by Greg McGee
‘Cool,’ Stan said. What he really wanted to say was: Where the fuck are they?
‘She said we should all get together this time of the year, to look back on what’s happened and make a plan.’
‘A plan?’
‘Y’know, what to do next.’
Jackson didn’t strike Stan as disingenuous. Maybe it was just his way of asking what the future might hold for him. But Stan had no idea: after he’d delivered Jackson back to Auckland, that’d be over to Ellie.
‘Nan said she made that up,’ Jackson continued, maybe to let Stan off the hook. ‘The bit about her tamariki and me and Lila. Nan said some people thought the ariki part stood for chief. Like, for you, it might stand for your dad, his eyes looking down at us.’
Stan looked up at the cluster and realised that he hadn’t once thought of his father since hearing that he was comatose after suffering a massive stroke. Maybe that was the point Jackson was making. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.
***
AS they traversed the gravel track down through the paddocks to the ruined bridge and forded the river, Stan tried not to think about whether he would ever see the farm again. They turned at the T where the farm entrance met the shingle road down the valley to the sleeping town, then joined the two-lane blacktop leading east out of Collingwood.
He’d driven this road so often. The pictures in his head were of mountain ranges on his right and the curving bay on his left, as he followed the tunnel forged by his headlights through the darkness. Jackson made no further attempt at conversation. Stan was grateful for the silence, and for winter. This road in summer was full of tourists, many in vans just like his, rent-a-dent crapola, big enough to sleep in, store some food and a gas cooker, but no room for a dunny – the signature vehicles for the notorious freedom campers who shat their way across the country. In turn, vans like Stan’s got shat on by the locals, dirty looks, blasting horns, cut off by big utes charging past, pointed questions as soon as it parked. It would be sort of okay as soon as his accent declared him a local, but sometimes even that didn’t help. Stan felt like saying, Hey, I shit in a compostable toilet at home. What do you do?
Tourism was the lifeblood of the district, and many of the locals now relied on clipping the tourist ticket in one way or another, but the co-dependency had become increasingly fraught. Stan couldn’t be sure that the divisions and tensions weren’t here before he came, but they hadn’t been as patent. They passed an idyllic spot beside the Tākaka River, bulldozed and landscaped so vans like Stan’s couldn’t hide.
The tensions weren’t all imported. Further back, they’d passed a side road leading off to the Te Waikoropupū Springs. Stan wondered whether a sign he’d seen last summer was still there, placed prominently in a paddock just before you turned onto the little road that led down to what was reputed to be the purest water in the world, sacred to local iwi. The last thing the tourists saw before they entered the reserve was a sign put where it couldn’t be missed: ‘Wanted: Person or Business To Market Spring Water.’ For Lester that sign summed up the obscenity of commerce, its encroachment on the valley. And, with that at least, Stan could not disagree.
As they crossed the bridge before Upper Tākaka, Stan looked for and saw in the grey mist of dawn, the huge herd of dairy cows down beside the river. Sure, the farmer had fenced off the water, but there was no way that number of animals could graze on porous alluvial soils without leaching nitrate, piss and shit into the river and aquifers.
Light was filling the sky as the old Toyota began struggling up the big hill. The road had been washed out in several places by Hurricane Gita, and most of the repairs had been completed before the latest weather bomb wrecked it again. They’d had to reinstall traffic lights to control the remaining one-lane track across the precipice of slips above and below the road. Stan marvelled that the road was open at all. When he’d seen the huge clay gullies which had opened up and taken whole hillsides down into the ravines, he’d despaired that the road could ever be safely reinstated. For people like Lester, the isolation caused by the torrents of rain and mud and debris wasn’t a bad thing, and he rejoiced that the area might once again be dependent on coastal shipping for supplies in and out, because that would at least kill industrial dairying. But for Stan it was a warning that the vain little constructs of man, like roads across wild terrain, would fall victim to the new climatic normal. Just one harbinger of many that urged him to get back over the hill while he still could.
