Rain

2006:

The first of October. The afternoon darkens; grey cloud thickens, saying rain soon. But it’s still warm out here on the verandah, still calm. The first of October, and this morning I heard the first pipiwharauroa. In the East, cloud begins to melt into a misty veil of rain over distant hills. A blackbird sings a gentle song from the sycamore and another answers from lower down, perhaps in the apple, perhaps the manuka. A tui too: warbles and clucks punctuating melodic phrases.

The rain veil spreads. Two putangitangi fly, silent and synchronised, across that sky, South to North, upvalley. In the same moment a swallow darts and flickers over the paddock, flying directly away from me, more a quick movement than substance. Receding, flickering its way into the oblivion of the encroaching rain. As the putangitangi fly North and the swallow East, a small flight of finches scatters South and alights in the top of the sycamore. The moment lasts no more than a handful of seconds but seems to contain the meaning of a lifetime. I look up into the sky, above the rain, where the cloud seems uncertain whether to close and thicken or break to let the light shine through. It resembles something William Blake might have painted—dark, immanent, potent, full of symbolism. The first of October.

The first rain begins to tap on the verandah roof.

1997:

Rainwalking, Pohangina River

I used to hate the rain
the miserable drip and
gradual seep the drum
on the hut’s iron roof
with the river rising
all the time uncountable
crossings still to go

Now on my own making
whatever time I like
it’s just another part
of being out here
the silence expands
in this taptaptap this
leafsplatter the dull gleam
of riverbed boulders

Anyone else would wreck it
I hope the other world’s
long gone tucked behind
warm walls with the radio on
leaving me with the cold the
mist thunder in the gorge rain falling -
anyone else would wreck it

but I remember the colour
of the sea and find myself
smiling.

---

Photos (click them if you want a larger image):
1. Mallard. Williams Park, Days Bay, near Eastbourne, Wellington harbour.
2. Image based on a mallard duckling (loc. cit.), with significant post-processing.
3. Shoreline at Burdan's Gate, Point Arthur, Wellington harbour.

Photos and words © 2006 Pete McGregor

Dreaming

A stone sits in the middle of the driveway in front of the house. One stone, darker than the rest. A stone that would fit into a cupped hand. The shape is irregular and lumpy; the texture rough and pitted. The stone is encircled by a small, blue band of webbing, like a miniature climber’s sling. I recognise its significance.

It is the mark of incipient terrorism.

...

The Neurological Foundation of New Zealand (NFNZ) suggests the current scientific consensus is that dreams have no meaning. The Foundation’s usually excellent newsletter quotes Harvard Medical School’s Allan Hobson [1] as pointing out that “hallucinatory mental content is lowest during active waking and highest during REM sleep,” while “the incidence of thinking is highest during quiet waking and lowest during REM sleep.” From this, the Foundation’s article concludes a sleeping brain cannot simultaneously generate perceptions and think about them; in other words, you cannot make sense of your dreams.

I’m still struggling to make sense of that logic.

...

I walk down the driveway and through the gate, into an area of scrub-covered hillside and crumbling rock, leading down to flat land. I spent my childhood here; now, however, it is more arid, full of drought and fear. I walk with my hands held out and up to show I am helpless, that I am no threat. I am afraid, but keep walking. A group of small men walk past me and I try to explain that I just wish to talk. They seem to be in a hurry, but they assure me they will arrange a meeting. I am doing this to avert the attack on my family.

...

The NFNZ’s article was published this year. I check the article on which it was based and find it was published in 1998 [2]. Given the article did not present original research but instead was a selective, popular summary, the conclusions are likely to be close to a decade old. That’s a long time in science, and I wonder what the consensus is now.

...

I wake in a room already full of light, and reach out to turn on the radio. A New Zealand woman has been seriously wounded by a gunman in Jordan; another person in her group was killed in the attack.

I am awake in my room in the Pohangina Valley, listening to what happened in the world while I was dreaming.

