by Bruce Ansley
I left Christchurch on a drizzling, grey Saturday morning. Spirits were damp despite the usual brisk Saturday-morning traffic, shoppers, sporty carloads, people with that air of urgency that comes with either trying to get to work or celebrating not having to get to work.
I tripped into a desert, where I was thoroughly lost. The landmarks had gone. The houses had gone. Whole housing developments, great chunks of suburbs had just vanished into the huge debris dumps to the north. The earthquakes had done for them. I was deep in the Red Zone.
Riverside suburbs had disappeared. Just the odd garden feature or fireplace remained as gravestones. I drove through what was left of Burwood, or so I guessed, and onto Marshland Road, previously the main north road from the city’s eastern suburbs. It was once a swamp, of course, and the earthquakes did their best to turn it back into one. In fact, part of the road was originally to have been a canal, and the earthquakes tried to restore that plan too.
I imagined pulling off onto a side road, perhaps to change a tyre, and upon getting back in the car becoming disoriented. The grey closing in around us. Lost at sea. I might be trapped for weeks in the maze before someone noticed a muddy Subaru Outback shuttling back and forth, for I stuck to the New Zealand male driving rule and never asked directions.
Signs along this route pointed resolutely to Picton, until they did not. They took their business elsewhere, leaving traffic on anonymous grey tarmac somewhere on the marshy flats of northern Christchurch.
But this Saturday morning the land felt firm enough, and I turned off onto the motorway and was immediately stuck between a huge yellow earthmover riding on an even bigger green truck, earthquake bric-a-brac, and an orange party bus going god-knew-where on this grey morning.
This was once dry Canterbury. Now vineyards crowded the landscape and here was a whole new town, Pegasus, whose developers boasted that 6000 people would one day call it home. It was as if the huge fist of the earthquake had knocked everything out of the pond, and little puddles of Christchurch had formed all around.
But now, at Waipara, a bright orange sign told Picton traffic not to go straight ahead, as it had done since long before Europeans settled in this country, but to turn left, through the limey soils of the Waipara vineyards to pass beneath the famous Frog Rock hanging over the road in the Weka Pass, flash past ancient Maori drawings in limestone shelters, and go by the moa-bone troves of the Pyramid Valley.
We pulled in behind a tourist bus. It had a learner sign in the back window. The driver hadn’t practised pulling over. A growing number of cars formed a queue behind. A whole funeral procession.
It was 422 kilometres to Picton, which could take an awfully long time. Perhaps I should stop in Hanmer and loll in the hot springs instead? Two hours had brought only the old Hurunui Hotel into view, and that looked inviting too. But no, I was on a mission. Spray from passing trucks coated the windscreen. The wide forests were being cut down to make way for dairy farms. An end-of-the-world feeling seeped into the car.
Over the Lewis Pass. Into the forests, huge raindrops gobbing from the tall trees like cricket balls. It was as dark and cold as the Kaikoura route was full of light. Past Springs Junction, where the tourist bus forked off. Our loss would be Reefton’s gain.
Huge trucks created their own weather systems: torrential rain, gales, their headlights like lightning, their sides flashing strings of lights. Every now and then one pulled off the road and sat there like a town taking a rest. The procession behind it passed and honked thanks, politely. The road just wasn’t designed for this kind of traffic.
We trundled over the Shenandoah, such a hurdle in the old days and now revisiting its former reputation. Over Pea Soup Creek, past the ‘View of Old Man Range’ sign. No view, no range, just the grey.
We rolled into Murchison, which must have hoped SH One would never reopen. The little town was throbbing. The old general store, an endangered species in this country, was open for business. The junk shop was crammed with treasure. The butchery boasted of its gold medals. The French bakery smelled delicious.
On to Kawatiri Junction, where the default SH One turned and headed through Nelson Lakes National Park for the coast. Now the road, all but terminally ill, took a turn for the worse.
