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Choyce has impeccable pacing, a flare for the lyrical … Sylvie makes a great anchor for this sea yarn.

–Globe and Mail, August 02, 2003

For Sylvie, Ragged Island – and the whales who swam around it – is the only world she has ever known. It is the place where she was born and raised, where she lived with her four late husbands, and where she plans to live out her remaining years. It is also the home to a community whose love for the island is immense. But when the Nova Scotia government decides to shut down the ferry service that is the lifeblood of Ragged Island, the residents see their world beginning to disappear. Sea of Tranquility is the lyrical and moving story of an island struggling to survive. Lesley Choyce’s seventh novel, it contains the elements for which the author is known: engaging characters, page-turning storyline, and uproarious humour. Choyce is in top form.

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July 12, 2003

I wake on a foggy morning twelve billion years into the life cycle of the universe. For all I know, today, July 12, is the birthday of the universe and therein lies the cause of my celebration.

The experts, the ones who have what they think is evidence, argue about the exact age of the universe. Some say it is as young as ten billion while others think it is as antiquated as fifteen billion. The consensus is twelve.

I do the usual. Get up, eat some breakfast and walk the dog on the beach. It was about a year ago that Jody was as close to death as a dog can get. But today she is fine thanks to her family’s loyalty, tenacity, vigilance, medicine, healing thoughts and that colour photo of the old Pope placed beside her.

And today the universe itself is fine. Foggy but fine. There may be surfable waves by afternoon and the fog may lift. Or not. But I’m on the optimistic side of things today after several dark days brought on by I know not what.

On the beach, the usual miracles. Sand — one of the great inventions of a twelve-billion-year-old universe. Wet stones, each one a collaborator in the eight a.m. artwork of this place. Seaweed, dollops of it, bright rusty threads of it, pulpy shiny glands of it, fine thin slimy sheets of it. All of it asleep, waiting for high tide after a night of sleeping off a great party on the beach.

A blue toy sand shovel: evidence of sun and children in the recent past. And then this, my anchor for the morning. Someone has carried a large flat stone to the wooden walkway and written on it with purple paint, “Nakita, 2003, Indian Brook.”

It’s been many years now since NASA launched that probe into deep space. Unmanned but full of math and symbols and music and art and a recording of voices, I think. The earth was already filled with silly monuments in arctic and sub-arctic and tropical places, great chunks of granite set down in cities and countrysides to commemorate atrocities and man’s predisposition to killing each other. Something more ambitious was in order — a benign bullet shot into the vast emptiness of this small galaxy. (There are so many and ours is a trifling bit of fluff, or at most, just another face in a vast crowd).

But we do tend to want to leave some evidence that we were here. As Nakita did.

Why the rock is so instructive and pleasing to me I am not sure. But I think it goes like this. I’m fairly sure Nakita is a girl or a young woman — the purple paint, the shape of the well-formed letters. It is an unlikely name for these parts and it reminds of Nikita Khrushchev who has always interested me.

My take on history is that the only reason we are all still alive is that Khrushchev had the good humanitarian sense to back off in 1962 as his USSR naval men were hauling missiles to Cuba. John F. Kennedy threatened all-out nuclear war if he didn’t stop the shipment. The US already had nuclear missiles not far from the Soviet border in Turkey and Khrushchev had hoped to balance things but Kennedy would have none of it.

In those days, I was but a boy and practising for nuclear attacks at school by going into the hallway and kneeling with my head down facing the wall. Teachers would scold you if you poked your head up, admonishing that if you popped your head up, you would get radiation in your eyes and go blind.

I knew enough science even then to realize that, head up or head down, if we were anywhere near a nuclear blast, we were going to be smoke. It wasn’t like we would be able to get up after it was all over, brush off the dust and go home to dinner.

Like everyone else in my school, I thought we were the good guys and thought Kennedy was a pretty sharp president. But it wasn’t until nearly two decades later that I realized Nikita Khrushchev was the one man who saved us from global calamity on that fateful day.