...

Even a cursory investigation raises doubt about the NFNZ’s dogmatic conclusion. Hobson's models of dreaming have not been universally accepted; indeed, they have been opposed vehemently by Mark Solms, whose research results disagree with Hobson's in three major areas.

Hobson claims dreams originate in the same region of the brain (the pons) that stimulates REM sleep; the signals arising here are relatively chaotic [3] and it is the forebrain’s attempts to “make sense” of these chaotic impulses that we experience as dreams. He now concedes that the forebrain might in fact influence REM activity, but still maintains that because the “thinking” part of the forebrain (the prefrontal cortex) is not active during dreaming, while the “emotional brain” (the limbic and paralimbic regions) is active, dreams have little or no meaning.

Solms, however, claims to have shown that dreaming is not synonymous with REM sleep—in other words, that significant dreaming activity occurs independently from REM sleep [4]; and that dreams originate in a different area of the brain (the ventral tegmental area of the midbrain).

Hobson and Solms also disagree about the biochemistry of dreaming. Hobson focuses on the levels of serotonin, norepinephrine, and acetylcholine and how the interactions of these chemicals cause the observed characteristics of dreams, while Solms argues that the dopaminergic system—which also regulates appetites and desires—forms the basis of dreaming.

Thus, the controversy arises from three major differences: the area of the brain in which dreaming originates (and therefore the implications of this in light of what is known about the function of these different regions); whether dreams are substantially a byproduct of REM activity; and the neurochemical basis of dreams (and again, therefore, the implications of this).

The upshot of these differences is that Hobson’s theory points strongly to dreams as being largely random and therefore meaningless, but Solms’ theory links dreaming with areas and processes considered important in generating our appetites and desires. This also means Freud’s theories of dreams can have no place in Hobson’s model, but seem to be not just allowed, but supported by Solms’ model.

Despite this polarisation, Hobson and Solms both consider dreaming as akin to psychosis; they regard dreams as fundamentally bizarre and emotional. However, empirical sleep research—in loose terms, experimental observation—suggests otherwise; moreover, this research suggests both theories are wrong because the predicted associations between neurophysiological activity and the characteristics of dreams (e.g., “bizarreness”, or intense emotion) have not been observed [5].

...

I lie awake, thinking about the dream, thinking about dreaming. When I was a small child, I often dreamed of being chased by wolves and escaping into the sky. As I grew older and learned more about the true nature of wolves, the dream became less frequent. Now, I no longer have recurring dreams—at least, not that I remember. But other people do, and I wonder: if brain activity during dreaming really is so chaotic, how can this explain recurring dreams?

...

Further investigation leads me into a mire of arguments, hypotheses, digressions, and technical jargon well beyond my comprehension, but what does seem clear is that the NFNZ's dogmatic conclusion is unjustified: other theories have been proposed, but all are flawed in some way. Even the popular assertion that sleep serves to consolidate memory is hotly argued [6].

Currently, no satisfactory model explains dreaming. A sound model, it seems, remains a dream.

...

Do dreams have meaning? For all my scepticism about the quality of the NFNZ’s article and regardless of whether Allan Hobson’s theories (or any others) are correct, I’m inclined to agree with at least part of what he says: the greatest value of dreams is that the attempt to interpret them tells us something about ourselves. The difficulty, of course, arises if you believe they mean nothing; if you believe you cannot meaningfully interrogate your dreams. If you believe that, then dreams can tell you nothing about yourself.

---

Notes:
I’m not suggesting any kind of prescience in the dreams I mention here, nor do I attach any importance to the supposed coincidences. Dreams about terrorism are, I suspect, not uncommon. Tragically, nor is terrorism solely a nightmare.

