Civilisation

by Steve Braunias

  The following morning she didn’t look too comfortable. She was still standing up but the calf’s head was hanging out the back of her. I managed to get up close by walking very slowly and crooning softly. I like the way some animals let you near them when they need help.

  I rubbed her back for a while, working my way down towards the calf. I could see a leg was half out too, and I reached out to stroke the calf.

  It was cold. Cold enough for me to be sure it was dead.

  The cow looked over her shoulder at me with big droopy cow eyes.

  ‘That’s a shame, Alice,’ I said. I don’t know why I chose that moment to give her a name.

  I patted her gently and then grasped the calf’s hoof. I put my foot up on Alice’s rump, lent backwards, and pulled as hard as I could. Alice groaned and staggered as she tried to push the calf out but it didn’t move far.

  We tried again a couple more times but the calf seemed to be stuck.

  ‘Looks like I’ll have to call the vet, Alice,’ I said, as I rubbed her back all the way up to her ears. ‘We’ll get it out soon. Just hang on.’

  It was five hours before the vet came. I took her up the hill and we found Alice lying on the ground, moaning. The vet said I should have called her earlier. The calf could have been dead inside her for days. Now Alice was really sick. The dead calf was swelling up inside her.

  The vet got down to business. She pushed her whole arm up inside the cow trying to find the other hoof, but she couldn’t find it, so she got out her scalpel and cut the calf’s head off.

  Next, she reached in again and found the other hoof, tied a chain around both hooves, and winched out the headless calf.

  I didn’t watch. I sat on the ground stroking Alice’s cheeks and humming softly. The vet said Alice would probably die. If a cow doesn’t get up, she said, it dies.

  For the next three days Alice lay on the ground. When I visited her she would try to get up but her back legs didn’t work. I gave her water in a bucket and some hay, but nothing changed.

  The next day the farmer came home. He got out his gun and headed up the hill. I didn’t go. I tried to keep busy with a few chores.

  He came back with a smile on his face. Alice was standing up.

  After that she got better by the day. At first she couldn’t stand for long, then she walked with a horrible limp, one hoof dragging on the ground behind her.

  One day she was back with the herd, and we knew she was going to be fine. Every time I saw Alice I called hello, but as time went by she ignored me. Eventually she stopped limping.

  The vet said Alice was damaged inside and would never be able to have a calf. Alice had a good spring. Lots of hay. Plenty of new grass. Warm sunny days. But the time to put the bull out with the cows was approaching and Alice had nowhere to go.

  One day, while the cows were eating their hay, the farmer got his gun out again. The bullet went in right between her eyes. Her legs slowly folded underneath her. The other cows watched her for a while and then turned their attention back to the fresh hay.

  Alice’s life was short but it was mainly pretty good. When she came home wrapped up in beautiful parcels labelled fillet steak and roast beef and ribs, it felt like eating her was the best thing to do.

  The hump beneath the moon got closer and closer as I walked along the verge of the highway. I came to a stile, and a sign that announced the hump was, in fact, Mount Iron. I climbed the stile and set off to conquer it. I fancied the idea of being the first person to climb to the summit that morning.

  I had barely got as high as the first foothill when I saw a retired couple walking down. ‘Morning, Steve,’ they said. How did they know my name? Who were they, and what were they doing up so goddamned early? They must have climbed Mount Iron in the dark. I pondered the questions and saw another retired couple walking down. ‘Morning, Steve,’ they said.

  Five days in Wānaka and I was already part of the furniture. Four more early-bird trampers trotted down the mountain with cheerful first-person salutations. I recognised a man and two women from various morning and afternoon teas at Mount Aspiring College. It felt good to belong. It was a wonderful tramp, steep and unbelievably scenic – I walked into and then above a soft thick carpet of woolly fog that moved through the valley in a lovely white twist. Lake Hāwea lay beneath it. Trudged onward, past rosehip and rowan berries, thistle and thorn, the plants holding with a tight white-knuckled grip on to the hard rock of Mount Iron. I came to a bald spur. A sign said DANGER.

  I thought about Beth McArthur, lonely and sighing in the front of the class, daring to write about becoming a widow.

  We didn’t put our names down for what happened. My husband fell off our rock. It’s a ten-metre schist rock on top of which we had our home built 40 years ago. He always said, ‘No one will ever fall off the rock.’ But he did. Just like that.

