Driving Minnie's Piano Read online

  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 an
d 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 t
hat 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.