Driving Minnie's Piano (22 page)

^{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.}