  It was a warm summer evening. I remember the date, of course. November 3, 2008. Just an ordinary Monday.

  After our evening meal we planned to drive the fourteen kilometres to our ten-acre block at Springvale to tend our peonies but Dick decided to stay at home and watch TV. A night off. I said, ‘Well I’m going out to weed that garden in front of my office.’

  Dick wandered out the front door during the ads. ‘How’s it going, young Beth?’ he asked.

  ‘Good.’ I replied. ‘I’m just going to pop over the rock and cut down that seedling elm.’

  ‘I’ll do it for you,’ he said. I gave him the secateurs and he descended the couple of metres to the small tree, then returned saying, ‘I’ll need the loppers.’ On his way down he lost his footing and fell. It was a free fall. He fell feet first, arms outstretched. It was 7.30 p.m.

  I made a 111 call. ‘Ambulance, fire, police?’ the operator asked. ‘Ambulance,’ I screamed.

  I thought people might think I pushed him. Nobody will ever want to buy our property. Why did I say I was going to get the seedling elm? My God, this isn’t real. It should have been me who fell. This isn’t fair. It’s not right.

  As I hurried down the hill to find Dick, Lynette next door called from her balcony. ‘Is everything all right?’ ‘No,’ I screamed and breathlessly continued on down the hill.

  By the time I got to Centennial Park the ambulance was screaming round the corner from the opposite direction.

  ‘Help! Get me up. Help!’ Words from Dick. He was alive. Thank God. I was still about 30 metres away.

  The ambulance officer told me to stay back and sit down. I was still holding our home telephone. It was now out of range. I borrowed the paramedic’s phone.

  ‘Bridget. Dick has fallen off the rock,’ I said. ‘Is it bad?’ our youngest daughter asked. ‘Yes,’ I replied.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was a policeman.

  The paramedic directed me to the far corner of the park to show the fire brigade to the accident site. Malcolm Macpherson pulled up. ‘I’ll direct the fire brigade,’ he said. His wife, a doctor, was at the bottom of the rock helping with Dick.

  Under the tree, on the grass, Bridget and I huddled together. The fire brigade got to work. Soon, two lines of men with arms outstretched were bearing my husband from man to man, gently, carefully, and finally through the open doors of the ambulance.

  ‘How many brothers and sisters do you have?’ Joy Watson from Victim Support asked Bridget in the corridor of Dunstan Hospital.

  ‘Three,’ she said.

  ‘Ring them right now.’

  I felt I’d been cut in half. I wanted to cuddle Dick but wasn’t allowed that close to him. The emergency staff were working on him. Life-saving measures. A nurse cut off his shirt. I never did like that shirt.

  At last I was allowed to talk to him. I kissed him. ‘My arms are tingling,’ he said. ‘Something strange is happening.’

  The team from Dunedin Public Hospital arrived in the rescue helicopter.

  We walked out to go home to shower and pack for what lay ahead. Sue and Malcolm Macpherson took me. The ambu
lance doors were gaping wide open. ‘Where’s Dick?’ I asked. ‘He’s in the helicopter,’ Sue replied.

  Bridget drove. We were almost in Milton, which is one and a half hours from Alexandra. Bridget broke the silence. ‘We haven’t said a word since we left.’ I replied, ‘What is there to say?’

  The puffing and hissing sounds from the oxygen equipment indicated that Dick was still alive. Dots blinked across the heart monitor and the oxygen saturation recorder was in place, along with a drip.

  It was about three a.m. Linda was awake to greet us. ‘He’s broken his neck,’ I said.

  Bridget and I went to bed in Linda’s spare queen-size bed. We cuddled each other and cried. Bridget slept for about an hour. I couldn’t sleep. The pillows were damp with our tears.

  The next morning at the intensive care unit at Dunedin Hospital a consultant and a medical registrar took Bridget and me into a room. The official diagnosis was delivered. Dick was C5 tetraplegic. Complete. He would never walk again.

  They said Dick would be transferred to the Christchurch intensive care unit as soon as a plane or helicopter became available. Wrapped and strapped in red blankets and silver survival sheets for the flight, Dick looked like a giant Christmas cracker.

