Driving Minnie's Piano (18 page)

^{“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.}