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.

Wellingtonian Wastrels: After the Reel Rolled

And then it is Sunday the 23^rd and we re-awake in the late morning.  The pale blonde alarm clock having exited the house and taken the boat south several hours ago.  So we re-awake in the late morning—Robin gone—and spend the next three days celebrating Caroline’s birthday. 

The 23^rd, the 24^th, the 25^th.  These are the Halcyon days.  The golden days.  The waking life walking through the lucid dream days.

We—she and I—walking through the graveyard sprawl once again.  The parrots flitting over the gravestones.  The primary colored parrots: yellow and red and blue.  And they wheeling into the bush where we follow. 

Into the deep green and up the rise to the top of the hill.  Towering above Karori.  The southern tip of the North Island spread below in a suburban puddle of stacked houses.  Right to the water’s edge.  The Wellingtonian wash of the rolling hills.  The city built into the shallow slopes.  Right to the water’s edge.

We braced on the hill-top, side-by-side, for it is a whipping wind up here above the city and the sea.  Side-by-side and our hair wild, our clothes rippling around us, our voices muted in the rushing: as if we are underwater.  The two of us underwater and unaware of the breathing world.

We are blown down the cattle trails, through the tall grass, along the ridge line.  Blown and buoyed by the invisible currents that feel as if they will lift us up—we light-footed and springing into the sky set solid.  Swift like deer vanishing into a wood.  Vini Vidi Vichi.

This lucid dream unravelling like a ball of yarn down a flight of stairs.  Yet remembered as the ball intact.  A spinning globe on God’s little finger.  The afterglow after the reel has rolled.  And now spun into yarn and wrapped in a sphere.  The sphere spinning in a vain attempt to solidify these unravelled and unravelling days.  The days that lie ahead.  The last days of the girls’ year long adventure, and the beginning of the end of my own New Zealand trip.

A blur.

There are chocolate banana pancakes made from scratch and fresh off the skillet.  There is the smell of marijuana drifting up the spiral stairs.  There are clouds amassing over the city like an enemy army.  Advancing now toward the hills.  There is the digital glow of the television and of the laptop computers.  And the million messages from facebook friends.  “Happy B-Day, X.” 

There is the moment when Caroline complains of the clouds.  The moment when she claims that this will be her only chance at having a “hot birthday” in January.  The moment when she decrees that the clouds part on behalf of her birthday wishes.  And they do.

There is sunbathing in the backyard.  There is downtown Wellington in the afternoon.  Caroline and Eva and I chasing the sun from bar to bar to bar as it sinks slowly toward the horizon.  Brown beer in the glass and waiting for the shadow land.

There is homemade pizza in the oven and a chocolate cake that will take three days to eat.  There are movies on the television after the sun has set.  And the unbelief that anyone will ever have to go.

These are the golden days, wrapped together in the yarn ball.  Twenty-four on the 24^th.  And it feels afterward as if it really was a dream.

Wellingtonian Wastrels: The Rolling Reel

The next several days would be comprised of a series of snapshots strung together and completing a slide show.  Yes, the highlight reel.  The pointer finger of God having punched the play button.  And away, and away, and away.
　
Thursday:

That first night, after everyone found their way back to 61 Standen, after everyone arrived full-bellied from suppers consumed separately, after everyone was seated in a semi-circle around the television sipping wine, we somehow came collectively to the conclusion that the only way to kick off the weekend would be to watch "The Golden Compass."

"The Golden Compass" a children's film full of CGI special effects.  Full of witches and talking soul-animals and magic wands, et cetera.  This, the movie we choose after Caroline (earlier in the day) singled out the fans of the Fantasy genre as a group of people with whom she chooses not to associate.  This, the film that we choose.  And--once again--a children's film.

And a film that, in the end, not a single one of us can comprehend.  There are too many characters, the plot is all over the place, and we just don't know what's happening. No.  We can't follow the children's film on the screen.  So we file out of the room one by one until we are all downstairs.  All of us downstairs and the DVD still rolling on the television screen upstairs, still blasting through the stereo speakers on the second floor.  The last view before shutting the door to Eva's bedroom is this: Eva and Robin side by side in Eva's bed, their faces aglow in the digital light from their computers, and apparently the both of them gaming away.  

