Charging toward Retreat

The snap into action.  Early morning in Picton and the sound of loggers in the early morning.  Through the thin walls that act like the skin of a drum’s head.  Not to dampen the sound, but to amplify it.  The bread and butter being eaten in the kitchen, the high-vis jerseys being pulled on in the bedrooms, the coffee being poured into the coffee cups and the coffee cups being sipped as the faceless ones walk through the house around me. 

And me.  Unable to go back to sleep.  Knowing that I’ll have to wake up and walk to the ferry sooner rather than later.  Waiting for the faceless ones to leave so that I can eat breakfast with Robin without having to talk about my trip.  Because the loggers don’t really care anyway.

And I’ve said my goodbyes to the ones that I know, and I hope that I’ll see them again.  But now all I need is coffee (and will I ever drink you again, you delicious dark demon, without thinking of Wayne sipping brews?).  All I need is coffee and the shoes on my feet and the pack on my back.  And I’m gone.

To ferry across the Cook Straight.  For the sixth time.  Count ‘em: one two three four five six.  For the sixth time.  There and back, and there and back, and there and back again.  Eat your heart out Bilbo Baggins.  I’m the Blue Bridge wonder boy, I’m the Inter Islander acolyte.  Ping-ponging between the North and the South like a bird that can’t sense seasons.  Back and forth, and back and forth, and back.  Now forth again.

Early morning on the ferry and the realization that the toilet-paper tissue is of the finish line sits pale and parallel with the horizon.  This is the end of the trip.  The final push before the retreat.  And the day blooms soft in the window. 

There is another thumb song sing-a-long.  Off the boat and running.  From Wellington to Rotorua.  Nine rides.  Construction worker to drug dealer to wine salesman to bushman to old man to rabbit breeder to young gun to train engineer to gold-medal-winning masters.  Nine rides.

Then the waste away in Rotorua.  The Tuesday Wednesday waste away.  Two doctors appointments to check-up on my still-injured elbow.  And when I’m not in the waiting room I am reading, writing, watching movies, eating, sleeping, slowly beating back the ghosts of going home.  Anxious.

Nothing to do in Rotorua as the Boyes brothers work alongside their father in the garage.  Attempting to “use up” all of the native New Zealand wood that father Paul has hoarded in his builder’s lifetime.  Precious wood that can no longer be cut-down nor processed nor sold in New Zealand.  And now they must use it, now they must build, now they must make things.  Before Paul moves out of the house and begins travelling the world with step-mom Tracy.  So the saw blades sing and the hammers keep time and the drill bits hum to the tune.

And I cannot tote a table to the states.  No room even for a picture frame.  So there is the waste away.

The Tuesday Wednesday waste away.  And the Thursday ride to Aukland.  Feet dipped into the ocean off of a dock in Aukland.  Beside sailboats sitting in slips.  Shirtless.  Shoeless.  Browning like a bird in the oven.  The sunshine city.  Sun shine. 

Then suddenly—dropped like a quiet bomb—there is my last night in New Zealand.  My last night, and it spent in the Aukland International Airport.  Like a fart leaked from the clenched butt-hole of technology:  my last night spent on a brown plastic bench and bathed in the ghastly fluorescent glow of the infinite tube lights.  Curled beneath the golden arches of a built-in Mackers with the air-conditioning blowing cold from the ceiling.  Blowing cold to keep vagrants like myself from calling this hot-house of movement a home.  Even for a night.  But I am willing and able and, after extricating the sleeping bag from the bowels of my backpack, I sleep tight for a couple of hours.  At least.

This the last night.  Dropped silent but deadly.  This the quiet bomb surprise.  And I am painted into the scene: the morbid creature that is common to all of us.  That is common to us all.  The one that lifts the covers of this last fart-of-a-night.  That lifts the covers over its head and sniffs the stale pungent air.  Just to see what it smells like. 

Because curiosity never really killed the cat.  And I’m creeping on claw-paws toward another adventure waiting.  Waiting in the dark unknown.  Somewhere in the black tunnel of the not-too-distant future.  And what will it be?  And what?

