by Bruce Ansley
Something did block it, thoroughly. On 14 November 2016, an intricate network of faults ruptured around Kaikoura. The huge earthquake lifted parts of the seabed clear from the water and brought down hillsides in a rain of rocks. Squeezed between mountains and sea, SH One was buckled and buried. The critical link between Christchurch and the north, even the lifeline between the South and North islands, was broken.
SH One was transformed from a sedate trip, if a spectacular one, into a wild journey. Or several wild journeys. The road split into two. Then two and a half. Then maybe three and a half or even four, according to which vision for the future was in vogue. It frayed in its middle, unravelled.
It became so complicated trip computers couldn’t cope. The closest they could get to a decent guess was that you’d get there sometime, somehow.
I’d never thought of SH One as a wild journey, except as a kid on Sunday afternoons when the world shrivelled to a back seat and time stood still.
The main road north of Christchurch was the Main North Road. Everyone who lived in Christchurch knew it well. Their Sunday mornings were spent driving north to the Pegasus Bay beaches, Brooklands, Kairaki, Woodend, Waikuku, sometimes further, where the names rolled on your tongue, Amberley, Cheviot, Parnassus, and on exceptional, wonderful days, all the way to Goose Bay and, oh joy, Kaikoura.
Why not? Petrol was cheap and the roads wide and empty, except on Sunday afternoons when everyone drove home at once. Then from Saltwater Creek all the way to the city, they queued. Traffic stopped, then started again, but never at much more than a walking pace. Dogs panted. Radiators boiled. Cars died on the roadside. Kids grizzled. Fathers did that strange one-handed scything thing over the back of the front seat. Kids ducked.
Through Woodend the cars crept, then Kaiapoi, inching (for these were pre-metric days) over the Waimakariri, past all the fruit and veg stalls of Marshlands and finally, exhaustedly, home, where we’d fight over who had to unload the car.
The Main North Road became State Highway One. They — those faceless people who did these things — put a new bridge over the Waimak. They built a four-lane motorway (four lanes!) from Belfast on the city outskirts to Kaiapoi. There it ended, and still does, although there are plans to extend it around Kaiapoi to Pegasus, which is a new town-in-progress to the north getting a fillip from Christchurch popping outwards after its earthquakes.
State Highway One was a joyous business then, and I always felt like Toad in The Wind in the Willows: ‘Here to-day, up and off to somewhere else to-morrow! The whole world before you, and a horizon that’s always changing!’
After the Christchurch earthquakes State Highway One became the fairway, the shining path. Hitting the road was a huge relief after queuing for petrol. Escape!
When earthquakes slammed Kaikoura too, everyone had had quite enough of them. We were thoroughly experienced in fault lines, and magnitudes, and seismologists and their arcane language of fault geometry and seismic moment. We were far too familiar with the EQC and the insurance companies. Many of a lifetime’s treasures lay broken on floors and we were scared to bits too.
But it wasn’t the fear, or the damage, or the bureaucracy, which mattered most. It was the loss, of community, city, history, those places our parents had loved and their parents too. That’s why the Kaikoura earthquake hurt so badly. It wasn’t fair. We didn’t live there, but we’d grown up with the town. It had always been part of our lives. We loved it, and what then seemed the endless journey to reach it.
The highway had forked at Waipara. You took the left fork if you wanted to sit in the hot pools at Hanmer, or drive over the Lewis Pass to sit in more hot pools at Maruia Springs, or turn left at Springs Junction for the West Coast, or go straight ahead over the Shenandoah to Nelson.
If you were heading for Kaikoura you went straight-as-a-die past Waipara and through the long gentle valleys below the ranges which blotted out the sea. You went through Cheviot, that neat little North Canterbury town where only the shopkeepers changed.
Much of the South Island’s early European history, the vast sheep stations literally given to the wealthy and adventurous, was summed up here by William Robinson. He owned a huge sheep run that ran over the hills and far away and even had its own harbour, Port Robinson, where ships loaded his wool. He was known as Ready-Money Robinson. One story said he carried the money to pay for his land in a wheelbarrow; another insisted that after his cheque had been declined by land officials, he cashed it at a bank, demanded small change and notes, put everything in a sack, returned to the land office and dumped it on the counter.