Dorks in the nighttime.  Travellers sharing beds so as not to sleep on the floor.  The internet a necessity until you don't have it.  And then an amazing commodity when you have it again.  The two of them looking like gamers in the gloom.  Goodnight.

Friday:

The day evaporates quickly.  Separate trips to the supermarket and the liquor store.  Another walk through the graveyard with the dog.  The late afternoon sun-soak on the deck.  Beers tabs popped in the sunshine.
And then it is roasted veggies tossed in oil and lemon-pepper and rosemary, the rosemary plucked from the grass between gravestones.  All of us grouped around the kitchen island and sipping wine and pretending to be characters from "Waiting to Exhale," what with the girl-talk gossip and the girlfriend shimmy and the limp-wristed laugh.  And why am I a part of this?

Slow jams on the stereo and we're dancing after dinner.  Switch back to beers.  Beers from the fridge and get ready to go out.

To Southern Cross below the southern cross.  And beers.  Pitchers of beers slopped on the too-long tables.  And pictures--snapshots--that look posed in the aftermath.  Bottoms up and cigarettes shared.  The dance floor closed by the time we make our way to the hardwood.  So on to another bar.

And on.  Like sneak thieves in the street.  We darting between the shadows of buildings.  Behind square columns square in the asphalt.  Like fat totem poles rising to greet the city gods.  And we the demon spirits, the incarnations, below the downtown totem poles.  Dancing through the liquid night to avoid Caroline's past.  Through the shadows to avoid the eyes of certain persons at bar-entrance openings.  Through the night.

Bar-hopping.  And I loose myself twice in conversations with strangers.  The first, a man whose attention I was attempting to divert from the girls.  This after he asked them where they were from, and, when they answered "America," he mouthed the word "yes" and fist-pounded a friend at another table.  Classy.  The second stranger a loner who bummed me a cigarette and explained why I should move from my native land on the South Island (I don't know why he assumed this) to the always exciting Wellington.  Best Friends Forever in the alcohol haze.  And "what was your name again, mate?"

In both instances the girls come to the rescue.  And eventually we taxi away to Karori in the early morning. Back to 61 Standen Street.  Where apparently it is time for left over corn on the cob.  And the inevitable fashion shoot that ensues.

So.  The girls vogue, striking pose after pose.  Seductive.  All while mowing down the un-eaten dinner veggies.  And I snap photos of them from different angles while they smile at me with corn kernels between their teeth.  And we're just getting drunk as we head to bed.

It is Diddy Dirty Money with the lullaby on the laptop.  I'm coming home. And over and over we ask "who would have thought?" "P-Diddy back on track?" "who would have thought?"  And over and over Robin answers, "I would have," "I did," "I knew."

And we're just getting drunk as we head to bed.

Saturday:

To wake up drunk and cook a mid-afternoon brunch.  Veggie-egg scramble, hash browns, and chocolate chip pancakes. Complete only with a slew of mimosas.  Let the highlight reel roll.  Outside in the pic-a-nic table sun with the fist-sized speakers blasting (Diddy Dirty) and the eating gold and gone.  Who eats brunch at 3:30 pm?
　
Soon drunk.  Still drunk in the late afternoon and watching Dawson's Creek on the television.  It is Wilmington landscapes within the digital cage. It is a teenage melodrama articulated by B-level actors using grad-school grammar.  But we're not really listening.  All of us taking turns talking over the story on the screen.

And after Caroline directs a diatribe at the character Joey Potter (I seem to remember the phrase "straighten your fucking hair you stupid bitch").  And after Robin takes an airplane ride on the soles of my feet--she lifted up by laughter--this prone plank flying through the room.  And after the last champagne bottle clinks into the recycling bin along with the rest of them--the orange juice jug empty and the house bereft of alcohol.  After all of this we look at each other one by one by one by one and wonder aloud why we are drunk and inappropriate in the middle of the afternoon on a random Saturday thousands of miles from North Carolina.

Let the reel roll.

And we roll into town to run errands and collect more booze for the nighttime falling.  And while I sit and wait on the girls--while I wait in the illegally parked car--while I wait on the city street called Lambton Quay, I browse through Robin's ipod until I find a playlist entitled "fun jamz," and am immediately transported back to West Cary Middle School.

