Browsing Category | New Zealand

Onwards

View from the shed apartment lounge that we lived in this time last year. Photo by Madz.

It is strange to be in a new year, after so much anticipation.

It was a year, as comedian Dave Chappelle commented in a podcast John and I listened to last month, while driving across Nevada, when for better or worse, we have all lived in close proximity with the decisions we have made in our life up until now. Our choice on the color of our couches and kitchen walls, to our careers, businesses, and spouses, was now under careful scrutiny as we have come face to face with them each day, often under serious stress. I told my cousin about that quote today and she laughed that she had just gotten rid of a dining room table that always went back to being wobbly, no matter what repairs she did to it.  She had thought it was quirky up until recently. She finally realized that 2020 was the year she needed a solid table to lay her head down on for a good cry and then get on with it.

For many this has been a year of heartbreak and tragedy, confusion, grief.  For others, this has been a season of hustle, as redundancies and cancelled plans have led to opportunities that wouldn’t have been available in 2019. For others it’s been a combination of all of this. Some have commented that 2020 has accelerated trends that we were moving towards anyways, like working remotely or ongoing independent study for those of our kids who have ended up being happier and more productive outside the traditional classroom.  We have all felt lonely, scared and a little lost without actual face time with our communities and families at some point in the last ten months.

In our house, 2020 has been a mixed bag that I’m still sorting through. This time last year we had just settled into summer in New Zealand in a friend’s beautiful shed apartment. I threw myself into freelance projects and worked at a pub at night while hanging out with Jessie – then just six months old – during the day as John fished and explored the rivers around the South Island. The idea was that we were setting ourselves up to do this every northern hemisphere winter, for as many years as we could. We barely made it back to the U.S. before both countries – and the rest of the world – shut down indefinitely in March. We had unexpected weeks with family in Colorado in quarantine, as Jessie had long nights of teething and we slept in shifts, drank endless pots of coffee through the snowy late mornings, ordered take-out, and took solitary walks by the creek when we needed a breather and a big-picture perspective of what was happening. It was all going to go away by Easter. Then the middle of summer (which, unexpectedly, exploded with work for both John and I – turns out that everyone in the U.S. wanted to be in Montana). Then it was September. By then we knew we had to put the plan to return to New Zealand on the back-burner, maybe indefinitely.

Instead, as the months have gone on and work has calmed down, it was replaced by plans for another adventure this winter that has become more and more certain.

It’s a journey that might be closer to home, yet no less nerve-wracking than a move across the world. And if you’ve run into me in the last few weeks, you’ll see that I’m well on my way.

At 32 weeks pregnant, with an 18-month-old toddler running laps around the couch I’m beached on like an exhausted mammal looking up at photo collages of the rivers, lakes, mountains and oceans of New Zealand we were exploring this time last year, I’d put my hand up to agree that this has been a year when we have lived in tight quarters with our collective life decisions that have motored us along to where we are now, then screeched to a halt, dumping us here in 2020: Surprised, messily joyous, overwhelmed, hopeful, exhausted, grateful, tougher and thicker skinned than we were 12 months ago.

At a work meeting on December 31, going over wines and a tasting menu that evening, we talked about where we all were as 2020 came, maybe mercifully, to an end for each of us. The theme for the night, with fire-dancing, a bonfire and fireworks, was “the rising of the Phoenix,” which has never felt more appropriate. I said that I felt like my own theme word for the year was “pivot.” I’ve had to release more than I’ve ever had to release this last year. Ideas of myself. The vision board I had for our future. I had to learn to relinquish myself to the rest that my body and mind had actually been craving, after months of traveling and living in transition. Then turn around and throw myself into work. Then turn around again and re-accept the gift of rest when our workplace shut down for 10 days in August, as Covid cases rose in Montana. I had to learn to incorporate fatigue and morning sickness into my summer and make peace with collapsing on a couch at the end of the night to eat frozen grapes and watch Below Deck. I got to learn the joy of having a wonderful community of parents and childcare pros around me – literally, my neighbors – who adored Jessie and helped shuttle her around and give her a beautiful summer with a wee tribe of adventurers that she will be growing up with.

In all of the unexpected twists and turns, the releasing of plans and control of the future – whatever that looks like – I’m okay with where our household decisions have landed us, even close up – scratched wood floors, tiny kitchen, toys, abandoned sippy cups, peeling siding on the front that I’ve covered up with a wreath and wind chimes, and all.  Winter and darkness is very acute in Montana. Solstice on the 21st felt appropriately somber. And comforting – like a heavy duvet had been thrown over me. As the holiday cards still strung up around the house tonight remind me, 2020 has been “a year to remember.”

Ha. Yeah it has.

Now bring on 2021 from the ashes.

2 Comments California, Montana, New Zealand

Homecomings

It is the first week of Spring, and we are back in the Northern Hemisphere, in a fast-changing world that has been whittled down to a tiny house by a creek in a wooded Colorado canyon. We have family, a teething 9-month-old, and hours to find our routines and fresh air.