1. Hobson is one of the developers of the activation-synthesis hypothesis, which in its original form regards dreams as essentially meaningless (Hobson, J.A.; McCarley, R. 1977: The brain as a dream state generator: An activation-synthesis hypothesis of the dream process. American Journal of Psychiatry 134: 1335–1348. [Read the abstract]).
2. The original article is no help, because in it Allan Hobson doesn’t argue the case for denying that dreams have meaning—he insists they have no meaning: ‘"Dreams do not contain messages from the unconscious mind, or provide an outlet for repressed feelings," insists J. Allan Hobson, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.’ (op. cit.)
3. This has been disputed; brain stem signals may be ordered and predictable, or at least not as chaotic as claimed by Hobson (Jones, B. E. 2000. The interpretation of physiology. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23: 955–956).
4. The association between dreaming and REM sleep has been recognised since 1953 (Aserinsky, E.; Kleitman, N. 1953: Regularly occurring periods of eye motility, and concomitant phenomena, during sleep. Science 118:273–274); however, this aspect of the Hobson/Solms controversy focuses on whether REM sleep is the sole origin of significant dreaming.
5. Domhoff, G. W. 2005: Refocusing the neurocognitive approach to dreams: A critique of the Hobson versus Solms debate. Dreaming 15: 3–20.
6. For example, compare Robert Vertes' conclusion that “there is no compelling evidence to support a relationship between sleep and memory consolidation” with the view of Jan Born and Björn Rasch that “ compelling evidence has accumulated that links sleep to learning and memory.” Vertes, R. 2004: Memory Consolidation in Sleep: Dream or Reality. Neuron 44: 135-148; Born, J.; Rasch, B. 2006. Sleep to remember. The Neuroscientist 12 (5): 410–424.

Photos (click them if you want a larger image):
1. Possum (Trichosurus vulpecula) skull, No. 1 Line track, Ruahine Range. Someone had hung this by its eye socket from a small, dead shrub in front of the massive rimu, a tree hundreds of years old.
2, 3, 4. Viv, Tony, and Paul playing at the Waterford a few weekends ago.
5. Kowaowao (hound's tongue fern, Microsorum pustulatum), No. 1 Line track.
6. Image based on a photo of horopito (mountain pepperwood, Pseudowintera colorata), No. 1 Line track.

Photos and words © 2006 Pete McGregor

Corrugated iron

Corrugated iron. It’s so much a part of the New Zealand landscape—sheds, roofs, fences, shelters, old sheets lying in paddocks. Newly erected iron gleaming; iron painted every colour; unpainted, faded iron; rusted iron. Patchworks of reused iron salvaged from demolitions and nailed onto the side of a shed to replace the iron rotted by age and too much rain and damp seeping from cold ground. It’s everywhere, from every angle you choose to view the landscape; it’s rural and urban; you find it on old huts in remote areas among mountains and along coasts—particularly along coasts where people shelter after a day’s whitebaiting [1] or surfcasting and drink beer and whisky and lie about what they had on the line. The rain arrives—hard, West Coast rain so loud you can hardly hear the lies so you sit back and eat fritters and enjoy the sound and hope it’ll be a good day in the morning.

Not everyone appreciates corrugated iron. Some people associate it with other things. Years ago I knew someone who emigrated from South Africa to New Zealand to practise as a GP for the foreseeable future. As her plane flew low over Palmerston North she looked down on the rooftops. She looked down on all those corrugated iron rooftops and burst into tears. She thought she'd come to live in a shanty town.

At Te Papa, the Museum of New Zealand, there’s a Holden Kingswood station wagon on display [2]. The panel work is made from corrugated iron the colour of rust. To me, cars are tools, but I can appreciate a car like that.