I wonder to myself who could think of the west without the prefixes "wild" and "wild."  Who could think of the west without conjuring a mental image of the bleach-headed, bare-chested Sisquo and the gun-slinging, line-dancing Will Smith?  It's the Wild Wild West on repeat, and the car is a carriage through the avenues of time.

Back up the hill to sit and sip.  While watching Whale Rider--a New Zealnd film about the native Maori population, women's lib, and the use of cetaceans as horses.  And when it ends we flip through the channels looking for The Patriot.  Knowing that the Mel Gibson epic is supposed to be playing.  But alas: we have 30 minutes to kill before it begins.

And suddenly we're all frantic. What are we going to do? We have a whole half-hour. What are we supposed to do?  I don't know. Do you know?  No.  I don't know.  What can we do? Frantic.

But the movie comes on before we can make a decision.  Thank God.  And we settle into our seats for the duration.  And it is late before we know it.

Wine tonight to go along with Laura's five-star Lasagna dinner served in the middle of the movie.  And we're still eating as the Casio digital calculator turns today into tomorrow.

Sleep deep on distended bellies.  And the only alarm clock in the house is the pale figure of Robin running into the room in the much-too-early morning.  Jumping onto the bed in this: the last violent charge before her retreat.

Goodbye. And the highlight reel rolls to black.  Goodbye.
　

Wellingtonian Wastrels: Before the Reel Rolled

Ferry.  Ferry, ferry across the blue.  Through the sound country on the metal monster weaving.  The horn honk echo off island walls.  Off the steely decks of sister ferrys flowing past.  Low pitched like a whale's whistle in the salt breeze.  This buoyant belly bearing us through the Cook Straight.  Cutting through the waves like a hot buttered knife.  And on across to Wellington: the city on the sea, the capital city.

Into port.  Rubber wheels on the metal deck.  Push start the Corolla.  Feet planted firmly behind the car.  Within the metal cavern filling and always filling with carbon dioxide.  Shoulder down and push toward the cave opening, the ferry workers yelling, toward the sunlight and down the ramp to freedom.

Into the five o'clock traffic.  Into the congestion, the blocked intestines of city streets.  Past the parliament's beehive buzzing and up the hill to Karori.  To 61 Standen Street.  And standing in the street I bid farewell to Chester Boyes.  Chester in a hurry to get back to Rotorua and "sort out [his] life."  Chester throwing my belongings on the sidewalk.  Chester speeding away in the Corolla.

While I walk up the steps to re-unite with the lovely ladies of Carolina.  Freckled faces in the domicile and the smiles of southern belles.  Slide into the comfortable stasis of a house of a home.  And pretend.  Off the boat and afloat in Windy Welly.  Put John Prine on the six disk changer and "come back, baby, come back.  I want to play house with you."

And is that domesticity tap tap tapping at the door?  Put the dog on a leash and walk him through the cemetery sprawl on the edge of suburbia.  Through the garden of gravestones, the polished rock sprouting over the human seed.  Lay them in the ground lying down.  And I know your name, and yours.  You a decade gone and six feet deep.  Your name, and yours.  And your age, and yours.  And your family around you.  On and on, the cemetery sprawl.  Down the rows, the dog chewing grass growing from graves.  Pull the leash.  On and on.

Stop at the store for beans before heading home.  Then it is a pot on the stove, greens in a bowl and the promise of a blockbuster DVD to acompany the bottle of red wine.

"Come back, baby, come back.  I want to play house."  With you.  Long walks with Caro the morning after and for the rest of the week.  Into town hand-holding, and hootie-hoo, how easy it is to fall into rhythm with a girl who knows how to dance.  "Life is a stage," said the patron saint of writing Wild Willy.  And: Good God!  I'm with a fucking star.

Shoot.

Nothing to do in town but turn around.  The shops closed and the empty streets feeling like a sepia-filtered photograph.  Into and out of the library, our look-a-likes stalking behind us in the black-glass reflections of ground-floor office building windows.  So it is.  Back up the hill with the wind rising.  Back up to beans and rice and another blockbuster and another bottle of wine.  Back up.

To wake to sunshine and the pic-a-nic table lawn chair lay out.  From the late morning to the early afternoon: lounging.  Sun ray soaking, until we get the call we've been waiting for.  All business from the cell phone receiver.  But boy-o-boy what a pleasure.

