beautiful monsters

Mountain to the sea

They say it gets easier. Life, I mean. I always thought they were saying there wouldn’t be so much hard stuff to deal with as I got older, but maybe they just meant that when stuff happens, it doesn’t hurt so deep. Sometimes I think I’ve built up so much scar tissue I can hardly feel a thing. I’m tired. It’s been a hard week. Sometimes I feel as though every week is a hard week. But life goes on. It always does. It's amazing...

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I started summer school today. The teacher talked at us very rapidly in Maori for two hours. I only caught a few words, among them "Rumaki reo," which means immersion; we can't speak any English during the course. And “Whakamātautau,” which means test. This Thursday.

I had approximately three days of holiday, which I savoured every last moment of. Still, it wasn’t enough.

At Kapahaka class last week, my friend Hoturoa came up to me and said, “do you want to go skiing tomorrow,” to which I stammered, “uh-uh-ok?” I haven’t been skiing since I was sweet sixteen never been (er, ok, let’s not go there…) but I jumped at the opportunity. Fi + Mountains = Very Happy Fi.

His friend Nic had a bigger vehicle - more room for skis etc, so we went up in that. Have I ever mentioned the extreme phobia of dogs that I developed after one bit me when I was three years old, leaving tooth scars above and below my eye? Well, I had to get over my fears when I discovered that I was stuck a moving vehicle with Ngaru, an exuberant and affectionate black Labrador.

Because it was the last week of the season and the weather was slightly dubious, the only people on the mountain seemed to be the die-hards with season passes. I was, without a smidgen of doubt, the least competent person on the whole mountain, but luckily there weren’t many people and they were good at dodging around me as I ploughed through the snow with limbs splayed out in all directions. At one point, after I’d crashed out and was lying in the snow groaning, someone going over on the chair lift yelled out “don’t stay there long.” It took me a few minutes to realise that I was sprawled right underneath a jump. I got up pretty quickly after that.

As the day got clearer and brighter, my skiing ability deteriorated – once I could see how steep the slope was, I kept panicking and losing control. Hoturoa, on the other hand, was possibly one of the best skiers there… ok, so I’m no judge of the technicalities of skiing, but he was the most beautiful to watch. He moved with such grace, at times I thought he might glide straight into the air and never drift down.

In the late afternoon we headed down the road and bowled up to a lodge at the foot of the mountain. The place seemed quiet so we thought we’d have no trouble getting a room, but when someone came to the door it was only to tell us that the whole lodge had been booked out for extras working on Without a Paddle. No one was actually staying there, but they couldn’t take any other guests in case a whole lot of people from the movie suddenly showed up.

We found a room in a nearby lodge that had a spa pool outside. There were trees over hanging the pool, and as we lay back we were entertained by a kereru and a tui in the branches. Two guys were just leaving and offered us some beers (way to get drunk quickly – drink in a spa pool…)

Steamed pink and wrinkly, but warmed and relaxed, we headed into town for pizza. Unfortunately when we arrived we found out that the film company had just bought 50 pizzas and the restaurant was closing for the night. But the fish and chip shop up the road did a decent pizza too.

Ngaru was up and barking at 5am, much to the annoyance of the proprietor. We crawled out of bed to placate the dog and check out the weather; it was raining heavily so we got back into our sleeping bags and spent the morning reading and writing until the proprietor (still grumpy about the dog) kicked us out.

Then Hoturoa had the bright idea of going to the film set to see if they needed any extra extras. They were filming in Raetihi, where the locals (dressed up as hillbillies if they were Pākehā, or American Indians if they were Māori) were quite blasé about the whole thing. Apparently it’s their third movie in the past couple of years, and there will be a more in the near future. And after Lord of the Rings, Without a Paddle barely registered a flicker of excitement; except for the guys I was with, who got a buzz out of sneaking into the middle of the action. Ngaru soon became the star of the show. After about half an hour of watching Seth Green do his thing, and Ngaru sucking up to the crew members, I went back to the car and read my book, so I wasn’t included in the announcement that came over, “Would the two guys with the dog, once they’ve had a good look around, please leave…”

Thwarted from their goals of fame and fortune the boys trailed back to the car and we headed on our way… but not for long. We only made it as far as Waiouru before Nic decided he wanted to go to Auckland. Auckland? Yeah. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “But we need to get back to Wellington, I’ve got a launch at the institute tomorrow…” Hoturoa suggested we give Nic some space to make up his mind about what he wanted to do, so we took Ngaru for a walk. “I’ve got a lot of patience for Nic,” he told me. “He’s been so good to me in the past.” Meanwhile I was muttering, “Yeah, well he hasn’t been good to me. I’ve only just met him and already he’s dumping me at the side of the road.”

