Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg

I was two years into living in the Holland Street house we’re in now, when I first read “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg,” by Richard Hugo.

It was eerie that I had already come to love a place that I would have been pulled to from afar with this poem alone, with its distilled lines about complete bleakness, following a walk Hugo took around town here in 1966, on “streets laid out by the insane, past hotels that didn’t last, bars that did, the tortured try of local drivers to accelerate their lives.” There’s a jail that turned 70 that year, Hugo describes, with only one prisoner, always in, not knowing what he’s done.

“The principal supporting business now is rage. Hatred of the various grays the mountain sends, hatred of the mill, The Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girls who leave each year for Butte …”

My whole life I’ve had a thing about dying communities. It’s not the fascination for ghost towns, with dedicated volunteers who revive these places once a year with apple-bobbing and gold panning demonstrations. It’s the towns that are just barely hanging on still; not quite dead enough to be romantic. It’s the towns that had boom-time glory years, with people packed into streets, looking up at the camera, from under hats and parasols; streets now bare,where the loveliest time of the day is at dusk, when the gas station sign is the only light that holds off the dark, and there’s just the faintest heartbeat of survival. The kind of towns where you wonder if might be wiser to keep driving, and hope that there’s another gas station up ahead.

My hometown came back from the grave because it has rolling winter-less hills with coastal fog hanging over the oak trees in the mornings, soil good for wine-making, and it’s only two hours north of L.A. Here, it’s more complicated. There is beauty everywhere in this part of Montana, and yet the towns still decay, because it is hard to price this beauty up unless you can ski it, mine it, or you have the fortitude to build on it.

This last week I looked up a book by Seattle writer Frances McCue about Hugo’s life, which she titled with one of the final lines from the Pburg poem, lifted for the cover – “The Car That Brought You Here Still Runs.” Pburg was just one of many towns that Hugo spent time in and wrote poems about. McCue describes how this was including a trio of poems penned by Hugo, Jim Welch and J.D. Reed after getting drunk in a bar in Dixon after a day of fly-fishing in 1970, and sending each of their competing verses to the New Yorker. They were published in October of that same year under the title “The Only Bar in Dixon” and got themselves into trouble with Welch’s line “You can have the redheaded bartender for a word…”

The redheaded bartender – also the owner of the bar – turned out to be a bit of a writer herself and fired back with a letter to the Missoulian that she herself was in the process of co-penning a poem with the mayor of Dixon and titling it “An Ode to Five-Bourbon Hugo.”

Hugo was more sensible when he wrote about a redhead in “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg.” She’s the final shred of hope that all may not be lost in this town after all in 1966, with her red hair that “lights the wall” despite bigger cities “of towering blondes, good jazz and booze the world will never let you have until the town you came from dies inside.”

Earlier this Spring, it seemed like most of Pburg was packed into the old Fire Hall to watch the premiere of Saving The Burg, which had video footage of Hugo walking around, towered by the empty buildings of Granite, with lines from his famous poem reverberating. The late Peggie Pahrman – to whom the documentary was dedicated – was in a clip, recalling how the town would have been bulldozed but there was no money to do it. It was moving, as we all crammed in, shoulder to shoulder in a sold-out event, to see what had been done to bring Philipsburg back and up and away from being a town, as Hugo describes in the first lines, as a place you’d only end up when your life breaks down.

Against the odds – and as the film’s subtitle points out, with a lot of love, sweat and beers – Hugo’s prophecy that all was not lost came true. It is a gray today. A shade specific to this time of year in a small mountain town. You go to the store to buy lettuce everyone at the check-out is trading stories of how the weather compared at this time last year, or even the decade before. It’s a spring afternoon with winds churning up dust that we turn our heads away from and scowl. There is snow still in the hills around us. But in bigger cities at lower elevations there are buds of green starting to erupt with white flowers on the streets and we know that we aren’t far behind, that June is pushing through and that soon the smell of lilacs will be everywhere.

The car that got us here still runs.

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Traditions

I’ve always marked the birthdays in my family with the holiday it’s been conveniently tied to. My little brother symbolized new birth at Easter. For my mother it was the last of the long summer beach days of Labor Day Weekend. For my father, it was Thanksgiving.

