Dusk

You step out into the dusk. Grey and white clouds mount over the ranges; a full moon rises, huge, the colour of bone. Colour still lingers in the sky—violet, purple, mauve, a tinge of pink. Hues fade, moment by moment; the remains of the day are overwhelmed by twilight, the looming dark. Edges soften and disappear, leaving only forms and shapes; clarity becomes a remembered concept; the world is seen best from an angle, not confronted directly by the eye. This is the time of birds roosting, late shapes flitting quick across a road, the chink-chink of blackbirds, things half seen moving under branches. This is when the rustling starts in old sheds; when you hear the pattering run of small feet along the malthoid lining of the fowlhouse roof. Chooks murmur and shuffle on their perch. Perhaps a possum[1] might start up in the macrocarpas[2]—the sound of an old man trying to cough and gasp and chuckle all at the same time. Hearing it, a man reaches for his spotlight and .22.

You step out into the dusk, which is no longer a winter dusk. Cold, but without the edge, lacking the bitterness. You step out into the dusk and fall backwards out of the present, into a half dreamed world of wire netting and paling fences preserved with old sump oil and warped by the years. A cat springs onto a post, looks briefly back, and is gone. Vegetable gardens in back yards; careful rows hoed; a few cabbages; a pruned vine trained along the paling fence, tied with baler twine. Your grandfather sits in the doorway of the shed with his pipe and his memories. Perhaps he’s thinking of a time before your mother was born, or perhaps he’s thinking about what to plant in the plot he’s just finished turning over.

You step out into the dusk and people you never met walk out of the shadows. They build fires and camp on river banks, cook eels and kereru, and move on past you, upriver, into the shadow of the mountain. They nod to you as they walk by and you do the same. No words. A ruru[3] calls and another answers; in the moonlight, something runs across a clearing. You don’t know what it is, but you know it will never be seen anywhere but here, in this time, in this twilight, in the back of your mind.

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Notes:
I've been working on a post about dreams, and seem to have stalled. Late the other night I abandoned it (perhaps temporarily) and started writing something completely different; something not intended as a post; something I thought would have no structure, would go nowhere. Writing for the sake of writing and nothing more. Later, I stopped, sat back and wondered where on earth—or elsewhere—it came from. This is it.

1. The introduced Australian brushtail possum, Trichosurus vulpecula.
2. Cupressus macrocarpa. Known as Monterey cypress elsewhere but here simply as macrocarpas, these are near-ubiquitous features of the rural New Zealand landscape.
3. The morepork, Ninox novaeseelandiae. Aotearoa's only extant native owl.
Photos (click on them if you want a larger image):
1. A view East across the upper Pohangina Valley to the southern Ruahine Range, winter 2006.
2. My maternal grandmother, Veronica Blake (R; dark hair), and her sister, Aileen. Date unknown, probably the first few years of the 20th Century. The original photographer was H.H. Clifford, of Christchurch, N.Z. Veronica ('Nana' to us when we were kids) grew up and married James McGrath.
Photos and words © 2006 Pete McGregor