As I write this, I drift off to look at a small plastic globe sitting in my window. The sun fades the colours of nations. Canada is a large northern faint-pink country. Mexico is  a pale yellow place and the United States, once the sun has altered a prominent green country to light blue, is the same colour as the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The effect is startling. It is as if it is not there. Canada hovers like a great craggy island at the top of the world and Mexico has a northerly coastline. There appears to be an easy navigational path between England and Japan.

Nova Scotia looks like a small narrow appendage dangling to what’s left of the continent.

The seas will reshape all of our native lands any way it damn well wants to when the time comes. My beach is being consumed by the Atlantic and may be gone within my lifetime, so I’m committed to walking it each morning to get my money’s worth out of it before it goes.

I should also point out that Nakita’s rock noted the year, 2003.  Not the exact date, just the year. She clearly had some expectation that people will be noticing that rock, saying to themselves, Nakita was here in the year 2003. Imagine that. She will be old and wise and charming by then. I know this to be true.

The fact she is from the small inland community of Indian Brook assures me that she is in fact Mi’kmaq — descended from the first people who lived in Nova Scotia. The Mi’kmaq have been living here for about 12,000 years if we are interpreting the evidence correctly. My own ancestors, the Europeans, have been here less than five hundred years. We are not as good at sharing the wealth of this place as the Mi’kmaq have been.

The beach, Lawrencetown, named for the military governor responsible for the expulsion of the Acadians and atrocities against the Mi’kmaq, was a place where the Mi’kmaq people would migrate to in the summer. It was a place of great bounty — fish and clams and mussels and more. But in the winter, the Mi’kmaq wisely retreated to the inland forests, following waterways north into the interior.

I don’t ever see many Mi’kmaq people on the beach on hot summer days when the thin strip of sand is crowded with pale city people stretched out on towels, looking oiled and bored.

 

As you may recall, the earth has existed for 4.6 billion years. It took 7.4 billion years before that for the expanding universe to contrive a planet where people would one day invent computers, chewing gum and surfboards. But it was in the schematic from the beginning.

Our spinning sphere was a ball of boiling goo until 3.8 billion years back, at which point some hard surfaces appeared and oceans were in the works. Evidence of life is dated as far back as 3.5 billion years, which, if you think about it, suggests that it came on the scene fairly quickly. This life took the form of blue-green algae not much different from that in the ponds in the salt marsh beyond my garden.

I used to buy the family some fairly expensive supplements of dried blue-green algae that came from a lake in Oregon. It may have done some good and we only quit taking it because it was so darn expensive. This is odd, of course, realizing that it is a form of life that’s been around for 3.5 billion years and such a common commodity in the world. Some people think of blue-green algae as not much more than pond scum. But just because it can’t play chess, it doesn’t mean it is less important than you or me. Far from it.

 

On the week leading up to this birthday of the universe, this foggy Saturday commemorating that extraordinary explosion that set everything in motion, I gave myself (being an intrinsic part of the universe) a series of presents.

One was a journey to a remote Bay of Fundy stretch of shoreline that I’ll call Crystal Cliffs. Crystal because there is amethyst to be found there. Cliffs because you have to lower yourself down to sea level by an extraordinary series of ropes. My friend Lou went with me, each of us uncertain about finding the right path through the dense spruce forest or if we could hoist ourselves back up the cliffs once we made it down.

Lou is a psychologist by profession and he and I hike to remote places to get away from civilization as much as is humanly possible in this century. I don’t think he shared my enthusiasm for the upcoming birthday of the universe and wasn’t convinced that I knew exactly which day it was. But I tried to explain it was like other shifty holidays: Easter or Christmas, for that matter. Washington’s Birthday, even, was sometimes shifted around by the wily Americans to allow for long weekends wasn’t it?

In order to get to our destination we drove to the Fundy Shore and parked at the very end of the road. The great thing about this shoreline is that here is where two continents collided and pulled apart millions of years ago. What was once the landmass of Gondwana had wandered north and west and smashed right into what was the old version of North America. It was a slow crash by modern standards but monumental in that it shoved rock that was once horizontal into vertical formations. And it brought to the surface quite a bit of unusual rock that was usually found deep below the surface.