The Night of Revelation

This is the night of revelation.

And this is what happens.  We drink cold beers on the dock-end of the wooden jetty.  After the Anakiwa Hostel check-in, after the welcome/introduction speech from the hostel owner Shane, after throwing our bags into our shared room.  We drink cold beers on the dock-end of the wooden jetty.  The pylons act as back rests and the bare feet dangle.  Into the salt water, into the sound water.  The sea.

The sun already gone and the cloud reefs now back-lit by the light of a vanished star.  The neon sky poised above the surrounding mountains as if it will swoop.  The clouds red-rimmed and raw and violent like a massacre of heaven itself. 

And then the light gone all together and the ragged gray rags left hanging in the pale sky where the colors had danced in the setting.

And this is what happens.  We sit in the darkening.  In the slow fade with our feet still dangling and we talking about the lives we’ve lived and the lives we have left to live.

Waiting on the light to disappear.  Waiting on the night time.  And the night time falling around us.  Until it is dark enough.  Robin’s eyes the only gauge we have because she is the only one of us who has seen what we are going to see.

And once it is dark enough we fill our pockets with beer bottles and head down the Queen Charlotte Track.  Invisible down the trail we.  Now hunters in the night, and hunting that mirror.  That mirror planted in the damp secret spots of the earth.  Reflecting the night time sky and reflecting the entirety of the universe.  That mirror composed of a million tiny organisms.  The effect of the whole rendered possible by the work of the miniscule minions.  By the work of the soul-bright soldiers.  By the work of this: the glowworm.

And all of a sudden we are upon them.  And I cannot believe the sight before my eyes.

And this is what happens: we stop like two pegs plugged into a game board.  Stopped.  And silent.  Creeping now on tip-toe over the trail.  As if the glowing will stop.  As if the worms will vanish if we make but the slightest sound.

So we are silent and creeping into the glow.  By slow degrees.  Each point specific.  And a few lead to a few more and these to a few more until we are surrounded.  And once surrounded we sit on a wooden bridge erected over the life-blood of this light colony.  Erected over the water that dampens the hillside shining.  And we whisper back and forth about the scene.

And the scene is the night sky blanketing the earth.  All around us.  And we like titans or gods themselves sitting on an invisible bridge suspended in the sky and looking down at the universe.  At the ink black speckled with shining stars.  The constellations clustered where rocks have fallen out of the dirt embankment by the side of the trail, or where water has trickled out of the stream and dampened the duff beneath the trees.

And we are ancient astronomers stumbling through the dark.  Staring at the starry ground and returning with more beer to our bridge in the sky.  And “the only thing that would be better,” says Robin, sitting beside me now with the universe below both of our feet and the constellations burrowed into the hillside before us, “the only thing that would be better is if we could dive into it.”

And later in the night we do.  And this is how it happens.

After an hour or so in the glow worm heavens, we get up and go.  Taking with us as tokens only the memory of the trip and our empty beer bottles.  Back to the backpackers hostel to root through the communal fridge for more beer and then down to the jetty jutting into the sound.

We take up the same seats that we were sitting in during the sunset—the dock and pylon chairs—and we fall back into the same conversation.  Having forgotten that during the welcome/introduction speech given by the hostel owner, Shane, we were informed by him that—besides the glowworms—the phosphorescence might be worth checking out.  “If it’s around,” he had said.  “Because it comes and goes with the tides,” he had said.  “Because it comes and goes.”

So—having forgotten this—we sit in our seats and sip on our beers and talk about life and the lifetimes to come.  Until Robin interrupts me mid-sentence, saying this, and only this, “They are here.”

Her foot has fallen into the water, and I follow her eyes to the point where the flesh enters the sea.  And there, oscillating out in ripples from her ankle, is something I can only describe as glitter confetti.  Flashing through the water.

“Put your foot in,” she says.  So I strip the shoe and the sock and submerge the bare foot in the water and all of a sudden it—that is the foot—is breathing fairy dust into the dark wet.  A thousand points of light bursting from the pale foot in the water.

