Message in a Bottle

I saw a crisp yellow leaf fall on the trail today.

It kind of completely took me off guard. I know how the turning of the seasons work, but at the same time, I think I had this naive idea of New Zealand being a southern land of summer sunshine and lollipops. And for mid-February, it is – but it's not a perpetual summer, and I don't know if that ever really occurred to me. My path is pointed due south, which has the opposite effect as it does in the Northern Hemisphere – digging through my backpack, there's not too much space set aside for April, when the nights will get cooler and, yes, that white stuff will start falling.

“Hey! All the movies were filmed here, moron!”

But that's putting a lot of emphasis on one leaf. I can still comfortably wear shorts and t-shirts, so back to my ignorant bliss I go.

I spent the morning around the house, going in a circuit from the fruit trees to the kitchen. I haven't punched a clock at a commercial orchard (yet?), but I did it – I was busily occupied with picking apples, plums, and nectarines, coring and dicing them to be dehydrated or juiced. I can talk about “that time” I ran away to New Zealand and picked fruit, and not be entirely lying. It's messy work, but you can stop whenever you want and munch on something that was on a tree a few minutes ago. And the juice, a mix of apples and plums and none of the water, sugar, or additive crap that comes in a carton, tasted unmistakably real, a splash of fruit in a glass with little specks of pulp to pick out of your teeth.

 Drying plums: before and after

The sun burnt through the overcast morning by the afternoon, so I took Dave's bike down from Mt. Fyffe to the Kaikoura town area, surprisingly close to 10 km down a long, straight gravel road. Either because my ride through the up-and-down Marlborough Sounds last week warmed me up, or because this bike was decades newer than the one at the Blue Moon Lodge (possibly a mix of both), the ride through town was much more seamless and enjoyable, going from the large farm areas along the Kaikoura Flat to the busy town centre along the ocean.

I had to do some tricky maneuvering when I got to the main drag, a melting pot of bars, backpackers, and surfer-hipster hangouts – I saw one biker ride on the sidewalk, another with traffic on the side of the road, so the section of my ride before I hit the designated bike lane was an awkward straddling where my sole aim was to avoid getting superkilled.

  “Superkilled” is now an accepted word on my Spellchecker. I'm an adult.

The busy part of Kaikoura isn't very big, and soon the road was just this open course along the speckled ocean at the feet of the mountains. A decent escape route.

It was a beautiful day, so I just kept driving, up the Esplanade and Fyffe Quay along the Kaikoura Peninsula, a jutting tooth of land that branches from the highway. As I reached the most seaward point, a footpath ascended towards Ward Street, part of a little subdivision on the heights, overlooking the rest of the town. This is where the folks with money go, so I wheeled my bike up through a farmer's paddock and peddled through the area. It was here that I found the Kaikoura Lookout, where just about every awesome picture of the town was inevitably taken. Not surprising – you can see everything from up here, miles down the pristine coast in either direction.

Coasting back down to the township, I stopped every so often to take a picture, and was struck by a thought. Ok, I had a nearly identical epiphany from Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh, and John Mayer wrote a song about it when he was younger than me, so it can't be that groundbreaking, but it's worth bringing up again. Pictures couldn't do this scene justice, and that's a blessing and a curse. It's too bad, because for those who are reading about it on the other side of the world, I'm starting to sound like that guy who tells the jokes that end, “ah well, you woulda had to have been there.” But it's good too, precisely because you had to have been there. No matter how hard you try, you can't bottle up a moment, a feeling, or an experience. All you can do is commit yourself to being totally, completely there at that one little juncture of time, because the world is in a constant flux, and so too are we all – if you lived a hundred lifetimes, you'd never be able to duplicate that afternoon bike ride through Kaikoura and get everything right. 

 

But I was there. I saw it with my own two eyes. How cool is that?

It's worth it, just stopping and reminding yourself of that from time to time, and actually feeling the wind on your skin and seeing the world that's around you. That's why I'm glad that I can't get the same effect by following my route on Google Earth – I had to come all the way to New Zealand to live it, and that makes it pretty damn special.

Before supper, I took the lawnmower up the hill and did a little stretch of grass. An early evening haze set in on the valley, enveloping the farmlands and the town in an otherworldly glow. By 9:00, as I was finishing up, the sun was setting behind the hills, while a half moon rose not far away. I don't know if it's because I'm eating better here, or if it's the area itself that is cleansing and liberating my soul, but as I gazed out across the fields to the rim of the Pacific horizon, I felt more together and healthy than I have in a long time. 

 

A few hours later, just past 11:00, I headed back to the field on the hillside with a lantern. The view from my little cabin window shows an impressive chunk of night sky, but I figured the openness of the mountain air, away from the treetops, would bring every little orb into sharp focus. Up a lonely, shadowy woods path, climbing onto the dewy grass incline, switching off my light, letting my eyes focus and adjust, and then . . .

Woah.

Spend the better part of an hour lying on the grass, peering into the celestial depths and not caring how damp your clothes get or that you only know a few names of the stars you're actually looking at. If ever you need reassurance, not so much in the idea of a God but at least in the existence of a human essence that's capable of being humbled and inspired by the universe, that will do it.

I can't bottle that experience up for you. For all you know, I went right back to bed after our meal, and just made that whole thing up. But maybe, just maybe, if you believe that I lay down in a field in New Zealand until midnight, focusing on nothing other than the stillness of the world and being alive right here, right now, then maybe something of that fleeting moment will find you.

Don't ever underestimate the significance of a moment. Nothing else would matter without them.

Cheers,

rb