  By the time I puffed my way to the summit of Mount Iron it was mid-morning, bluish, windy, cold. A sign informed climbers of the mountain’s geological history – it was formed by glaciers, was once a thousand feet beneath ice. There were views of the mountain ranges, Fog Peak, Black Peak, Shark Tooth – and Rob Roy, which was covered with snow all that week.

  There were views of the past. I’d come to know the ranges and valleys in travels with my father. He lived his final years in another of the ‘cold lakes’, Tekapo, and later in Fairlie. I’d visit. We’d take road trips, stay in motels. We’d go to Wānaka. We’d go through the Lindis Pass.

  In 2003 I wrote about our last trip together:

  A great many things were going on in the middle of the South Island two weekends ago. In Ōmarama on Saturday night – no doubt you heard about this on the news – it rained at three a.m.

  That was at the end of a warm crisp day in winter, not a cloud in the sky, and hardly another car on the road. Out of the wind, poplars still held their autumn blaze. You could see that most vividly on the shores of Lake Benmore, and beside the Benmore Dam, where a father and son were fishing next to the No Fishing sign.

  I was on a road trip with my dad: another father and son spending time together in the middle of the South Island. We went indoors to see fish. The pub in Kimbell has a 43-pound salmon, caught by L. Rooney in 1970, mounted on a wall. It’s above the jukebox (‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’, ‘Rocky Mountain High’), and next to a gallery of photographs marking great days in the history of the McKenzie Collie Dog Club, established in 1891; in 1950, at the club’s jubilee trials, vice-president Roy Rapley appeared in a kilt.

  Next door to the pub – there are two doors in Kimbell – is Lloyd Harwood’s Silverstream Gallery. Lloyd draws portraits. ‘You should be able to see the eyelashes really well,’ he promises clients. He also paints, although he is colour-blind. Much of his gallery is devoted to landscapes of Randall Froude, ‘the Monet of the South Pacific’, whose paintings have generated over eleven million dollars in sales – they have hung in Japan, Australia, England and the US. Where does the artist currently reside? ‘Over there,’ said Lloyd, and pointed through a window to a house on the other side of Kimbell Creek, behind a row of cottonwood trees.

  All the pretty towns: Geraldine, where you can buy your best investment in the middle of the South Island, a hand-knitted woollen hat; Waimate, which gives its name to Oligosoma waimatense, the endangered scree skink; Twizel, which is illuminated at night by an electric light sculpture – 43 flashing sequences, imported from Japan – on top of a power pole. So much space, such abundance. The vital statistics of the middle of the South Island included 900 hectares of onions, 4,000 of potatoes, 7.7 million head of sheep and 505,000 of beef cattle.

  But crime has run rampant. In Fairlie a sheep was shot in the leg; police suspect the sniper fired from Mt Gay Road. A mobile sheep yard was stolen in Albury. Thieves also made off with firewood, filched from the open sheds of two elderly women in Twizel, and went to a lot of trouble to nick the stainless steel circular map from the layby at Mount Michael.

  Good people continue to do good things. John Campbell has been re-elected as pipe major of the Mackenzie Highland Pipe Band. Caroline Bay had just hosted the thirty-seventh national square dance convention, and the South Canterbury Cat Fanciers Club is about to hold its thirty-eighth championship show. And you could go to Kurow, where the butcher is famous for his smoked and pickled tongue, or shop in Ashburton, where Kitchen Kapers sells a frightening range of plates in the shapes and patterns of cabbages.

  It rained in Ōmarama on Saturday night. That was a surprise: the night was clear as glass. Sunday morning was damp, cold, grey. The only warmth to be had was the bonfire lit by the new owner of the Aruhuri Motel. It was his first weekend in business and he was burning a lot of old cardboard boxes, and about to throw a harmonica into the flames.

  All fires are mesmerising, especially so on a winter’s day in a small friendly town. A slide in the children’s playground was set in a mound of dirt. Outside the police station, a policeman’s cap was placed on top of a tree trunk with the sign DO NOT FEED THE POLICEMAN. Scraps of burnt cardboard floated above the motel.

  ‘Look,’ I said to my father, and we stood together watching the cardboard fly through the air like burned birds, on a morning in the middle of the South Island, in winter, before snowfall.