And—once again—I cannot believe the sight before my eyes.  I am literally awestruck.  I am having trouble believing what I am seeing.  And how did I not know that this existed?  How?

We jump up and run to the stairs that lead down.  Into the water.  And we stand on the steps and stomp on the wooden stairs below the surface.  And every stomp brings forth from the wood a fountain of light that shrouds our feet in the brightness.  We stomp a firework show out of the wet-wood.  Laughing and shouting and kicking the water brilliant.  And who knows how long we are there.

But it dawns on us that we must get into the water.  All of us: from head-top to foot-bottom: all of us.  And we do.  And I am covered in sparkle dust as soon as I dive in.  Flailing my arms and legs in the water and shouting over and over into the night that “I’m a star.”  And all of me—my entirety—glowing beneath the surface, and Robin’s as well.  And we swimming in arcs.  Cradling the water in our hands and tossing it into the air so that the showers of liquid sparks rain down on us.

This is the magic water and this.  This is the night of revelation.  Because who knew that such things could exist.  Not me.  No.  Not me.  This is the natural world, and I cannot recall a moment in my life where I was more absolutely amazed. 

The glowworms and the phosphorescence.  The natural night world on fire.  Burning green and gold with the electric feel.  And this is what the world is for.

And we are a part of it.  Within it.  And a part of it.  Not apart from it.  But a part—a piece, and an integral piece—of it.  And from this night forward I will never be able to forget this fact.

So burn.  And burn, baby, burn.

This is the night of revelation.

The Sound of the Weekend Rising

Into the sound country.  And this is my vacation from my vacation.

There was the early morning work in the garden.  The job: to backhoe the upper tier.  And I am a gravel slinger, I am a weed killer.  The elliptic blade humming and I am death dressed in black stubbies.  Rake up this world of destruction and how crisp the rock beds rise from the tilled gravel.

This the deed done and rewarded with a massive cheeseburger feed on a bun of fresh-baked bread.  Yum.  The backpack packed and a plastic grocery bag full of fresh food from the garden.  Robin’s Room empty and awaiting her return.  But not now.  No.  Not now.

There was the ride out of the Wairoa Gorge.  Through the gate.  Now ousted from Eden.  Over the concrete bridge, through the tree tunnel, and past the building bees buzzing.  Around Richmond and through Nelson for the drop-off at the pull-out by the side of the highway.

There was the hug and the kiss and the promise to call.  And the Toyota Land Cruiser speeding away.  And then there was competition on the roadside in the form of a petite hippie-chick with brown shoulders and dreadlocks hanging in ropes down her back.  But this is the thumb-song sing-a-long and the two of us ride together through a series of strange cars and trucks to the Picton Port.

There were the four rides given as gifts and all of us nameless along the way.

There was the walk through the sweating town wearing black jeans and a slippery jersey of perspiration.  There was the knock knock knock at 95 Waikawa Road.  And the re-greeting of old friends on a brand new vacation.  Friends bound for the Marlborough Sounds.  There was.

And now there is.  There is the late afternoon sunlight filtered through the tree leaves.  There is the lying beneath the umbrella green.  We in hammocks strung between trunks and looking up at the blue patches between the branches.  The song of cicadas singing and the sound.  The water of the sound reflecting the sun and a breeze off the water blowing beneath the trees.  The water ripple.  With no stones thrown and the sway of the hammock in the salt breeze.

This is what is.  After a morning hike down the Queen Charlotte track to a rise above Mistletoe Bay.  The hike after coffee and poached egg sandwiches.  And after the hike a swim in the sound off the jetty.  And now we are pupa in rainbow cocoons, quarter mooned in the curl between trees.

A vacation from vacation.  A week working for Carolyn and now the supine swing in another paradise picture.  Lounging in the New Zealand post card land.  Lounging in the afternoon of the day that followed the night.  The night and the night of all nights.  The eye-opening, soul-quenching dark descent of the night.  And it was the night.  And it was the night.  And it was the night of revelation.