 

New Zealand is like Narnia now, and we’ve come back through the wardrobe and into a cold, torn-up and muddy landscape outside the windows as winter recedes. It is like no time has passed, and yet everything has changed. Sometimes at night, when I’ve put Jessie back to sleep for what feels like the 18th time, I’ll go through the photos from the last three months on my phone, under the covers, up until our last journey down the long, winding driveway from the shed where we spent the summer. Five days into this quarantine, I now marvel at the ease of movement in each photograph. How no matter how far away we traveled, there were cafes to stop at for a cappuccino and egg-and-bacon pie, or a pub by a lake where we’d sit at a shared table with strangers, holding onto cold pints, condensation running down the glass and over our fingers as Jessie mastered the army slither she still prefers over crawling, in the grass at our bare feet.

 

Two Wednesdays ago, we were at my parents’ house in California, and I had gone to a coffeehouse on the coast. The night before, at dinner at a Mexican restaurant with a friend, we had scoffed that all this talk of a pandemic was election-year stupidity. That next day, as I typed on my laptop at an outdoor table, as rain fell just beyond the patio, I watched someone carry two super-sized packages of toilet paper from a grocery store across the wet parking lot. The sight chilled me, and even though I could brush it off as Californians over-reacting, I still felt fear setting in. Each day after that has felt like a collapse of some part of my life that I have taken for granted, as we would watch the news from kitchen counters: going out to eat with friends; stopping at breweries and sitting shoulder to shoulder on bar stools watching live sports; visiting extended family so Jessie could flap her arms and yabber away at her cousins; stopping at public beaches, parks, the zoo. Going out to the movies. Sitting in a coffeehouse on the coast like I was doing that day, sharing space with strangers, not thinking about how many hands had touched the jug with creamer, with a dim awareness that a virus somewhere was spreading, but that it wasn’t near, and definitely wasn’t my problem. Spring blooms were everywhere. Citrus trees were heavy with fruit. Before we left my cousin’s house in California, where we spent our final afternoon, she gave us five lemons from the trees in their backyard.

 

We ate the last of the lemons this week, here in this little house on a creek in Colorado. The pandemic is here and it definitely is my, and everyone’s problem, as we make decisions about who we will be each day in the face of this new world we are in. There is fear. But there is kindness, appreciation, compassion, gratitude and a deep exhalation of surrender to this time as well. This morning I made breakfast while Jessie sat with her grandpa and watched morning sports commentary. I got to go for a long run along the river, eyes on the red canyon above. The day will be about making a long and possibly complicated dinner out of simple ingredients, giving Jessie a bath with bubbles, toys, in her mermaid swimsuit and sending clips to family. Jessie will be wrapped in a unicorn towel by her grandma and sung to. I will dress her in pajamas and read “Hush-a-bye Bear Cub.” Her dad will rock her and put her in her crib. Then we will all pile on the couch and watch Jeopardy and the season finale of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Jessie will likely wake countless times in the night. But that is alright, because we can take turns napping all through the next day if we have to.
Someone sent me The Peace of Wild Things last night. It’s a Wendell Berry poem I had never heard before and it is perfect, I think, for this week we are all in. I also read this at 3 a.m., under the covers, after putting Jessie back to sleep for the countless time, then not being able to sleep myself.
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. 
I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
A month ago our world was so big. Now it is very, very small. There is nowhere to be right now but here, as we are, with each other.
2 Comments Colorado, New Zealand

A new wonderland

 

Everything is turned upside down.

Seasons, constellations, the length of days, what we wake up to in the morning. There is green everywhere. Birdsong so loud I have to wear earplugs to sleep. It is early summer here but storms are still unrelenting. Above our bed is a sun roof made up of thick, grooved plastic, where we can see the southern cross and see the rain pelt down, sounding like gunfire at midnight. John and I walk down with the compost pail, Jessie strapped to him in the front-pack, eyes bright, as Fiordland stretches around and below the long, winding driveway we are on, the flax bushes rustling beside us. We dump it in the pile, just a corner of a big, sweeping garden sprouting rhubarb, zucchini, green onions and new lettuce.

It is December 25th in New Zealand’s South Island. There are no gifts, other than Hospice shop books and a 50 cent stuffed bear and a straw rattle for our daughter, but Jessie is enraptured by her toes, the sight of a spoonful of food coming at her, by a crumpled up piece of paper, zippers on jackets and trees flying by when we’re driving down the road. The packaged gift years will come, but not yet. Our gift to her this year is summer. Green grass to learn to crawl on. The sight of sheep and wapiti in the distance. Of a horse being ridden along a ridge line at 9 pm in a still-light sky, its rider stopping to leap off and open a gate, then remount in a swift move, like a gymnast, then they race away. Of avocados for breakfast. Stone fruit – apricots, plums, peaches – from orchards just over the mountain. I take a bite out of a cold nectarine and Jessie gingerly grasps it, pulling it to her face. Her lips quiver as she tastes it, decides she likes it, then goes whole hog gnawing on the juicy sphere in her hands that also soothes her gums.

Jessie rolls like a champ, wrestling with wrapping paper like an athlete as she turns over, but is stumped by crawling still. She lifts her arms and legs in a complex yoga move, resting completely on her torso, and squirms, looking like a stuck sea turtle, head craning to look around as if to ask Am I there yet? 