***
GITA and that weather bomb had also been a disaster for Te Kurahau. Lester liked to say the Kahurangi National Park was their backyard, but that wasn’t strictly true. There was a slice of much darker green on the last small hill at the bottom of Te Kurahau land, rising beyond the organic gardens and pasture, which had been planted in pines by the previous owner. That had been part of a much larger belt of pine plantation between the end of the farm and the beginning of the bush that ran up to the snowline. Lester had always preferred not to see it: he hated pine forests, partly because they smothered any native diversity, but mostly because they were commercial. But that belt beyond the farm was gone, clear-felled by a forestry company two months ago, the dark green now mottled grey scored with huge yellow slips. The foresters had gone by the time the bomb hit, but they’d left live fuses: huge piles of slash and off-cuts that had been swept downstream and had wiped out the old one-way wooden bridge, the only vehicle access to the farm. The bridge was still down, but so was the river, and their vehicles could get through the ford as long as it wasn’t raining in the mountains.
The real damage was to the river, their beautiful river with its gravel bed, where they would have summer picnics and parties with the Wwoofers on the bank by the swimming hole. Now it was a silty mess from clay sediment and slash and sludge. It had become clear that if Te Kurahau and everyone further downstream, wanted compensation from the forestry company they could, in the words of the yellow-helmeted bastard who appeared to be one of the owners, ‘whistle for it’. Using the reviled court system to sue for compensation for their bridge would be, in Lester’s opinion, almost as bad as having to rely on the medical system for a knee that worked. Stan doubted it would happen.
In the meantime, they needed to rebuild the bridge and work out how to pay for it, and that’s what they’d talked about last night in Lester and Penny’s house. Stan and Jackson had joined Aaron and Malcolm and Isabel around the big table made out of two doors lashed together and overlaid with marine ply, while Penny oversaw the huge cast-iron woodburner oven and water heater. It looked like a giant Aga, but was in fact designed locally and made by some guy in Motueka, freighted over the big hill in pieces. The open-plan kitchen/dining/living room was still warm from the bare concrete floor: there were no rugs, no carpets, to inhibit its heat-retaining and releasing properties. Lester and Penny had angled the eaves of the house to give shelter from the sun in summer and let it fall on the concrete pad in winter; between the woodburner and the floor, the house was never cold.
The kids, Nathaniel and the twins, Jasper and Sarah, came and went at Penny’s direction, Nat and Sarah bringing wood, Jasper at the basin washing and chopping the pumpkins, kūmara and Brussels sprouts Stan and Jackson had lifted from the garden that morning, along with the leeks already in the pie. Penny, in her mid-seventies like her husband, face weathered nut-brown, framed by white hair urchin-cut, long, scrawny limbs anchored by a bit of belly these days, looked as if she’d go on a lot longer than Lester, but even she had slowed considerably in the years Stan had been here. Lester stayed in his armchair, with his leg raised, close enough to contribute his bob’s worth if he felt moved to do so.
Malcolm, as usual, had led the discussion. Listening to his discourses about pine forests or any aspect of organic farming, you’d never know that he’d turned his back on a career in corporate PR. And yet you could see the vestiges of that former career in the way he smoothed the edges w
hen personalities clashed, the way he mediated and found a way ahead that everyone could buy into. His wife Isabel matched Malcolm so perfectly in build and colouring – both were small, wiry and sort of prematurely wizened – that you might think there was a bit of narcissism going on, if you didn’t know them. Twelve-year-old Jasper and Sarah already looked like their parents’ miniature doppelgängers.
Isabel was more introverted than Malcolm, less voluble, but equally kind and generous. She’d been in IT and had built the Te Kurahau website, which made it easier to contact any Wwoofers who were interested in coming this far out of the way. Te Kurahau had no wifi, but Isabel could feed the website every couple of days via the free wifi at the Golden Bay Cafe in Collingwood. Stan usually found an excuse to go with her, just for a change of scenery. Which was telling, now he thought about it.
