Pasted above is an image taken from my deck here at The Moorings, looking down at our garage. It’s hard to tell from this angle, but the door is jammed half-way open, because the electric opener is on the fritz, which is why our car isn’t parked inside (the door’s motor seems to be broken – yes, we checked the batteries in the remote, Jesus, why does everybody take me for a low-grade moron?). This isn’t great from a security standpoint, but there’s not much we can do at the moment, because this is Nova Scotia, and in Nova Scotia you can’t get any sort of trade or repair person to come help you out, not for love or money. They tell you on the phone they’ll be right over, sure, but then they don’t show. You can offer them twice their going rate if only they’ll pop on by to give you a hand, and still it’s no dice. They don’t want the money. They don’t want to work. You can call them back and leave messages, but they won’t be returned. They’ll just ghost you. Happens every time. At best they’ll show up in the middle of a random afternoon, unannounced, half-finish the job, then disappear for good. It can take years to get anything done. Literally. So, our broken garage door opener joins the lengthy backlog of this building’s untended maintenance requirements. We have a call in to the most reputable local shop, and they were supposed to be by last Friday, but you know. If they get here at all they’ll be early.
Fine. Not great, but O.K., life goes on.
It’s usually a bit aggravating returning to our unit here on the Bay after long spells away. Everything manages to break down while we’re gone, and it takes me days to set it all right. The A/C will be unresponsive, the wifi will be down, the TVs will be strangely out of whack, everything electric will be giving us error messages because at some point the power was out, keys won’t seem to work even though the locks haven’t changed – or the frigging garage door opener will have committed ritual seppuku – and you just have to roll with it for a few days. I get frustrated, but by yesterday we had most things back up and running, and I was feeling pretty good, staying up late, Kathy having gone off to bed some hours earlier, me keeping myself amused. It was an exceptionally beautiful night, temperate and still, with a gentle ocean breeze, and there I was in the early morning hours, out sitting on the deck, sipping a drink and bathing in a warm sensation of well-being the like of which usually eludes me, revelling in the calm silence of nighttime here on the waterfront, and feeling so soothed and relaxed that I felt compelled to write about it, right that minute. Hence my last posting. After wrapping that up, night owl that I am, I stayed up for a couple of more hours, watching TV, and then went back out on the deck to soak it all in for a little bit longer before going off to bed.
It was about four in the morning. I was at peace. Off in the distance a cricket was chirping, and that’s all there was to hear. The bay was so calm there weren’t even gentle lapping noises against the sea wall.
Then somebody, or some thing, decided to pop my happy little balloon.
I was sitting there, quiet as a wee timid field mouse hiding under the pews of a Gothic cathedral, when an ungodly mechanical noise sounded from somewhere close below. I couldn’t figure out what it was. I didn’t even have a theory. It stopped, and then began again. Then it was gone for a minute, but came back. It was loud. It sounded industrial, in a way, ominously mechanical, like something a Foley artist would record for use in science fiction movies. I almost didn’t want to know what it was. It seemed to be coming from under the other end of the deck, so, mustering more courage than you’d think it ought to take, I tiptoed over to the railing, looked down wondering with some dread what I was going to encounter, and saw that our garage door, which had been jammed fully shut, was now all the way open. Huh?? How?? I’m staring down at the thing, and as my mind starts to play tricks on me – I’m positive I can hear a whispering voice, and the light shuffling of feet from within the garage – the goddam thing closes! Jesus Christ! I just about had a stroke! As I try to process what the hell’s going on, it opens up again! Then back down! At four in the morning! I’m beside myself! I scrambled around the unit, looking for a flashlight that I couldn’t find, and the thing kept going up and down, while I kept thinking I was hearing murmuring voices, and was wondering whether I was going to have to call 911 or something.
Maybe it was the wrong move, but I decided instead that I had to pretend to be wearing a pair of big boy pants, and go down there myself to see what was up. It wasn’t really such a ballsy decision, truth to tell. Our garage has a back door accessible from a basement hallway. All I needed to do was open it a crack and peek in. If there was anybody in there, I could close it right back up and skedaddle.
Still, I was none too keen.
I figured I’d better first tell Kathy what I was up to, you know, in case I didn’t make it back, so I woke her up, poor woman, and she grabbed her phone and followed me downstairs to the basement. As we got to the door into the back of the garage, I told her to stand about 20 feet down the hall and get ready to call the cops if I started screaming, then – gulp – opened the door, flipped on the light, and looked in.
Nobody there.
The main garage door, however, then sprang back to life. It was going up and down all by itself.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking somebody else was using their own remote on their own garage door, and it happened to be activating ours too, but that’s unlikely because a), our door machinery is broken – it shouldn’t have been moving at all – and b), there was nobody around, and unless there was some lunatic across the bay with a garage door remote that emitted an unusually powerful signal, who also felt the need to be opening and closing his own garage repeatedly for about 30 minutes at what was by then 4:30 in the morning, it couldn’t have been anything so mundane. Anyway, whatever was happening, we had to put a stop to it. The ceiling-mounted motor is plugged into an adjacent socket, and Kathy climbed up a step ladder and yanked the thing out. If it had kept cycling after that, that would have been it, we’d have been in the frigging car and making haste towards the nearest Best Western.
But it stopped, praise God.
Yoiks that was unnerving.
I suppose there must be some sort of short circuit, or something. Or maybe the spooks that sometimes mess with me were just having a little fun; it’s been a while since the last inexplicable incident, so it’s about time. Beats me. We’ll never know, probably, because this is Nova Scotia, and in Nova Scotia, you can call the local garage door opener sales and service outfit, and they can promise to come over and have a look-see, but they’ll never show up. Not for love or money.
the needlefish 