Wondering where that go to

About six months late and looking the worse for wear my Boston Review arrived over the weekend.

 

I think I know why it was late….

I’ve never been to France. In a stange way I’m actually kind of chuffed I own a mag that has.

Save the Footpath

Save Manners Mall! You can join the Facebook group. You can hardly avoid the eye-catching posters.  But can you, can anyone, actually explain to me what’s there to save? What good is served by the current pedestrianised Manners Mall that outweighs the need to improve our public transport system?

These aren’t rhetorical questions. Maybe I’m missing something amongst the mopey teenagers, the grimy bricks and the sparse, ugly seats. If so, I’d love to know what it is.

The Comeback

It was the best day I’d seen at the best surf spot around these parts. Surf law says I can’t give the game away and tell you where it is, or even reveal too many telling details. So maybe it was a beach-break with the best sand bar ever, or maybe a rocky point, swells crunching down its length. Or maybe a river bar after the flood of the decade. Or maybe a long shallow reef. The main thing is, it was the best day I’d ever seen. Just the, best, day. Double head high sets, blue-green walls, held up by an offshore wind until they spun off down the line, in hissing curving tubes.

The car park was full. Someone videoing the action. Someone nursing a snapped board. Hangers on, restless dogs, people exchanging excited diagnoses. Out the back was a serious pack of serious surfers. Old grumpy guys, locals, rippers, wanna be rippers, and one weird guy who limped down the beach and paddled into the line-up wearing a single white shoe.

The weird guy, that was me, of course. My heart hammering as I paddled. Watching the waves, breaking faster and angrier as they sped down the line. I tested the shoe with my good foot. I had to wear it; I couldn’t stand on a surfboard without it. The pain in my heal was too much. The padding of the shoe helped, got me into the gentle waves round home. But now as I paddled out along the edge of the exploding whitewater towards the serious pack of serious surfers I wondered what would become of the shoe and I should we actually catch something.

It wasn’t that I hadn’t surfed waves like that before. I had – plenty of times, from the outer edge of Atlantic Islands, to the murky beaches of Mexico, to the coral reefs of the Indian Ocean. But I’d done all that when I was whole. When mind and body worked as one. Now I wondered: could I even get to my feet quick enough; would I trip over the shoe; would I snap if I did.

In the end it all came down to one wave – my first. It broke wide, away from the pack and I spun into it a little way down the line as the barrel started to race. Lots of things could have happened: I could have been caught in the lip and pitched into the shingle; I could have nose dived on the drop and slapped into the shallows, I could have slid sideways under the lip as I tried to angle into the tube. Could of, could of, could of, but – in that instant, in that moment the story hangs upon – didn’t. Instead my feet fell into place under me, I made the lurching drop and pivoted into the tube, racing the raucous breaking swell. In the end I lost the race – flipped over the falls. But by then I knew all I needed to know. I knew I could still surf. I paddled out the back, where the serious surfers bobbed like black swans, and started catching waves, big draining barrels, beaten by some but making most, swooping through tube after tube, board chattering, hurtling towards the channel. Even the grumpy old guys hooted me on a couple. I can not tell you how happy I felt.

That was 2005. Back in the present, the methotrexate is helping. I’m getting round a lot better. But I’m still a long, long way from surfing again. Hoping though, as you can imagine, for another chance at a come back. They’re almost worth going away for.

Wellington!

I know, I know, I’m always saying this but, this evening…

… clouds retreating east, pulled back like a curtain, letting in the winter sky; sunset to the west, smouldering behind the mountains. The wash of breaking waves in bits and pieces along the coast. The hopeful blink of a lighthouse as it waited for the stars…

…had to have been the most beautiful evening that Wellington ever stitched together.

Starlings

Starlings roost in the middle of Wellington, near my wife’s work. Depending on the hour, when I’m waiting to pick her up, I sit in the car park and listen as they settle in the billowing trees. Hundreds of them, dowsing the car sounds in bird song. Chattering, chattering, chattering like crazy to each other. I don’t know, maybe they’re gossiping, or telling the stories of their day, or spinning delighted tales about the glory of flight. Or maybe they just chirp because that’s what birds do. But that conversation, taking place on a thousand branches, over the tops of the lonely commuters, as the street lights replace the sun, is the most reassuring thing. A secret, happy urban joy.

