South Again: From Picton to the Holy Homestead

In the aftermath of the Rolling Wellington Reel I contacted Chester (a feat in itself), and we came mutually to the conclusion--through a series of short sentences over the telephone--that we wouldn't be climbing at Lake Taupo the upcoming weekend/week (due to my elbow injury, and his search for the meaning of life).  So I decided I would WOOF on the South Island for a week, rather than hitch to the Sulfer City and sift around.  Chester said "sweet as," and we decided to meet the following week--my last week--in his hometown.

Phone calls to Robin and Carolyn (my host-to-be) and everything looks good to go.  So after a day alone in the house with Eva's cousin Laura, I took the Ferry south in the middle of the day.  Cartoons all the way across the Cook straight and into the port on the sun-shining South Island.

Off the ferry in Picton and down

Wakkawa Road

.  Around the sound to number 95, and no one is home.  So I strip to my skivvies and lay out in the green strip beside the asphalt.  Pure white trash by the side of the road.  Red shorts and bare-skin.  Sweat-stained and covered in grass clippings.

And soon walking down the road to find a dairy.  Where is Robin?  I don’t know.  Where is the house key?  She told me, but I can’t remember.  But never fear.  Because there is ice cream in the cone, and I’m lounging in the shallow lawn again.

Before long—while I’m still working on the ice cream cone, in fact—a bearded man emerges from the house.  Barefoot and shuffling over the gravel, squinting under the sun, and carrying a steaming mug between his hands.  As if bearing a gift—Gold? Frankincense? Mere?—this wise man moving off of the driveway and into the lawn and asking, “Nate?  Are you Nate?”

“Yes sir.  Yes sir.”  As I follow him inside for a brew.  For a hot drink fresh from the electric kettle boiling.

And we sit in the kitchen—plastic chairs on the linoleum floor—and we chat.  This bearded Wayne man.  Wayne of the laugh-line webs, Wayne of the perpetual hot drink.  Wayne.  The logger, the father, the employer and host, and the man seated smiling in front of me.   

A string of porcelain cylinders filled and then emptied while we exhaust conversation in the caffeine shine.  Then tea from the oven—tea another name for supper—tea from the oven and another hot drink.

And after we finish, sitting calm and quiet in the empty house, Wayne proposes a walk to the café for coffee.  So.  To the street and a walk down the street through the neighbourhood and over a steep bridge to the one-street town.  For a short black at the café and a glass of sugary port.

Clouds over the water and the lavender fade as we alternate between alcohol and caffeine.

And when you’re up you’re up.

And when you’re down you’re down.

And when you’re only halfway up, you’re neither up nor down.

So we float back to the flat in that always in-between.  Tiptoeing across the slack line strung above downers and below uppers.  Across the bridge and through the neighbourhood, the purple sky swallowing the day.

Robin welcomes us at the flat along with Thomas—Wayne’s son—and Gavin who is another member of the logging crew.  They have all had the day off—the first workday in “God knows how long”—and have been diving and fishing in the sounds for the duration.

They are all stoop-sitting when we arrive.  Armed with butter knives and spoons and digging their shellfish catch out of their (the shellfish) shells.  Paua, yellow foot, scallop.  These stoop-sitters cross-legged on the concrete, heads bowed and working with their primitive utensil-tools.  Beside them a bowl of the gathered meat and a plastic grocery bag full and always filling with the discarded guts and the brittle shells.

Robin tries her hand at pan-fried scallops and we slurp them down before hitting the hay. 

And they’re all gone in the morning.  All but Robin and myself at

95 Waikawa Road

.

We spend the day sound-side, reading and writing in the grass on the rim of the water.  Half naked in the sun and staring out at the Sound.  The peninsula points reaching out, reaching into the water like octopus arms.  Reaching out to pieces of lost land-flesh, the islands floating in the blue.

Above: pontoon planes buzzing in lazy circles before ski-stopping into the bay.  It is blue and all blue here.  Blue, as a fleet of sailboats slides into view.  Around the corner of the dock and into the open, the sails bellied out—each one red and streaked with a diagonal white stripe—and wide with the wind behind them.  Into the blue.

