Driving Minnie's Piano by Lesley Choyce

Author:Lesley Choyce
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: poet, biography, piano, memoirs, surfing, nova scotia, surf, lesley, choyce, skunk whisperer
Publisher: Pottersfield

Spring Surf

Spring in Nova Scotia could be dull if it wasn't for the waves. The sky is a low, soft curtain of grey wool and the sea is the colour of gun metal as I pull my car to a stop at a small crescent pocket of sand on the shoreline of the Atlantic forty-five minutes from downtown Halifax.

The snow on the ground is melting but some of the boulders along the shoreline are glazed with ice. I ease my surfboard out of the car, take a final tug on the zipper of my drysuit, inhale deeply, and then sprint across the sand and into the sea. Within seconds I've lost contact with mainland life and I'm back in my element.

I take slow, easy strokes and watch the dreamy kelp undulate back and forth beneath me in the frigid clear water. I see my breath turn to smoke in the air. I watch a head-high wave form like a dark monument, sliding towards me, breaking from a perfect peak thanks to an unseen reef of rocks beneath the surface. I realize for the first time that when the wave hits the shallows of the reef it's laced with slivers of ice.

This happens in the spring. The ice breaks up in a nearby inlet, sifts out to sea and then winds drive it back towards shore. No icebergs here. Just small sargassos of slush ice and infinite variations on the traditional refrigerator ice cube.

I'm still paddling but safely out of reach of the wave as it goes critical, bowls out and then sends a shower of water and ice into an emphatic cascade. There's a hollow place forming big enough to squeeze a Nova Scotian surfer into if he had the right set of tools and I'm hoping I'll soon have a chance with this wave's cousin. When the frosty lip touches down on the mother sea, all that blitzkrieg of ice sounds like a box of fluorescent light bulbs dropped from a second-storey window.

I find my destination: the middle of the cove just outside of the peak. I sit up on my board, scan the headlands still whitewashed in snow and genuinely grieve that winter and its frosty Nova Scotian sidekick, early spring, is just about gone. Summer is soft and easy here. Winter is hard and slick. I sometimes prefer the latter and I'm happy that the big bad Canadian winter doesn't give up without offering me this particular gift: a day of sea and ice.

The water around me has soft cotton balls of melting slush mixed in the mosaic of dagger ice: some long and pointy like stilettos, other chunks cut clean like pizza slices. There is no wind to muck up the design, only waves pulling themselves up from the deep, waves that have trundled silently here to these shores from maybe three hundred miles away, from storms that will have no effect on these shores . . . except for their generous outpouring of waves.

I study the waves, wait for company.

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