Wellington!

I know, I know, I’m always saying this, but wasn’t this morning – with it’s ice covered windscreens, mist clogged valleys, and faint-hopeful sun – quite possibly the prettiest morning in the history of Wellington?

Storm Surge!

When I drove to work on Wednesday morning the hail was piled up like snow in the streets of Berhampore. An hour earlier, maybe  a little more, the Thunder woke me, and I lay in bed listening to it boom, counting the seconds between the lightening flash and following sound.

I can barely remember the last time I heard a storm like that in Wellington. In Sydney they used to roll across the city regularly – I can remember watching from the KPMG building where I worked above Darling Harbour as white-purple bolts crashed into the Western Suburbs. I can remember racing to cover the windscreen of our flatmate’s car so it didn’t shatter under the marble size hailstones belting out of the sky. I can remember sitting on the beach on dusk, in a warm calm world again, watching the passing squall, fading out to sea, electric light on the horizon.

From summers in Long Island I remember storms on humid nights. One which passed directly overhead, lightening striking a power pole at the end of the street where my then girlfriend lived. We road over from my place to find the fire brigade dowsing the surrounding trees and the power pole splintered and smoldering on the ground.  We rode on to her place to find the television ruined. Despite the fact it was off, and turned off at the wall. It had been plugged into a multi-point surge protector too – all that was left of that was a melted lump of plastic.

Anyhow, while I was lying in bed on Wednesday morning, listening to hail and thinking of storms in other countries, someone was up videoing. You can watch the Wellington storm on YouTube. And read about it on the MetService blog.

Life in the Slow Lane

I was living in London when I had my first attack of reactive arthritis. Every couple of days I’d take the underground from Bethnal Green where I was couch sitting to Charing Cross Hospital. Sometimes, when I felt up to it, I’d stop and sight-see on the way. I was more mobile then than now, but still painfully slow.

And so I spent a lot of time hobbling in and out of Tube Stations. I would alight from the train, shuffle out of the way, and start towards the exit. First amongst a throng, then a crowd, then a trickle. Then by myself, in the empty echoing tunnels. If the station was large enough, or the walk long enough, other trains would arrive, and the walkway around me would fill with sound and people again, before it emptied out. Occasionally, I’d have company; the brave or determined elderly. Sometimes there’d be a line of us, spread out along the handrails like mountain climbers on a rope.

The other day, I was having coffee with a friend who also has a chronic illness. We talked, as we often do, about the frustrations of being unwell. One frustration that I wouldn’t have predicted in the days before the arthritis is the frustrated grind of expectations, the things I want to do with my life, still set by the norms of the people around me and life before I was sick, against the realities of being unwell. Things could be much worse, and I’m lucky and have a lot to be thankful for. But it’s hard not to feel sorry for yourself sometimes when it seems like life’s bustling out of the station in front of you, and you’re left limping along behind.

Or, at least, that’s the glum view of it all. What I need to remember is that, despite the faltering steps, I still made it out of the Underground in the end, and got to see most, if not all, of the things the city had to offer…

Close Enough to Home

I took a creative writing course once. In it, the lecturer explained that the tension you feel in Shakespeare’s sonnets is that of the English language being stretched to breaking point. Well, it looks like it just snapped.

Picture taken on our way out to Jo’s mum’s.

The Hutt Valley tries hard to throw off its stereotypes. Unfortunately, some residents just keep letting the team down.

Agnostic Wonderings

Yesterday evening I caught the wrong bus and ended up by Te Papa. Lured by the salt-smell I limped to the wharf’s edge and watched the street lights prick the dusk. Hills wrapped round the windless harbour like the frame around a mirror. And above it all quiet grey sheets of cloud began to fade back into the sky.

Standing there, listening the burble as a wake washed against the bollards, I started thinking of the sublime. Surely, a universe which is so beautiful, so often, and in so many different ways, has to have a purpose. A meaning, an order, a reason. Surely. Standing there I could feel it. I could almost be convinced.

And yet. In 1994, in the space of 100 days, Hutu genocidaires killed 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda. During the 1970s Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge wiped out nearly a quarter of the population of Cambodia.  Millions died in the Holocaust, and in Stalin’s Gulag. How can all this have a purpose or a reason? What order did it serve? What kind of higher power would let all that happen?