Fortunately, it was not the sort of collision where lawyers were involved because there were no people around. Mostly just rocks, who had the run of things in those days.

Gondwana eventually became tired of being jammed up against old North America, grew restless in a geological sort of way and headed off south and east to become, ta da, Africa. However, a fairly large chunk was left over, like a scrap of somebody’s fender stuck to your bumper after a car crash. That fender became much of Nova Scotia, dangling out in the Atlantic shaped like a lobster.

So Lou and I were at the crash site. The trail to the cliffs was not obvious and a local woman pretended she didn’t know the route. This made perfectly good sense because, once we made it to the rope drop, we realized it was a perfect place for the average person to fall several hundred feet onto old Gondwana rocks.

She said, though, we could talk to her uncle, Carl. Carl was stacking firewood in the neatest configuration I had ever seen. It was summer and the need for the wood was a long way off but Carl’s stacking had a kind of geometric precision. I asked about the path to the cliffs and I could tell he was sizing me up.

I had a one-strapped European backpack that had the logo for a French party drink. This did not speak of cliff climbing expertise. I could see the doubt in his face. But he looked at my shoes and then back at his firewood. He took a deep breath and then gazed across his pasture.

“There,” he said. “Walk across the field until you see the path by those blown-down trees. Go to the top of the ridge and veer to the right, then go left if you can find the path going down.”

Lou and I had several debates as to which was the right path or if we were even on a path. We stuck to the basic theory of going up and then down for we knew we had to cross a ridge. We veered at what we thought was a good place to veer and then explored several dead ends until we found a path that led to the ropes. 

The ropes were a series of various old fishing ropes tied to trees and roots that were amazingly cemented to the side of this very steep piece of real estate. The footing was loose gravel or crumbly rock. The descent was breathtaking.

Once we dropped to sea level, we had arrived at the proverbial land that time forgot. High rock cliffs to the north, wide stony plain to the south  – low tide on the Bay of Fundy. Not a soul in sight. No boats, no houses, nothing. Two boys with rucksacks looking for rocks.

The tides of the Bay of Fundy are legendary in that they drop so far and sweep back in so quickly. The tourism departments of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia speak of them as being the “highest tides in the world.”  Because Fundy is a funnel, it has an amazing capacity to drain itself quite low and then as the tide comes back in, it compresses a massive amount of water into an ever more narrow space until you get a tidal bore sweeping up the smaller tributaries. In full surge, it is said that the volume of the flow of the water in the Bay of Fundy is equivalent to the “output of all the world’s combined rivers.” How someone figured that out is beyond my comprehension as many things are. But it could draw more tourists if promoted on the Internet, I am sure.

 

One of my dreams is to surf the front of the tidal bore, muddy as it is, but I’ve tried and failed twice, getting dragged a mile or so until beaching myself on a sandbar (mudbar, really).

Today we had about two hours of low tide before the flow would reverse itself and come washing back in. We had been warned that if we did not retreat up the ropes soon enough after the tide’s turning, we could be in big trouble. If we were a mile or so away, with sheer rock cliffs to our backs, there would be no way out. People had drowned here. Others had been rescued by Sea King helicopters.

I claimed that I wasn’t worried. Lou was more respectful of things neither of us understood, a good tactic for a psychologist hiking with a half-crazed poet blathering on about the age of the universe. Lou wondered out loud exactly where all that water went, when the tide when out.

“It goes back into the sea,” I suggested.

“But we live by the sea on the other side of the province,” he reminded me. “And the tide goes out there too.

“Maybe it goes to Europe,” I suggested.

“Or the other side of the planet.”

“I know it has something to do with the moon,” I offered up.

Lou shrugged. We had not a clue as to where the water went when the tide went out. Between us we had four graduate degrees and not one solid clue about where water went at low tide or why it bothered returning to our shoreline at the appropriate time. It was a dazzling failure of the North American education system and we were both impressed by the poverty of our knowledge.