First I walked through Picton.  Through the one street town and around the harbor.  Over the steep bridge and on and on to 95 Waikawa Road.  And then we—that is Robin and I—and then we ran the errands that we needed to run in town.  Picton, Picton let us run through.  Picton.  And the run slows to a jog—the power outage in the grocery store.  And the jog slows to a walk—the credit card machine shot-to-hell and the cashiers adding frantically the sums of the shoppers’ groceries.  And the walk slows to a tip-toeing over egg shells as we pull into Subway and Robin “runs in” to grab supper—the one worker working in the international chain, cashier, sandwich-maker, bread-baker, etc.—and Robin emerges half an hour after entering.  She shaking her head.  No.  No.  No.

In her absence I’ve eaten a dozen oranges, and the rinds roll bright on the asphalt.  A semicircle around the open car door.  Let’s go.  And go. 

On to the Queen Charlotte drive.  And drive.  Whip the whip around corners blind.  The winding road winding into shining curves where the anticipation rises as soon as the bright patch appears ahead on the road.  And then?  Blindness.  All of a sudden total blindness in the sun-star shining.

But we make it safe to the Anakiwa Backpackers Hostel.  And we’re on the wooden dock jetty for the neon sunset to the west.  And thus begins the night.  And the night of revelation.

And in the aftermath of that night there are poached egg sandwiches and the Queen Charlotte hike and the lounging in hammocks.  And later a game of chess beneath the sunset while sipping white wine out of wine glasses.  While sipping white wine and waiting on the pumpkin and the potato and the kumara to cook in the communal hostel oven. 

And then the meal eaten and more wine poured into the wine glasses and the walk down to the wooden jetty.  Not because we chose to do so, but because we had to.  Just as we had to tell everyone in the hostel about our night of revelation.  Just as we had to encourage the lot of them to get out on this night—the night after—and experience it for themselves.

But there are no takers.  As we walk alone.  Alone onto the wooden slats and walking to the end to find the magic water.

And we leave intermittently to fill up our glasses—to finish the wine bottle—only to return with a guitar.  To sing songs on the dock until the clouds clear and we can see the lyrics of last night written in the infinite points pin-pricking the firmament.

And there is sleep and there is even the next day.  The breakfast of left-overs and instant coffee.  The packing up of belongings and the mid-morning kayak trip through the aqua-marine water of the sound.  The paddle blades cutting through the silicon-soul of a sprawling jelly-fish school.  The jelly-fish translucent and bobbing through the water like so many flap-jack souls submerged.

There is the diving off of the dock and the drive back down the Queen Charlotte Drive where we—that is Robin and I—talk about poetry and the south and tattoos.  And there is even the afternoon in Picton.  Spent in the shade of palm trees.  And there is whatever is to come after the afternoon.  But…

No matter what is to come, no matter how complicated the addition of the aftermath, the weekend will be remembered on account of that first night.  That first night that was the night.  And the night of revelation.

Working on the Fat Land

It was a week of work but not a workweek.  Here in the neo-Eden.  Living off the fat of the fatted land.  It was a week of work, working with Carolyn, but far from a workweek.

There was no alarm clock.  No sound but the early morning Tuis in the trees.  And after rising from Robin’s Bed in Robin’s Room, I would move in slow motion down the hallway to the kitchen.  Where the water in the kettle was always hot.  Steam rising from the spout, but no one in sight.  So morning after morning I had coffee on the deck and watched the light growing in the eastern sky.

Then to work.  And work we did.  For there were always jobs to do.  And once one was done, there were always others to begin.  And really there was never a beginning nor an end.  Pick beans on Monday, and by Thursday they are ready again for the picking.  Weed a boxed bed on Tuesday, and a week later the weeds are beginning to grow again.  Even when we harvested the crop of potatoes, the job was not done.  For the potatoes still needed to be washed and cooked and eaten.  And the soil in which they laid needed to be re-planted.

Yes.  There were always jobs to do.  And there will always be jobs to do.  Pouring heart and soul and sweat into the seeded ground and watching grow what will grow what will grow.

