry off.

I carried my Canadian passport, of course, and my Nova Scotia driver's license but both of them had a picture of a guy from New Jersey on them. I sometimes had a feeling that people could tell this and some day I might be questioned. Just because I had sworn allegiance to God and Queen and taken a driving test in Nova Scotia, did that truly make me Canadian?

Driving Minnie's piano to Canada was a significant event in my life. The Miller Piano Company in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, built it in 1929. I had first heard it played by my grandmother I think around 1960, the year Adolph Eichmann was captured by Nazi hunters, the year Gary Powers was shot down in his U2 plane over the Soviet Union. We were headed into a dark time as Minnie played the piano for me. My grandfather, Gaga, was eating raw oysters in the kitchen, oysters that had been shipped up in a five-gallon can from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. My grandmother had been up since 5:30.

The weight of the piano in the U-Haul made it hard to go up hills and a line of cars clogged up behind us. There was not much passing of other traffic - a tractor, maybe, like the one my grandfather used to plough the fields with - slow but lots of traction. I could feel the trailer weight slowing us down, overheating the poor engine, and I realized that I should have had the radiator replaced as my father advised.

Pamela, as I recall, did not complain about the heat and we left the radio on loud with the windows down and wind blowing all through the car. It was a dull roar of pop music, traffic, and wind - especially out on the Tantramar Marsh looking like a giant manicured Acadian lawn.

The final leg of any journey gives rise to a kind of anxiousness, a joy tinged with satisfaction but also fear. The journey is an event which interrupts the ordinary life and prevents you from dealing with the usual set of problems, tasks and responsibilities. That all comes collapsing back upon you as you near home.

On a clear day, as you drive towards Lawrencetown Beach, you can see my house from about two miles away as you cross over the Lawrencetown River and look beyond the great expanse of marsh and lake. At that moment, I look across to see if my house is still standing. When you go away, you always pray that your home and your life will still be there when you come back.

The potholes on our gravel road seemed deeper than when I'd left. I drove very slowly but the bumps were substantial and I heard the piano produce a minor chord or two before we made it to my driveway. Having arrived home, Pamela jumped out of the car and opened the back door to the usual explosion of dog. Jody, jumping and licking faces and peeing on the ground in the excitement of our arrival.

It rained hard that night, the torrential rain having followed us from Maine. In the night, my dreams collected their chaotic scrapbook secrets and pooled them together into an insane montage of events.

In the morning, I unlocked the U-Haul and removed the surfboard, uncovered the keyboard and ran my fingers along the keys. One of the ivory coverings had fallen off the D note right next to middle C. I began a one-sided conversation with Minnie's piano, a kind of welcome speech, an apology for a difficult trip and some words of thanks for our safe arrival.

Later, after my neighbours helped me move the piano into the house, it would become a kind of shrine of memory and music, sitting in a room that captured the first light of morning on a hillside by the sea.

~~~

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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