Not entirely clueless when it came to the age of the universe or the history of the geology at hand, I knew that geologists had been here before. Two codgers named Alger and Jackson had been poking around near here in the 1820s. Jackson, the more poetic of the two, wrote, “The visitor, in addition to the wildness and picturesque beauty of the scene, will find the field so richly stocked with minerals that he will delight to linger on the spot and gather these objects of science.”

I envisioned Lou and me hefting heavy payloads of amethyst  – the currently desired gem of the day — up those nearly dependable dangling ropes.

We walked the rocky shoreline for a bit until we came to a likely place to search for rare rocks: a chunk of fallen cliff face. We knew that geodes, agates and even amethyst could be found inside seemingly dull, uninspiring rocks. And there were many dull uninspiring rocks. Lou had a hammer and chisel, which surprised me that he had come so well prepared. I myself was expecting amethyst to jump out at me and command my attention.

My own research had led me to understand that much of the ordinary uninspiring rock was basalt but there was also Triassic red sandstone and shale, even some Triassic limestone. I tossed the word Triassic around quite a bit while poking away at the cliff face with my bare hands, disturbing millennia of the hard earth-building work that had situated the rocks here. The basalt had come from lava; that would be your igneous rock, left over from back when the planet was cooling. Now we were at least getting ourselves back into the past, closer by a breath at least to the origin of the universe.

Sir William Dawson, back in his 1891 volume Acadian Geology, wrote, “The trap formation of Nova Scotia has become somewhat celebrated for the abundance and fineness of the specimens for which it affords.” Trap was another word for basalt. I liked the way Dawson spoke of “abundance and fineness,” words that one would like to apply to every day of one’s life, not just concerning rocks but other pleasures as well.

We wandered off from each other and, from a distance, I listened to the echo of Lou chipping away at the dull rocks looking for gems. I had a small assortment of interesting specimens, none agate, but a geode (a nifty little cave of crystals) nearly as big as a penny and some black dangerous-looking crystal rock that looked like it came from an asteroid.

Sitting on a big boulder eating a sandwich, I saw the tide reverse itself and begin to advance with great rapidity. The amethyst continued to ignore my presence and I hiked back to where Lou was still attempting to bring down a precarious overhang of basalt on his well-educated head.

For our trouble, we had found rocks with names like haematite, gelignite, schist (an old favourite rock name from my youth), dodecahedron magnetite and some prized zeolites that looked like frozen waterfalls of crystal. As the tide advanced, we retreated to the ropes and the rock face for ascent. In truth, my best find of the day was a pinkish white zeolite the size of a beer bottle that I picked up randomly right before heading up the ropes. It was strategically placed dull-side up but, once turned over, had a magnificent appearance.

Though I gloated momentarily over my good luck, Lou brought me down out of my glory by pointing out it was unlike any other rock beneath our feet. Some other rock hound had carried it this far but rejected it as too heavy, too unworthy of lugging it up the several hundred feet to the ridge above. 

The climb back up the cliffs was straight out of a Harrison Ford adventure movie. The Tim Horton’s coffee on the way home tasted better than any cup of coffee produced since the Triassic period.

On the road back to Lawrencetown Beach, to home, I reminded Lou that for the first three billion years on earth, life only existed in the oceans. “And probably for good reason,” he said.

“There were no living organisms on land until a mere 400 million years ago,” I stated with self-satisfaction. I wanted to go on but Lou was losing interest so my diatribe became internal. And so the tides kept flowing in and out, day after day. Tides always seem to know what they are doing. As do planets in general and galaxies.

There are, they say, no goals of evolution. Shit happens. Purpose or not. Random consequence or divine plan. What humans are referred to — genus Homo — have been on this planet for only two million years. We are a kind of test case for who knows what. We are not particularly adaptable, the biologists would point out. The cockroach, for example, evolved into its present form 300 million years ago. It can survive almost anywhere on earth on its own without Game boys, Gore-Tex or Spaghettios.

