by Paul Theroux
The photographer, Ian, said, “This sunlight is threequarters of a stop brighter than anywhere else on earth I’ve taken pictures.”
It seems that the greenhouse effect can be measured with a light-meter.
In this dazzling light, Pam helped me strap on her fifty-pound pack and we climbed upward. Lake Harris, a few miles up the trail, was greeny-blue and enclosed by cliffs. Then we were above it, tramping through alpine scrub and the blowing spear grass they called spaniard. Staggering under the weight of Pam’s pack, I tottered towards Harris Saddle (4,200 feet), which stands as a glorious gateway to Fiordland. Beyond it is the deep Hollyford Valley, which winds to the sea, and high on its far side the lovely Darran Mountains, with glaciers still slipping from their heights and new snow whipping from their ridges.
The Harris Saddle was worth the long climb for the sight of the panorama of summits to the west, a succession of mile-high mountains – Christina, Sabre, Gifford, Te Wera, and Madeline. I could not imagine mountains packed more tightly than this – a whole ocean of whitened peaks, like an arctic sea.
Apart from the wind whispering in the stunted scrub, there was silence here. At this height, among powerful mountains, I felt that I had left mean and vulgar things far behind, and entered a world without pettiness. Its counter-part, and a feeling it closely resembles, is that soaring sense of well-being inspired by a Gothic cathedral – not a nineteenth-century New Zealand imitation, of which there were many, but a real one.
Walking along the ridge of the Harris Saddle, I had a clear recollection of the London I had left, of various events that people talked about: a steamy affair between a literary editor and one of her younger assistants; of a famous widow, an obnoxious Ann Hathaway type, who gave parties – drinkers jammed in a room full of smoke – that people boasted of attending. I saw people – writers – talking on television programs, and partygoers smoking, and snatching drinks from a waitress’s tray, and shrieking at each other, and talking about the literary editor and her younger lover, and then they all went home drunk.
From this path blowing with wild flowers and loose snow these far-off people seemed tiny and rather pathetic in their need for witnesses.
“Bullshit!” I yelled into the wind, startling Isidore until he discerned that I was smiling.
I needed to come here to understand that, and I felt I would never go back.
Walking these New Zealand mountains stimulated my memory. My need for this strange landscape was profound. Travel, which is nearly always seen as an attempt to escape from the ego, is in my opinion the opposite. Nothing induces concentration or inspires memory like an alien landscape or a foreign culture. It is simply not possible (as romantics think) to lose yourself in an exotic place. Much more likely is an experience of intense nostalgia, a harking back to an earlier stage in your life, or seeing clearly a serious mistake. But this does not happen to the exclusion of the exotic present. What makes the whole experience vivid, and sometimes thrilling, is the juxtaposition of the present and the past – London seen from the heights of Harris Saddle.
Leaving the others behind I started the long traverse across the high Hollyford Face – three hours at a high altitude without shelter, exposed to the wind but also exposed to the beauty of the ranges – the forest, the snow, and a glimpse of the Tasman Sea. It was more than three thousand feet straight down, from the path on these cliffs to the Hollyford River on the valley floor. The track was rocky and deceptive, and it was bordered with alpine plants – daisies, snow berries and white gentians.
Ocean Peak was above us as I moved slowly across the rock face. It was not very late, but these mountains are so high the sun drops behind them in the afternoon, and without it I was very cold. The southerly wind was blowing from Antarctica. As the day darkened I came to a bluff, and beneath me in a new valley was a green lake. I was at such a high altitude that it took me another hour to descend the zigzag path.
Deeper in the valley I was among ancient trees; and that last half-hour, before darkness fell, was like a walk through an enchanted forest, the trees literally as old as the hills, grotesquely twisted and very damp and pungent. A forest that is more than a thousand years old, and that has never been touched or interfered with, has a ghostly look, of layer upon layer of living things, and the whole forest clinging together – roots and trunks and branches mingled with moss and rocks, and everything above ground hung with tufts of lichen called “old man’s beard.”