Celebrating gratitude and my father have always gone hand and hand, pulling my brother and I home from wherever we were that year; more so than Christmas. Thanksgiving Day always seemed to be the natural prelude to Dad’s birthday – a big gathering of extended family that ate all the traditional American food Dad had never experienced until he married my mother and settled with her in California: the turkey, the stuffing, the pumpkin pie, cranberry sauce, a Jell-O salad from my grandmother’s 1950s-era plastic mold, Hawaiian rolls and buttered walnuts from their trees in the backyard. Before we’d start, my brother would always recite the same Thanksgiving-themed poems that he had learned by heart by age 11, involving football and turkey-carving, and we’d all sit patiently through this, rolling our eyes, then pass around the bowl of corn kernels, putting as many as we liked on the bare white plates to symbolize what we were grateful for, before a prayer of thanks, led by Dad if we were the hosts that year.

As lovely as that day, crammed with traditions, has been, it’s been the aftermath that I love and miss in the years that I’m not there. The lounging around in pajamas the next morning, eating pumpkin pie and coffee with leftover whip cream, going for bike rides and hikes, having friends stop by to say hi and watching All Creatures Great and Small episodes by the fire in the evening with bowls of ice cream. In the morning there was often a layer of fog over the field across the street from the house. In some years they grew pumpkins there, horses and cattle grazing on the hill marked by oak trees just beyond this, and I’d sit on the couch with a coffee and watch condensation burn off. Dad would either be up and raking walnuts outside or bringing out the tandem bike from the garage that he and Mom would do their morning ride on – her way of keeping them both in shape.

In many of these years, Dad’s birthday was a post-Thanksgiving, pre-Christmas road trip an hour up the coast to San Luis Obispo, all four of us crammed into their car, listening to holiday music mixes my brother had put together. We go out to breakfast at the Apple Farm, where we’ve been going for vacation breakfasts for about 30 years, and go find a Christmas tree at the farms that were starting to pop up. One year we went to the beach and Dad and my brother threw footballs and frisbees back and forth, while Mom and I read in beach chairs. Dinner on Dad’s birthday was often just grazing through the free samples at Costco – his choice – while Mom bought us socks and underwear and coffee in bulk. We’d drive home that night with a tree tied to the top of our car and Dad and my brother would set it up in the living room. If we were ambitious, or if one of us had to leave the next day, we’d decorate it that night.

As adults, the last weekend in November was often the only time we were together for, so it was all crammed together in one Frankenstein-ed holiday weekend. Maybe it’s weird, but that was just us. To me, it was wonderful.

My brother, who is in the Navy, is stationed on a ship touring Asia and the Middle East until next April. I won’t be able to make it home to my parents this year for the holidays. I think it’s in these years when we’re missing each other, that we value the memories of Dad’s Birthday Weekend the most.

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My boys of Summer

This was exactly what I had dreamed of: seeing the chipped, blue nail polish of my toes just slightly above me, framed by the mountains in the background, and the coolness of being suspended on a deep body of water, within an inflated pink flamingo doughnut and a beer dangling from my hand.
Somewhere on the banks of Storm Lake my husband was casting – I could hear the rhythmic whir, then the quick tightening of the line. Gabe the dog was patrolling the shore with great intensity and joy, exhausting himself by diving into the water to retrieve branches. The afternoon shower that had just swept through was gone, driving all but the determined and the already-camped-out away back to Philipsburg or Anaconda. On the way up we passed trucks slowly descending one gorged out piece of trail to tree root to rock like the dirt road out was staircase back down to paved easiness. But also life. And cell phone service. And routine. Stresses big and small. All the things we are up here to forget for an afternoon.
It is lush this high. I rolled the window down as we drove up, the rain already starting to work its way through the pines, making everything smell like soil and incense. The side of the road that stretches into the forest is covered in wildflowers in mid August, while everything below in town, around the lowlands, has gone dry and brittle. I’ve already learned that Augusts in Montana can be rough on the mind. It’s the panic of the last true long month of summer covered in smoke. Maybe not ours, but from somewhere where there is something on fire, a reminder of death and destruction. The smoke is confusing, full of unknowns. Threats are everywhere in the soupy, pink-tinged fog that covers the hills we are used to looking out to when we open the curtains. We don’t know what is out there. It’s unsettling. I have to push away resentment that the season I’ve been hanging out to be in is eaten away at – or outright devoured – by the fire season.
But up here in the aftermath of a summer storm, it is the best of August. Cool, with the sun just coming through the clouds above the ridge. We have an hour before it will disappear behind the mountains. That hour is enough. My flamingo tube turns slowly as the wind comes up, and it is like my eyes, behind sunglasses, are getting a sweeping, panoramic photo of everything around me: dog swimming, mountain ridge gleaming, husband fishing, tents being set up on the far side of the lake, and through all this, my toes gliding past each of these scenes as the water ripples turn me around and around and around. I feel like a queen taking a tally of her kingdom.
The smoke is far away and below us. The haziness is gone, at least for an afternoon. There is a reason we go up to get away. There is something about being suspended on a cool, deep body of water, where for at least an hour or two, we have clarity.
1 Comment Montana