John is fishing, just as he’d dreamed, catching beautiful, elusive rainbow trout, exploring the rivers during the days. They are high and murky right now with the heavy rain, water levels almost up to the bridges we cross in the ‘94 Honda Accord we bought last week for $800. We picked it up from a farm at the end of a long gravel road above the ocean, where the owner had lived her entire life. When we came in out of the rain, and into the kitchen to make the purchase, she was icing a Christmas cake. It was one of the traditional English Christmas cakes that are everywhere in a Commonwealth country, soaked alcohol then covered in a layer of thick, white, smooth icing that is rolled over the cake like pie dough.

It is as smooth as the snow in the hills outside our windows in Montana, I think, holding Jessie on my hip, her eyes on the artificial tree in the corner of the room, lit up with twinkling lights, wrapped boxes underneath. I remember back years before, of hikes into the woods to find the perfect pine, it’s needles filling up our tiny house with its scent. There is a distinct twist of homesickness that comes over me.

We will have other Christmases like that, ones with all the trappings, as we have before.

But for now, we are in another kind of wonderland.

 

Comment New Zealand

The Blue Tent

I bought this tent I’m falling asleep in nine years ago this month. I had just finished up co-guiding a two-week trip around the South Island of New Zealand and I hadn’t slept more than five hours a night for that time. I was fit and grimy and all of my clothes smelled like sunscreen and citronella. I had a $1,600 wad of tip money and nowhere to really be for 13 days until my next trip. Bedding from my last apartment I had occupied was still tucked into the trunk of the 1994 Toyota Starlet I drove everywhere in those years, with a chandelier Christmas ornament dangling from the rear-view mirror.

I remember going out to breakfast and ordering something really expensive to eat. Then I went to chain store called The Warehouse – the equivalent of a Walmart – and picked up this tent in the outdoor aisle, just over from the gardening section. I set it up in the front yard of the farm where all of the hiking trips were based out of; where all our packs, food and trailers were stored between trips and where the guides often crashed on floors and in twin bunk beds, with outdoor gear laid out to dry.

The blue tent was like a safari photograph, with blankets and pillows from the Starlet arranged. I read a borrowed Hunter S. Thompson book all week and figured out the new laptop I had also purchased, starting my Homefires blog with the thin flap unzipped, and a view of the dairy cows grazing as I lounged on throw pillows and tried to describe my life at that time, going into the staff kitchen every so often to brew another cup of tea to take back out to my space.

That tent would get pitched in the back yards of friends all over the island that summer. It wasn’t hardy enough for big, high altitude, multi-day trips, but for what I needed – a small space of my own to block out the rest of the world – it was perfect.

Two years later I would take it with me to Spain when I walked the Camino de Santiago for two months, quickly learning that it was unnecessary weight to carry when I could just stay in the convents and guest houses along the thousand-year-old pilgrimage path for about six dollars a night. So I sent it to my parents’ house in California, where it would live in a closet for another four years, forgotten.

The blue tent was discovered and loaded up in the green Saturn I bought when I came back to the U.S., later in my 30s. I had one car-less winter in Big Sky, where I met my now-husband. Packing up the leftovers in my childhood room that late April and driving north and east back to Montana was a risky move, but it felt right – more so as John and I would unfold and pitch that tent by rivers all over the West that summer and fall. Each time I rolled it out I felt like I was coming back to an old, familiar room I had once lived in.  It was a piece of myself I was returning to, only now I was learning about sharing it with someone else.

Two years later it would go up at a sandy campground at Refugio Beach for me and my friends to sleep in, the night before John and I got married. And we would break it out on our honeymoon back to Montana through Big Sur and the Lost Coast in northern California, Oregon and Washington.

Tonight, the blue tent is pitched beside the East Fork of the Bitterroot. The sound of the creek is deafening. There is a large stone holding down the right corner of the tent where it has ripped – but other than that the canvas walls are still in good shape. In the morning, we will go on my first float of the season, in the spring sun, stopping at a river island for John to grill the antelope tenderloin we’ve defrosted for this trip, as our dog runs up and down the banks, in and out of water and we will have strawberries for dessert.

But right now, listening to the spring runoff outside, wishing desperately that I had thought to bring my water bottle in the tent with us because I’m so thirsty, I just think about every kind of soil these tent pegs have been hammered into. Our dog, smelly with river brine and dirt, nestles between us, buried in blankets. And I am strangely comfortable, even at 8 months pregnant, though every time I turn on my side I feel like a rotisserie chicken, with each move needing careful planning and a strategy.

When I do make it upright and then outside, the stars are bright and there is a layer of ice on the flap as my headlamp scours the picnic table for my water bottle. Nine years ago was another life. Sixteen hundred dollars in a wad of cash. That is so much to me right now, I think, as I chug water. And I wish I knew what I had done with that chandelier Christmas ornament that dangled from the rear-view mirror from that long gone Toyota Starlet on the other side of the world, because that chandelier seems ironic now. I was obscenely wealthy and I didn’t even know it back then.

But I remember that this tent made me feel rich in those years when I’d crawl into it. It still does, I think, as I settle in. There isn’t much to these canvas walls, but it’s ended up being a tent for all seasons.

Comment California, Montana, New Zealand

Night Running

 

Photographs of Okarito line the walls of our Montana house, even though Okarito is a place I hadn’t been back to in seven years. One photo is of a bonfire on a beach and is the landscape on this blog – just layers of flames then the sea, then a sunset, and finally a darkening blue twilight – and one is of a white moon over a lagoon, waters rippling with a midnight gust, that now hangs just to the right of our kitchen doorway.

