New Zealand

Landscape plays a slow tune.

At first distant, a gathering of cloud beyond the horizon. Or, spring sunshine on frost. It’s a gradual softening and loosening of things. It builds, there’s a reordering and at some point it throws flames, sudden, great flames that leap and cast shadows and throw warm arms up to the cracked walls and smashed glass windows. And there’s a heat, and it melts the creaking doors from their frames and dawn shines on flame and it doesn’t relent and nothing asks why.  

It took an entire week in New Zealand, this tune. No conscious hand can hurry it along yet I seemed destined to try. Wild-eyed and crazy for a connection I pulled my thoughts this way then that, through days and lakes and books. If I could just be startled, or sad, some sort of shock perhaps? Anything that would open those doors to the sunlight. This awful dance started early, on the slow descent over the beautifully named “Remarkables” mountain range near to Queenstown. They were enormous, clouds were boiling in valleys and what wasn’t black rock was brilliant white snow. I conjured up some tears and swept some make-do emotions into a nice neat pile, you know the way, like wondering at a baby’s hands or how on earth did they build the pyramids? We turned down a river valley, the water was turquoise and the stone was that alp-grey colour; as the engines whirred through their landing notes I grappled around faster and faster for connections, some way, any way, to bring the landscape to me. All this, even before I’d breathed the air.

It was through this hazed panic for joy that I approached the first days. There are plenty of ways in which not to connect with the environment in New Zealand and I drifted about these corridors quite regularly, what’s worse is I’d taken to using a camera. So on more than one occasion I’d pull over into a little carpark and take a photo, get back in the van and drive on, that anxious, hollow desire to record and catalogue, a reducing of the actual world to your own dreary collection of lurched-for images, holding onto moments that never extended beyond the act of capturing them anyway. It’s a regret that I never quite shook this off, this awful enslavement to images, following my camera around like some faithful dog.

I was living as some glitching computer programme or machine, flitting about between places and times, through sleepless nights and knotted dreams, over and over that same dry, wheel-rutted terrain of conscious grief. But then the brilliant flames? The doors melting away all of a sudden? Well of course, I exaggerate. I can chose to remember and repackage this holiday however I wish, whatever seems most appealing in retrospect. The truth is there were moments of peace and clarity throughout the holiday, it didn’t all burst at once, and I’ll come onto those. But there was this one experience at the end, something of an epiphany - or at the very least some sense of becoming okay - that I want to indulge, embellish here and there, take liberties with and simplify. All with the intention of presenting the holiday as I’ve held it since, as some beautiful coming together of threads.

It was on the shores of Lake Hawea at a little Department of Conservation campground. I arrived late, but in time to have a swim and cook dinner before spending a few hours on the beach with the setting sun. The swim had been calm, I remember standing up waste deep and letting the water drop from me before diving under again head first, I kept doing it and a London Grammar song lyric drifted around my head, maybe I’m wasting my young years. A smile rose, I wasn’t. At some point, after the sun dropped behind the mountains but long before darkness, I laid down, it was warmer down here and I felt assured, my thoughts had slowed to the pace of the idle breeze and flames lapped away inside me unhindered. I began to fall asleep and each time I opened my eyes, the huge cloud that cut across the sky had darkened a little more. Eventually stars switched on and the tent zips and camper van doors became the only sounds, even the lake became silent, nothing, no rustling at the pebbles, no sloshing, absolute calmness under the long dusk. I’d spent the week in crystal clear waters, walking endless beech forests, long sweeping ridges above Fjords and sailing on the world famous Milford Sound. These environments had their slow effect and there is no way that arriving here on the first night, I would have drifted into a peaceful sleep under the stars like this. Slowly the mania had lifted, and as it fluttered off across that silver lake I realised it was the first time since Ali died that I had felt peaceful, or indeed anything approaching it. And so New Zealand holds a special place in my heart, the giver of peace and as odd as it feels to say, something of a redelivery of Ali, now in a form with which I don’t need to wrestle, or spin around, or scurry away from. Now a peaceful, permanent, loving companion lying comfortably alongside me as the stars of the southern hemisphere knit those great unfamiliar shapes across the night.