End of the road

Greenie was never meant to go quietly into the night.  He was meant to go just like he did.
It happened where Skalkaho Road stretches out straight, aiming right for the Pintlers. It was a day out of a Tom Petty song. I even had my hand out the window. The moment I heard the sound, I knew it was the engine, and that at nearly 300,000 miles, this was the end of the road for us.

In 2014, I bought Greenie for under $1,499 in a dusty parking lot in central California, only hoping that he would get me as far as Montana – from there I’d get something more reliable, I told my dad, a mechanic. I had a hunch that Montana was where I was supposed to be. And I had just met someone. It seemed like a good omen that the used car salesman who sold me Greenie was a fly-fisherman, just like John, the guy I had just fallen in love with back in Big Sky. The salesman calmly left me to make up my mind, and pace the parking lot a few times before I  was finally ready to walk up the steps to the office and write a check in exchange for the keys.

Four winters, two lost keys, a flat tire, repeated maulings by an adopted 100-pound dog with separation anxiety issues, and more than 70,000 miles later, Greenie the 1999 Saturn SL2 coasted me safely into a patch of grass by the highway and let out one last smoky gurgle. He had done his job and then some. I was picked up by two morticians in a mini van traveling to Anaconda with a labradoodle dog in the back. Somehow, that also fit in with my time with Greenie: even at the end, he carried me to a story, one that I’d tell my dad later that week, describing the automatic door of the mini van slowly, painfully, opening to reveal an empty stretcher that I climbed in next to, the labradoodle beside me, as I was taken to a spot that had cell phone reception where I could call for a tow.

Greenie’s other role in my life was a secret storage unit, when my life started to overflow from our 1-bedroom house. It took five plastic bags and a box to get everything out, and back into our living room, where I had 24-hours to myself to sort through it all on my own later in the week.

It was like going through journal entries from the last four years since I came to Montana. There were old agendas and budgets from town council and hospital board meetings in one bag. Camping equipment and music festival lineups in another. One bag held all my roller derby gear and duck taped skates when I was the Gwyn Reaper. I found a wig, a green jacket and an 80s era felt jumpsuit from two White Front Halloween parties when John and I went as Maude and The Dude one year, and break-dancers the next. There was the first draft of a wedding invitation. Then two plastic wine glasses from our honeymoon road trip back to Montana, when sparkling wine was sent out to us as we swam in a pool overlooking Big Sur. There was a bag of walnuts from my parents’ backyard – wedding guest gifts – and a Happy Anniversary card sent last November.

Car break downs are always stressful, especially when you know it’s the end, and money has to be scrapped together for a new vehicle. But standing in my living room, looking around at all my loot, I just thought about what a life Greenie and I have had together. How he transported me from the coast to the mountains; from one season of my life, to the one I’m in now. I rolled the dice. And Greenie got me where I needed to be.

Tomorrow I’m off to Butte to pick up my next gamble – a 1990 Pontiac Bonneville for $1,350.
I’m hoping it can just get me to work and back until the end of the summer. But there’s a part of me that’s hopeful.

You never know where – and how far – a used car yard gamble is going to take you.

