...Though I lived in suburban Christchurch, meadows, streams and
woods were the landscape of my childhood. The kowhai and cabbage trees in my
own garden were less substantial than the oaks and elms under which the
characters in my favourite books played out their adventures. I yearned to see
badgers and foxes as they did, to jump into the harbour from the deck of a
fishing smack, to spend a summer in an old stone Martello Tower.
But I was stuck in New Zealand at the bottom of the world,
where nothing interesting ever happened. I grew up thinking I was missing out
and, as soon as I could, I left. I went to England, where I lived in the
countryside and rode horses through the fields and along the narrow lanes
between high hedgerows, listening to robins singing in the hawthorn bushes.
Christmases were cold and sparkly, and at the cosy pub along the road nearly
everyone knew my name. The year was divided up by seasons and festivals, and I
was enchanted to be part of it all.
There was something, though, that was the opposite of
missing. I didn’t realise it until I took my English husband to explore the
country I had come from, and we arrived in Queenstown. Of course we were both
dazzled by the glamour of the lake and mountains; but it wasn’t until we
started walking the Greenstone Track and got hands-on with the bush that I
understood the value of emptiness. In England, wherever I went there were
people, busily making their mark on the landscape, as they have done since
prehistoric times.
In the Fiordland bush there was no-one, and nothing to show
of people at all apart from the path we were following. Everything else was
pristine: the fresh green ferns, the black-trunked beech trees, the snow-capped
peaks peeping through them. For three days we followed the trail, sleeping in
huts that had been helicoptered in, little oases of civilised comfort
surrounded by untouched wilderness. Each morning we shrugged on our packs and
set out into a day that felt truly new, every brow crested bringing a view that
was ours alone.
And even when, on the third day, we spotted horses being
ridden across the river flats, catching up with us from behind, the spell
wasn’t broken. They were stockmen on their way to the Glenorchy Races, making a
week-long cross-country trek to an event they looked forward to all year. It
seemed gloriously rugged to us, a direct link to the olden days, and we were
captivated.
So beguiled, in fact, that we went to the Races too, steaming
up to the top of the lake on the Earnslaw
with a good chunk of the Queenstown population. It was down-home entertainment
of the very best sort: grandstands set up on utes and flat-bed trucks with
sofas and tarp sunshades, the PTA sizzling sausages, kids and dogs everywhere,
and of course the horses, numbers spray-painted on their rumps running
forwards, and backwards too, dumping their riders or racing and bending with
fierce concentration. It was chaotic and casual, there was both fooling about
and intense rivalry, and everyone there was having fun.
It was a wonderful day, and as we chugged back again
afterwards it was like being part of a family. There was singing round the
piano while the sky turned saffron behind the mountains, and as we neared
Queenstown an old man stood at the bow and played the bagpipes. It was real, it
was ours and I missed it.
So I came back home again...
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