Enter Robin Fail.  And thus: the pointer finger of god poised above the play button on the highlight reel of the Wellington weekend.  A highlight reel that is more a series of snapshots than it is a grouping of stories...

And which begins with Robins appearance at 61 Standen Street with her New Zealand "Mother" Mrs. Carolyn Stilwell, and a bottle of rose-colored champagne.  Drink up.  Cultured--cultivated--the five of us spinning yarns in the sitting room, legs crossed and laughing, pouring the pale pink liquid from wine glass to mouth as the sun slides through the bay window that looks out on the afternoon sky.  Drink up.

Before she and robin head back to the city centre, Carolyn invites me to come stay with her at her family's home "in the gorge outside of Nelson."  An offer that I then ignored with a smile while pocketing the piece of paper she handed me.  While pocketing the piece of paper that contained her scrawled number.  A piece of paper that is now secured firmly within a southern gothic novel, marking my progress through the word fields of Faulkner, and forever handy for I might need it now that the offer has been re-considered.  Now that I've re-assessed my situation.  Now that I'm headed south once again.

But on that first afternoon--after the introduction and the glass of champagne--I crumpled the piece of paper and stuffed it into my pocket and didn't think about it again for the next several days.  Didn't think about it at all for the next several days.

For the next several days would be comprised of a series of snapshots strung together to complete a slide show.  Yes, the highlight reel now rolling.  The pointer finger of God having punched the play button.  And away, and away, and away.

Godspeed and Goodbye to the Christchurch City

Out of Christchurch.  The final farewell.  Goodbye Park City.  Early morning and driving against the work traffic.  The low-riding Corolla riding low.  Packed to the brim and we're off.  This is the end.  The end of the South Island tour.

This is the morning of the end.  And this morning is all instant coffee swigged in the kitchen and the frantic search for the forgotten.  It is Anna and Simon seeing us off.  The two of them wrapped in towels, stumbling out of their shared room, and squinting through the haze of sleep.

Then the ceremonious ending.  The push-start down the driveway at 312 Greers Road.  Simon and I side by side.  Bent into the back of the car, and his towel slipping.  Pop the clutch and give her some gas.  I am waving goodbye as I run down the driveway to catch the Corolla.  Don't look back.  Simon's towel surely on the ground around his feet.

Goodbye.  And thank you so much.  Goodbye.

Out of the city center.  Up Highway 1 North.  Once again.  Into the golden fields of wine country.  Grape vines growing up the wire lattice work roadside.  Row upon row indentical and zipping by the window like a farm field flip-book.

And in between the vineyards the sheep grazing and the cows.  The sheep, white speckles into the distant hills.  The sheep infinate and spread like a net of bleating stars across the land.  And the cows.  The cows puddled beneath the trees.  Seeking shade.  Seeking shade from the all-alone sun in the sky.

Queen Anne's Lace in the ditch by the side of the road.  Bobbing in the breeze.  "Tossing their heads in sprightly dance" to the tune of the whistling wind.  The wind that blows us north.

These are the summer days.  The mid-January summer days.  Two boys in sunglasses and shorts cruising toward the coast.  A shared mason jar passed back and forth between them.  The mason jar full of a homemade banana milkshake.  The sweet dairy deity.  Gulp.  And: good god it feels good to be moving.

On the road after.

After climbing in the Port Hills on Saturday.  Three sport climbs in the dying light of the setting sun.  Climbing beneath a glided sky.  The Nor'wester cloud fleece tempered metallic so that the folds of the sprawling underbelly glitter silver pink.  The sky on fire.

After sleeping restlessly on a stomach full of bananas (the diet having momentarily changed from toasties to the potassium powerhouse because of a stack of FREE BANANAS at the local fruit store).  And climbing at the Cave Stream boulders beside Castle Hill.  Where--incidentally--both Marky and I take repeated falls from the top of a problem called "Baby Food," and re-injure elbows already throbbing from overuse.

After spending Saturday afternoon at the overcrowded beach-retreat of Taylor's Mistake.  All of us planking ourselves into the breakers to surf, horizontal and smiling, toward the shore.  Then the fish and chips sitting cross-legged in the sand.  Grease.  Flocks of seagulls circling endlessly.  Ride back into town in the boot of the car for a desert of frozen bananas.