 

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Kids and Dogs

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Wet grass soaked my shoes as we made our way through the valley, the hum of the highway fading behind us. Gabe darted around from the scent to scent, his fur still damp from plunging into Flint Creek. John was a little way in front of me, calling him back when the dog disappears into the trees for too long. When he emerged, panting wildly, waiting for John’s blessing to carry on, he embodied a blissed out state that we humans have a hard time wrapping our heads around.

There’s that familiar adage “Do more of what makes you happy” – but I’d say there are times when you don’t always know what that is. Especially when you’re weary and the motivation to live fully in the beauty of an area outside your front porch isn’t there. Sometimes it’s easier to find distraction.

My body was achy, but it felt like a long exhalation to be tucked into the woods, saying nothing except to comment on scat, or the tracks we are walking over. We stop and examine them. Then we carry on. There are the sound of birds I wish I could identify. In the hills behind us, there are smears of yellow. But here, deeper into the trees, the colors become more varied. White and purple. A solitary Indian paintbrush in the grass above a creek. I remember that when I am not doing so great in life, one of the first things to disappear is my curiosity. Out here it stirs. I want to be able to identify the sounds and smells around me. To know if I’m passing a cottonwood or an aspen.

There is the sharp smell of wild onion and I stop to pick a few of the green strands that come up on the banks, thinking of the bags of morels John’s twin nephews handed to us earlier that morning. They were fresh from camping and mushroom foraging at Moose Lake for the weekend. Their feet were still caked in dust, their arms and legs covered in bumps, bruises and scratches. Each mark was an illustration to a story about an adventure in the last 48 hours. These two 3-year-olds are my teachers on how to make the most of the long days we have, days I dreamed about in January when all of this was hidden in white.

The valley opens up before us again. We can see the truck and hear the highway. Gabe rushes for the vehicle with longing that is so pure it makes my heart hurt. He comes to life on these adventures, but he whines with happiness when we pull onto our street, leaping up the steps of our house and collapsing on the cool wooden floors. Out there in the wild was beautiful for him, but it is seven minutes in a past he’s moved on from already. Now he is back home. This is beautiful too. He slumbers peacefully, knowing how to rest his body after exertion.

We’ve only been gone for two hours, and we’ve barely driven ten minutes from our house. Sometimes doing more of what makes me happy isn’t as far off, costly, or as complicated, as I think it is. Kids and dogs understand this best

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So this is Spring

Suddenly, after weeks of coming and going, it is nearly June and we are back at our house in Philipsburg, teetering on the edge of summer, with no intention of going anywhere outside Montana. I put a calendar up on the wall just outside our kitchen last weekend. It’s hung there, completely blank as May comes to a close, stretching out like an empty, calm ocean.


The sun comes up early and bright through our white curtains. It is still barely there when I come home from work late at night, with windows down so I can smell the pine trees and the fresh rain on the dirt road, as I pull onto Skalkaho.

Late April and May had been about suitcases and packs laid on the bed or the dining room floor. It’s been 4 a.m. starts and dashes to the airport and seeing sunrises through bloodshot eyes, from a cramped seat, thousands of feet up, flying above the clouds.  It’s been dragging a suitcase up the steps of our house after midnight and falling into an unmade bed, feet still sandy from the beach I had one last run on that morning. It’s been a gift to see old friends and family this Spring. But there is a huge part of me that wants to wake up and curl up under heavy blankets, turn on music and watch the newly green hills and listen to birds and cattle being moved. To only go as far as the hardware store for eggs and a new hook for the back yard hammock. This little house and ramshackle yard, with a kitchen sink that looks out to Discovery Ski Hill is the longest I have lived in one house as an adult. In August it will be four years.

I look out to our neighbors’ tree in full white bloom, above a fence built almost 40 years ago, that might just make it through one more summer. That tree is a transplant from the mountains around us. The frame of the hammock I bought last August for my birthday is still a skeletal outline above the grass that is almost brushing my calves when I take coffee and toast with me into the yard. I wake to the sound of lawn mowers starting up. That purr is the sound of summer beginning, something I never thought much about when I was growing up in the temperate California climate. But here, it is as tied to this new season as the sound of Rock Creek rushing at the banks when I go to my car at night. Two months ago, I was still trudging through the dark in my boots, sloshing through potholes of muddy snow. Now, there’s just the sound of my flip flops and I’m walking along in a t-shirt, the night breeze like a cool balm on my bare arms.