Road crews toiled like cleaners. The heavy traffic rolled through, road workers mopped up. The carriageway was stitched and patched, except where it no longer existed, and forlorn men in wet-weather gear presided over one-way stretches. It passed through St Arnaud, the national park’s capital, which succeeded in looking even lonelier than usual. From this end the old stock route between Nelson and Canterbury looked quite enticing as an alternative main road. Mountains, gorges, rivers? Didn’t worry the drovers.
The terrain flared out into the wide and beautiful Wairau Valley with its cliffs and peaks and superb river. I passed a woman in a lonely caravan offering bacon butties and chicken curry. In this café desert, never had a menu been more popular. The road rejoined SH One at Blenheim, and the procession rolled on to Picton on a highway that felt soft as carpet.
The journey had taken eight and a half hours, almost double the usual time.
By now, Kaikoura had been relieved. The Inland Kaikoura route had been opened to traffic, in fits and starts.
That route turned off the Lewis Pass road just before Hanmer and ran through the little village of Waiau, nicely preserved right down to its jail. It had been left alone in its corner and was free of supermarkets and fast-food chains. Its two churches seemed to complement the old pub.
The Inland Kaikoura route ran through the town rather than over it, then through farmland and canyons until it joined SH One just south of Kaikoura, avoiding the slips blocking the main road. Its main attraction, for me, was a single, tiny grave above the road, the last resting place of tiny Alice George. The daughter of a road-builders’ cook, Alice was one year and ten months old when she fell ill in 1887. A doctor rode his horse for hours to save her. He failed. She died, and a clergyman had to ride just as long to bury her.
That little grave seemed to carry the country’s hard lonely soul within its railings. But now, more traffic than Alice had ever seen rolled past. Five weeks after the earthquakes, this road had become Kaikoura’s lifeline.
A wider pessimism remained. Some had wanted to abandon Christchurch after the earthquakes there, arguing that the city was too badly damaged, too expensive and too badly sited to repair. The same chorus was now rising over Kaikoura.
The coast was too precipitous. The rock could never be held back. They’d have to find another route for State Highway One, a detour around Kaikoura. Why not the old Molesworth Road? It circled around the treacherous coast. It started at Hanmer Springs and ran inside the Inland Kaikouras pretty much in a straight line all the way to Dashwood on One.
Well, not many people used that road, for good reason. It dated from a time when huge sheep stations covered the land and drovers dictated the routes.
It was guarded by Tapuaenuku, the beautiful giant at the northern end of the Inland Kaikouras, beckoning, showing envious North Islanders across the Strait what real country looked like. At its southern end the road started at Hanmer, the kindly face of what lay beyond. You drove up the Clarence Valley Road and over Jacks Pass and in that short time you were, again, in another world. The thermal pools and the cafés and the motels became a dry golden country so lonely you immediately checked all your car’s vital signs, and your own.
Yet another route forked off this road here. It was the Rainbow Road, whose qualities were summed up by its hours: open in summer during daylight, closed in winter. Part of it was the old drovers’ route between Nelson and Canterbury. It ran through the mountains to Tophouse beyond the Nelson Lakes National Park. It was spectacular, narrow, slippery, slimy and for enthusiasts only. Yet some suggested this too as an alternative route for the damaged SH One.
Those who loved the back country prayed that the main road would be restored unto the nation, and soon.
&
nbsp; Back in the real world, or perhaps the ethereal one, the road we were on became the Acheron Road, at first following the Acheron River. It was crowded by hills but the country felt open, for there was no bush, only a few trees and vast patches of yellow broom like sunlight through clouds.
It was an ancient land and felt no younger even when you reached the outlier of this sparse civilisation, the Acheron Accommodation House, one of a chain of thick-walled, graceful cob houses built for drovers within a day’s trek of each other and reaching all the way from Hurunui to Nelson following a Maori trail: Te Rauparaha and his allies sneaked through this country in 1831 to attack Ngai Tahu in their fortresses. The accommodation house was a palace in the wilderness. Travellers and drovers rested in its small rooms for seventy years until 1932.