As well as the twins, Malcom and Isabel had an older daughter, Maddy, fourteen, boarding at high school in Nelson. She’d been home-schooled from the age of seven by Stan, and he sometimes wondered if his teaching had been partly responsible for Maddy wanting to go to a real school over the hill. Maybe that was just the way it went: none of Lester and Penny’s five adult children had chosen to come back to Te Kurahau. It was a matter of private sorrow to them both, though they lived in hope that one of them might decide to return sooner or later, with their grandchildren in tow.
Clear-felling their own pines on the little hill at the bottom of the farm would give them more than enough cash, said Malcom, but they’d have to live with the risk of erosion until the new natives developed decent root systems, a four- to five-year window in which the soil was increasingly vulnerable, due to the frequency of bad weather. Stan listened as Malcolm talked about an alternative concept: continuous harvesting, where batches of mature trees could be felled every year and replanted in mānuka. The batches they felled would have to be big enough to allow sun and light into the fledgling mānuka, but not so great that the root system holding the surrounding land together would be made unstable. Malcolm reckoned that over, say fifteen years, if they were careful, they could replace that pine forest with mānuka, which would give them as much high-grade honey as they could eat.
As well as financing the bridge rebuild, Te Kurahau needed a modicum of actual money for petrol and parts and regos for the vehicles, rates and so on. Some of that they got locally by bartering their produce, and they could always sell at the Nelson farmers’ market, or offer lessons in organic farming, and Isabel and Malcolm would run open days for $25 a head if they were really desperate.
Te Kurahau also had a capital fund, a trust fund created by Lester and Penny, since augmented by the proceeds of Malcolm and Isabel’s family home in Lower Hutt and by an apartment that Aaron and Rachel had sold back in Tel Aviv. They couldn’t risk spending any of the capital, but the interest from the fund was never enough, particularly since the rate had dropped post GFC. Finding enough cash to survive was a constant struggle, even with the unpaid labour of the Wwoofers. The pine forest was a unique opportunity. But Malcolm’s concept wouldn’t give them the big immediate cash injection they’d get from clear-felling – enough to rebuild the bridge and cover everything else for a year or two.
Aaron, an ex-Israeli Army engineer, was the beekeeper, wielded the chainsaw on the old logs for the winter fuel, kept the tractor and implements going, could fix anything, from the hydro to the house-truck, hunted wild goats and had become the co-operative butcher, assisting the local man, Selby, who killed and butchered whatever beast would provide their meat for the following twelve months. And every year Aaron would say the same thing, as he wielded the knife: this cow or calf or pig has had a wonderful life, but for this one very bad day. Selby had a sign back up the valley that probably freaked some of the passing tourists – ‘Home Kill Professional’, with a number to call. Aaron was a tall, dark, spare man of few words and bleak moods, which Stan found intimidating, and even more so since his wife Rachel had gone back over the hill. You didn’t waste small talk on Aaron, you didn’t just pass the time of day. Whatever you said to him would be gravely considered, as if it might be a rebuttal of the theory of relativity. Inevitably disappointed, Aaron would regard you with what looked like mild contempt, through grey eyes which must have seen life and death up close. He was in favour of clear-felling, of taking the cash and the environmental risk, until Lester weighed in from his armchair. ‘We do what is right, not what is lucrative.’ And that was that, debate over, even for Aaron.
But not in Stan’s head. His eyes had drifted up to an A3 sheet plastered against the macrocarpa cladding at the end of the table. Lester had told him it was Te Kurahau’s founding document, and that what had been crossed out was as important as what was written. The sheet was actually a blow-up of the Riverside community’s statement of intent, created back in 1990 when that community was still Christian Pacifist. Lester and Penny had been members until 1998, nearly ten years after the statement had been written, when they’d left the community at Lower Moutere and come over the big hill to found Te Kurahau. The first word crossed out was therefore ‘Riverside’, which had been replaced by ‘Te Kurahau – The School of Vital Essence’.
Jackson had had a problem with that translation when he first saw it some weeks ago, whispering carefully to Stan. ‘Vital essence? What’s that?’
