Life on the Farm

So I guess I'm a farmhand now.

I know I've got a track record for being a bit of a smartass at times, and you're probably wondering what kind of stupid joke this is leading into. It's not, I assure you – I'm pretty much a farmhand now.

My new WWOOFing locale is on a petting farm/cottage accommodations/llama tracking business on the Kaikoura Flats: the Kaikoura Farm Park. It's been owned by an English couple for the last 5 years – a struggling business, but for the traveller whose aim is to poke his nose into as many unique nooks of New Zealand as he can, it has the exact romanticized, magnetic pull I've been seeking. It would need to though, given what happens here in the course of a day.

At any given time, there are six people working on the farm: Kevin and Lynn, the husband and wife owners, and four WWOOFers. Right now, that's me, an English guy and gal, and a girl from Germany. 

We've got a little living building away from the main house: a common lounge with some books and a TV, and two bedrooms on either end. Welcome to life in rural New Zealand – the wardrobes are stocked with ragged shorts, shirts, and socks for mucking around in the fields, the showers are short to save hot water, anything that can get recycled does (Kaikoura is actually pretty well-known for its zero waste initiatives), and the kitchen and bathroom are in the house, so if you have to get up in the middle of the night, it's the outhouse for you.

The day starts at 7:30 – breakfast time for the WWOOFers, some tea, toast, and cereal. We're cleared out of the house by 8:00, and ready to go by 8:15 to feed the animals. Picture this: half a dozen main fields, and within those a bunch of clusters of smaller pens, essentially enveloping the living area. Spread out across those fields are the animals, some 160 of them: birds of every kind, rabbits, guinea pigs, llamas, alpacas, pigs (I'm not sure about one of them though – it might be an Orc from Mordor), a tame deer named Bambi, donkeys, ponies, and some goats. 

The animal park isn't a zoo: people come in to look at the animals and feed them (although I said this is a struggling business, so there aren't quite as many crowds as Disneyland), but it's not through a glass or even a cage. Instead, there's an open, traditional concept to the farm, so that all the critters have free range for the most part. When we go out in the morning, it's feeding time.

And the animals sure know it. They're waiting by the gate, and flock to you like dudes playing "Wagon Wheel" to Open Mic Night. Meanwhile, they make an awful, cacophonous din, just like . . . well, dudes playing "Wagon Wheel" at Open Mic Night. 

First off is the pigs because, by virtue of being pigs, they'll eat the other animals' feed if they're not looked after right away. You wouldn't be able to do this job with much of a hangover, and not only because of the early mornings – the pigs' food needs to be scooped from garbage containers full of leftover everything, collected from town: a smorgasbord of rotting vegetables, fish heads, and any other scraps that happen to get tossed in there. We've got a few saucepans to put a pile into a feeding pail and chuck it amongst the squealing pigs – the morning is just getting started, and you already need to shrug your shoulders, dig your hands in, and accept that you're going to get a bit dirty on a farm.

From there, the other animals need to be fed – a lot of crumbled bread and greens, and then water buckets all across the farm need to be topped up. The morning routine takes about an hour, which brings you to the main part of the morning.

So, there are 160 animals. And each of those 160 animals needs to poop. That's the only way to put it, no prettying up that I can do. We've got some scrapers and bags, and you take a field like you would if you were mowing the lawn: you walk up and down in strips, bending everywhere you see a pile and flicking some turds in your bag. And it's not like there are 160 neat little piles – animals aren't exactly particular, and won't even stop their wandering to lighten their load a bit. So, it's everywhere.

I can't say it's the most unglamourous job in the world – that's hyperbole, and I've got no time for doing that on this blog.

"Uh?"

But the most unglamourous job I've ever had? Ok, that comes closer to hitting the mark. And you know what? I love it – I'm not going to drop everything and be a farmer, so this two week stint is the closest I will ever get to gaining that perspective, to seeing what self-sufficiency is and how getting the bacon and chicken to your plate requires immersing yourself in a complete lifestyle, not just working 9-5 and forgetting about it. It takes two hours, sometimes more, to clear the poop, and I like that I get the chance to spend my mornings that way. That was part of the reason for running away in the first place, to do something that I would never have another opportunity to do and to soak it all in like a sponge. So far so good, even if that soaking can be a bit messy at times.

After the fields are relatively clean (you're not going to get it all, and even if you could, the animals don't waste much time filling in the gaps you nearly broke your back to create), it's back to the feeding room, to crumble bread, chop fruit, and generally sort out the feed for that afternoon and tomorrow morning. Only after the animals are taken care of is it lunchtime for people, and the end of the day for half of us. The two that are left stay in their farm clothes for project time – digging holes, painting, just anything that happens to need doing. This afternoon, it was slaughtering two chickens.

Wait, what?

So, you tie a string around the unfortunate sucker's head, so that his last moments are at least kind of comfortable. The other chicken is taken to another part of the field – the last thing I'd want to do before getting my head lopped off is to watch the same thing happen to my buddy. Even for chickens, ignorance is bliss. You pull that string taut with your foot, lay him down on the chopping block, have one person hold the body, and with one swoop of the ax . . .

