What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

by Kristin Newman

  What would ten days of not speaking even feel like? Almost immediately, my fantasy about the silent meditation retreat started to include a handsome, silent stranger sitting across the meditation yurt. We would spend ten days communicating with only our eyes, falling deeper and deeper in love without speaking a word. Even without speaking, I would just know that he loved children and dancing. He would just know that I was neither a morning nor a night person, and would think being at one’s best only between ten a.m. and seven p.m. was normal and charming. And at the end of the ten days, a bell would ring signaling the completion of our vow of silence, and he would walk up to me, and say:

  “Hello.”

  “Hello,” I’d reply, taking his hand.

  And we would be in love.

  I was so enamored with that ending that I immediately started writing a play with that “Hello” as the last line. (In my head I wrote it. Let’s not get excited and think I actually put pen to paper.) That final “Hello” before the stage lights went out would leave the audience wondering—would they really be in love once they found out that the other person was nothing like they imagined, like the audience had known all along? What if this play was a huge hit?! I could marry my meditation boyfriend and become a playwright and move to New York and be done with Hollywood forever!!! And, by the way, FUCK that network president who didn’t even give me a chance to prove him wrong!!! I should have just picked up the phone months ago, and told him that—

  So that was a no on the silent meditation retreat. I would have adventures and find international love instead, I decided. Which, really, is the only way I’ve ever found to quiet my mind, if not my mouth.

  Quiet country life with Josh and Olivia was not leading to either adventure or love, but I had one other contact in New Zealand. A friend who worked in extreme sports connected me with her “hot Maori friend” who sold surf and snowboard gear, and he invited me to come stay in Mount Maunganui, a little beach town on the North Island. Josh offered to drive me there, and when we arrived we found that the hot Maori wouldn’t be around until the next day, since he had gone away for the weekend … with his girlfriend. So Josh and I got hotel rooms and went out to dinner.

  We ended up meeting a posse of fun Kiwis who invited us back to a house party right on the beach. The party was very cool, with a bonfire on the sand, a DJ, and lovely, friendly surf people dancing everywhere. Oh, hello, international sexy love story. But everyone was coupled up. And very into gardening. The biggest, hottest Maori surfers would amble up, lean in close, and shout over the pumping electronica in those adorable accents:

  “My sweet peas are going off right now! The boys came over and we put up a new deck and trellis, and the vines are loving it! They’re doing so well my partner and I are thinking of expanding the veggies this year if we can move the compost heap,” one might offer, except in a twenty-minute version, with his girlfriend suddenly appearing on his lap.

  And then another huge dude would start to talk about his tomatoes. For an hour. They love their gardens in New Zealand.

  There is something about New Zealand that attracts runaways. Over and over and over again, other travelers told me their stories. And almost no one was just there to see the scenery. Everyone was going through something, running away from something, processing something, putting off something. I learned that night in Mount Maunganui that my sweet, cheerful friend Josh had moved to the country in New Zealand after ten years in San Francisco because of a nasty little speed habit he had acquired as a result of the fifteen-hour workdays of a chef. He couldn’t quite figure out how to stop, but thought removing himself to a green, quiet place at the bottom of the world might do it. He was right.

  The hot Maori and his lovely blond girlfriend invited me to stay for as long as I liked. This is what all Kiwis do, inexplicably. When I was ready to move on after a few days, they took the day off work to drive me to Rotorua, an actively volcanic national park like Yellowstone with crazy stinky weird stuff coming out of the earth. With the funky smells of Rotorua returned the emotional funk of my work heartbreak in Hollywood, my first-week running-away high fading as my new friends drove off. So I kept moving.