Both meaningful and meaningless universes seam impossible to me. But one of them must exist.

Gravel Roads and Aching Bones

Wednesday

Holidays in aching bones are different, but different isn’t always bad. I’d rather be walking or surfing but I’m not. And so –

When you can’t move much you think carefully about the place you’re going to stay. And when you’re there, you notice things that might have passed you by had your own momentum been greater.

We’re at Riversdale, staying in a cabin in the grounds of Orui station. A quiet bend in the coast; the weather tempered by topography. Other than summer holidays it’s rarely busy; on weekdays in winter it’s on the edge of empty. There are irritations – joyriding teenagers in quad bikes first amongst them – but they’re usually escapable.

On calm mornings, the sun wakes up over the glassy sea, warm from the first, washing everything in melted red, then green. On days like today when the Nor’Wester is blowing the sky becomes stretched; rain clouds trapped far to the west along the Tararuas, high clouds spread out, hurrying – bent by the jet stream into streaks and sweeps.

The first afternoon we were here I went for a bodysurf. Limber enough, just. Catching the waste high waves that pitched over the sandbars. I even got a couple of barrels, a couple of moments watching the pitch and swirl of watery light before being tumbled through the shallows. As I did all this – some weird middle aged guy in a wetsuit and a hood, bounding about in the already too cold sea – the day gave way to evening and strokes of sunlight turned everything to a weary rural gold.

Yesterday we drove up to the empty coast at Otahome, looking north to Castlepoint. Today I’m sitting by the cabin, on the edge of the homestead’s gardens, kept company by the farm cat. There’s a grey warbler singing somewhere and the wind is in the trees, coaxing quiet applause from the poplars and sighs from the ancient pines.

The sky is sailing by – a storm in the Tasman maybe but here, two mountain ranges East we’re far enough away for all of that to be missing us, resting by the sea.

-~-

Sunday

And yesterday we drove home, via Flatpoint, along the gravel forestry road, break pads smelling of burning dust. I scanned the coast for surf spots and we made it to Gladstone by late afternoon. The grass was still summer brown but the willows and poplars were filled with autumn colours. Chocolate in Greytown and sun set as we got home.

The Evening

The wind was howling when I got there, clattering out of the valley, blowing chops up the faces of the waves, blowing plumes of spray off their backs. It filled the air with salt water rain, making it almost impossible to see. Still wondering if I should have stayed at home and finished that essay, I paddled out and caught a couple, free-fall drops, bouncy walls, racing barrels.  A few other surfers joined me. It was fun enough in a difficult sort of way.

Eventually, the evening worked its spell and – sun beyond the horizon, water changing colour – the wind dropped back. The waves got better as the day ran out until, right on the edge of dark, the set came through: shadowy swells filling the bay, the biggest waves of the afternoon. One of the Maori guys who lived up the valley caught the first one, dropping out of the lip to the hoots of his mates. I was next in line, the second one was mine, thick low swell bent into the bay. Humming with nervous excitement – don’t blow it, don’t blow it – I paddled out, spun and starting paddling in, matching the wave’s speed as it steepened, jumping to my feet as it became vertical. With a yell I called an interloper off and dropped, board falling under me. Turning at the bottom, I could see the wall beginning to bend in on itself. After that everything was instinct. I held my turn back for a moment, then angled up the wave, stalling, loosing speed, and then back down again, now pointed for the shoulder, in the pocket, accelerating. The wave turned concave, it’s dark-dark green lip throwing over me, and I was standing in the tube, chattering mind silenced for a moment, weaving my way through, section after section throwing over me.

Just before the closeout the wave backed off, letting me out and leaving me time to straighten out in front of the whitewater. Laughing, singing to myself; happy, happy at the end of the day.

Getting out more often

On Saturday, angling for late summer sun, Jo and I drove to Titahi Bay. Almost freed by steroids, we walked along the beach and waded into the warm green sea.

Rolling in like sighs from the Tasman, the waves were almost too soft to bodysurf. But after all these years I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve. So I caught some – tilting down the little drops, skipping across the flats and sinking into the ebbing white water.