Further down the road lay the main buildings of Molesworth Station, best-known of all high-country stations, biggest of them all, larger than Stewart Island. The station was part of our folklore and still publicly owned.
The road here was stony and dusty and you drove carefully over its length. It crossed Isolated Flat, hurdled Wards Pass and dropped to the flats beyond.
The Molesworth homestead settlement was not far from here. The road now circled around the settlement. Instead of driving through it, as they once did, visitors were directed up a side road to a vantage point above. The sixty-kilometre, two-hour drive through the station was scarcely built-up. Now that it detoured past the station buildings, you passed only two houses on the road. The first was the Accommodation House. The second lay at the other end of the station, another fine old cob house where the station manager once lived.
The road then climbed, clung to the side of a steep gorge, dropped, became paved, then unpaved, repeated this pattern for a while as if uncertain of the permanence of the people it served, then took hold, boasted a white centre line, and you knew you were getting close to somewhere that actually appeared on a map, which here is Dashwood.
It was not a dangerous drive, nor even a hard one, in good weather at least. In winter, when the road was closed, it became treacherous. Winters here were truly icy. Long vehicles were not allowed, nor boats or caravans.
Yet some now suggested it as an alternative route between Christchurch and Picton. It was shorter, at 207 kilometres, but not quicker. Some tried it and ran out of petrol. Many ran out of patience. Neighbouring farmers ran out of goodwill. They longed for autumn, when the road was closed. A few drivers ran out of nerve, some complaining bitterly that road workers had suggested the road as a detour, when no sane and sensible driver would ever go there.
But an alternative to SH One? What a shame that would be. First, we’d lose the most enchanting stretch of our prime highway. Second, we’d spoil the superb desolation of the Acheron country. A highway, passing lanes, the clutter of signs, rest stops, petrol stations, cafés? What a disaster. Third, Kaikoura would still be isolated.
But with Kaikoura sitting in fault lines as webbed as the veins of a very old person, and its road whittled from rock and an even harder place, the sea, who knew?
Why, those sterling fellows from the New Zealand Transport Agency did. They never lost faith. Great earthmoving machines toiled. Engineers moved mountains. An army of abseilers stabilised them. And one wonderful day, they announced success: the second-class version of SH One along the Kaikoura Coast opened for part of each day from just before Christmas 2017.
I had to give it a go, of course. How many times in a lifetime do you get a front-row seat as the state moves mountains and conquers not one, but two mighty earthquakes? So on Waitangi weekend 2018 I set off from Christchurch again. My heart was full. The road was too. These were the weekends of my youth returning, long queues of cars and caravans carrying cheerful people off for a holiday.
Signposts said that State Highway One through Kaikoura was open between 7 a.m. and 8.30 p.m. The cavalcade took on a pioneer hue. Kaikoura had been suffering, withering, without its visitors, its arteries blocked by mud and rock. We were the rescue column, the relief force, the liberators!
We poured through Parnassus and over the Hundalees and on the other side was the sea, the sea, the sea. Where the sperm whales cavorted and the dolphins flew and the crayfish crawled deep into the cracks and crevices of their new habitat, the old one being hoist into the frame of every passing mobile-phone camera by the great uprising months before. Little white horses galloped across the blue and it looked like the Kaikoura of old, the happiest place in the world.
Couldn’t get away from the earthquake, of course. We soon ran into its rubble. The traffic slowed, then stopped, then jerked forward in a single lane.
The people controlling the flow were housed in little huts beside the road. The huts were the size of outhouses and looked like sentry-boxes. These people were the palace guards. From the corner of my eye I noticed something else odd about them, without it registering.