  My Mount Maunganui friends insisted that I go to Queenstown, a mountain town on a lake on the South Island, where bungee jumping and canyoneering and just about every other extreme sport were invented. They e-mailed their “gorgeous” friend Alex, who lived in town, and promised I’d be shown a great time. Why I expected Alex to be a hot, single, interested, male extreme-sports guide, after so much evidence that this was not going to happen on this trip, is beyond me, but I did. As you would expect, because you are brighter than I, Alex was a beautiful, thirtysomething woman. And instead of meeting me for a beer, like I suggested, she met me at the airport, with my name on a sign, then took me back to her lovely two-bedroom cottage on a flowery hill overlooking the town and the lake.

  “I hope this is okay,” Alex said, as she showed me to her extra bedroom, where she had put lavender on the pillow. “Stay as long as you like.”

  This is just what happens in New Zealand. In the six weeks I ended up spending in that country, originally knowing only one local, I paid for a place to stay for exactly seven nights. Kiwis just kept passing me to other Kiwis, who inexplicably would invite me to stay for months if I wanted, and then call another Kiwi down the road to take me in if I was moving on. Maybe being in the middle of the ocean at the bottom of the world makes them happy for a visitor and a story, or maybe they’re just the most hospitable people on earth. As someone who comes from a group of friends who no longer give each other rides to the airport or help each other move, I found it remarkable.

  Gorgeous Alex turned out to know every extreme-sports guide in town. That first day, she and I went down to the lakefront and lay in the sun, watching paragliders float down from a mountain above us. I said I’d love to paraglide while I was in town.

  “Easy! That’s Casey flying down right now. I’ll text him,” Alex said, and pulled out her phone. Moments later, smiley, adorable Casey dropped out of the sky and landed lightly on the sand in front of us.

  “Welcome to town, American friend! Got your text, done for the day, but I’ll take you flying in the morning,” Casey trilled in his delightful accent, almost as he landed. He then threw his parachute into a backpack and invited us to come across the street to the bar where the flyboys were all gathered for postwork beers, a parachute under every barstool.

  That night I extended my trip by three weeks.

  But I would not end up kissing any of these men, regardless of how long I stayed. I would go on glorious, wind-whipped rides around the lake on the back of their Ducatis, and blast through canyons on their speedboats, and eat and drink in their homemade houses. I would hear stories of how the idea of bungee jumping came to two of them one night on acid, twenty years before, and of their famous illegal leap off the Eiffel Tower that brought bungee jumping to the world stage. I would go to a couple of memorial parties/flights with them (an alarming percentage of their population had died in extreme-sports accidents, and they always memorialized these victims with more extreme sports). I went to one flirty (taken) flyboy’s fortieth birthday, which was out in the country, at the base of a mountain, at the paragliding headquarters. While a hundred people danced on a deck under the stars, he and a few friends took their parachutes up to the mountain above us at midnight, and flew through the pitch-black night to the dancing throngs way below. Their headlamps glittered faintly in the sky above the makeshift dance floor where we all watched them drift down through the darkness for half an hour, until they finally landed perfectly in the middle of the party.

  While there were not a lot of handsome men in New Zealand (too small a genetic pool of Brits breeding with Brits?), the few there were lived in Queenstown. But they all had girlfriends. Perhaps another result of being on a sparsely populated, male-deficient set of islands at the bottom of the world—the cute ones are hunted too aggressively to roam free f
or long.

  Finally, on yet another day that Casey and the other Kiwi flyers said was too windy to go safely, a twenty-year-old Swiss paraglider named Swiss Dave offered to take me flying. And because my fear of missing out on a nice heartbreak-numbing adventure is far greater than my fear of getting blown into a mountain, I went.

  Swiss Dave and I drove way down the valley, to a launch spot he said was safer on windy days than the mountain above town, where the pesky buildings and large freezing lake could make a missed landing a bummer. We drove up a mountain, he strapped me to his chest, and we ran off a cliff, floating into the sky over the green, green valley. It made me feel like Supergirl, and Swiss Dave started doing tricks, spiraling to the right, and then to the left. I loved it … until I started to get nauseated.

  “I think I don’t feel well!” I shouted into the wind.

  “Yeah, it’s rough up here!” Dave shouted back. “Probably was too windy after all. Gonna miss the landing spot!”