I took that last photo on a night I went for a run just outside of town, after finishing the last of the dishes for the group of 14 I was traveling with. This was always my routine when we came to Okarito, no matter how late I finished in the kitchen. During a two-week guiding trip of New Zealand’s South Island, this tiny town of about 30 people on the West Coast was the only place we stopped for two nights, contracting the guests out to a local kayaking company early the first morning, while the guides got to have a slow start to the day. Usually that involved cracking the windows so that you could hear the sea, stoking the fire in the potbelly stove that kept the guesthouse warm, and putting the kettle on for another French press coffee, as we slowly wiped down the long Rimu wood table and enjoyed the novelty of loading up a dishwasher, before sitting down for a second, maybe a third cup of coffee.

Later in the morning we’d make a hot lunch for the guests as they returned, usually windblown and soaked, laying their jackets by the fire to dry as they ate grilled cheese sandwiches with tomato soup and talked about what they saw out there on the lagoon. In the afternoons they would go for a hike into the bushland above the town, a place that gave them a view of the Southern Alps if they looked one way, and then the Tasman Sea below them in the other direction. That’s how condensed the South Island is. In the afternoon, we’d starting prepping for the leg of lamb we’d have that night, with mint and horseradish sauce, beetroot relish, roasted potatoes and parsnip with rosemary from the herb garden. Wine bottles and glasses would line the table. I’d have candles out in seashells we’d collected on the beach in the afternoon sometimes along with the black sand-smoothed rocks you always wanted to pick up as you walked on the shore.

That full day always led to the latest night. The dishes were brutal. Big roasting pans heavy with lamb fat and a trifle dish half full of chocolate mousse. It would sometimes be midnight by the time I was done, with a 6:30 a.m. breakfast prepped for the next morning. It didn’t matter. My running shoes were always waiting by the door; my tiny camera ready to go inside a jacket pocket.

I lived for those midnight runs. Under stars visible through the vines and thick beech and Rimu trees above me. The tannic lagoon waters would be black as the night around me as I’d run across the bridge, listening to the brown kiwis call out to each other when I’d turn off my music, hearing the sound of my breathing and my sluggish steps on the empty road that wound for 10 miles to the main highway if I wanted to run that far. I never did. It was about the solitude. Feeling weightless in the dark. It was taking photo after photo, trying to get the shape of the fern just right, so that the moon over the water wasn’t blurred when the wind came up. It was that last smoldering pile of driftwood on the beach. That was what I was on a hunt to capture on those nights.

When I went back to Okarito in February it was in the light of a long summer day. There was rain but it was warm out. This time I took to the Trig Walk, the trail that goes up, where you can spot Hector’s dolphins – the smallest and most rare dolphins in the world – out at sea, and smell the Manuka tea trees, with their white flowers set against the turquoise waves behind them. The sea almost looked gentle from this far up.

I only had a few hours to come back to this town before I had to head back to pick up my husband and then head south, to our next fly-fishing destination. It was a fast, beautiful run to the top, where I always sent guests to have that double view of Westland and the Southern Alps with the sea behind them. I got a little emotional standing up there on my own, thinking about the last seven years since I had been to this place. And how different my life was now, on a completely different side of the planet, in a little mountain town far away from the ocean. And how I was okay with this.

I was only away for a few hours, but it felt like I had traveled back in time to a side of myself that used to go on trail runs all the time with a tiny camera in a jacket pocket. I don’t wish for that old life back – but it makes me remember to integrate that part of me dead determined to find rest and capture beauty in the places I drifted through. Even for two days a month.

Another reason I wanted to take a trip out to Okarito, was to buy this natural sandfly repellent that was made locally and sold at the kayak shop, just coming into town. It’s made of almond oil and citronella and it was on everything I wore and slept in, in the years I worked for Active Adventures. It was the scent of physical exhaustion, an obscene amount of freedom, uncertainty, exhilaration, heartbreak, mountain peak hope – all the ups and downs of those long, beautiful Southern Hemisphere summers that I was young enough to rise to, and just old enough to know not to take for granted.

I thought about this too: I don’t know if I consciously set up my life this way, but I always seemed to put myself in the path of people wilder and stronger than I was. Because of this – mostly to keep up – I think I became a little wilder and stronger. That idea has been around in my mind for many years, but I was reminded of this when I stopped into the kayak shop to pick up the sandfly repellent and to grab a coffee. Behind the counter was a guy, Baz, who had also worked at Active Adventures in the tail end of my time there. It made me really happy to hear that he had bought the kayak shop with his partner, Gemma, who I also remember as a guide who often had baked goods in tins that she’d open up and share from the end of her trips. As Baz made me a flat white and I reclined on the shop couch with a magazine – just like I used to do in those gorgeous mornings off in Okarito – I saw a tin, the same tin, with Gemma’s banana bread that I remembered her passing around, while we were unloading trailers and unfurling roll mats and sleeping bags. Baz remembered me not so much as a guide, but as a writer – that summer I worked with him and Gemma was the final one before I went back into journalism full time – and that made me feel known. Because that’s what I was, more than anything else. In those years, I was just hanging around a lot of those people who lived fierce lives, and they made everything around me expand. I’m guessing they didn’t even know I was quietly learning from them.