After all of this and the rain sweeps in at the start of the workweek.  We are confined for the entirety of Monday and Tuesday to the living room jail-cell of the flat.

And after the rain we are--now--casually cruising through paradise.   On the road.  The one window of the Corolla that works rolled down.  And the sea breeze on the bare skin beneath the blue sky.  Drift.

Switch seats in Kaikoura and we're off once again.  Drift.  Bare feet working the gas and the clutch and--once we reach the road work--the brake as well.  The roadwork.  The stop and go.  And stop.  And go.  Swing around the slow movers in between work zones.  Hold tight through the curves and sling-shot into the straight aways.  We arrive with time to spare.

Ice cream in Picton before boarding the Ferry.  Sweaty.  Unshaved. Unshowered.

The only thing holding us up?  The sustenance of our farewell flight?  Bananas and ice cream.  Hooray!

Headed north.  And into the fray.

Stone Monkeys Swinging

The hitchhiking done for the time being and once again sedentary.  Temporarily sedentary in the city of Christchurch.

“Back into the swing of things.”  And swing we do.  From the city to the station in the basin.  Swing into the field of the limestone monolith.  The limestone monolith innumerable.  All together, an homage to the rock-climbing gods.

The first day back and the sweet kiss of the Quantum Field.  A hangboard workout once we’re back at the flat.  Swing.  This is the rock climbing way. 

Toasties in the toasty-maker, and here we are.  The willing dopes of a delicious Déjà Vu.  Thank you.  A classic movie cued on the laptop flipped.  Two toasties apiece.  Two toasties steaming hot and drowned in Homebrand smoked hickory sauce.  Cold beers from the fridge and the throb of fatigued forearms.  This is Monday night.

This is Monday night, and by Friday morning.  I will have taken two more trips to the Castle Hill basin.  From Christchurch.  Over Porters Pass and into the rhapsodic revelation of the limestone kingdom. 

I will have eaten nine more toasties.  That’s eleven all together.  From Monday night to Friday morning.  That’s twenty-two pieces of bread (a loaf), eleven eggs, two red peppers, a kilogram of mushrooms, a block of cheese, a package of ham, and a bottle of smoked hickory sauce.  “Get ‘ur down ya’, boy.”  A three day binge of sliced-bread pies.  And more to wolf down in the weekend waiting.

But the food is an afterthought.  A way to pass the time between bouldering excursions.

There is the first trip to Quantum.  Where the sun beats us off of the rock, and Marky and I hitch back to town.  Then.  There are two trips to the fabled Flock Hill.  Flock Hill “better than Castle Hill” according to the New Zealand Rock Jocks that we met in the Darrans.  Flock Hill with “more holds and cleaner lines” than Castle Hill according to the stars of the Boone Speed climbing film Big Game.  Flock Hill with more rock to climb than the combined Quantum Field and Spittle Hill.  According to Mark.  According to Mark and a new friend—who is a famed New Zealand Rock Jock in his own right—Mr. Peter Allison.  Sometimes referred to as “The Radness.”

No guidebook available.  Special access that must be granted by the landowner.  Across the road from Castle Hill.  On the other side of a shadow valley.  And up the slope of another hill entirely.  Here we are.  This is a Narnia Land.  Immortalized forever in the film version of the “final battle.”  And here we are.

After a gut-busting snack of coffee poured over heaping helpings of ice cream.  After a techno-blasted afternoon ride over the Canterbury plains.  With the sun sitting low in the sky.  Setting.  Here we are.  We are here.

And we are the nighttime ninjas.  The post-supper savages creeping.  Up the green folds of the earth.  Up the green field aslant.  The rectangle shells and the steady gait.  The slow and steady turtle gait and the setting sun behind us setting.  It is sinking below Castle Hill.  It is throwing our shadows in front of us.  Black boxes on moving legs.  And we chase them up the hill.  A motley flock up the hill.  To Flock.  We fly.

And does it strike anyone else as strange.  After the walk, the pads tossed on the ground below the boulders.  Does it strike anyone else as strange that this is what we do?