I think it’s the texture I love as much as anything else. A corrugated iron wall can never be a blank wall. Not like the freshly painted wall I see out this window, across the street from the Wellington City Library, next to the construction site. A blank, concrete wall, painted khaki. Bland and featureless, it functions aesthetically only as a screen on which the late morning sun projects patterns of shadow and light from the glass and concrete surroundings, and as a backdrop for the found sculpture of reinforcing rods projecting skywards from the foundations like stripped sinews. Corrugated iron, however, always has texture; it’s never blank. Lead-head nails slide their shadows across the corrugations; the sun glances off the side of a shed at a low angle and every long hollow’s a line of shadow, every ridge a bright line of light. The pattern's so regular that every dent stands out, each containing a story. A world without imperfections is a world with nothing to say.

I drive the narrow road to Kuku beach, past dairy farms and ragged hedges, by old wire fences with battens leaning at random angles. The wire's still the old, pliable No. 8, not the thin and difficult high tensile modern stuff. Beyond the railway line there’s a poultry farm, every shed made of corrugated iron. Pukeko [3] forage in roadside paddocks, high stepping, tails flicking. One stretches its neck to inspect the car as I idle past; another slips away, head down, through long, hummocky grass. More reptile, or dinosaur, than bird. Each house has one or more sheds or garages of corrugated iron; the houses themselves are roofed with it. Haybarns, milking sheds, calf shelters, abandoned fowlhouses—all corrugated iron in shades of oxidised galvanising and faded red. That battered shed over there might once have been pale lavender, perhaps from a cheap lot of bargain bin paint; now it’s almost indistinguishable from the grey of aged iron. A shelter by a farm driveway is the simplest of structures: three sides and a roof, just enough in which to keep dry until the school bus arrives; a basic frame of weathered four by twos and a few sheets of corrugated iron banged on with left-over lead-heads. But the bus has gone, the kids have disappeared, and the shelter contains nothing but sunlight and shadows, the warmth of Spring and a few infinitely patient spiders at the mouths of their retreats. Nail a sheet of corrugated iron to a wooden frame and you create 27 homes [4].

The car bounces over the last 50 metres of sandy track to the carpark. I assume this is it; it’s just a flattish area in the dunes, near a line of low, salt-stunted macrocarpas. Empty of cars, empty of people. The place has that out-of-time feel, as if it’s been abandoned by the twenty-first century, left to the birds and the wind. I walk slowly, aware how each footprint adds to the line, and sit on a driftwood log in the sun and the cold breeze. A spur winged plover [5] calls at me until it sees I’m sitting still, then it resumes its inspection of the shallow water along the edge of the stream. On the far side, pied stilts [6] step and yelp and probe the water.

The whitebaiters padlock the door and drive off, and a blowfly, trapped inside, walks up and down the windowsill; a cloud passes overhead and the iron roof cools and contracts, banging and cracking. Inside, the clock's tick stops; the fly pauses, then falls to the floor, and the room fills with the sound of surf at the river's mouth and wind around the walls.

---

Notes:
1. New Zealand whitebait are juvenile forms of our native galaxiid fishes. They're mostly diadromous and definitely delicious, with inanga (Galaxias maculatus; considered catadromous because the adults migrate to estuaries to spawn) reputedly being the best of the several main species of whitebait. In Wellington last week, 100 gram punnets of whitebait were selling for NZ$15; bad luck if you're short of money—or if you're a whitebait.
2. The work is by Jeff Thomson (do check out the link; it's an excellent essay with great examples of his work). He's well known for his corrugated iron sculptures, particularly the animals.
3. Porphyrio porphyrio. The English vernacular is “swamphen”, but no one I know calls them that in New Zealand. They're always pukeko. Or “pookackas”, sometimes abbreviated to “pooks”. A few farmers—those whose crops have been damaged or water troughs fouled—have other names for them.
4. Three rows of nine tunnels. Now, corrugated iron is rolled in all sorts of lengths and contours, but my calculation's roughly true for the old style sheets. Its propensity for harbouring little creatures is something else people hate about it. Understandable when you're sitting on the long drop at night, surrounded by the gleam of spiders' eyes, the long legs of Cambridgea reaching out from between the iron and wood.
5. Vanellus miles novaehollandiae. Rare only a few decades ago, these weird and rowdy birds have spread throughout New Zealand and are now among the most common farmland birds. Because they prefer large areas of open pasture, they're found at most airports; consequently, they're the most common cause of bird strikes in New Zealand.
6. Poaka; Himantopus himantopus.