  “I kinda think I’m gonna be sick!” I finally confessed, as we kept drifting.

  “We’re almost there. There’s a sheep field that the farmer lets me land in when I overshoot. Hang on!”

  Finally, fifteen seconds before landing, I could hang on no longer. For some reason I decided that when one needs to vomit while falling from the sky strapped to the chest of a Swiss man, the best move is to cover one’s mouth with one’s hands. Which did a great job of making sure all of the vomit went back onto my own face, as well as around my head and onto the face of Swiss Dave. This all happened about four seconds before we hit the ground, hard, and I fell face-first into a pile of sheep shit, Swiss Dave on top of me.

  “Nice!” he exclaimed.

  I met up with Swiss Dave five years later, in Interlaken, Switzerland, where he was living. He was still paragliding, and Emma and I were traveling through after a spring snowboarding mission on the Matterhorn. I bought him a beer, and apologized once again for my gastric faux pas all those years earlier. He waved me off—it apparently happens all the time.

  “What percentage of the people you take up puke on you?” I asked him that night, in a loud Swiss basement nightclub, as he danced behind my cousin.

  “About eighty,” he admitted, grinning. “At least one per day.”

  I finally left Queenstown. The uninterested and/or coupled-up cute boys were getting depressing. I started to wonder if my romantic luck abroad was limited to non-English-speaking countries, where my personality couldn’t get in the way. My gloom began to return, and I would e-mail my writer friends and my producing partners from my show, and ask what I could have done differently to keep it all from imploding. The answer was always the same: nothing. It was doomed politically from the start. But I couldn’t stop replaying notes calls with executives, conversations with actors, moments that I mentally rewrote until I was smarter or more political or more manipulative or less trusting than I had actually been.

  One thing was for sure: I was not yet ready to go back to Hollywood.

  I needed to walk. So I joined a five-day hut-to-hut hiking tour of the Milford Track, one of the iconic Great Walks of New Zealand. We walked eight to ten hours a day, through green, wet valleys, sometimes in the rain, always surrounded by dozens of waterfalls streaming down the black mountains on either side. At night we slept under down comforters in secluded lodges that were only for the walkers, and ate three-course meals with wine we didn’t have to carry on our exhausted backs. I spent the walking days alternating between peaceful and angry. Sometimes just breathing in the green, sometimes playing out various drafts of perfectly written “so there!”s against those who did me wrong in Hollywood as I marched.

  My walking mates, mostly other solo travelers, were, for the most part, no less tortured. Among the group, we had:

  One punk-rock-haired Australian girl who was going through her first divorce at twenty-six.

  One twentysomething Swedish student whose mother had kidnapped her and her siblings as children. Her mother then brainwashed them with lies about their Canadian father, who died before my friend finally found out the truth and tracked him down.

  One sixty-year-old Australian owner of an online gambling site who had just lost his mother.

  One fortysomething American couple and their single female friend, who struggled valiantly not to be sad about being a third wheel.

  One thirty-year-old, muscled Texan who had just cashed out of a successful sex toy business and was trying to figure out what to do next.

  And finally there were two fiftysomething Kiwi businessmen, old, jolly friends who took hiking and fishing trips together a few times a year, and whose wives and grown children were friends back home. One night, in one of the cozy little lodges, I watched the two buddies rubbing each other’s sore backs and feet … and heads and legs and chests. Further conversation made it clear that these quarterly fishing and hiking vacations were also vacations from their marriages, and heterosexuality.

  “Do your wives know?” I asked them.

  “Probably,” they said cheerily. “Who knows. But we don’t talk about it.”

  “Have you ever thought of leaving them, and being together?” I asked.

  “Nah, the girls are lovely. And the four of us have a nice time together. We just like a little Brokeback variety!” one explained. They had been taking these trips for almost thirty years.