But I did learn. They introduced me to places like Okarito and showed me where one of my favorite authors lived, with the gate sign that read All Strange Dogs will be Shot on Sight. It was Jordz who reckoned the flat white at the kayak shop was the best in the whole South Island. It was Dodgy Mike who taught me to recognize the male and and female kiwi calls. The male will always sound like this: Soooo, I’m just heading down to the pub for quick drink before heading home… And the female response that rings out in the dark: The hell you are. You better pick up nappies and milk and be home ASAP.

It’s kind of magical and still a little bit hidden. If you find yourself on the West Coast and you’re going from Glacier to Glacier, and you see the turnoff to here and wonder what’s at the end of the road that seems to just go right into the forest and sea, this is what you will find.

If You Go

Okarito is about 15 km north of Franz Josef on the West Coast. From Highway 6, take the turnoff to Okarito Forks and drive 13 km to the township. There’s no shops or petrol stations out here, so make sure you fill up your tank and load up on groceries in Hokitika or Whataroa (though Whataroa is just a small convenience store – better to get what you need in Hoki) if you are coming from the north. Franz Josef would be the last stop to get supplies if you are coming from the south.

Staying Here

Okarito has beach-side camping at the Okarito Camp Ground and there are numerous Airbnb rentals like this one – my pick if I was staying in town, practically in the sand with views to the alps. This cottage has a fire bath in the back yard. I remember when it was for sale and a few of us had a peek around, wondering how feasible it would be to buy it and carve out a life out here. The Okarito Beach House, where we used to stay, is sometimes available, with rates starting at about $165 NZ, which is pretty reasonable for the space, the views and that beautiful long table with the woodburner stove.

What to do

Walking and kayaking are your main options for activities. A great place to start is at Okarito Kayaks  for an overview of the area. Wander in, have Baz make you a coffee, have a slice of Gemma’s gluten free carrot cake, and you can either book a tour or hire a kayak independently to explore the Okarito Lagoon, the largest unmodified wetland in New Zealand and is the only nesting home in the country to white herons. There are three main walks that begin right in town – they vary from a 20 minute stroll around the wetland to a 3 1/2 hour return trip on the Three Mile Pack Track. I’d recommend at least fitting in the Trig Walk, which is about 1 1/2 hours.

Have a chat at the kayak shop about music coming to town in the evenings. They are involved in booking artists for the historic Donovans Store, built during the 1860s during the first gold rush on the West Coast, when the population here was about 1,250 – 2,500 if you counted the outlying communities of Three Mile and Five Mile. My great aunties, Jessie and Minnie Gunn from Whataroa, used to be school teachers here before they married. Of all the hotels, theatres and bond shops that used to line the main street – The Strand – Donovans is the sole survivor and is actually the oldest building of its kind on the West Coast. It is used as a community hall and a music venue now – some fantastic artists come through to play here, so it’s worth checking in to see who’s on the event calendar. It might even be worth planning your visit around.

 

 

Comment New Zealand

Whataroa

 

 

 

One of my favorite pictures taken in New Zealand’s South Island is of me, talking to two older men in a driveway. One of them in gumboots, the other in flip flops. Both of them were dragging their feet through the gravel, when the photo was snapped, trying to draw a map to the house where my grandfather may, or may not have, grown up in.

My husband took the photo of me from the passenger seat of our rental car, a vehicle loaded up with camping gear, sleeping bags, two hiking packs and his fly-fishing gear, a cooler and just enough clothes to get us through the three weeks we were there. I had left the car running.

The porch of the Whataroa Hotel.

We were in Whataroa – a town smaller than where we lived in Montana. When we stopped at the town hotel – which like all towns around here, doubles as the local pub – the windows were thrown open and pillows had been placed on the sills to air. The paint on the porch was peeling. The sign for Speights beer was faded. The sitting chairs out the back where we sat looked like old church hall seats that were torn. The yellow stuffing showed through the slits.

This was the town that my father’s father, Jim Hyndman, had grown up in, leaving for another farming community in the North Island where he met my grandmother, Gwyneth Griffith at a dance at the town hall. Jim died when my father was 15, leaving the Waikato sheep farm in Kiwitahi to my father’s older brother to run, while my father left for Australia, and then London to work in motorsport. Dad met my mother there. They ended up in California – her oceany homeland – where I was born. New Zealand became a fairytale, faraway land to my father’s children. A place in framed photographs across the carpet from the hallway closet until we were old enough to experience it for ourselves.

The Hyndmans were descendants of the Gunn family, who ran this as a boarding house in the 1890s through the 1920s because it was on the main route down the West Coast. That route now runs through farmland.

The house in the 1920s.

His memories, and my own, are of the farm in Kiwitahi, which stayed in the Hyndman family until my uncle and aunt retired more than ten years ago. The tiny town on the battered west coast of the South Island where Grandpa Jim had been raised was only known to us in old photographs. One was of the home in the 1890s, horses and a coach pulled up in front. Then in a faded, fuzzy photo in the 1920s, when it was still used as a boarding house. Another was of Grandpa Jim in a paddock, with the Hyndman home behind him, probably taken sometime in the 1930s. In this photo he was on a tractor and the mountains behind him were dense with native trees and bush. My father told me that this was the first tractor in this region of the West Coast, something I’ve never probed the accuracy of. It’s too cool a story to mess with. He remembers that the tractor went with Jim to the North Island and that it became a piece of playground equipment at the local school.