Photos (click on those above if you want a larger image):
1. Shed and creeper; Shannon.
2. Pukeko at Lindale; Horowhenua.
3. Spur winged plover at Kuku beach; Horowhenua.
4. Jeff Thomson's Holden; Te Papa, Wellington.

Photos and words © 2006 Pete McGregor

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.

---

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

Vagrancy

A shower of rain, heavy on the roof at night. A friend sends a txt: the sound of rain, her bed a tent, her vehicle a bike, her house a backpack. I reply saying rain here too, but there's too much stuff here, and tell her about the herons nesting in the poplars by the bridge [1].

The Gang of Three visited this morning. We sat on the verandah and I read another book to them, but Emma, being only four, got distracted and kept checking the paddock for more pieces of wood for their fireplace. “That one's no good!” she said, “It's got dirt on it!” My reading meant nothing to Aaron, of course—he's less than a year old and only just discovering words. Carly, however, sat next to me listening, attentive, politely not interrupting. Holding onto Cookie. She tells me he likes going for walks because he gets bored lying in her room all day doing nothing until she's home from school. Eventually Olive and Aaron went to feed the deer and lambs, and the girls and I followed shortly after, to find Aaron sitting on the ground by the gate, in the mud, with two lambs checking him out while Olive threw stale buns or something to the deer in the next paddock. We rescued him as Olive returned, half muttering and half laughing about kids and mud and saying that’s what washing machines are for. Back on the verandah we sat on the steps, chatting while the kids ran up and down the verandah yelling and having fun. Aaron waddled over and managed to topple and slide head first onto the top step. Not serious, but I expected howls and tears. But Emma picked him up and put her arms around him—she’s hardly bigger than he is—and hugged him, tucked his head into her shoulder and held him tight. The tears never came—instead, he went straight back to stealing the pieces of wood she'd collected, and offering them to me. I remembered how Emma had become upset a few weeks ago and Carly had comforted her in the same way; arms around her. The wisdom of small children. I think of the puerile behaviour of our politicians and realise they don't deserve the compliment of being called “childish”.

I walked down the road, stopping to photograph tui [2] and korimako [3] and the herons standing tall and thin in the poplars by the bridge; walked on up No. 3 Line a little way, then returned, photographing the herons again and a kereru [4] in the cutting. Cold air but the brilliance of a clear day at the deep end of winter; some warmth. Birds; lambs growing day by day—already the wobbly fragility of the newborns has begun to disappear and they’re beginning to develop that slight robustness. I walked along the road and looked out over Te Awaoteatua Stream from the No. 3 Line road, looked up to the Ruahine, dense with leatherwood [5] and bright under dark cloud, and saw everything new, saw it all as if for the first time. The following evening I drove South to Point Howard. The light still had that old look to it—deep shadows, strong relief, the warm look where the sun caught the land seemingly at odds with the cold contained in gullies, under hedges, beneath trees, behind barns. Shower cloud darkened the sky and let the sunlight through in rays and beams. Prehistoric light. Along the coast between Paekakariki and Pukerua Bay the sun had almost set, the clouds orange and mauve and grey; the South Island silhouetted on the horizon. That feeling of the utter remorselessness of time. You look ahead to something, then it’s here, then it’s gone. It becomes the past; becomes history. Your history. Is that all we do—moment by moment, create our own histories? In a sense, maybe it is, whether we create it—in the sense of determining or influencing it—or not. But, seen like that, perhaps it’s the ultimate lesson in making the most of every moment: because we’ll never get another chance. What we do with these moments determines what they’ll be, forever.