O!  And I am a shape-shifter.  A chameleon moving from job to job to job.

I have strapped a gas-powered weed-eater onto the side hook that hung from the full-body harness.  I have covered the ears with earmuffs and flipped the full-face screen down.  And suddenly I am a post-apocalyptic warrior.  Looking out at the dark world through a shade-shield.  My weapon hanging from my side and my trigger finger revving the engine roaring behind my elbow.  Look out lawn.  I’m approaching, swinging this screaming machine in wide arcs in front of me.  Down to the delicate work around flower beds and tree trunks.

I have harvested the potatoes alongside Carolyn.  Each of us wielding “garden forks,” which are just smaller versions of pitch forks.  Bent into the work and then standing and wiping my brow and staring into the distance at nothing at all with the fork upright in my hand like the old man from the American Pastoral and the potatoes rolling around at my feet.

I have chopped down the flax stalks with loppers, loping through the garden underbrush like a bushman hunting some hapless creature, the loppers snapping with a crack the flax stalks, some of which are almost twice my height. 

I have broken these stalks with my knees, the juice dripping down my legs and onto my socks.  And I have loaded the broken bones of these flax phalluses into a trailer and towed them down the road behind a John Deere tractor.  I am a country boy in the driver’s seat.  Sporting my trucker hat, the wheel between my legs.  And looking like I’m toting some nuclear waste, what with the bright green flax juice tattooed onto my knees and shins and shoes.

And I have planted trellises for tomato plants to climb, tied tomato plants to wooden stakes rising branchless from the earth.  And I have weeded boxed bed after boxed bed after boxed bed.  And I have strung up plants in the tunnel house and sprayed soapy water on pests lurking beneath plant leaves.  And I have beaten back the greedy arms of the garden below the house.

And I have done all of these things and more.  And I have done all of them happily in the morning light.  Under the guidance of Carolyn my guide and she never more than a stone’s throw away, working diligently on projects of her own design.

And everyday she would stop me in the midst of whatever I was doing and say, “Let’s get the hell out of this heat and go have some lunch.”  And we would.

And the lunches and the dinners were made up.  And made up almost always of fresh fruit and vegetables come straight form the orchard, from the garden out back.  And I stuffed myself taught until the skin was stretched taught like a turkey stuffed fat for Thanksgiving.

And there is no thanks that I can give that is elaborate enough for that week on the edge of the Wairoa River Gorge.  The afternoons spent reading and writing and running down trails.  And the nights spent sitting in the sitting room talking and cracking hazel nuts and watching made-for-TV movies. 

There are no adequate thanks floating in the humble wells of gratitude, and I can only hope that one day I’ll return the favor.

Another link clasped tight onto the traveling chain.

Thank you.

Eden on the Wairoa

That first weekend is full and full to the brim.  Robin introducing me to a life that she has already lived.  Over seeing my induction.  Leading me through the rites of passage.

The orchard walk on that first afternoon.  Bare feet in the grass and the trees heavy with hanging fruit.  Apple and pear and plum.  Ripening on the limb and some of them ripe for the picking.

So pick.  Pick the one that you want, pick it off of the tree, pick your teeth when it’s gone from your hand.  O!  How easy it is to pick fruit from a tree.  From a tree giving fruit.  From a giving tree giving.  How easy it is to pick fruit from a tree and feast fast beneath rustling leaves.  O!

And who do I thank for a feast such as this?  Tell me for I am so thankful that such a transaction can exist at all.  From the laden branch to the empty hand.  The fruit passing passive and perfect.  So?  Thank you.

Bare feet in the grass and over the grass to the garden.  Through the unplanted lanes between beds.  The grass walkways between wooden-box frames.  Walk.  To see the myriad faces of the vegetable portrait.  Beans and beet root.  Zucchini and cucumber.  Capsicum, potato, onion, and garlic.  Tomatoes fat on the vine and bloated in the afternoon sun.