When I worked for a South Island-based hiking company, we would drive through this area on our way to coast and I’d point out the old family farm to clients. I always planned on one day coming back through this place. I’d have a beer at the pub. Maybe go take a picture of the old homestead. They might even let me inside for a look.

And this was the afternoon to finally do this, with John beside me.  I pulled into the driveway I had been pointing out to people through the years, without being able to stop myself. I had saved a photo of Grandpa Jim on the tractor and of the Hyndman boarding house in the 1920s onto my phone.

Two brothers and their families were there in the sun on the front steps and listened while I explained myself. A barbecue was going on somewhere. Nineties rock was on. I could smell sunscreen. I was there to take a photo of the house that my grandfather had lived in, if that was fine with them, I said, feeling like I was a journalist again, apologizing as I was trespassing.One of the wives listened in, a hand over her eyes to block the late afternoon light. I could tell she would have invited us to stay for tea if I had lingered much longer.

They were friendly, but perplexed. They remembered the Hyndmans, they said, but as far as they remembered, the Hyndmans had lived on the adjacent property, not theirs. The brothers  looked at the photos I showed them. Yes, one of them said. That’s the Hyndman house, but that’s on the other end of the road, where the highway used to go through and is now closed to through traffic. Look at the treeline, one of them said, holding up the photo of my grandfather on the tractor. Just like he pointed out in the photo, the wild bushland that went straight up behind us had a clear treeline and it was no where near where we were standing in their driveway.

A booted toe dragged a line through the gravel, hands pointed, and there was lots of talking over each other as the brothers discussed the best way I could get to the old homestead. It was still occupied, they said, and was one of the oldest standing houses in the community.

I got in the car, disoriented. It’s weird to have a piece of your family history all backwards, then explained back to you by a stranger who lives with that history in their backyard. Were the brothers wrong? Could there be more than one Hyndman house, as is common in farming families. Maybe my dad or I had looked at the map backwards or upside down. I wondered how that had happened as we drove back through Whataroa and to the other end of the same gravel road, following the directions they had given me, an eye on the treeline that defined the property below.

The old house was falling apart. When I walked towards what seemed to be the front, lined with boots and jackets, I could see that all the doors were open. I called out “hello?” – a few times, but all I heard was a few familiar strains of a song I couldn’t place at first. A strumming guitar. A few blurred minor keys. Then Bowie’s voice set the definitive tone for this sojourn into my family’s past in this place. My feet actually went step by step up to the top of the porch to the front door to a that haunting countdown, a searing, psychedelic guitar strain, then Check ignition and may God’s love be with you. I stopped when I saw a lone vacuum cleaner in a vast lounge room with just one lounge chair and a flatscreen television. Someone was in house. Maybe they were just in the shower. Maybe behind a parted curtain. But everything felt wrong and weird and I didn’t want to be standing on those front steps anymore, like the first victim in some indie horror film.

I walked back down to the car, turning around to take pictures with my phone, definitely in retreat. I didn’t know what to make of this house. It was definitely the workers’ quarters for an adjacent farm now. If this homestead had glory days, they were long gone. It felt like a run-of-the-mill, decrepit house that you’d see in any old town that you’d drive through and just think creepy.

It’s funny how ordinary history is – and how missable – when it isn’t in a framed picture in your family’s hallway. My dad contends that the brothers got it wrong. That the Hyndman house was on their property after all. Was it the foundation that their newer house had been built on in the 1970s? I just think my dad and I need to come back to this place and get to the bottom of this mess, so we can get our story straight. But this is why you take these side trips – to get a better idea of how your own lineage descends through the tree on a piece of paper. Sometimes it’s drawn for you in the gravel of a driveway.

Comment New Zealand

New Skin

 

It’s like a new skin of an old self that I’ve returned to.

Sitting on sunken couches, under windows with cobwebs triangling the corners. Waves, wind rain; a door-stop of a book opened in my lap, unread past the first paragraph. Walking barefoot to the shower outside and standing there under the heat, the plastic curtain pulled back, the wind chimes going, watching the sea and flax, as rainwater batters the tin roof. The sound of the tea jug boiling on the gas burner when I get back to the main crib. The smell of toast and salt air and sea mold is deep in the walls.  That’s the skin I’ve returned to.

We are on the West Coast of New Zealand’s South Island. It’s an off-grid shack I booked months ago because it was cheap and on the beach and just off the winding remote highway that I used to drive down once a month for work, wondering who lived in these weather-beaten cribs that have been here for generations, just barely enough shelter from the tides, storms and sand flies. For these first two nights, it belongs to no one but us.

It’s a perfect crash pad after four hours of buses, Ubers, check-in lines, a bad airport bar, then finally an 11-hour flight to Fiji, a 3-hour layover, than a 5-hour flight to Christchurch, bio-security checks, then finally, a 5-hour car journey from the East Coast of the South Island, to the West Coast.