One way or the other, he built a vast mansion just outside the town, and bought another in Christchurch. A model of his country seat has pride of place in the Cheviot Museum. It was a huge affair of 1418 square metres, built around a central courtyard, surrounded by a park ranging over the rolling hills. When Robinson died in September 1889 his estate ran over more than 37,000 hectares of prime North Canterbury country.
The mansion went up in flames in 1936, and was so thoroughly burned only its chimneys remained. His first Christchurch house was fated, too. In 1871 his butler, a man called Cedeno, stabbed a housemaid to death and tried to kill another. At his trial he said he’d wanted to kill Robinson as well. Cedeno became the second (of seven) to be hanged at Lyttelton Gaol.
Now you could trace the mansion’s foundations in the green grass of the Cheviot Hills Domain, where the cricket pavilion stood on what had been its front steps. Not far away the old manager’s house, a rather grand place too, was kept in good shape. The remains of Port Robinson slowly disappeared into the sea.
The Cheviot Museum speaks of the moa-hunters who once ranged along the coast, troves of adzes, huge ovens, piles of moa bones. Near the coast lies a great slab of sandstone whose hollowed centre sheltered moa-hunters, its edge serrated with slits where ancient adzes were sharpened.
A little north of Cheviot a road branched off inland and made its way over a low range of hills to Waiau, an isolated country town soon to become its own headline.
Once, SH One traffic was carried over the Waiau River into Parnassus by a one-way wooden bridge. Much later I discovered the name, Parnassus, was the whim of another runholder, this time a man who fancied himself as a classical scholar and imagined a likeness between a nearby hill and Mount Parnassus in Greece. Instead of the god Apollo and the Muses, however, Parnassus was home to the classical country-town triumvirate: garage, store and tearoom. But in 1980 road-builders replaced the wooden bridge with a curvy concrete one which carried the highway past poor Parnassus in a flash. Now a few buildings huddled on the old road. Ahead lay the Conway River and the Hundalees.
The Hundalees were as much a part of the South Island highways legend as the Otira, or the Lindis, or the Takaka Hill, roads feared by drivers in the old days of single carburettors and three-speed column shifts. You could get stuck on the Otira, snow-bound on the Lindis, or boiled dry on the Takaka Hill. Back-seat passengers were merely in a lather as they climbed over the Hundalees, four long, slow summits, one, two, three, and an eternity later four, and as you reached that final summit and looked down, oh my.
The Kaikoura coast sparkled below. It always shone, no matter what the weather. The sea changed from aqua near the rocks to indigo in the Kaikoura Canyon where the great whales feasted.
As you drove down that hill, yellow kowhai lay like sunshine on the land and the world seemed so happy that nothing bad could ever happen again. The road rocked back and forth and around until with a sigh it levelled and you were at Oaro. Contented baches gazed at the sea, where a perfectly white rock rose from the blue. How many generations, centuries of birds had painted that rock? High on the bushy headlands falling sheer to the sea lay the earthworks of the mighty Omihi pa where Ngai Tahu once guarded their territory, an eyrie whose defenders could see far up and down the coast.
They took refuge there from the invading Ngati Toa chief Te Rauparaha but not even Omihi could save them. The Ngai Tahu were sheltering the
chief Kekerengu, unwisely. Kekerengu had been having an affair with a wife of Te Rangihaeata, Te Rauparaha’s nephew and right-hand man. Te Rangihaeata was not someone to cuckold. He and the Ngati Toa took the pa and killed almost everyone inside it before rampaging south. Kekerengu got away.
The road threaded along this coast, around the bays, clinging to the buttresses, through road tunnels where as children we’d clamour for our father to honk the horn, as I did for my own children and forever thereafter.
Every turn of the road held a memory. Over there was the high rock which you could climb and throw your fishing line through a hole like a window down into the sea below. Not far from the road was the hidden pool, as big as the learners’ pool at my school, where you could swim among purple and translucent-green seaweed and (once) watch the feelers of crayfish waving like wands from their crevices in the rocks. I swam there until, well, the catastrophe overtook all.
On one straight stretch a railway tunnel ran beside the road, with a concrete outer wall, vents like a castle’s arrow-slits.