  We all walked, and talked, and sometimes separated and spent the whole day walking alone. The scenery looked like that of The Lord of the Rings, and we felt like explorers on a quest. I started replaying the last year of my life less, and started to think about the future more. At night in the lodge, my new friends reported the same phenomenon. Divorces were becoming less important, deaths less tragic and more a part of life, ideas for “what’s next” springing up with each step. My “tragedy” felt much less like a tragedy in the face of these real tragedies, and more like what it was: a really lucky experience that just didn’t last forever.

  Our five-day walk ended in Milford Sound, a spectacular bay surrounded by dramatic fjords, on a dark, stormy day. We celebrated the journey, dancing in the outpost’s one pub, and playing pool, and taking pictures of one another in big group hugs. I held off an inappropriately young kayaking guide or two so I could just chat and laugh with my new friends. I had finally taken the universe’s hint: this trip was not for kissing boys.

  (To this day, many years after my New Zealand adventure, I have one sad, lone condom in my toiletry bag. It made that trip to New Zealand with me … and came home with me. Six years later, it’s become sort of a good-luck totem, that hopeful condom that never got used, but is extraordinarily well-traveled.)

  Jana the kidnapped Swedish girl had been traveling around New Zealand on a bicycle. She had ridden alone, with all of her belongings, across the South Island, over a mountain range, staying with sheep farmers along the way who would call their friends who were a day’s ride down the road to make sure she had another bed for the next night. She and I decided to travel together for a few days after Milford, and so got a little car, and headed east to Kaikoura.

  Kaikoura is a tiny town on the water, famous for its marine life. I had grown up on the ocean, had traveled to dozens of beach towns around the world, and yet had never seen a whale. It was weird, and I was determined to see one here. Jana decided she’d rather see wine country, and so we separated for the afternoon.

  You could go whale watching two ways: on a boat, or in a helicopter. Since in New Zealand only two vessels of any sort are allowed to be near a whale at any one time, once a whale surfaces it’s a race by all of the tour companies to be one of those two. So the helicopter is the way to go, because you get to the whale first. I learned in the hostel that my ability to take the more expensive helicopter option made me a “flash-packer” in this part of the world, which basically means you are a backpacker who can afford private rooms in the hostel and helicopter rides. I liked that—it sounded age-appropriate, but still fun.


  I went up in the helicopter after a day of swimming in the ocean with hundreds of wild dolphins. We were instructed that if we sang to them it would get their attention, so a dozen of us floated in the frigid Antarctic water singing “Hot Cross Buns” and “Paradise City” into our snorkels. The dolphins swam by with their babies, who nosed me in the tummy and jumped over and under us as they passed. After the dolphin swim, I headed for the helicopter, where my tour partners were a gorgeous honeymooning couple from, of course, Argentina. The man could have been Father Juan’s brother, all shiny hair and dulce de leche skin. We went up together, and I got to see my first whale in the wild.

  I ended the day alone on a black-sand beach under a glacier-covered mountain, and as I watched the sun set, I noticed something: I wasn’t mentally fighting with anyone in Hollywood anymore. I was just alone on a beach, and at peace. The year started to coalesce for me: I had basically gone to grad school for showrunning. I knew how to do it now. I had been given an amazing experience, and a four-million-dollar short film about my family. I had learned I was a real writer, that if I had to write a new script in one day every day for months for forty-five bosses with conflicting directives, I could. What had been the worst part of the show experience was how out of control I was. But getting on a plane and getting away from it all gave me my life back so I could see what was ultimately a work failure as just a small part of a big picture of goodness. My life as it had lain out so far felt very full, and rich.

  But also, I realized … done. Not like I was ready to die, or change careers, or leave L.A. forever, but I realized at the end of this day of spectacular experiences by myself that I had a lot of days full of spectacular experiences by myself. The whole Lone Woman at the Bottom of the World thing was pretty checked off. Perhaps, finally, even played out. Just as I had proved to myself that I was a real writer, I had proved to myself that I could be happy and brave and tackle the planet by myself. So … I didn’t need to prove anything anymore. I could stop.