Afterwards we drove up a little hillock and sat in the car.  Beyond the tidepools waves broke like glass in the sun. Further out still, the rising norwester pulled tufts of white from the sea off Plimmerton. We ate our iceblocks and immersed ourselves in papers on the art of aid growth regressions and the economics of family planning. These were very happy hours.

Ode to the Hutt

I grew up in Eastbourne and even for an awkward fit like me that brought with it certain snobberies. Chief amongst these being the one we cast over our shoulders back in the direction of Lower Hutt.

My teens took me through high school there so, to be fair, I at least had evidence for the grudge I bore: the bogans, the black jeans, the way the parties always ended in fights. The smoggy conformity, the prefab pride. That fucking shopping mall; tumorous, relentless, eating through the heart of the city. The architecture in general.

But that was then. Today I’m sitting on the 6th floor of Hutt Hospital receiving steroids intravenously. The view out the window is hemmed by hills. Worn geometric skeletons behind Belmont. Green regenerating ridgelines converging north. The lurching Tararuas. In between, lazing in the forgiving sun, is a valley I’ve never seen before: sports grounds and hopeful homes. Trees everywhere, hiding roads and nestled round red-tiled rooves. Nikau palms like landed stars, white ivory eucalypts. Willows along the river and Norfolk pines stretching taller than the building I’m in.

Every once in a while black-back gulls glide by, sailing on confident wings, letting out their gloating cry. They’re right you know; Lower Hutt is really beautiful. Truly.

-~-

On an unrelated note, one of the most common side-effects of methyl-prednisolone is a ‘high’: a state of mild but giddy, euphoria. Did I mention that?

The One Legged Man

Damian and I were bored out of our brains. Becalmed mid-summer.

All our hope lay with the southerly that had blown in earlier that day bringing with it a low, murky sky and the faint possibility of surf.

Acting on that, we checked the waves on an hourly basis – flat, flat, flat – each fruitless survey accompanied by much positive visualisation.

“Looks a little bigger now.”

“Yeah, that last one almost broke.”

“Yeah, maybe the incoming tide will bring in a bit more swell too.”

“The tide’s going out.”

“Oh. Well maybe it will break more on the low.”

“Yeah.”

Then we’d drive back to Damian’s parents’ place and watch another surf video.

“Green Iguana?”

“How ’bout Wave Warriors 4?”

And so the afternoon went. Until some time around 5pm when our surf check revealed something completely unexpected: waves.

Bad waves: onshore and closing out. But waves all the same.

I didn’t even stop the car. We raced back to Damian’s to get the boards.

“Hurry!”

“Before it goes flat.”

Remarkably we returned to find that, far from going flat, the swell was actually getting bigger.

“Out there!”

“Yeah, quick.”

“Before it goes flat.”

We’d been in around half an hour, the only surfers in the water, when the southerly died away.

Without the wind to cut it up its surface, the sea became oily, smooth as a mirror, reflecting the grey back at the sky.

The swell kept rolling in though; the waves were a little over head high now and instantly better without the chop bringing down sections. Bent in by the outside sandbars, the swells stood up just to the north of the small steel and wood groin below the car park.  Taking turns, we’d catch them right at their peak and speed south, past the groin,  zipping over the shallow sand. The waves would barrel, back off for a moment and then close out in the shallows allowing us the chance to imitate the manoeuvres we’d been watching in the videos all afternoon.

The waves were unreal. We hadn’t anticipated surf like this.

We didn’t anticipate what happened next either.

A guy appeared, standing in the evening murk at the top of the stairs that lead down to the beach. He was wearing a one-legged wetsuit. He was propped up on crutches. He only had one leg.

Very, very carefully he climbed down the stairs and made his way out onto the beach. He stopped about 10 feet from the water’s edge. Following in his footstep was a kid, maybe 10 or 11 years old. The kid was in a wetsuit too, carrying two surfboards: one for him and one for the guy on the crutches.

When they stopped the older man set down his crutches and the kid gave him one of the boards. With it, he hopped the rest of the way to the sea, falling with a splash into the shallows. The kid followed and they both paddled out.

We watched in wonder. Not so much wonder though, that we missed the set that was coming our way.

“Go Damo, go! I’ll take the second one”.

