Driving Minnie's Piano (15 page)

^{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.}