Then came the Kahutara river mouth at the end of the cliffs, where surf crashed onto a black-sand beach piled high with driftwood and running along to the mouth of the Kowhai River. My father fished there, casting a long line into the surf and sitting hunched for hours, sometimes catching a moki and dancing on the wet stones. We camped in the blue borage near the river bridge, in a huge square tent with a green top and sides that lifted to make extra rooms. I struggled through the driftwood looking for the kauri logs I was going to make into a boat, like my hero Johnny Wray of South Sea Vagabonds.
Kauri forests did not grow in the South Island, but I didn’t know that then, and if someone had told me I would not have believed them, the South Island being not just my universe but the synthesis of every good thing in the entire world.
Not long ago I climbed Mount Fyffe, the beautiful little mountain beside Kaikoura, and saw far below a lake I’d never known despite a lifetime of poking around this place. It lay secret in a wobbly basin near the Kahutara. As I stood there in the snow on the peak a helicopter suddenly thumped up and landed and disgorged tourists. They’d done my day’s climb in a few minutes. My quiet sense of achievement and joyous aloneness vanished.
There it was. Tourists and whales. Their collusion had transformed Kaikoura. The tourists came to see the whales and the whales came to see what they could find in the canyons that lay so close offshore.
Yet not long ago Kaikoura was a little town where fishing boats clung to precarious moorings and the cinema showed old flicks on Saturday nights. I once stayed in the posh Adelphi Hotel with my father. I thought it very grand, with a big lounge and deep armchairs whose inhabitants could barely be seen, and the bathroom not far down the hall. On the way to the Point with its seals and great terraces of flat rock stood the Pier Hotel, whose public bar had the best view in all New Zealand, if not the entire world. From here I could stand, later, at a leaner with a glass of beer, look over the fishing boats moored in the deep blue bay to the snowy Kaikouras, and tell myself that Queenstown was for beginners.
Kaikoura was the main reason Christchurch thronged SH One then. It was as far north as anyone could wish to go. People pulled crayfish from the pools and dreamed of little baches in South Bay.
A little to the north lay Mangamaunu, where the great Australian bush poet Henry Lawson once taught Maori kids. It later became a mecca for surfers (who would have got along with Lawson very well). To the north, the flanks of the seaward Kaikouras hid a secret history of old farms and falling fences and buildings rotting back into the bush. But unless you were a tramper, you weren’t looking on that side of the road, you were looking at the sea, and the blue, and the white foam lapping the rocks, and the brown kelp swirling, and the seal flippers standing up like sails. And you stopped, and got out of the car, and stood wedged between the mountains and the sea, and you could taste the great ocean and feel the strength of the land.
What stood between you and lunchtime, however, was a series of little bays with caravans for baches and crayfish for sale. A crayfish and a smooth rock and the sea serenade made the perfect picnic. Under the sun, of course. It was always shining.
You reached Ohau Point, where the road was notched into the rock. Even a stranger knew this must be Ohau Point. The side of the road was crowded with cars and campervans and people leaned over the precipice looking at the seals below. The seals were languid stars. They rolled, and yawned, but mostly they slept. Their smell rose up in clouds.
A seal pup nursery lay just beyond. You ducked under the railway lines and walked up a short path through the bush. It ran beside a stream and ended at a pool fed by a waterfall dropping over a black cliff from far above. Seal pups frolicked in the spray. They slid through the water, under each other and over, curving into furry knots. They were magical, entrancing.
And beyond them, before the road rose up and over the hills and through the hot dry towns of Ward and Seddon and Blenheim, Kekerengu lay at the foot of its reef. I used to think Kekerengu was just a tearoom that served the best afghan biscuits ever baked. But the tearoom gave way to a wonderful place called The Store, full of sculpture and old beams and a big open fire for the winter and wide wooden steps where you could sit and watch the reef.
This was where the errant chief Kekerengu was said to have met his end.
Most people did not know of an old settlement running up the valley. You drove up a side road, passed a few houses and came across St George’s, a tiny jewel of a place. It is said to be the smallest church in New Zealand, and it would be hard to imagine one tinier: it is about the size of a bus, its tiny pews and absolute simplicity giving an instant peace. The little cemetery told of ancient disasters, shipwrecks, drownings. The Kekerengu community lay beyond, invisible, unknown to all but the curious.