That's when thing get real. You've heard of a chicken with his head cut off? It's a real thing – all the nerves in the body shoot to life when you make that severing blow, the wings fluttering and quivering with feathers flying everywhere. You need a tight grip, just to keep it in one place. After both chicken have paid a visit to the guillotine (their feet need to get hacked as well), the bodies are soaked in boiling water, so that the pores on the skin open up and the feathers are easier to pluck. After the skinning, it's the gutting, and then we're at the same place as when you go to Sobeys. Except, funnily enough, Kevin says the chicken in the supermarkets are generally better than this – the birds you buy have been born (and killed) to end up on your plate, and don't end up developing all the tough muscles that the birds on the farm do. Still, it's supper tonight, so I'll be the judge of that a little later on.

Things finish up around 4:00, after the afternoon feeding. We take our showers before the evening meal, to get as much of the farm gunk off as possible. I haven't felt fully clean in a few days, but I haven't felt uncomfortable in this setting, either. After supper, the evenings are ours, usually back to the WWOOFer cabin to play ukuleles and watch movies.

For two weeks of my life, I'm more than ok, getting this glimpse into down and dirty rural living. The company is good, the food from the fields is tasty, and after a hard day of honest work, you sleep well.

Saturday fell a bit out of routine, because it was the annual Kaikoura A&P Community Show (that's Agricultural and Pastoral, and it's essentially a big country fair), and the Farm Park had a tent along the race track outside of town. So, it was an early, 6:00 morning – after the feeding, it was time to herd some llamas, an alpaca, sheep, ponies, and go chasing after a pig that sounded like it was being slaughtered. Once they were on leads or in crates, they were lugged to a horse trailer, and taken down to the grounds. Over the next few hours, I watched a Grand Parade featuring tractors, saw a wood-chopping contest where a guy cut pieces into an upright log and used the cuts to wedge a board that he then used as a standing platform to cut another piece in the log, sold animal feed to children, and judged a kids' sheep contest. If I'd ended up having a square dance with a country belle, it wouldn't have surprised me that much.

After we'd unpacked the animals from the show, Kevin and Lynn took us to the Adelphi in Kaikoura, for some pizza (chicken with drizzles of aioli – mmmm) and pints as a thank-you. Seems a bit unnecessary – I'm pretty thankful for getting to spend my days in this little microcosm, not only physically separated from the rest of the world but also seeming to belong to its own little time, years behind the rushing pace of 2013 society.

But that's how it goes – we farmhands just take it as it comes.

Cheers,

rb

Surf 'n Sky, Pt. II

I had a bittersweet realization today. The average life expectancy for a guy in Canada is about 81 years. I'm 2 months shy of 24, but let's count the 2 years I lived in St. John's with Ian, Craig, and Ditto as 2.5 years apiece (and that's a conservative estimate – homebrew kits were cheap and we still spent a literal mint). Assuming the robots don't take over in the meantime, I've statistically got some 54 years left (you know what, I didn't expect that number to look so small – I take back tacking on those years, and if I start jogging again today, let's call it 60 years).

Anyway. In all that time, I will never, ever, look this cool again.

So I went surfing today, at Okiwi Bay, north of Kaikoura. I don't know whose life this is that I've unwittingly stumbled into, but it's a pretty fun one.

The instructor from BoardSilly, who uses words like “radical,” “killer,” and “sweet as” without a hint of irony, picked myself and a family of four up at the i-SITE, the official tourist information spot that pops up in just about every town in New Zealand (there are over 80 nationwide). The spot we were headed was a semi-sheltered, sandy little bay about half an hour north of Kaikoura, just off the highway. Squirming into a wetsuit that clings to your skin and feels like one of the most unnatural things you can do, we unloaded half a dozen nine foot soft top boards and hit the beach.

So, here's how it goes: you start a little ways off shore, flat down on the board, face forward. There are constantly waves breaking, but you need to wait for the right one to start paddling your arms back toward the shore (read: the instructor who's holding your board in place tells you when to go). Then, when you've hooked into the frothy leading edge, you bring your palms down near your waist and hoist yourself to your feet (popping up), slowly rising and riding the wave. Ideally, anyway.

We practised the movement a bit on the beach, and it seemed easy enough. But, when you're out in the Pacific, waves constantly bombarding your body (not since I was two years old on the Piccadilly Sands did I drink that much saltwater), it's another story. For me, a total newbie, there are a lot of things to simultaneously remember: hands in the right place, face forward, rising at the right moment, feet perpendicular to the board. It was easy on the beach, but out amongst the waves, that moment of standing on a plastic board floating on the water felt even more unnatural than tugging a wetsuit up your body. People aren't supposed to stand on water, it's weird and disorienting.

Not surprising, I took my share of nosedives, drinking more of that Pacific water. The board was attached to our feet by a cord, otherwise mine might have ended up in Christchurch before the afternoon was out. I, who had looked so cool on the little bluff by the beach, was looking like quite the goof on the water, especially since this family from Hamilton, Ontario were just out for a day surfing, not learning it from scratch. We went out in deeper water, which had the added challenge of having to get back out there after each attempt. After an hour, I was good and exhausted.