My friend sends another text; words I recognise: “…geese in flight and dogs that bite…”[6]. I check the definition of “vagrant”[7], and read, “A wanderer who has no established residence or visible means of support.”

The wind picks up, and a shiver runs through the house.

---

Notes:
The names of some people may have been changed.
1. White faced herons; Ardea novaehollandiae novaehollandiae.
2. Prosthemadera novaeseelandiae.
3. Anthornis melanura.
4. New Zealand pigeon; Hemiphaga novaeseelandiae.
5. Olearia colensoi; tupare.
6. From James Taylor's, Carolina on my mind.
7. The definition is from WordWeb, the free edition. It may not be as comprehensive or authoritative as some other dictionaries, but for sheer functionality, it's peerless. Highly recommended.

Photos (click on the smaller photos if you want a larger image):
1. The kereru in the cutting.
2. Red billed gull (Larus novaehollandiae scopulinus; tarapunga) preening; Petone wharf, Wellington harbour.
3. The same gull, doing what gulls are wont to do.
4. Rock, mussels, waves. Eastern shore of Wellington harbour, near Burdan's Gate (ref. my 6 August post). I desaturated all the colours except the greens, and tweaked the contrast a little.

Time

A week of illness leaves me feeling weak. But it feels good to be able to breathe easily again, to feel my legs working well, to exercise. Gently, though—I’ve felt as if I'm coming right only in the last few days. I'm sure I haven't recovered fully, and I have no intention of being killed by viral myocarditis. How often do you hear someone say, “Just a bit of a cold,” or, “A good spin on the bike’ll blow the bugs out,” or something similar? Sometimes it's good not to let ill health get the better of you, but if that “bit of a bug” happens to have infected your myocardium, a good spin on the bike might kill you.

So I crawl up the hill in the lowest three gears, often at no more than walking pace. I don’t care. It feels good, I’m enjoying the afternoon, the sounds, the clean air, the warmth of the sun soaking into my back, the smells of freshly graded clay by the roadside, and … oh yes, silage, and those other bucolic smells . Better than exhaust fumes, though.

Besides, I have as much time as I like. Since I can’t go hard out, I might as well go easily and for longer.

…

At the top of No. 2 Line I look out over the Pohangina Valley. Deep shadows, green hills, the afternoon sky a perfect blue, fading as it approaches the horizon hundreds of kilometres away. So pure, all I can see are the imperfections of my own eyes, drifting and floating, half thought, half perceived, reminders of who and what I am. Up North, snow on the Ngamoko, Ruahine, and Whanahuia tops. Fresh, white, clean; from this distance the snowline appears distinct, almost as if it’s been stencilled onto the summits. It’ll be melting fast, but will still be slow going—deep in drifts, a crust that sometimes supports your weight, sometimes collapses. I’ve trudged and waded through snow like that many times. It's tiring and frustrating. I’d like to be doing it now.

The sight of that snow reminds me of the words of Ishak the minstrel:

“We are the pilgrims, master; we shall go
Always a little further: it may be
Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow…”[1]

How long would it take me to walk to those mountains? One day? Two? Of course, no one thinks of walking those distances if a road goes there. You drive; if you’re keen, fit, and concerned, you ride a bike. If, for some reason, you have to walk, you do so with your thumb out, with your most harmless demeanour on display. In that philosophy, the object of travelling is to arrive, to get there.

But Ishak said, “Always a little further…” suggesting the pilgrimage would never end. This is like Arawata Bill’s prospecting [2]: the gold he sought in the wildness of South Westland, he never found—or he lived with it, constantly. What would he have done if he had found the mother lode? What would Ishak have done if he had found, “…a prophet who can understand /Why men were born”?

Asked these questions, I suspect Bill and Ishak would have either given unconvincing answers or—more likely—would have looked away and excused themselves from further questioning on the grounds that the gold, or the prophet, still remained undiscovered [3].