  Greymouth

  The Pike River Mine Disaster

  The most unforgettable film in New Zealand history is the CCTV silent movie recorded at the Pike River coal mine on a Friday afternoon in early summer when the lives of Conrad Adams, Malcolm Campbell, Glen Cruse, Allan Dixon, Zen Drew, Christopher Duggan, Joseph Dunbar, John Hale, Daniel Herk, David Hoggart, Richard Holling, Andrew Hurren, Koos Jonker, William Joynson, Riki Keane, Terry Kitchin, Samuel Mackie, Francis Marden, Michael Monk, Stuart Mudge, Kane Nieper, Peter O’Neill, Milton Osborne, Brendon Palmer, Ben Rockhouse, Peter Rodger, Blair Sims, Joshua Ufer and Keith Valli came to an end in darkness, underground.

  The following winter, on another Friday, with snow on top of the Paparoa Range, a bunch of flowers rotted in a wire-mesh gate that served as a roadblock in front of Pike – no one bothered to add the word River, it was only ever the flat and joyless monosyllabic Pike.

  The route to Pike crossed Big River Bridge and followed Logburn Road towards the mountains. It was big, dark country. The fields were dug up like furrows in a drainage technique called humping and hollowing. A road sign carried an illustration of a weka and the command DOGS PROHIBITED. Signs festooned the roadblock gate: ENTRY BY APPOINTMENT ONLY; IN AN EMERGENCY DIAL 555; DO NOT LITTER. A bunch of red plastic flowers wrapped in cellophane had been placed on the side of the road. In smudged ink, a card read RIP BRENDON FLY TRUE LOV YOU ALL WAYS MINDY.

  Families of the 29 men were given a private screening of the film. It was later shown at a press conference. The longest version, available on YouTube, is two minutes and 31 seconds.

  The chief coroner ruled on what no one could know and said the men died on November 19 ‘either at the immediate time of the large explosion that occurred in the mine or a very short time thereafter’. He worked on ‘the available evidence’. But the bodies weren’t available. They remained in a tomb of granite and coal.

  The mine exploded on November 19 at 3.44 in the afternoon. An emergency was declared at 5.51. Six days later, at 2.37 p.m. on Wednesday, a second explosion ripped through the mine and all hope was lost.

  The CCTV camera was fixed to the left of what looks like the opening of a cave. The static image on November 19 shows an arch cut through grey and solid rock. The ground is wet and puddly, with tyre treadmarks heading into the cave, and there are scaffolding pipes a
nd a metal roof. The sunlight is very bright. It burns on a stand of West Coast native bush – beech forest, ribbony, mossy, unlike native bush anywhere else in New Zealand. It has a sweeter smell, the light is darker. Pike was set deep in forest, beyond the White Knight Bridge.

  ‘Oh God, it’s so beautiful there, honestly,’ said Cath Monk. Her husband Bernie said, ‘The water’s so clear, and it’s running over granite stone, and there are ferns growing everywhere.’ It was Friday night at Greymouth’s handsome Paroa Hotel, purchased in 1955 by Ham and Corrie Monk. Their sons, Bernie and Winston, now manage it together. Bernie’s son Alan was behind the bar. There was a framed photograph of Alan’s younger brother Michael on a small table by the door. It showed a good-looking guy with an open face. The portrait made it seem he was guest of honour; a visitor wondered aloud if it was his birthday. Michael worked at Pike. He was building an underground dam.

  Talk of the scenery at Pike reminded Cath to fetch something. She came back with a large rock. ‘Granite,’ she said. ‘One of the guys gave it to me. It’s from out of the mine.’ She said they went to Pike on Christmas Day. ‘It’s a beautiful place but it’s so far away. You just can’t go and visit. We want him home with us.’

  The two-minute 31-second film opens with a faint movement: what looks like a strip of rag, fixed to the inside wall of the cave, stops blowing into the mine and flops down, inert. This is the beginning of the end, the moment the methane gas explodes about two and a half kilometres inside the mine.

  ‘Concussion … thermal injuries … acute hypoxia … The men would have died within three to five minutes of the explosion,’ the coroner said.

  ‘I was here working when it went off. I heard it,’ said Gina Howton, who ran the general store in nearby Blackball. ‘It was like that first clap of thunder in a storm. I thought, no one will come out of that alive.’ Some of the men were customers. ‘A couple of guys who worked there said, “It’s gonna blow. Not if, but when.” That’s what they said.’