Bookshop stop after we’re both sunburnt.  And though the books are grossly overpriced, both Robin and I agree that the trip was well worth while as we found: first, a book detailing a set of the most bizarre and least attractive hairstyles ever assembled on human heads; and second, a complete and detailed guide to the Golden Compass, a children’s book/movie that neither she nor I was able to understand.  Good bookstore.

We walk in the woods afterward to kill time, and we talk about that looming tunnel toward which all of us are always headed.  That slick-sided tunnel called the future.  And if there’s a light at the end, I haven’t yet seen it.  And if there’s not a light, then I can only hope that I’m not looking down the loaded barrel of a gun.  Good God.  That’s a little heavy.  But we’re all getting older by the day, here, boys and girls.  We’re all getting older by the day.

Fried fish for lunch, fresh yesterday’s outing.  And Carolyn arrives soon after, the Land Cruiser crunching over the gravel.  But instead of rose-colored champagne this afternoon she comes bearing two boys.  Her nephews Max (8) and Anthony (5), both of them blonde-headed and blue-eyed and ready to get back on the road to Nelson.  To Nelson from where they’ve just come.  And we’re off.

Anthony behind me—strapped into his car seat in the back back and repeating the salutation “Hello Nathan” over and over as we cruse through the wine country west.  To stop at a dairy in the Rai Valley for lemonade ice-blocks.  Ice-blocks the New Zealand equivalent of American popsicles.  And it is ice-blocks and always lemonade ice-blocks for these boys.  Lemonade ice-blocks to collect the sticks.  Popsicle sticks with potential prizes stencilled into the wood.  Spell out words and phrases and mail them in to the provider provided.  Popsicle sticks in an envelope: the payment for dreams amassed beneath the blonde hair of little boys.

That was my first on Friday afternoon.  And since then I’ve been knocking them back.  And knocking them back, because who knew how refreshing a lemonade slab on a stick could be.  And stick after stick the boys are building their hoard.  Stockpiling their fortune of word-stencilled wood.

We drop them off at their house in Richmond—past Nelson—and turn onto the road that will take us to what will be my home for the next week and a half.  The house perched above the Wairoa River Gorge.  Wairoa of the big water, of the green water.  And the green water clear to the bottom.

We bouncing off of the beaten track, off of the asphalt and onto the dirt road, a dust cloud curling out behind us.  And suddenly Carolyn skids to a stop as we round a bend, swerves the Land Cruiser into a gravel pull-out, and turns to us and asks, “Did you see that?”

“No.”  Robin and I looking at each other and then back to our cryptic host-mother.  “No.”

So we all three exit the car and approach cautiously that which has cause her to stop.  It is a bush-branch dripping with bees.  Literally.  The branch drooping and the bees balled on the end, hanging like a living stalactite.  All of them crawling over one another for there is nothing to crawl on except one another.

The seething mass of black and yellow buzzing and the bumble-bee pool below the buzzing stalactite buzzing.  Pooled in the grass and the ball of bees above it literally dripping onto the ground.  As if in imitation of that sweet substance which only they can produce.

Oh, honey.  And after we get our fill—after we feast our eyes on this pre-comb, on this honey-hive-to-be—we jump back into the car and bounce through a tree tunnel.  A tree tunnel sonorous with the song of the countless summer cicadas singing.  Through the tree tunnel shadowed and into the sun again.  Over a concrete bridge that spans the jade-green Wairoa, and through a gate on the opposite side that Robin must open before us and close behind us.  A gate that bars the exit of any piece of this paradise and that halts the momentum of any evil wishing to enter this Eden.

This neo-Eden perched above the Wairoa: house and hill, and cows on the hill, the plot of land, the orchard growing on the lawn, the lawn that leads to the garden green, to the tunnel house and the sunflowers, and the vegetable garden boxed in beds. 

And this is the fat of the land.