In reality - and I should record the truth - during this epiphany I had two trips back to the van, one for a jumper and one for some insect repellent. I couldn’t get my back comfy after a while, the stones cooled down rather fast and thoughts of airports kept intruding like heavy boots, but at some point during that time all those wonderful things did happen to me, the calmness, the Ali-by-my-side, the big dark cloud like a tear across the sky.  

To all those other experiences then, the threads, the actual holiday I sat down to write about today. I should start with the Milford Sound (actually a Fjord, not a sound). Foremost, it had the most arresting effect on me, I find myself telling people it changed the way I see the world, and although that seems a little grandiose, it does persist as a feeling. The actual experience wasn’t all that visceral, I was milling about on a boat with others taking photos and listening to the too-loud tannoy guide, but the scenery has stayed lodged in me. The slow progress of the boat through the deep, blue-green water made the mountains seem infinitely big. Mitre peak, which stands straight up like the Langdales do above Old Dudgeon Ghyll stretches up 1692m and you see all of that, foot to summit from the water. Tides and crabs slip up and down its base, trees cling so far up and then it’s just brilliant silver rock chiselled into some kind of lightning strike, the perfect jagged triangle. Gable from Wastwater. There were seals and a solitary dolphin, there were huge forested valleys sloping off around corners, under impossible cliffs and ever-changing low clouds. Sometimes a wind whipped down the fjord off the Tasman Sea, I held a coffee and leant against the railings at the front whilst sea birds came close then far, giving some scale back to the cliffs, small planes did the same, or perhaps they were big? After the cruise I swam awkwardly at the head of the fjord, clambering over seaweed rocks out into a sea that refused to get deep. Once afloat though, I could stare up at Mitre peak and across at the 150m waterfall cascading from a glacier high above in the frozen valleys. There was an Oystercatcher and a few Brent Geese enjoying the late afternoon sun, and on my way out I let saltwater dry across my back as I crouched over a rock-pool bustling with tiny life. Everything beautiful.   

Later in the week I climbed Mount Luxmore and Ben Lomond, both of which provided unnervingly vast views. I felt compelled to pull the mountains closer in, huddle them around me. The lakes stretched away forever like seas and the mountain ranges were enormous piles of snow-capped monsters. These hills with their muscular, freshly formed shapes were, at times, an aggression upon the senses. I couldn’t stand the thrust. I longed for those old sages of Lakeland and thought wistfully of Skiddaw who’s youth was not unlike this. Its adolescence was full of drama, bursting up from a fault line into a mountain of Himalayan proportions, before the long drift north, the slow weathering into that beautiful stump sitting now, ever watchful over Keswick.

Weather? Clean air, winds. From the south, air uninterrupted since Antarctica would bring cold mornings to the campsites, chins in zipped fleeces over barbecues, dew on tents and puddles in ruts. Then warm tropical air would blow from the north and cicadas would wake up, the grass would crunch underfoot and everything seemed to be suddenly hot, like Spain or something. Often the sky would wake-up and cloud the heat away, wind would whip shapes across the water, rain would fall and then stop, leaving sunshine on steaming roads. Long days tumbled by and that beautiful dance between cloud, water and mountain never stopped all week. It was free, ever-changing weather, fast and troubled like a mind.

I genuinely didn’t think a place as beautiful as Britain could exist elsewhere, that a climate so spectacular and engrossing was just pottering along like ours, equally over-looked and undervalued at the opposite end of the globe. I can feel my hand on the warm pebbles at Lake Hawea, I can feel that mineral-like fine dust they left on my palms, I can hear the tents and camper vans, I can close my eyes and see the dark hills across the lake standing tall and black against the last embers of the day. Everything is a re-imagining, a sense of shapes in the chaos and New Zealand will remain just that to me, a forming of fantastic shapes that I’d long-forgotten existed.