But then, as we just about finished up, something clicked. That motion wasn't so hard after all, and I'm pretty much awesome now. Ok, not really – but I did manage to get onto my feet and stay there to ride some waves – plural!

I will definitely never, ever look cooler than that. And I've come to terms with that.

This morning, my alarm went off at 6:25, just as the sky was stained red. I thought about going back to sleep, but ended up slipping into my flip-flops and stumbling up the trail to the field overlooked the town and the ocean. Perched on top of a pile of rocks, I watched the sun rise over Kaikoura, seeing the quiet, sleepy world burst to life again and wondering what was in store for the day.

First off was a return to bed, where I thought about reading for all of five minutes until I was snugly slumbering again. I'm never going to finish Wuthering Heights at this rate.

When I did get up for real, there was a steady bank of cloud moving in from the ocean. Which sucked, because I was planning on hiking to the summit of Mt. Fyffe, a 1602 m climb at the foremost edge of the Seaward Kaikouras. I checked the forecast (sunny with some clouds) and decided that the summer heat would easily burn through the fluffy ceiling by mid-afternoon – so, I packed some water, dehydrated apple chunks, and set off on the bike.

I assumed, since Dave's farm is at the foot of the mountain, that the hike would start around here. An hour later, I was still pedaling down a dirt road, wondering where in the hell this tramp started. I couldn't even look up into the heights, the clouds had moved in that much. There was another time that I started a hike where I couldn't see the top – that one ended up alright, but just barely. I was really hoping that sun would persevere, and soon.

 

 Pictured: Idiots

When I made it to the car park and stashed the bike in the trees, I started down a gravel path that soon ended up not being a path and just a river bed. Turns out I made the only wrong turn I could have, getting 20 minutes into the 2-3 day Kowhai-Hapuku circuit before I thought, “This ain't right.” I backtracked and started the real Mt. Fyffe trail by noon.

The ascent was much steeper than I had anticipated, and as I started to climb, the fog started rolling in. At little open nooks that looked out to the town (or, at least where the town should have been), you could see the wispy tendrils sneaking in. Soon, I was just in the thick of it, sweating because of the climb and cooled by the fog.

And then, all at once, the sun reappeared in a blue sky. Not because the clouds had disappeared – I had just gotten up above them. 

Maybe it would have been a spectacular view, to see the town and the ocean all along a climbing panorama. But looking out and seeing a blanket of cloud, interrupted every so often by a jagged mountain peak? That's not something a guy from a small town in Newfoundland sees every day. And once you turned your back to Kaikoura, you saw rows and rows of mountain peaks, going on into the distance.

For mountains is what they were. Two things I did not know when I started my morning climb are that mountains are, by definition, 1000 m or higher, and that Gros Morne Mountain, my go-to longish hike, is 806 m high. As the world started opening up before my eyes, I rose up over 2 Gros Mornes stacked on top of each other, up in the 100% pure mountains.

When I reached the Mt. Fyffe DOC hut, I figured I was nearly done. Not so fast – the summit was still an hour and a half away, and it's up, up, up the whole way. Let's do this.

I happened to run into Chris and Rani, a couple from British Columbia, around here – although, wouldn't you know it, Chris is originally from Halifax. On the one hand, being in the thick of these mountains makes you appreciate the scope of the world; in another instance, you very quickly appreciate how small it can be. “You're from western Newfoundland? Nice, out by Corner Brook?”

When they're not climbing mountains, this couple is travelling throughout the Pacific on a sailboat, coming from Mexico to check off a bunch of Polynesian islands. What a cool adventure – they're keeping a blog too, which you can check out here.

Having only seen two other people all day, it was nice to have some travelling mates for the last leg of the trip. The dirt road wound about itself a bunch of times, before coming out into the open air. And what a friggin' sight: clouds, clouds, everywhere on one side, and then a massive gorge with tiers of mountain peaks as the background. Every side-path was a lookout. Every corner presented something new, until you stood on the summit and looked out over a wild, untamed, real world.

 

The sublime was one of the cornerstones of Romanticism, right?

By 5:30, it was time to make our way back to the car park, far below our feet (and still hidden by clouds). It's a winding gravel path, and you need to watch yourself – still, it's a whole lot quicker on the return journey. My feet were good and sore by the time I pulled my bike out of the thicket, meeting Dave halfway along the Postman's Road, where the scene was grey and dismal – hard to believe the world that was up there, just above the clouds.

After all that popping up on a surfboard and scrambling up the rocky pathways of a mountain, I daresay I'll be out as soon as I hit the pillow tonight. Which is for the best, since I've got another early morning tomorrow – I pull out of the cabin just past 8:00, and start working at Kaikoura Farm Park, where they have some 160 animals, including llamas, alpacas, pigs, ponies, and sheep. Hold on tight, because this ride is just getting started.

Cheers,

rb

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