To climb to the top and walk off?  To the top of a boulder, to the top of a mountain?  To climb to the top and walk off?  Does it strike anyone else as strange?  To clip bolts up a sport climb?  To unclip them?  To place traditional gear up a trad climb?  To pull it out?  Does it strike anyone else as strange that this is what we do?

We like to climb rocks.  So we climb them.

It is a funny thing.  To monkey up the stones.  To play stone monkey.  A funny thing to figure out the body puzzle required to move up the rock.  The secret sequence.  And it is a different puzzle for every person.

To climb.  The verb has a special meaning—a different meaning—to each and every Subject perpetrating the act.  That is: each and every climber defines “climbing” in a nuance all his or her own.

But I believe it is a vehicle.  Above all a vehicle.  Like any number of vehicles designed to move men and women from the indoors out.  It is the vertical vehicle carrying we stone monkeys out.  Out from under ceilings.  Out from the hum of electric lights.  Out from the structure.  From the brick.  From the wood paneling.  Out.

To take communion with the open air.  This, the sweet Eucharist of mother earth.  Her body, her blood.  Eat.  Drink.  And be merry.  Carpe Diem.  Sieze.

These are the rudiments of our human roots.  To thrive in the open.  To find a problem.  To create a problem.  To find a problem and solve it.

Now go fang up that rock.

Yes, two nighttime missions to Flock Hill.  The first with Paddy and Peter Allison and a boy named Tony.  All of us hopped-up on ice cream and coffee.  Snacking on candy.  And coffee.  An exploratory mission, with Peter Allison the Flock facilitator and guide.  And it is through the field we Cyclops climbers.  The brigh-white eye of the headlamp strapped firmly to each forehead and floating up the rocks.  Moon sliver and the Milky Way burning above.  The temps falling.  And falling.  And falling until we leave the boulders around four in the morning. 

For toasties in the dawn-light leaking from the east.  Bedtime in the sunshine.  Rest for round two tomorrow.

The second mission made up of two cars of climbers.  Marky and Peter Hardcore and myself.  Peter Allison, Chester, The Fish, and a guy named Troy.  And we’re off.  Caravanning through Canterbury.  The obligatory stop for pies along the way.  One car in Sheffield, the other in Springfield.  And the battle of deliciousness rages on.  And on to Flock Hill.

The sun setting once again, and once again we are the nighttime ninjas.  Stealthy.  This is a mission to send the unsent.  To re-grapple and to grapple anew.  To gain the tops of the rocks and to walk off.  To climb

Into the shadow land.  The moon cradled now by nothing but blue.  Now by the enveloping black.  While the ninjas swing swift.  And swift into night.

The Thumb Song Sing-along

The Darran days done. 

Simon and I hitch out on Saturday beneath blue skies.  Chester and Carl head back into the hills.   

Roadside.  Simon and I wait roadside.  With a pack apiece and our thumbs outstretched.  Learn to speak the lingo.  Learn to sing the transient song.   

We wait roadside for an hour and a half before Ligar picks us up.  Ligar a Swiss photo-enthusiast with a self-proclaimed predilection to “getting smashed.”  North from the head of the Gertrude Valley to Te Anu to stop for two cups of cappuccino at a cafe and a slice of chocolate cake.  Then crowd back into the yellow hatch-back rental and blare techno all the way to Queenstown.  Stopping for Ligar to snap photos all the vistas.  Vista after vista.

All the way to Queenstown where Simon and I say goodbye and hustle down the street to stuff ourselves with a world famous Fergburger.  To give up a ride for a slab of beef on bun.  And well worth it.

We head back up the hill after fashioning a cut-out cardboard sign.  Thumbs out.  Half smiles.  And the cars go streaming by.  Two couples come walking past, the men handsome ogres, the women beautiful.  Trophies.  “Good on ya, boys,” says the smiling Alfa male.  “Keep it up young guns,” as they pass.  And over his shoulder, “But Geraldine’s quite far away.” 

We know.   

A twenty minute ride with three Maori boys in a jalopy.  They just come from the rugby match.  Drinking warm Tui beer out of bottles in the backseat with the speakers rattling fuzz into our eardrums.  And they drop us off in Frankton, which is really just the outskirts of Queenstown.  Not even twenty minutes.  But they’re “good cunts” nonetheless.  Finish the beers and throw away bottles and get back onto the road.