A couple of stops and starts later I realised . . . They were waving at the passing parade with what seemed to be genuine affection. We flapped our hands. They waved the harder, called words of encouragement, leaned through a few open windows for a chat. Some threw in a little dance for good measure. Perhaps they had performance criteria to meet, in the more literal sense. Possibly they were as delighted as we were that after so many months of work they were triumphant. They were the cheeriest, most entertaining stop-go people on the face of the earth, especially this earth, which recently had been wobbling so frantically.
When I saw what they’d done, I got it. They were celebrating, saluting the successful outcome of the greatest road-building effort ever seen in this country, men and women and machines working day and night in every kind of weather to repair a vital link in the nation’s affair. They were proud of themselves, and we were proud of them. Many of us clapped.
We passed the settlements of tents and caravans on the thin reserves between the highway and the sea. I recognised the scene from my childhood: men wearing singlets and determined looks, women in gumboots. They gutted fish for tea and laughed.
The seascape had changed. The seabed had been lifted and thrust into view. It lay white and odd. Was that reef out there before? That rock standing alone like an obelisk?
But here were the first two road tunnels, then the second pair, although only one of them was being used. They were reassuring. Still, it didn’t seem right to honk the horn. Over there was the concrete-sided railway tunnel with the slits.
Above, the cliffs and hillsides had been scraped to their bones, first being shaken like pups by the earthquakes then cleaned of hanging rocks and debris by men and women dangling from ropes.
The road squeezed around rocks and poked into bays, the cliffs and buttresses above them pegged up, studded, wrapped in steel. I’d always taken the road north and south of Kaikoura for granted. Now it was easy to see how it had been chipped from the edge of the world.
Kaikoura town was bustling. Some of the shop verandas were propped up but the shops themselves were busy. The smile had lost some of its teeth: the graceful old Adelphi Hotel was just an empty space, the New Commercial around the corner a charred ruin.
The town’s lovely old cinema was fenced off but most prizes were still in place, even James Mackay’s rocky stool in South Bay where the agent sat bargaining the Ngai Tahu out of their land. The pointed rock must have given him piles. But the town’s beach was even more beautiful, lifted from the sea and strung with rocks and reefs.
Ohau Point lay on the north side of town. I had to search for the place where SH One had been widened to accommodate the throngs of visitors who stopped and watched the seals on the rocks below. The point lay like a long finger above them. Now it was stripped, skinned. Nothing recognisable was left. I’d passed by this place hundreds of times, but now I had to check my phone to make sure I was there.
Tucked in the bay around its tip lay the stream where once tumbled baby seals, the waterfall pouring onto their heads. Even the track had vanished. I saw a hole in the bush tha
t might have been the entrance but it was blocked by road crews. The pups were long gone, and probably the waterfall too. But what had been sea floor now lay white in the sun, strewn with black seals, as fine as ever.
Ohau Point was the place where everything became apparent, where the monster showed its hand, where all its forces had seized the land. What a mighty construction, what effort and courage and skill had gone into rebuilding a road and railway line when not very much of either remained.
Mountainsides, shorn, bolstered, corseted, hung over the void. Stopping for a closer look was banned, should some fool even think of pausing beneath those creaky cliffs. (One did. He crashed the road cordon in a 4WD, dodged a digger trying to block his way and fled north.) At the other end of the danger zone, Goose Bay, schoolchildren at a camp had been led through a rail tunnel when the trains were running. Perhaps earthquakes inured people to risk.
I’d had enough of living dangerously. I turned around and joined the queue for Christchurch. A stop-go man did a little jig as I passed.
6
Finding God
I never spent so much effort getting to church as I did on the elusive Serpentine. The church there isn’t much as old stone churches go. It is tiny, completely unadorned. Its only architectural feature is its simplicity: four walls and a roof. It doesn’t even have a steeple. Yet if God awarded marks for attendance, you’d score highly for this one, for the Serpentine church is very hard to reach. It stands in wild, remote country which freezes in winter, scorches in summer and in between is just vast and windy.