Downhill’s fun but lacks the satisfaction of exercise. The only things working hard are my hands gripping the bars and my adrenals, pumping furiously as I hit a patch of loose gravel. I coast along a flat section and pedal slowly up a slight incline, taking time to look around before I have to concentrate on the next, winding downhill section. Time—to do what I’m doing. Much of the art of living, it seems to me, is to be able to focus on what’s happening; conversely, much unhappiness and dissatisfaction arises from the tendency to be engaged with something other than what we’re doing. Always something at the back of the mind; something we did or didn’t do; something we have to do when we finish what we’re not doing properly right now.

A pair of putangitangi [4] call in alarm from the dam as I speed past. The value of time, like that of money, lies not in how much you have but in how you spend it. The thought prompts me to wonder how much of the suffering in the world arises from two time-related insecurities: attachment to the past, and fear of the future. I think I'll keep working on a different aapproach: the past as something to be appreciated, and the future as possibilities to be anticipated.

---

Notes:
1. J.E. Flecker: Hassan: The Story of Hassan of Baghdad and How He Came to Make the Golden Journey to Samarkand. In fact, I first found the quote in the 1953–54 edition of The Canterbury Mountaineer, the same volume in which my father wrote an article on mountain photography. It's a strange feeling to read something written by your father, in a time before you were born.
2. Arawata Bill is less well known as William O'Leary, and better known as the subject of Denis Glover's 1953 poem, Arawata Bill.
3. I might be wrong about this, as the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography points out that "He ... made no significant gold finds during his lifetime, but, as he admitted to a friend, his prospecting only rationalised his love for the back country."
4. Paradise shelduck, Tadorna variegata.


Photos (click on them if you want a larger image):
1. Farm track, Pohangina Valley, August 2006.
2. I heard from a neighbour recently that this ruined shed on No. 3 Line used to be a schoolhouse. Now, I suppose, it teaches us other lessons.
3. Sometimes even a common weed, caught by morning sun on a roadside bank, has the power to captivate. No—not sometimes. Often.
4. And now for something completely different (again). Just a bit of fun with a zoom lens and software. The underlying image is autumn poplars in Te Awaoteatua Stream. I think it's worth a closer look at this; I found it disclosed more than initially met my eye.

Photos and words © 2006 Pete McGregor

Failure

I sit in the car at Burdan’s Gate[1], waiting for J to return home with the Christchurch crew. Dusk and the sound of the sea outside; the long swells sliding in smooth and dark, breaking and foaming only when they hit the shore. A sickle moon hangs in the sky among scattered scraps of cloud and the Kaikoura Ranges look like one of Hokusai’s prints; as I watch, the lights of an aeroplane cross the orange-tinted sky above those distant mountains. I’ve missed this place; only realised it fully when I drove here this afternoon from Wellington and stopped in at the Eastbourne village, looked up at M&I’s, at JK&A’s; walked out onto Rona wharf where bored gulls sat on the mooring posts and ignored me until I got to within a few metres. Of course, I’d left the big lens in the car. Not that I cared—photos weren’t a high priority, although I took a handful, inspired by the light; by the patterns of the white-painted flaking picket fence with its rust stains and rot; the sweep of a long strand of kelp undulating in the green water; the colours in the evening sky; the textures of wood weathered by the sea and polished by wind and salt.

The light’s almost gone now. Two people walk past, first in one direction then, shortly after, back towards Eastbourne. A ute crawls down the farm track and across the harbour, Wellington glitters, a constellation of sodium stars. A big swell rolls in.

A black, looming wall, racing towards me.

...