I was emotional just walking out of the airport in the sunlight to collect our car. Then there was the long last stretch: a drive through mountains, over a hundred rivers that my husband craned his head to look at as we passed over, bright red rata vines in the bush around us, waterfalls exploding down, and finally that first glimpse of the Tasman Sea as we dipped down to the mouth of the Grey River that used to make my heart explode.

John has his fly rod and back-country pass. I have no agenda for our three weeks in New Zealand, except to follow him to rivers around the South Island, swim, eat lots of ice cream, and re-visit the haunts that shaped me in my 20s and early 30s when I lived here, in my father’s homeland.

It’s strange to think that a week ago I needed snow boots to walk to the car in our yard in Montana. I don’t need shoes to do anything here. John can’t get over that on a sunny day, entire families will march barefoot through the supermarket to do their shopping.

I have the same wonder – a returner’s wonder, I’m calling it. It’s about all those things you took for granted and forgot when you left a place. It’s been four years since I left New Zealand; seven years since I’ve been on this coast.

Being Here

Note for travelers, both returners and first-timers: I booked our first two nights in NZ at this rental and I’d highly recommend it – but there are about ten more that I’d love to book in the future,  up and down the Tasman, many for under $150. My almost rental was here – please tell me this doesn’t make you want to book a ticket to the South Island just to sit in this bathtub and watch penguins. Some other picturesque options near Punakaiki: A beachfront cottage for about $115. This off-grid sea shack tucked away into native bush is rentable for around $75. Stock up on groceries – we brought coffee, fruit and yogurt, lamb chops, fresh corn, salad, wine, beer and venison sausages for a barbecue on our second night – in either Greymouth (about an hour and a half away) if you are coming from the south, like we did. Westport would be the nearest hub north of this spot, also just under two hours.

Also, if you’re looking for a good read to take along with you, pick up Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries. She’s the youngest author to win the Man Booker Prize and it takes place just two hours south of here, in Hokitika. It’s crazy and beautiful and a pretty beefy, tough 826-page novel. But it suits this place.

 

 

Comment New Zealand

One weekend in November

wedding.johncrying.judi.bumstead

Just over a month ago, I had what felt like a really crazy dream.

It was the kind of dream everyone has had at some point, where distance, dimensions and time fall away, and all these people in your life collide in one place.

This is how the dream went: I woke up at a beach in California on a Friday morning, surrounded by friends I had known from pockets of the world over 39 years. We buried our feet and the palms of our hands in the sand, sunglasses on, bleary, happy and disoriented to wake up in this place that was completely other from the Northwest autumns and Southern hemisphere springs we had just driven or flown in from the night before. We made coffee, went swimming in the Pacific, marveled at sun – not rain; not snow – on our skin, then we packed up our sleeping bags, roll mats and tents and went to Ellen’s Pancake House in Buellton for breakfast and ordered all the things – waffles, biscuits and gravy, blueberry pancakes, Danish sausage – we would have pointed to on the menu when we had each just gotten our driver’s license in 1994 and learned how easy it was to ditch Phys ed.

Then suddenly we were all on this plateau as the sun was setting over the oak trees, vineyards and the hills where I was first taught how to ride, on a quarter horse mare named Lucy. I was eating perfectly barbecued tri tip, drinking wine from the vines around us, and all the same people were there, plus more, and so was the man I loved and both our families as the sun finally disappeared.

And then, just as suddenly, we were all at the Maverick, which hadn’t changed since two high school reunions with Cristi Silva by my side, who was still by my side, as the same dollar bills dangled from the ceiling above us and the same old guys propped up the bar. And there was a country western band, and suddenly I was line dancing with Kelli Ramsay, who I’ve slept next to under stars on both sides of the equator, then I was dancing with Andrea French, the hitchhiker I met in Ireland when I was 18. Wagon Wheel was playing – the same song Andrea and I danced to in a tent in Glenorchy four years ago when we ran into each other again, then rode horses the next morning through the same scenery Andrea had kept in two tiny photos in her wallet when I first met her on the Beara Peninsula in 1996. And Kathleen Sieck, who I’ve sat next to on piano benches and built imaginary worlds with since I was four, was right there too, and dancing with Madeline, who I last saw when I sat by her potbelly stove in a shed in Fiordland in 2013, wrapped in a blanket, eating stew as South Island winter rain pelted the tin roof. Then, weirdly, Chris in the Morning from Northern Exposure was hanging out in the background in a black cowboy hat pulled low, and Madeline was asking him to dance, while Kathleen two-stepped with Craig, the wrangler who gave me a ride home in Big Sky, Montana in his truck one December evening three years ago, and whose front seat passenger had been a fly-fishing guide/bartender with beautiful blue eyes and a deep, gentle laugh named John McKinnie, who opened the door for me when I got in and out; the same guy I was now slow dancing with in this bar in my hometown on a Friday night, and who I planned to marry in a meadow by an old barn on a friends’ ranch the next day.

Everyone always says weddings are a blur and that it goes by too fast to grasp – but really I don’t think I had any idea how true that was until November.