Another string of cars.  The yellow hatchback with Ligar behind the wheel.  He pretends not to see us.  Tactful. 

But before too long we are picked up by the Alfa male and his girlfriend.  They come cruising by in a flash car.  And the taillights blink.  And they do the side swerve.  And we realize once we’re inside that it’s one of the couples we saw on the sidewalk. 

“We’re only going to Cromwell,” says the man, “but we’ll get you that far.”  He slides his seat forward to accommodate Simon.  “A little farther on the way to Geraldine.”  And all of a sudden he is scrunched.  Like a freckled clown.  Huge.  Hunched in the driver’s seat.  His hulking frame too much, his knees jabbing into the dash.  Into the console on the one side, the door panel on the other.  Bending the shape of the car.  Genes, I think to myself, he’s got giant genes.

And as we chat.  And chat.  It comes out that he, too, is from Rotorua.  He graduated with Carl Fischer’s big brother.  The elder fish.  So he and Simon--common ground established--shoot the shit.  And after a while Simon says, “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch your name.”  And the man responds, “Tom Donnelley.”  And a silence falls.  And after another while Simon says, “I’m sorry, I’m a bit out of the loop, but don’t you play for the All Blacks?”  And the man responds, “Yep, yep.  I play a bit.”

A starting lock for the best rugby team in the world, and yet he’s modest as a mouse.  Down the road to Cromwell.  Chit-chatting about rock climbing and other “extreme sports.”  And after they drop us off in Cromwell, waving goodbye out of the sunroof, Simon says, “Well, you’ve just taken a ride with one of New Zealand’s premier sportsman.”  What a good cunt.

Then a ride from a milky-eyed man who may or may not have been three sheets to the wind.  A ride from scruffy Bruce and his mangy dog.  All the windows down, and a child lock employed.  I can’t hear a bit of the conversation from where I sit in the backseat.  So I pet the dog and wait.  And Bruce drops us off in the middle of nowhere.

No shoulder.  Few cars.  But nowhere, after all, is somewhere.  And as the clock tics toward seven in the evening we catch our fifth and final ride from a fellow traveler.  A German girl who is on her way to Christchurch.  On her way to the big city to sell her car and get out of the country.  The first female flagged down, and she plays Sufian Stevens as we cruise toward Geraldine.

She stays with us at the Sentinies’.  In the always welcome arms of Anna’s parents.  Yogurt and fresh fruit as a nighttime snack.  And a comfortable conversation with Ad before bed.

Wake up early and cruise to Christchurch.  To 312 Greers where Marky lounges shirtless and shoeless in the driveway.  Smoking.  Waiting on Paddy and a car to take him to Castle Hill (Sir Lancelot the Mitsubishi Lancer having exploded over Marky’s holiday break).  And I’m fiending to climb.  I’m ready to go.  Itchy fingers and the driveway pacing.

But Paddy arrives with a full ride.  And I’m forced to hitch to the hill.  No problem. 

By now a master: practiced and skilled in his art.  The thumb hung out in the afternoon sun.  And soon a ride with a young couple.  They sweating out alcohol from the revelry of the previous evening.  On their way to a late holiday celebration with a hospital-bound relative.  “We’re not too excited about it,” the boy behind the wheel says, blinking into the sun.  “Shit, I’m still drunk,” says the girl. 

And this is the way it goes.

Back to Castle Hill for a session in the sunshine.  The distant triangles of hang-gliders swooping through the hills surrounding.  A collection of multi-colored cut-outs, construction paper cutting through the blue.  But it is hot, and before long the sweating sun forces us from the field.

Marky and I bid farewell to Paddy and the rest of the posse and wait roadside, thumbs loose.  We hitch to the Springfield pub via a family of three.  And, after a jug and a cigarette each, back to Christchurch via one of the hang-gliders from the basin.

Back to Christchurch and the familiar faces.  Simon and Anna and Marky.  Carl and Chester due back by Tuesday.  Back to the comfortable couch in the living room.  Toasties cooking in the toasty machine, and a movie cued on the laptop.

The promise of good weather and trips to the basin.

The thumb song of the last two days echoing with the voices of helpful strangers.