All of this made State Highway One far more than a road. It was a gallery, pathway, arcade, experience, excursion, pilgrimage, odyssey. If you knew it, you understood New Zealand.
It changed in a flash, just after midnight on 14 November 2016. A huge earthquake hit this coast and, just as the previous Christchurch earthquakes had done, shifted lives forever. In a web of fault lines, one ruptured. It set off other ruptures on other fault lines, the sequence growing bigger and more damaging as it raced northwards through the network, killing a woman in the little ski settlement at Mount Lyford, crushing a man under a big old house on the coast. It shoved Kaikoura a metre northwards, and left the coastal seabed high and dry, crayfish, paua and all. It heaved Christchurch southwards and Wellington northwards. Slip after slip blocked the main highway, wrecked the railway lines beside.
It also closed the only other way into Kaikoura, a narrow, meandering route passing through Waiau and called the Inland Kaikoura Road.
Months passed.
Kaikoura, clinging to its narrow shelf, was marooned until road crews pushed a way through the fifty slips on the Inland Kaikoura Road, now renamed the ‘Kaikoura Emergency Access Road’.
People did what people do in a disaster. They got through it as best they could.
They slowly cleaned up. Some of their town was gone forever. Many of their houses were severely damaged. The old Adelphi vanished. The New Commercial Hotel was first ruined, then burned. The wooden Pier Hotel, so fortunately placed, now housed a restaurant. It survived.
Buildings can be replaced, but the ecosystem takes a little longer. No one knew when Kaikoura’s would recover, or what it would be like. Some people rescued the crayfish the town had been named after, for the seabed had been raised so high that now a great apron of rocks ran out to the water. Its reefs and caves and underwater alleyways and sealife lay open to the sky, drying and dying. Kaikoura’s foreshore, a difficult, rocky affair where only the determined swam, was transformed into a broad, enticing beach.
A vast avalanche of mud and sand and rock poured down the sides of the deep canyon where whales fed, then flowed 700 kilometres north along the Hikurangi Trough to the Wa
irarapa. Astonishingly, the whales returned only a couple of weeks later. But Kaikoura lost its lifeline: State Highway One.
In the meantime, we were given a graphic demonstration of what was at stake here. The official route between Picton and Christchurch was diverted through remote territory: Wairau Valley, St Arnaud, Murchison, the Shenandoah, Lewis Pass. The officially estimated driving time expanded to seven and a half hours, three hours longer than the coastal route.
I’d driven through the Wairau Valley only once or twice. It was beautiful, but it didn’t go anywhere that couldn’t be reached more easily. Now there was no alternative.
But some of those roads just weren’t built for the loads they now carried. They became full-scale adventures. Potholes scarred the tarmac. Trucks crashed. Cars expired. The roads were repaired, then the repairs were repaired. Then the repairs to the repairs had to be fixed.
The New Zealand Transport Agency, which is responsible for roads, complained it was running out of money and, to the great disgust of locals, put parts of the road on hold until later. New Zealand’s critical-roads strategy came down to this: fingers crossed.
Even the diversion had to be diverted, once through Reefton, once even back to the precarious SH One.
The official journey time between Christchurch and Picton grew, and grew, and with that came all sorts of complications. A young shearer from Cheviot had to drive five hours, double the usual time, to reach the shearing competition at the Marlborough A&P show in Blenheim. He won.
Truck drivers dubbed the road the ‘white-knuckle highway’ and began quitting their jobs for safer ones. Roads and bridges started collapsing under the strain. The road toll rose alarmingly.
Some of the uninhabited part of the route was so remote and dangerous that NZTA had to extend cellphone coverage specially, along with an emergency phone — and a toilet, which probably came in handy for nervous drivers.
How often does the main road through a country, its most important arterial, the very life-course of the nation, get jiggled around? So I took the diversion one spring morning in September, its easy, comforting familiarity as close to the joy of the open road as I ever get. I dream of road trips, but the dream usually gets a bit damp after the first hour or so of queues, and the inevitable discovery that your favourite café has changed hands and is, by some mysterious rule of the hospitality industry, no longer as good.