That long weekend beginning with family and friends arriving on a Thursday and spilling over into that beautiful, long Friday of gatherings that led to more gatherings and finally into a Saturday that I kept wanting to find a freeze button for, was full of so much love and beauty, I couldn’t stand it. I loved that along with Cristi –  who as the maid of honor did everything from moving hay bales, to makeup the morning of, to putting together a most spectacular going away gift –  I had Angie, who I first met in Europe after we had both left our small hometowns to travel for the first time; Whitney, my Los Olivos Elementary School bestie who met me for a weekend in New York City last October, where we toasted more than 33 years of friendship with jalapeno-laced cosmos on a rooftop below the Empire State Building after nearly dying in a bicycle taxi ride; Megan, my sister-in-law who lives just down the highway from us in Montana and puts all the strength and stamina she once used to jump out of planes and fight wildfires into raising two gorgeous, strong-hearted twin boys who carefully carried our $30 rings (that’s a collective amount) hand in hand with their dad;  all while Kathleen sang so perfectly Patty Griffin’s “Heavenly Day” on her guitar at the front, as we walked towards an arbor of walnut and oak branches and eucalyptus she had spent that week collecting and putting together along with her mother, Maggie, one of my mom’s best friends who stepped in as wedding coordinator in the last months and saved us all, and Kathleen’s sister Anna Taylor who actually does this for a living and got roped into the chaos to cast her special magic over it.

At one point the day before I watched Anna organize us all, directing where the arbor should be placed as wooden benches made by a friend my brother went to high school with, were unloaded and placed on the grass. At the barn behind us, John, my dad, and my brother, Sean, were laying out the dance floor with Norm, the ranch manager. In Anna’s arms was her infant son, Wills, adopted just days before. She was no-nonsense and so chic as she gave directives with her one free hand, never setting Wills down, but all I could think of was the Anna I knew at age four, long before she became kind of a big deal in the wedding world, when she was my fierce, spunky protector at Garden House Preschool in Ballard and pushed a kid who was bullying me up against a wall, wild west style with both fists clenching the shirt under his chin, and told him to back off.

I had about a thousand flashbacks just like that during the weekend when I looked around at the beautiful send-off we were getting. Friends gave us so much of their time and talent to celebrate, it’s astounding to look back on. And their homes: John and Georgia Wiester hosted a wonderful rehearsal barbecue for us on their Buellton ranch on Friday night that welcomed in the wedding party. Ken and Bobbi Hunter were so kind to allow us to be part of a handful of friends and family who have had a wedding in a restored 1880’s barn on a Los Alamos ranch. My friend Rachel who married us, gently and joyfully coached us through the ins and outs of saying our vows and making sure we had all our paperwork in order. Jeff Sieck, Kathleen’s husband – brewed a hoppy brown ale and an Irish Red “Hold Yer Peace” beer in our honor that we toasted with (he’s not brewing professionally at this time, but he should be), and then MC’d the reception while he and Kathleen managed to still get their three beautiful daughters, Vera, Fiona and Clementine, into cowboy boots and gowns to be our flower girls. Long-time family friend Judi Bumstead made sure my husband was photographed weeping in both color and black and white; while Nick Kelly, Angie’s husband, and a breathtaking landscape photographer, made a special exception to do photos of a wedding; and my parents’ friend Julie Moss, as well as Cristi, and our friend Michelle, all graciously showed up with cameras and made sure that so many moments were captured in pictures and video.

And our parents: Steve and Doris McKinnie road tripped from Colorado and were there for the first dress fittings in August to silver polishing and walnut cracking for the pies on the dessert table in that final week. And my parents, Ken and Judy Hyndman who hosted such a beautiful and perfect day, taking care of so many details – outdoor toilets, insurance, catering, alcohol, heating lamps, manicures, hair, invitations, a surprise bagpiper after we said our vows, and took on so much stress – so that John and I could just roll into town and get hitched and be on our way back to Montana and life as we know it. People kept saying that I was the most relaxed bride they’d ever seen. There were a lot of people who shouldered the load that so we could be as chilled out and happy as we were that weekend.

In the final hours of Saturday night as I was saying goodbye to friends who were packing up and leaving, I looked back at the dance floor and saw John, double-fisted with bridal bouquets, dancing to California Love on a near empty floor, my brother going crazy in the background, both of them hands up to Dr Dre, and without even thinking about it much, the words for the first time, just came out: “And there’s my husband.”

It was a wonderful to be blessed and sent on our way. Both into a long honeymoon roadtrip up the West coast but also the life we are in on this dark December night, utterly other than where we were six weeks ago: Sturgill Simpson playing in the kitchen, Swedish meatballs in the slow-cooker, John reading one couch over, a Christmas tree we cut down last week off Black Pine Road shimmering with lights and ornaments in the corner – including the Joy sand dollar given to us as a wedding present –  our new dog softly snoring on his bed on the floor, snow swirling outside the windows and -20 temperatures predicted.

I do feel the joy from the sand dollar ornament. There’s nowhere else I’d rather be right now.

(Below are a few pictures taken by our wonderful friends from the weekend. Top feature photo by Judi Bumstead).

WordPress Image Gallery Plugin

John also did a day by day travel log of our honeymoon- “How a fly fishing guide and a writer spend their honeymoon” – that you can find here, done partially so we can remember how we spent the honeymoon funds that were gifted to us by friends, as we veered off the initial itinerary a bit. Also for anyone getting married and too broke for a honeymoon: Traveler’s Joy. It’s game-changer for the nomadically-inclined.

2 Comments California, Montana, New Zealand