It was so dark and damp here the moss grew on all sides of the trunks – the sunlight hardly struck them. The moss softened them, making them into huge, tired, misshapen monsters with great spongy arms. Everything was padded and wrapped because of the dampness, and the boughs were blackish green; the forest floor was deep in ferns, and every protruding rock was upholstered in velvety moss. Here and there was a chuckle of water running among the roots and ferns. I was followed by friendly robins.
It was all visibly alive and wonderful, and in places had a subterranean gleam of wetness. It was like a forest in a fairy story, the pretty and perfect wilderness of sprites and fairies, which is the child’s version of paradise – a lovely Disneyish glade where birds eat out of your hand and you know you will come to no harm.
I began to feel hopeful again about my life. Maybe I didn’t have cancer after all.
It was cold that night – freezing, in fact. I woke in Mackenzie Hut to frosty bushes and icy grass and whitened ferns. There was lacework everywhere, and the sound of a far-off waterfall that was like the howl of city traffic.
There were keas screaming overhead as I spent that day hiking – for the fun of it – to the head of Lake Mackenzie. The paradise shelducks objected to my invading their territory, and they gave their two-toned complaint – the male duck honking, the female squawking. I continued up the valley, boulder-hopping much of the way along a dry creek bed. It was steep, most of the boulders were four or five feet thick, so it was slow going. I sheltered by a rock the size of a garage to eat my lunch. The wind rose, the clouds grew lumpier and crowded the sky. The day darkened and turned cold.
I climbed onward, and the higher I got the freer I felt – it was that same sense of liberation I had felt on Harris Saddle, remembering the trivialities of London. At the highest point of the valley face, an uplifted platform just under Fraser Col, the clouds bulged and snow began to fall. I was in a large quarry-like place littered with boulders the size of the bungalows in Wellington, in a gusting wind. I decided not to linger. The commonest emergency in these parts is not a fall or a broken limb but rather an attack of hypothermia. I descended quickly, moving from rock to rock, to whip up my blood and warm myself, and I arrived back at the hut exhausted after what was to have been a rest day.
That night was typical of a stop at a trail hut. Over dinner we discussed murder, race relations, AIDS, nuclear testing, the greenhouse effect, Third World economies, the Maori claim to New Zealand, and Martin Luther King Day.
The Czech, whom I thought of as the Bouncing Czech – he had emigrated from Prague to become a businessman somewhere in California – said, “I never celebrate Martin Luther King Day at my plant. I make my men work.”
“How long have you lived in America?” I asked. “Since sixty-eight.”
“Do you know anything about the civil rights movement in the United States?”
“I know about my business,” he said. That was true – he spent a great deal of time boasting about how he had made it big in America.
“But you’re doing it in a free country,” I said. “When you left Czechoslovakia you could have gone anywhere, but you chose America. Don’t you think you have an obligation to know something about American history?”
“As far as I am concerned, Martin Luther King is not significant.”
“That’s an ignorant opinion,” I said.
Isidore said, “Does anyone want to play Scrabble?”
The hut was small. I was angry. I went outside and fumed, and through the heavy mist an owl ho
oted, “More pork!”
I woke early and left the hut quickly the next morning, so that I wouldn’t have to talk to the Czech. He was a rapid walker and what is known in camping circles as an equipment freak: very expensive multicolored gear.
It was raining softly as I set off, and roosting on a branch above the path ahead was a New Zealand pigeon. It was like no other pigeon in the world, fat as a football, and so clumsy you wondered how it stayed aloft; it does so with a loud thrashing of wings. In the past, the Maori who walked this way snared these kereru and ate them. They needed them to sustain themselves in their search for the godly greenstone, a nephritic jade hard enough to use for knives and axes and lovely enough for jewelry. They dug this rare stone all over the Routeburn Track. On that same stretch, from Mackenzie to Lake Howden, I heard a bellbird. This remarkable mimicking bird trills and then growls and grates before bursting into song. It was much admired by the Maori. At the birth of a son they cooked a bellbird in a sacred oven in a ritual of sacrifice meant to insure that the child had fluency and a fine voice.