 

Today, on this warm foggy morning by the sea, I drink in the damp sweet salt air with every pore of my body. I smell the richness of the seawater and the life contained therein. By afternoon there will be waves and I will tap the energy produced by storms hundreds of miles from here as the tide drops a billion gallons of water to go someplace else to an undesignated location.

Nakita’s stone anchors me to the present, which is a thing hard enough to do during any one of the twelve billion years this story has been in progress. At fifty-two years old, I have been part of the narrative for only .0000000043 or .043 billionth of a percentage point of the current universal life span. I suppose that makes me sound like a pretty small player in the scheme of things but, for whatever reasons, I am convinced that I am not without significance.

 

Lesley Choyce

My six-year-old daughter would come to me
with knots to be untied –
rope and shoelace,
string and sashes.
The mystery behind these knots, at first,
made her angry — but then she grew to understand
there’s beauty in the untangling.

The knots once arrived of their own accord but now
she’s older and invention is her game –
knots tighter, and more convoluted
than anything nature could conspire on its own.
And still she delivers them to me to
deconstruct
pretending the work is not her own.
It seems each day, the task is more difficult,
the untangling time grows longer,
the looped geometry more perplexing .
Ten years from now, we’ll continue on
at a similar game:
two loose ends, a knot,
a hidden pattern to be followed in
to unravel the core of confusion.

Self. Brotherhood. God. Zeus. Communism.
Capitalism. Buddha. Vinyl records.
Baseball. Ink. Trees. Cures for disease.
Saltwater. Literature. Walking. Waking.
Arguments. Decisions. Ambiguity. Absolutes.
Presence. Absence. Positive and Negative.
Empathy. Apathy. Sympathy and entropy.
Verbs are necessary. So are nouns.
Empty skies. Dark vacuums of night.
Visions. Revisions. Innocence.
I’ve seen All the empty spaces yet to be filled.
I’ve heard All of the sounds that will collect
at the end of the world.
And the silence that follows.

I’m alive, I believe in everything
I’m alive, I believe in it all.

Waves lapping on the shore.
Skies on fire at sunset.
Old men dancing on the streets.
Paradox and possibility.
Sense and sensibility.
Cold logic and half truth.
Final steps and first impressions.
Fools and fine intelligence.
Chaos and clean horizons.
Vague notions and concrete certainty.
Optimism in the face of adversity.

I’m alive, I believe in everything
I’m alive, I believe in it all.

I decided to be a writer with high hopes that it would allow me to avoid work. When writing turned out to be work as well as fun, I stuck with it anyway simply because it seemed too late to turn back. I stuck mostly to fiction where it seemed that the facts need not get in the way of the truth but then as time went on I found that some of the facts of my own life were more revealing that the fictional truths I create. This came as a surprise and a shock to me.

As a kid, I had a fairly minute ego: no one with in earshot was ready to persuade me that my opinions and insights were of much value in the world I lived in. So later, when I grew into my skin as a writer, I pretended for a while that what I had to say really was of importance. After a while, I started believing in the myth and this convinced me to abandon fiction for a while and get autobiographical.

Since my life story would be exceedingly boring, I was forced to edit my personal history ruthlessly until there was something left worth sharing. My first fragmented history of the self came out as AN AVALANCHE OF OCEAN and I almost thought that I was done with
autobiography. What more could I possibly say once I’d written about winter surfing and transcendental wood splitting and getting strip searched for cod tongues in a Labrador airport?
But then something happened to me that I can’t quite explain.

AVALANCHE had set off something in me a kind of manic, magical couple of years where I felt like I was living on the edge of some important breakthrough. It was a time of greater compressed euphoria and despair than I’d ever felt before. Stuff was happening to me, images of the past were flooding through the doors and I needed to get it all down. Some of it was funny, some of it was not. Dead writers were hovering over my shoulder saying, “Dig deep; follow it through. Don’t let any of it go.” And I didn’t.

So again, I have the audacity to say that these things that happened tome are worth your attention. Like Wordsworth, I am a man “pleased with my own volitions.” Like Whitman I find myself saying to readers, “to you, endless announcements.”

