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    The Ledge
    The Ledge
    The Ledge
    Ebook79 pages1 hour

    The Ledge

    By Lesley Choyce

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Nick was used to being good at everything. Hockey, football, track, they all came easy to him. Surfing was his latest passion. That is, until the accident. 

    Now partially paralyzed, Nick is angry, depressed and getting far too fond of his prescription meds. But his frequent visits to his physiotherapist, a Syrian refugee, and a budding friendship with a partial amputee who has also experienced firsthand the horrors of war help him start to piece his life back together. 

    A story about overcoming the odds and changing your life for the better.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOrca Book Publishers
    Release dateJan 28, 2020
    ISBN9781459824638
    The Ledge
    Author

    Lesley Choyce

    Lesley Choyce is an award-winning author of more than 100 books of literary fiction, short stories, poetry, creative nonfiction, young adult novels and several books in the Orca Soundings line. His works have been shortlisted for the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, the White Pine Award and the Governor General’s Literary Award, among others. Lesley lives in Nova Scotia.

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      Book preview

      The Ledge - Lesley Choyce

      Twenty-One

      Chapter One

      One day you’re this. The next day you’re that. Everything can change so quickly. Not even in just one day, but in one hour. Or, in my case, one minute. Think of it as Nick Peterson Before. And Nick Peterson After.

      By the time I hit sixteen, surfing had become the biggest thing in my life. All that kid glory from skateboarding was behind me. Hockey had me for a while, but it faded. As did football and track. I had some glory there too. But it was all in the past when surfing became my thing. The thing. But enough ancient history. Let’s cut to the event.

      September found me back in school, a ripping summer of waves behind me. I had surfed almost every day. I’d given lessons, too, and made decent cash. I had persuaded Olivia to be my girlfriend. Olivia—a year older than me, with her own car and her own credit card, and willing to foot the bill for whatever we did. She resented surfing sometimes, as it took time away from her. But she knew that if she asked me to choose between her (and her car and her credit card) and surfing, surfing would win.

      Being stuck sitting in a classroom sucked more than ever that year. Fall brought bigger swells out of the south. Waves not ridden. Time wasted at a desk, not on a board. I’d been watching this place out of town, a headland called Delbert Point at the end of Fraser Road. No wave had broken there all summer. Swell not big enough, the Wreck had once told me. The Wreck was what we all called this old guy who lived out near the point. Need a big push out of the south, he said. He liked to talk about his glory days on the waves. I wasn’t even sure I believed the stories at first. Especially the ones about the break there, the one he simply called the Ledge.

      A ledge—what surfers sometimes call a slab—is a big, flat piece of rock under the surface of the ocean. A wave, but it has to be a big wave, rolls in, hits it and jacks up like double overhead in a split second. You have to hit it just right. And then this big thick monster of a thing roars over it, not acting like any sane wave you’d ever known. Thick and meaty and heavy, heavy, heavy.

      If you could take off just right, you could drop, pull a power turn, set your track really high and boot it through an ugly but oh-so-hollow pocket and out the other side. If it could be done, then I figured I could do it. I was sure of it.

      Of course, if the crashing lip of water hit you, you’d be squashed like a bug in the shallow water barely covering the wide black slab. Dangerous, yes?

      Dangerous but doable.

      So that’s how it came to be that on that fateful second day of October, I was not sitting as usual in my English class, dreaming of the perfect wave.

      Let me paint the picture. Big swell out of the south. Bigger than most. The beaches were all closed. Most point breaks around were big but shapeless. When I had woken up that morning I had felt it in my bones. The Ledge was calling me. You think I was going to go to freaking school? No way.

      I left the house early, my board under my arm. My parents were already off to work. I hopped on my bicycle and rode to the headland at the edge of town.

      And that’s when I saw it. Everything the Wreck had said was true. It was big, mean and more powerful than any wave I’d ever seen. And it looked scary as hell. I slipped into my wetsuit and paddled out.

      Chapter Two

      Everyone knows you’re not supposed to surf alone. I told that to the people in my surfing classes. But rules like that are for beginners, I figured, not for real surfers like me. That October day I was alone. All alone staring at a most turbulent sea.

      The paddle out was difficult. All kinds of strange currents were tugging my board one way and another. The sky was dark. There was a storm out there at sea somewhere generating this big swell, but here, near the coast, the wind was offshore. It would make the wave hollow and fast. After a long, hard paddle, I stopped and stared at the monster of a wave, the final one of a set of seven, pounding down on the shallow shelf of rock. I could see where I’d need to take off, where I’d need to hang high on the wall of the wave, avoiding the quick drop, aiming for the shoulder and safety.

      Most all of my life, I’d been good at taking the fear that would crawl up from the back of my neck into my skull and transforming it into something else. Something that made me want to do it—whatever it was. Do it and not back down.

      It took me a while to

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