By the time we’d each caught a wave and were paddling out, the old guy and the kid were in position for the next waves that came through. The kid got the first one and rode it pretty well for an 11 year old.

The old guy was up next. We watched, waiting for him to fall. But he didn’t. Somehow – and I still can’t figure out exactly how – he ’stood’ in a crouch propped up by a bent leg, the stump of his missing leg, and his arm.

He dropped down the fast steepening wave, turned, and shot along it. He wasn’t graceful or entirely in control but he made it.

Faces opened up with surprise Damian and I stared at each either, neither of us saying anything, neither of us really sure what words to use. The old guy paddled back out.

“Does it often get this good here?”

“Yeah”

“No”

“Not often”

“Well maybe sometimes.” We were still struggling with words.

Technically, Damian and I being locals and the guy and the kid coming from out of town, we should have been grumpy, surly even, at their intrusion at ‘our’ spot. But really? We’d just been joined in the best waves we’d had for months by a kid and a guy who rode the impossible. Pretty soon the four of us were chatting happily.

The newcomers were from up north somewhere, visiting friends who lived over the road from the beach. They’d brought their boards and just happened to stop by on the only day in months that had surf.

The old guy had lost his leg to cancer, but was determined to keep surfing, so had. The kid was his son.

After about an hour they got out and headed to their friends’ for dinner. Damian and I surfed to dark making the most of the waves.

That surf was almost half a lifetime ago now. Damian lives in Australia. I’ve – mercifully – still got both legs but, for now, they’re no good for surfing. The beach we surfed at that evening is almost gone – swallowed by shingle.

I like to think though, that the old guy might still be surfing, up north somewhere. Weaving along wave faces on a stump and an arm. And I hope his son is too, travelling and enjoying all the other good things that come with being a surfer.

Summer Holidays

I love my tent. We’ve travelled together north of the Arctic Circle and as far south as the Straits of Magellan. I’ve camped in it on the beach in Chile and in the middle of the Outback in Australia.

I love my tent; unfortunately, I’m not the only one. As best I can tell, the Wind Gods also find it very pleasing. Why else would they follow it so? Patting it, playing with it, buckling it under their breath.

There was the night in Iceland where the gusts fell furious off the Vatnajokull ice sheet, shrieking through the empty campground. Even the old guy who ran the place reckoned it was a storm to remember.

Then there was the time in Patagonia when it blew like the clappers and I managed to set the tent side on to the wind. With every squall caving the walls in on us, my French Canadian travelling companion and I didn’t get much rest. Our only satisfaction being the next morning comparing our still standing tent with the other walkers’ bubble tents now strewn about the campground like bluebottles washed up by the tide.

And there was the gale at Tora. Stampeding out of the valleys and running down the coast at the same time, the wind blew so hard that Jo and I slept only in two minute bursts.

So it was that when we went camping this summer we went prepared. Arriving to a blowy westerly we put the tent up, parked the car up-wind and almost on top of it, and set out the storm guys, anchoring them to rocks and vehicle. We waited for the worst.

Then, the strangest thing happened. The wind got less rather than more. And we spent three days becalmed, alone on a small corner of farmland next to a quietly chattering sea. At night we slept under uncountable stars. During the day we bathed in the sun, read, did nothing, and enjoying being somewhere where nothing was the norm.

I spent hours trying to find words for the way the Cabbage Trees cut trails between the tanning land, sleepy-still sea, and swallowing sky.

After a day of this even the tent relaxed, yawning lazily in the occasional puffs of breeze.

On the Harbour

There are days when the Nor’Wester blows so strong on Wellington harbour that it brings surf to Eastbourne. These aren’t open ocean waves like the ones that sometimes weave their way through the heads in a strong southerly swell. These are harbour waves, starting their lives as ripples barely 8 kilometres upwind off Petone Beach. Such is the strength of the gusts that carry them, that by the time they’ve crossed the harbour they’re big enough to surf. It’s the same way that surfable waves are sometimes formed on lakes.

Needless to say they aren’t great waves. Small, short and torn ragged by the wind. But you can surf them and as surf-starved kids we did.

I can remember one day when I was thirteen catching the bus from Point Howard to Eastbourne. Board stashed in the back, the bus ride was easy; my difficulties began trying to get from the bus stop to the beach. To do that I had to walk upwind, towards Windy Point, and around Dellabarca corner onto Marine Parade.