And sunflowers on the other side of the tunnel house.  The tunnel house that tickles the nose with the smell of fresh peppers.  And the wild flowers bursting with color and growing at the edge of the gully-drop.  Among weeds: a color fire burning by the veggies.  In homage to a fallen friend.  These fire flowers in bloom and blooming, the flame petals always alight.

Bare feet in the grass and over the grass, and this is the life for me.  Living on the fat of the land.

Dinner and a movie and halfway through the movie the father-son duo arriving late and heading straight to bed.  And we following soon after.  Robin and I in “Robin’s Room.”  This South Island orphan child adopted by Carolyn and Wayne and Thomas, and she sprawled in her own queen bed in her own room and cracking jokes in the almost-dark with the boy on the pallet on the floor.

And we act like children, the two of us invited to this strange house perched above the Wairoa, and Robin already a family member and permitted with permission to ask friends to sleep-over, though neither one of us seems bent on sleep as we crack jokes and recount the highlight reel of the previous weekend and wonder aloud to each other if anyone else would think that we were funny.  And the answer is no and then no.

And neither one of us can remember the following day when or why we fell asleep and the only part of that lamp-light bed-time conversation that stands out in either one of our minds is the story that Robin told about the 2009 commencement speech at Carolina when Desmond Tutu—the archbishop of South Africa—made an out of character comment about “no one wanting an orgy.”

What?

But on to the new day and the day unfolding in the sunshine sky.  Wayne serving hot drink after hot drink after hot drink to anyone and everyone who cares to keep pace with him, this caffeine junkie, and I’m on board for the ride.

Robin gives me a tutorial on weeding a vegetable garden, and I collect apples that have fallen from the trees.  In the afternoon we navigate the gully drop down and down to the river to paddle in the crystal clear.  Now seated and floating on top of an open-boat kayak.  Now submerged in the Wairoa River.  Green.

We attempt to pilot the tandem boat down a shallow rapid.  Scraping along the stones until we are into deeper water, and gaining speed, and gaining speed, and gaining speed, until we collide with the bank opposite and topple—the two of us—into the wet.  Ego Check.

But the dot at the bottom of the exclamation point is this: that while trying to gain her footing after the sinking of the ship, Robin slips with a warbling “wooah,” and disappears beneath her straw hat—her straw hat floating on the surface of the water.  The scene played out like the flip-frames of some ancient cartoon.  “Wooah.”

So we splash around in the too-cold water, in the crystal-clear green, before docking the plastic boat and scrambling up the switch-backs to the house.  Following the family.  Into the car—like actors in a Toyota T.V. commercial—with the sun riding its descent line down.

For a feed of fish and chips at Rabbit Island and a walk on the beach afterward.  A fried food waddle on the sand.  The sun like a bobber half-submerged, and holding some celestial bait on the other end of the line.  Tossed in to the ocean’s horizon and then gone, caught by the catch of the following day.

And the following day the boys are back.  Lemonade ice blocks for lunch and dinner.  And I am galloping through the garden with shoulder saddled cowboys.  Giddy-up and get going.  For once the fun starts they do not want it to stop.

And then dinner with the gathered family.  Most of the food coming straight from the garden.  And after dinner with the gathered family, Robin and Wayne depart.  Lumberjacks heading back to where the wood is.  Into the car and onto the road.  Back to Picton.  Back to Picton, trailing a dust cloud out of the gorge.

And then it is Carolyn and myself.  Carolyn the long and lean.  The blonde-headed hostess of the week to come.  Caorlyn of the lank legs.  The legs sprouting from the armpits and reaching.  And reaching daily in long strides across the green grass to the garden.  Carolyn in the black dress perpetual, with the legs falling out of the black dress as if they are not attached to the body at all.  Fluid.  She is born of the earth—Adam’s rib be damned—this dirt woman, whose home is between the rows of beet root, beneath the soil and hidden among the hearts of potato plants.  She who is always reaching toward the sun with the red tomatoes, hop-scotching between the empty squares of the trellis screen.  A gardener in the garden and a cook in the kitchen.  A teacher, a mother, a wife, and a friend.  “Aunty Carolyn” to the lemonade ice block boys and a woman who is proud to be woman.