^{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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