The light rain in the morning increased to a soaking drizzle, turning the last mile on the Routeburn Track into a muddy creek. I passed under Earland Falls, which splashes 300 feet down – the water coursing onto the rocky path. There was water and mist and noise everywhere, and it involved a sort of baptism in order to proceed. Farther down the track the woods offered some protection from the rain, and yet we arrived at Howden Hut drenched. That is normal for Fiordland. Photography cannot do justice to rain, and so most photographs of Fiordland depict a sunny wilderness. But that sunshine is exceptional. At Lake Howden, for example, there are roughly two hundred rain days a year, producing twenty-five feet of rain.
It was still raining in the afternoon, and yet I was looking forward to three more days walking, down the Greenstone Valley to Lake Wakitipu. It was the sort of rain that makes local enthusiasts start their explanations with if only –
“If only it weren’t so misty you’d be able to see wonderful –”
Wonderful peaks, lakes, forests, cliffs, waterfalls, ridges, saddles, and ravines. They were all obscured by the rain. But the wonderful woods with their mossy grottoes were enough. This was a famous valley, one that had been pushed open when a glacier split off from the Hollyford Valley and flowed southeast about thirty miles to Lake Wakitipu. It was another Maori route to the greenstone deposits at the top of the lake. Its presence so near the rivers and lake confirmed them in their belief that the stone was a petrified fish. Greenstone had both spiritual and material significance and was cherished because it was so difficult to obtain.
Isidore still struggled along, humming Brahms. The Czech evaporated – we never saw him again – and we were joined by two New Zealanders, a courting couple, who were terrific walkers and who tripped and pushed each other, threw blobs of mud, splashed each other in the icy streams, wrestled at lunch in the tussocky meadows – kiwi courtship. And there was an elderly lawyer and his wife, from somewhere in Oregon.
Seeing the mixed bunkroom at one of the Greenstone huts, the man said, “Oh, I get it. It’s bisexual!”
Not exactly, but we knew what he meant.
The Greenstone was a walk down a river valley – no snow and sleet here. After breakfast we set off together but since everyone walked at a different pace we ended up walking alone, meeting at a rest spot for scroggin (nuts and raisins) and then onward through the forest for lunch – on the Greenstone it was always a picnic by a drinkable river – and finally slogging throughout most of the afternoon toward one of the riverside huts. As the river widened to a mile or two it became louder and frothier, and the soaked graywacke stone that lay in it made it greener.
Cataracts poured from the mountains above the trail, but they were so high and the wind so strong that they were blown aside, like vaporizing bridal veils – a gauze of mist that vanished before it reached the valley floor. We were followed by birds and watched by deer and hawks and falcons. The weather was too changeable and the prevailing westerlies too strong to assure one completely rainy – or sunny – day. Clouds were always in rapid motion in the sky and being torn apart by the Livingstone Mountains at the edge of Fiordland – for we had now left the park proper and were making our way through Wakitipu State Forest to the lake.
The silver beeches of the high altitudes gave way to the thicker, taller red beeches of the valley and the slender and strange young lancewood trees with their downward-slanting leaves at the margin of the valley floor. We walked across the sluices of long-ago rockslides and through a forest of whitened trunks of trees killed by a recent fire, and by a deep gorge and a rock (called a roche moutonnée) too stubborn for the glacier to budge, and through cool mossy woods, and knee-deep in a freezing creek – the courting couple shrieking and kicking water at each other – always followed by birds.