When we got back to the car, Nic was still agonising. “Oh shit, I should take you guys back,” he said, and we climbed into the car. I was relieved, but also felt a twinge of disappointment as the potential for adventure faded away. But then, after a few moments, Hoturoa and I realised something strange. “Nic, I think you really want to go to Auckland.” “Nah, nah, it’s cool.” “You’re going to Auckland,” “Nah, I’ll take you guys back.” “Nick, this is the road to Auckland. We don’t want to go there, can you let us out of the car?” “Shit! Is it? I had no idea…”

Very generously he agreed to keep our skis and some other gear in the car, so we didn’t have to carry them if we ended up walking home… and then he drove away. “I’ve never hitchhiked in my life before,” I confessed to Hoturoa, and as the grey sky churned overhead he reassured me with stories of long nights standing in the rain with only a plastic bag for shelter… But I must have brought us some first-timers luck, because within five minutes Hoturoa was chatting with a couple of people in the Army museum carpark, and beckoning me over. They were heading back from the mountain too; she was from Switzerland, he was from Sweden. “Hej, hur mÅr du?” I said. As we walked back to the cars, it became apparent there were two of them. Cars, I mean. “I’ll take this one,” said the Swedish guy, indicating me. “You ok?” Hoturoa mouthed at me. “Ok,” I shrugged back. I’d promised myself that if he proposed splitting up I was going to kick up a fuss. But this was a Swedish guy. It had to be an omen; my first hitchhiking experience had been blessed by the gods of good luck and uncanny coincidence.

I think Anders was a little disappointed when he realised that I’d used up the sum total of my Swedish vocabulary in the first five minutes of the journey. But then I found out he’d been to Costa Rica. “Slow down,” he pleaded as I bombarded him with questions. “I don’t understand.” He’d been to Arenal, the volcano that I could see from my bedroom window in San Carlos. I couldn’t believe it. In five years, he was only the third person I’d met who had been to Costa Rica, and the first who had been to Arenal.

We drove as far as Taihape, and stopped there to get some kai and check out the gumboot.

Anders decided to stay in Taihape and do some rafting, so I moved my gear into the car with Nadia (she was heading all the way to Wellington) and Hoturoa. He was planning to stop at Paraparaumu to go to his parents’ beach house, but when we got there he changed his mind. “I just want to get back to Wellington,” he said, and we drove straight through. But Nadia had to stop for a few minutes in Plimmerton, and the moment Hoturoa and I got out of the car and touched the sand and the salty air, we wanted to be on the beach. “We should have got out,” he said. “We could hitch back up the coast…” he dithered for a while, but decided to keep going towards Wellington. Nadia took us right up to his house, and we gathered our gear and climbed out. The sea was still calling us. We stood there silently, with the wind tearing through us, watching the shadows of clouds move over the water. Eventually I broke away and picked up my pack. I didn’t want to leave but I figured that the longer I left it, the harder it was going to be to drag myself home. But Hoturoa was still gazing at the sea. “I’m still thinking about going up the coast,” he told me.

We didn’t end up going to the beach house, but we did go to the beach. The engineered one in Oriental Bay. It was a beautiful evening; wild but beautiful. We stood with our arms around each other, knee deep in the waves, feeling the tug of the water, gritty sand under our soles, the thousand greys of the harbour, birds tumbling through the air above us, the clouds pierced by shards of copper and streaks of flaming crimson.

For some reason Saskia was nudging at my memory. She had been on my mind a lot, since I talked to Hoturoa’s sister after the opening night of Te Mana, and we started talking about loss and grieving, and whether the process should be selfish. Lately I’ve felt the need for selfish grief. At the time of her birth and death I didn’t have a chance to grieve. I was too busy looking after her brother, and trying to hold so many things together. I didn’t have the chance to grieve for me, for what I had lost. As we stood there in the sea I sung “Marama iti,” the waiata I wrote soon after Saskia died. The wind and the sea seemed to snatch away my voice and wash the grief from me.

The next day we launched Keeping Track; Voices on Matiu / Somes. It’s a collection of poems and photographs about the island in the middle of Wellington Harbour; everyone in our writing class contributed, and I did the design and layout.

There were speeches from Bill Manhire, and Sally Airey from DOC, and a couple of us read our poems. Then we had the launch of another special publication; “Do me like a penguin; an anthology of penguin porn.” Luckily by this time there was no one from DOC around…

The next day a friend who’d just finished her degree invited me to Makara beach for the ceremonial burning of her notes. Richie brought along his flute, and Al was playing didgeridoo.

We stuffed bananas with chocolate Sante bars, and roasted them in the fire. The sky was incredible. No moon rose, there was just a faint smear of city lights behind the hills, and the stars. I saw two shooting stars as I lay back against a log, listening to the others singing. “Earth my body and water my blood, air my breath and fire my spirit…”

And that, my friends, is where I shall leave you, because I’m exhausted and the onslaught of kupu hou begins afresh at 10am tomorrow. Did I mention we have a test on Thursday? Yeah…

Posted by Fionnaigh at November 17, 2003 03:50 PM