The following evening J and YH and I walk up the track behind the house. A strong wind beats at the manuka[2] and other mixed native scrub but the canopy’s high enough to shelter us from the wind and give sections of the track the impression of a kind of tunnel. The sound of wind roaring when you’re sheltered from it—a good feeling; one of those enormously comfortable sounds, like rain on a roof, or the sea lapping at the hull of the boat in some safe harbour as you drop off to sleep. I remember that sound from years ago, when we sheltered in the Bay of Islands on our diving trip to the Poor Knights Islands, so long ago now. Was it the day when, much to my amazement and the envy of the serious fishers, I’d caught the hapuku? Or the day we dived for scallops? I do remember it was the day we dived down to the Rainbow Warrior, still discernible then as the wreck of a ship, where we peered in through portholes and saw schools of fish sheltering in cabins that had once sheltered laughter and argument and passions to protect the world. I touched the seabed at 88 feet and returned to the surface with a head full of new memories and aching from the cold.

...

We drive to Burdan’s Gate; leave the cars there and walk along the coast in the wind, the Nor’wester whipping waves onto the shore, buffeting the gorse[3] and Melianthus and ngaio[4] and other scrubby plants; blackbacked gulls hanging in the wind, little shags peering at us from where they bob among the troughs and peaks of choppy water. On the shingle beach I pick up a cast up masking crab Notomithrax ursus, most of the weed gone from the hairy shell, like the vanished life, but on its left chelicera a white mark in the shape of a perfect ‘2’—so perfect I wonder whether it’s been put there by human intervention, the jetsam of a research project. Eventually I decide it’s coincidental, an accident of nature, but the possibility remains.

We struggle back in the wind, rugged up, enjoying the fresh air. Eyes watering from the wind, noses on the brink of running. Black oystercatchers and white goats; the shingle beach a mass of jumbled driftwood and old plastic bottles; a wrecked running shoe. On a stack just too far to reach without wading, I see a sodden jacket. I study it carefully with the binoculars, a vague insistent thought reminding me that not far from here a Chinese fisherman was swept overboard on that stormy night while I was looking after M&I’s house, and a handless, almost decapitated body was discovered recently on the beach at Owhiro Bay. The hands have not been found, nor the body of the fisherman. I walk closer to the stack, climb a nearby boulder and scan the saturated jacket, but it appears to be nothing but a lost item of clothing, something left behind, something returning to the elements—something containing nothing.

YJ and YH collect empty paua shells, as is the tendency of most boys in places like this. They’re still young, still struggling to understand how acquisition and ownership might be less important than appreciation. This a lesson that cannot be taught, only learned. Some people never learn it. The lust to possess—from where, and how, does it arise? So many of us never seem to realise that our dissatisfactions, our lack of contentment, our desires, cannot be satisfied by owning even more. I suspect it’s the converse: that those desires and discontent can usually be ameliorated best by owning less. Perhaps this is the buddhist concept of nonattachment? I can’t say—I’m not a buddhist—but why, when I hear the word “ownership”, does it evoke ideas of exclusion and encumbrance?

But perhaps I’m wrong; perhaps I’m the one who hasn’t learnt; perhaps I’m destined for failure. Perhaps I’m at risk of failing my lessons in capitalism.

---

Notes:
1. Burdan's Gate is the barrier, beyond Eastbourne, where vehicle access along the Coast road ends.
2. Leptospermum scoparium. It may have included kanuka, Kunzea ericoides, too.
3. Ulex europaeus.
4. Myoporum laetum.

Photos (click on them if you want a larger image):
1&3. Jacob's Ladders (a.k.a. "God beams") over Paekakariki. West coast of the lower North Island, North of Wellington. I stopped for these photos just beyond Pukerua Bay, while I was driving back to the valley last Monday morning.
2. Low tide at Waipapa Point, Southland. The weed is rimurapa, bull kelp, Durvillea spp. (antarctica or willana).
4. More Jacob's Ladders, this time over the Pohangina Valley, looking towards the Ngamoko Range from Takapari Road.
5. "And now for something completely different..." Steer (no bull...), Pohangina Valley, yesterday.

Photos and words © 2006 Pete McGregor