As I write this, I am bumping into forty five and I need to share the discoveries of the last ten years. For me it was a time of great battles. I fought the construction of street lights in the
wilderness, the tedium of organizations and the relentless, good intentioned blundering of government and science.

In Transcendental Anarchy I celebrated the uncompromising passages of a mid thirties male, admitting I would never be an astronaut or a president and, instead finding satisfaction in
building with wood, arguing a good cause or even undergoing a successful vasectomy.

Write about what makes you feel the most uncomfortable, a voice in my head told me. So I tackled fear and my own male anger and my biggest failures. And even more dangerous, I tried writing about the most ordinary of things: a morning in Woolco, an unexceptional day, the thread of things that keeps a life together. Throughout it all, there is, I hope, a record of a search for love and meaning fraught with failure and recovery. Maybe I’ve developed a basic mistrust of the rational, logical conclusions.

I’ve only had the briefest of glimpses beyond the surface but I’ve seen enough to know that sometimes facts are not enough. There are times to make the leap, to get metaphysical, and suppose that we all live larger lives than appearances would suggest.

Favourite book when young: Journey to The Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne
Favourite book now: unknown
Career : I avoided one. To busy myself, I write novels and autobiographical books, host a TV show, teach part time at a university, run a publishing company, surf, freelance TV and radio work, perform and record alternative music and raise spinach.
Pets: an old dog named Jodi, four pigeons, an Australian dove, a grackle and a blue jay. Used to have a goat and a telepathic raven as well as a one-winged seagull. No kidding.
Room: Overlooking the ocean on a hillside at Lawrencetown Beach
Spare time: surf, hike, play electric guitar with heavy distortion, imagine, travel, imagine some more.
As a kid: skinny, smart but not very cool, daydreamed a lot and made Tarzan swings, river rafts and tree forts.
My first book: publisher thought it wasn’t all that good but I should be encouraged. Skinny little book of poetry called Reinventing the Wheel ten years in the making. Kinda immature but full of insight.
Ideas: everything and anything. What makes me happy, what makes me scared. Bang, an idea arrives in the middle of the night.
Influences: waves, Nova Scotia, trees, dragonflies, kids, skateboarders, dogs, eccentric people, Canada, ice, music, books and dragonflies
How I work: I don’t work, never have. Mostly I just have fun and make stuff up.
Something I don’t really approve of: shoes.
Tips: Do it. Forget about money and live. Make up your own life as it goes along. Don’t let television or anybody do it for you.
My favourite book (of mine): Republic of Nothing

A Lot of us live lead lives of fragmentation. We have pieces, hundreds of them maybe, scattered about that don’t actually fit together. I do things that don’t always fit in with who I am. I can’t help it. I’m a product of my time. Because I’m committed (foolishly perhaps) to cramming so much into my life, I can’t possibly make it all fit neatly together — square pegs don’t drive easily into even octagonal holes.
What we all need is a bit of integration — or reintegration if we were ever whole to begin with. Writing, I think, allows me to integrate, to show that this life does make sense.

What happens when we get too parcelled up? We feel out of control, maybe. Or sometimes we just feel hollow — there is no centre for the chaos to swirl around. The best thing I can find for that elusive centre is the substance of family. This is a mundane subject, I suppose, but there it is. The centre must hold as best it can. And so we reintegrate.

On my March twenty-first birthday, I’m feeling only half alive, hollowed-out, and I don’t know why. Spring, angst and anxiety over age — nothing tangible. For nearly six months now I’ve been cramming. I’ve been shovelling everything together into a crazy life of writing, teaching, publishing, giving talks and performances and interview upon interview and loving the camera shoved in my face and now a brief hiatus. And it’s clear that whatever I’ve been doing has had no solid meaning. I’ve been used up. The media has sucked me dry and I’m a mid-forty-year-old aging novelist/surf champ on the downslide. The book world and music world hold promises for me but I’m thinking that further success might drain me further into oblivion.