At the last swing bridge that trembled like an Inca walkway near the mouth of the Greenstone, where the Caples Valley converged to form an amphitheater of mountainsides, the foliage was of a European and transplanted kind – tall poplars in autumnal gold, standing like titanic ears of corn, and dark Douglas fir, and the startling red leaves of copper beeches – the trees the New Zealanders call foreign weeds and would like to destroy, root and branch.
I was sorry to reach the end of the trail, because there is something purifying about walking through a wilderness. To see a land in the state in which it has existed since it rose from the waters and let slip its ice, a land untouched, unchanged, its only alteration a footpath so narrow your elbows are forever brushing against ferns and old boughs, is greatly reassuring to the spirit.
Bush-bashing on these tracks had stimulated my imagination, and the vast landscape had a way of putting human effort into perspective. The smaller one feels on the earth, dwarfed by mountains and assailed by weather, the more respectful one has to be – and unless we are very arrogant, the less likely we are to poison or destroy it. In the Pacific the interlopers were doing the most damage – bringing nuclear waste to Johnston Island, digging a gigantic copper mine at Panguna in the North Solomons, stringing out miles of drift nets to trap and kill every living creature that came near its ligatures, testing nuclear devices at Moruroa Atoll in the Tuomotus.
But this too was Polynesia – this rain forest, these Southern Alps. Te Tapu Nui, the Maori called their mountains. “The Peaks of Intense Sacredness.”
3
Waffling in White Australia
Australia, the gigantic Pacific island of Meganesia, is an underdeveloped country that is bewildered and at times terrified by its own emptiness. People shout as though to keep their spirits up. G’day! How’s your rotten form! Good on yer!
As on every other Oceanic island, most of its people live at its shores and beaches, so its edge is bricked and bungaloid, the rest an insect-haunted wilderness of croaking wind and red desert.
And the whole place is fly-blown. “It seems an unfortunate habit of Australians to speak through their teeth as if they came from the fly country,” a Sydney judge remarked about fifty years ago, and he went on, “afraid to open their mouths for fear of flies.” People there blink at the flies and turn their backs to the desert, showing total native imbuggerance, and say Go and have a roll! or Who gives a stuff? – in snarly voices. And maybe Australians talk a lot louder because they are so far away from the rest of the world. How else will anyone hear?
The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume, but its outrageous Book of Rudeness is a hefty tome. Being offensive in a matey way gets people’s attention, and Down Under you often make friends by being intensely rude in the right tone of voice. Australian English (one of Australia’s glories and its greatest art-form) is a language of familiarity. Goodoh! How yer doin’ mate, all right? How’s your belly where the pig bit yer? Understanding the concept of mate-ship is the key to success in Australia; and mockery is the assertive warmth of mate-ship.
Australians are noted for the savage endearments in their mocke
ry, and as for self-criticism, no one is more mocking of Australia than the Australians themselves.
“This is the arse of the world,” I heard an Australian say on television. He was from Melbourne, which some Australians call “Smellburn.” He was commenting on the Bicentenary, the anniversary of the ignominious arrival of the first convicts at Botany Bay. “Look at us on the map,” he went on. “The country resembles a bum. And, look” – he was pointing to its contours – “two sagging bum-cheeks!”
I brought my collapsible boat to the coast of Western Australia, which is a state the size of Mexico, a place which that man would have termed the left buttock. This was Perth, and you never saw such wind.
“We’re on the edge of the earth,” a woman said to me in the nearby harbor town of Fremantle. “And guess which other writer was here?” she said. “D. H. Lawrence. For two weeks.”
“Australia is outside everything,” D. H. Lawrence said in Kangaroo, the novel he wrote while he breezed through Australia in 1922. It took him less time to write this book than I took to read it, because it is practically unreadable. He started writing the thing, anatomizing and fictionalizing Australia, about ten days after he got to the country and he finished it less than a month later. Five weeks to write a 400-page novel. Lawrence is flat-footed in this book, but never mind! You have to admire his speed. And now and then he surpasses himself, describing a plopping wave or a jellyfish.