Stan said he understood it was a translation of the ‘hau’ part of Te Kurahau.
‘Nah,’ said Jackson. ‘Hau is, like, soul.’
Stan said he liked the sound of that, but they’d better keep it to themselves. He was humouring Jackson, because so many of the words on that A3 still spoke to Stan’s vital essence. Or soul, for that matter. And Lester’s abrupt closing of any debate over their pine plantation had once again contradicted one of the tenets up on the wall: ‘We choose to share responsibility in policy making, discussion and planning . . .’ Was that reason enough for leaving Te Kurahau in its time of most need? Or an excuse to justify his own selfish ambitions?
The tensions and divisions within the larger community had all come, according to Lester, on the back of commerce, driven by the almighty dollar. He could paint a clear national link between commerce and agricultural opportunism – land use that veered violently between whatever commercial fad held sway at the time: sheep, pinus radiata, dairying. Stan had never made it to Europe, but some of the Wwoofers had eventually given voice to their dismay about what they’d found here in what they thought would be nirvana. They said that much of Germany and France were still rural and had preserved a mix of forests and meadows for centuries. They’d shown him photos from home of rural beauty that made much of the countryside here look like the victim of short-term rapacity. And that was before news came from over the hill that all the blackcurrant bushes were being torn out because the Malaysian company they were supplying had reneged on contracts after finding cheaper suppliers in South America or India or wherever. So the hops that had been ripped out in the eighties were being replanted on the back of a boom in craft beers.
Lester, thought Stan, was like an old fire-and-brimstone preacher from a western. Self-sustainability was his mantra and he railed against the evils of commerce, which was reducing the globe to a polluted hell. That was what had driven him and Penny from Riverside community, as both words and cross-outs further down the A3 sheet showed:
We reject private ownership and private profit.
We choose limitation and equality of personal income.
We aim to be self-supporting and to produce goods of the best quality at a fair price.
We do not want to escape from the world, but to use our pooled resources to help it through service to others and practical involvement in social, peace and environmental movements.
But what had happened to their river proved, Stan thought but lacked the guts to articulate, that the world could no longer be kept at a distance. Even here in the furthest reaches of Golden Bay. So here they were, in dire need of ca
sh. And there was salvation, Stan knew, sitting at this very table. But salvation had kept its mouth shut.
Te Kurahau had been the perfect sanctuary for his troubled twenties, a place for him to take refuge and recharge and think about what he wanted. He’d arrived with a bunch of young Germans, medical students, with whom he’d camped overnight at Torrent Bay on the Abel Tasman track. He’d heard a joke, that if you fell on that track and broke an ankle, not to panic, there’d be a German doctor along within ten minutes. Stan reckoned you’d be unlucky these days to have to wait that long. He’d followed the Germans here, and when they left, he’d stayed.
He was proud of his contribution to Te Kurahau, and profoundly grateful to it for rescuing a confused young man with the oppressive humidity and humanity of Shenzhen inside his head. He’d come home at the end of 2010 after two years teaching English as a second language. The Foxconn scandal had just broken, but even before the suicides of those young workers, Stan had picked up from his ESL students that they were mice on the wheel. He’d come home with a sense of hopelessness, that the human race was doomed. Te Kurahau had given him a stable base, rescued him from depression, changed him from being a boy who didn’t know what he wanted to do to a man who did . . . He’d thought. Now that man was having his doubts. Te Kurahau was a knot he didn’t know quite how to start untying: if he pulled on the wrong strand, he might entangle himself further.
Stan still believed what Te Kurahau had taught him, that there was a kind of personal salvation in planting the soil and growing things. His experiences in the Shenzhen concrete ants’ nest might have precipitated that, but he’d probably also inherited something from his mother. His strongest memory of her was being in the garden, Carol in big-brimmed sunhat and gloves and loose cotton chinos, waving her trowel as she explained what she was doing. He’d found that Carol was also a weird connection to Te Kurahau, since so many of the back-to-nature people he met had lost their mothers to cancer – Lester, Isabel, Aaron and Rachel, when she was here.