So there is this. I am driving into Halifax with my six year old daughter, Pamela. I’ve been invited to be part of celebrity photo shoot for the cover of a weekly tabloid called The Coast. On the way to town, Pamela pulls out a deck of cards and asks me to play Go Fish. My first reaction is to do it even though I’m the one driving the vehicle down the twisty coastal road, dodging pothole and frost heave like a slalom skier on a downhill run.

But I’m good at doing two things at once, right? The skill I believe I posses is called cramming. Remember that term from staying up all night — puling an all-nighter — to study for some exam that you had failed to prepare yourself for? Now, cramming for me is the act of trying to do everything at once. I can talk on the phone, spell check a story I am writing and drink a cup of coffee all at the same time, while keeping an eye on the waves to see if it’s worth dropping everything to go surf. That’s cramming. Or if I’m running on a tight schedule on some town-trek day of the week, I can split a half hour into segments of five minutes and cram some important “essential” activity into every slot and still have time to show up to teach my class only one minute late. That’s cramming.

But this is my day of feeling hollow, worn out, fortyish. I don’t have the energy to even cram a card game in while driving. I can’t trust myself on that one today. “Sorry, Pam,” I say.

“Then who am I going to play my game with?” she demands, already beginning to deal out two hands of cards on her lunch box.

“I don’t know.”

“Then I’ll play it with God.”

“Yeah. God is good. Play Go Fish with God.”

So my daughter begins to play Go Fish with God. I’m busy with the potholes.

After a while I ask, “Who’s winning?”

“God.”

“Figures,” I say.

Then, miraculously, Pamela wins a handful of cards. God’s luck doesn’t hold out. Before I hit the first stop light, Pamela has all the cards.

“What happened?”

“God let me win.”

“Nice guy,” I say.

“God had never played Go Fish before.”

At the Soho kitchen, Kyle from The Coast welcomes us and I get my daughter’s name wrong when I introduce her. Wow, am I out of it today or what? Hollow be thy name. I call her Sunyata, my other daughter’s name, and then immediately realize this was an old trick that my father did, absentmindedly calling me by my brother’s name. Maybe parents do this all the time. Kyle, however, is left thinking, this guy has forgotten his own daughter’s name?

When the other “celebrities arrive,” it becomes clear to me that they knew about this whole deal a long time ago. I was only called nine o’clock the night before. I now know that I am the “fill-in celebrity” and wonder how far down the list they went before somebody said, “I know, we’ll get the old surf champ.”

No sweat. I won’t let on. The TV star comedian, Cathy Jones from This Hour Has 22 Minutes, the radio DJ, J.C. Douglas, and I sit down at a table and pretend that we are about to eat a wooden fish and two carved pine pigs. It’s some kind of a set up for The Coast’s special issue on Halifax food but it all feels pretty vacuous, hollow, without contact or content.

I smile for the camera. I’m good at this now. I do whatever the media wants out of me. I’ve been hollowed out by my minor success. I’ve become a wandering wraith of multi-talent for TV or radio or print. People are interested in what I am doing but I think a very small part of the population (I mean minuscule) actually read my books. My content is of much less interest to the world than what I appear to be doing.

Right now, I appear to be trying to eat a pine pig, painted pink. And I don’t know who I am. I’ll have to wait for the tabloid to appear on the street Thursday and see the picture. There I am. I will be this person doing this thing for some reason.
I stare away from the pig towards the DJ, JC who has the wooden fish. My daughter is sitting off to the side, her coat still on, laughing at us. Okay, God, Go Fish.

We change tables for a new shot. Three wine glasses filled with water. Cheers. I sniff, then taste it. “Hmmm, it tastes like 1983,” I say. The two other celebrities laugh. Click. We are sitting around having fun, the photo is supposed to say. All of this means nothing and someone will print thirty thousand copies of it. (I’ve written novels that took eight years to write, that included deep ponderous thoughts — that no publisher would publish, that no one will ever read).

“You’re not smiling,” someone says to me. I thought that I was.