This time last year the first wildfires of the summer were starting. Now we are eating the morel mushrooms that exploded with the new growth from the scorched earth, our eyes on the clear skies, not taking the air we are breathing for granted so much. There are music festivals and river floats to plan for. Our camper is already de-tarped and parked in a clearing by a creek in the Big Hole, where my husband will be fly-fishing through much of June and where the dog and I will be spending weekends, drinking percolator coffee in the mornings and reading by a fire, dusty feet in sleeping bags.

That’s about all the adventuring I can muster right now. That feels just fine to admit that.

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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.

 

 

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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

Going home at 40

This morning I went for a run, sun on my bare shoulders, the smell of damp eucalyptus trees around me, the sound of crows picking off the last of the walnuts in the branches above.

All around me is the neighborhood I grew up in. My feet crush shriveled olives, persimmons and walnut tree leaves as I move. It is winter and 75 degrees outside before noon.

I used to always want to arrive home in California with my life full of sureness. To appear together, visibly going somewhere. There have been years when it’s felt like I’ve been obedient to how my life is supposed to look. Most of the time though, instead of a triumphant return, it’s a collapse. Those are the years when I’ve loved this place the most.

When I go on these runs it is like swimming blind through memory lanes. I drift in and out of time lines. I’m too old to be nostalgic for my childhood here. Instead, there’s this tenderness for the long stretches of time I spent here in my 20s and 30s, usually arriving broken and beaten up by life, sullen, ready to sleep for 16 hours straight, then sit in the hot tub and grumpily drink coffee brewed hours before, when my parents first got up that morning.

Different scenes will come back to me at different times, and hardly ever chronologically. When I sit at the Corner Coffeehouse and eat gelato, I remember pacing the sidewalk outside, walking back and forth during a phone interview for a job in northern Montana that I didn’t take. Then hanging up and having that feeling that I could go anywhere I wanted when I was 36.

I drop off our rent check in the mail box outside the Los Olivos Post Office and walk past the gate to local hotel that we used to climb over to swim in the pool, a few months after I turned 33 and thought that life was all downhill at that point for me.

There were the hours I spent sitting back in a backyard chair made out of a wine barrel, tasting syrah from the hills around me, mourning the loss of the redneck ranching town that this place used to be – but simultaneously realizing that I was totally comfortable enjoying it’s trendiness as the new Napa. That I had changed just as much as this town of 900 people had. It was impossible not to alter, to adapt somehow, in order to survive and grow.

I drive with my mom to the next town over, and I think of myself, biking in flip flops and shorts and gas station sunglasses, to get peaches and nectarines from the farmers’ market on Tuesday afternoons, having just come from winter in the southern hemisphere at 28, uncaring that I was getting passed by serious cyclists, in proper, padded, cycling shorts.

This week I am back for the first time in this new decade of my life. My husband and I are here for five days, to drop off our truck in my parents’ backyard while we go overseas. Winter in Montana feels like this Narnia-esque dream we’ve woken up from. In the afternoons I walk outside barefoot and lace up my running shoes in the driveway. Before I leave I see John helping my dad rake leaves in the front yard. Later they will watch football in the garage. John and I are going over to our friends’ house tonight to barbecue in their back yard and drink cocktails at their kitchen island, surrounded by their girls, who I’ve known since their infancy.

Maybe in another 20 years, I’ll remember the ordinariness of the visiting times just like this one. When everyone we love is just down the street, or a phone call away.

Sometimes it takes a run through the neighborhood to bring it all home. I’m older now, so I feel released from having it all together when I return. Instead, this is what I wrap my mind around: The sun is out. I’m able to run. My lungs inhale and exhale air. There is my husband and dad raking leaves, with a game on in the garage and my mother cleaning out the filing cabinets in the office while listening to an audio book. Later, there is dinner with old friends just down the road.

That is as together as I need to be.

Comment California