At the time I was using a surfboard I’d borrowed from a cousin. Even back then it was old, a board from the late ’70s. It wasn’t huge, but I was tiny. And as I battled against the wind, the board clasped under my arm turned into a sail. It kicked and tugged, and right on the corner became too much. All of a sudden I was out of control and back peddling, feet slapping on the footpath. Luckily, there was someone behind me. A stranger from the same bus. With an arm on the board he stopped my flight.

“Need a hand mate”.

“Yes please!”

And so the two of us, him holding the front of the board and me the tail, battled our way around the windswept corner. Safe on the other side I was able to scamper into the shelter of the sand dunes and change into my wetsuit. And then stumble through the swept, stinging sand into the surf.

I can’t remember now what my surf was like that day but I can guess. Lots of duck-diving the incoming wash. Lots of paddling against the current that swept down the beach. And just enough short crashing rides to keep me enthused. After my arms gave out I would have retreated back to the dunes, watching the setting sun give colour to a sky full of salt spray and waiting for mum to come and pick me up when she’d finished work.

I’m thinking about this surf right now not because the Northerly a couple of days ago was windy enough to have made surf in Eastbourne (although it probably was) but because I’ve been reunited with my cousin’s surfboard. Thinking nostalgically (and also because old boards can be fund to ride) I asked him about it a few weeks ago. It turns out he still had it, collecting dust and occupying space under his house. I offered to buy it off him, but he was happy to give it away.

I’m stoked. It’s the first board I ever really thought of as mine. It was borrowed of course, but I had it long enough to develop that strange attachment I have for inanimate objects – cars, plants, clothes – which join me in my wanderings.

The first thing that stuck me when I saw it again was how much smaller it looked. And older. The change in size makes sense of course – I’m a little bigger now. But the aging surprised me. This, I guess, was because I’d always thought of it as old – even back then when I first rode it, it was a relic of the 70s. And so I wasn’t expecting the already aged to be older still. But then I did the numbers: it’s over 21 years since the day I surfed in that Nor’Wester. Which explains it.

So the plan now: fix up the dings. Hope my body repairs itself. And take the old board surfing.

Summer’s Calling Card

Three things I love about Nor’Westerly Gales:

1. The way they sweep across the harbour and over the Eastbourne hills, tearing at the native bush until whole hillsides roar with the motion of trees.

2. The way they peel white squalls from the sea at Sinclair Head and set them running, like ghost ships, south into the horizon.

3. The way they end, eventually, and leave days like today in their wake.

Surgery on Wednesday

On a day when Wellington was ringed by snow covered hills, Jo and I went for a drive. We sat on Petone Wharf and listened as fishermen spun nets of words in Khmer and Samoan. We drove out to Makara and watched the early afternoon sun set the Tasman shimmering like unspent promise.

I’m scheduled to go into hospital tomorrow and, barring the unexpected, surgery will be on Wednesday. All going to plan I will be discharged about a week later. So no blogging for a while (although I might see whether Jo can post an update here).

I’ve been anxious today in an odd sort of way. I feel nervous like you do the morning you’re due to fly out on an overseas trip. It feels like you’ve forgotten something but you can’t quite figure what.

Which is ok, my travelling days left me more or less equipped to cope with that sensation. As you may have noticed I’ve been distracting myself trying to find metaphors.

Newtown Wins!

This afternoon my wife and I went to People’s Coffee in Newtown. While she waited inside for the drinks I wandered out into the street. Propped up against the storefront a musician played country music. Songs about Hank Williams and Austin Texas competed with the traffic and won hands down. On the first of the cafe’s tables a couple watched the guy play – rapt. Next to them two girls, one with dreadlocks, ignored everything but their own conversation. On the table over four men from somewhere in Africa talked in their native tounge. The conversation rose and ebbed, its crests lifting their voices to near shouts.

Set out towards the footpath an older bearded guy sat on a stool, swaying in time to the songs, pausing only to light a Gudang Guram. The smell of the clove cigarette drifted over to where I rested against a sun-warmed fence and, as it always does, brought memories of Indonesia.

Above us all, large swollen clouds drifted aimlessly in the sky, utterly unable to make up their minds.