Looking into the lens of the camera, I’m thinking about focus. My daughter is giggling at us again from far out of the frame. I look towards her and then back at the camera.

“That’s much better,” someone says.

Later, at noon, at another restaurant, I am alone with Pamela and I run out of things to talk about. She is eating chicken nuggets shaped like extinct creatures and I am supping a bizarre Cajun soup made of shrimp and black mushrooms. Pamela cannot conceive how I can actually swallow something so weird looking. The baby shrimp look like grub worms.
“Klingon food,” I say. She smiles, understands.

When the waiter comes and brings her a glass of ice water, she sips it with a straw, then makes a face. “Yuck,” she says. “It tastes like 1983.”

Later, when we go for a walk beneath the huge pine trees of Point Pleasant Park, Pamela and I are entertained by a seemingly endless parade of old, pudgy dogs with breathing problems. They all sniff and chase around squirrels and each other and run off further down the trail as if they have some ultimate destination. But I know that at the end of the long wooded pathway is nothing but the open ocean. Rocks and kelp and lapping icy waves and a big patch of water, all the way to Africa.

Wedge Island is barely discernable on a road map of Nova Scotia because there are no roads to get you there. Although it is not truly an island, it’s 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, defined by geologists as a “drowned coast.” We are drowning because the sea is engulfing the land we live on. It has been 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 banshee 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 saltwater 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, shards of polypropylene rope as well as bones of birds and beasts litter the rocks near the shore 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 and let you pass.
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 in mock attack. 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 at the edge of man’s world in this safe haven hatchery for the great gulls that rule this coast. Once you find 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. This is the same substance of rock you’d find if you could make one giant leap from here across the Atlantic and step ashore on the edge of the Sahara. Beneath your feet is the very rock that was once part of the super-continent that had drifted north to crash into this coast, then drag itself away to form Africa. The stone here is closely akin to the rocks of Morocco.
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, reds and tawny dulce, 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 man has never 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 six stories 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 tenuous 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 wall 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 offspring when the time comes.

I was in Paris when twenty-five year old Kevin Shawn Coker drowned while surfing back home at Lawrencetown Beach. When I arrived back home, 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 PEI, 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 wipe out a lot. The dues you pay for winter wipe outs in near zero degree salt water is 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 went asking 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 some place 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 mere acquaintance but a member of this tribe, this brotherhood and sometimes brother sisterhood of Nova Scotia surfing, I feel a tremendous loss of innocence. No one has ever drowned here before in a surfing accident. It’s even extremely rare for anyone to get hurt.
There were couple of stitches 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 he 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 dry suit. I put my tooth through my lip in last year’s surf contest while crouched inside a mighty fine beach break barrel. But up to now, 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 buddy 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 form 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 hot shot. 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 hot shot, 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. (Sorry, I’ve given the sea a personality again.)
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 bolder waiting for some slack between sets for paddling out. Before that hiatus arrived, he was targeted by the biggest, meanest wave of the day that roared up 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 would always help out anybody in trouble in the water. Surfers have hauled in maybe a dozen swimmers over the years who got into 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 a nifty six foot and peeling like crystal ware 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 white water 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 saltwater on the face for overly long seconds hurts like hell. My advice to myself on that issue is always the same: don’t wipe out. Stay above the water line. 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 dry suit zipper came undone while surfing on a minus 20 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 garnered 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 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 loser to my car and eventually a long slow thaw in the shower.
When all of those tragic victims were dying in the icy waters as the Titanic was sinking, 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 that 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 feel diminished 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 when its unwanted. Giving advice, feeling a certain responsibility to other people. Complaining sometimes. This is the world and I live in it and whatever happens, happens with some thread of a connection to me. 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 overhead part of a 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. 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 community, one of writers and readers, part of some gargantuan book festival 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 film makers 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 cafes and bars drinking minuscule cups of coffee or glasses of red wine. I would think that would lead to a sort of lethargy which 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 where he had 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 back-handed reminder that caution and caring were the greatest of human responsibilities that should not be shirked.