Kiwi Tracks (22 page)
Authors: Lonely Planet
As I leave the bookstore, a small piece on the front page of the newspaper catches my eye:
MAN TAKES ON SHARK
An Invercargill man jumped off a boat and wrestled with a four-metre shark in Milford Sound yesterday. Grant Lightfoot was on a diving boat when the shark was sighted. Others on the boat went to look over the side at the thresher shark, but Mr Lightfoot jumped in and killed it with his knife. ‘I don’t know why I did it. It was a spur of the moment thing.’ Mr Lightfoot plans to keep the jaw as a trophy.
What’s with these guys?
LAKE WAIKAREMOANA
EAST CAPE
COROMANDEL PENINSULA
COROMANDEL – AUCKLAND – KERIKERI
NORTHLAND
NINETY MILE BEACH – CAPE MARIA VAN DIEMEN – CAPE REINGA
Riding in the front seat beside the bus driver to ward off motion sickness, I still feel pangs of nausea as we negotiate an endless series of turns, swinging into another bend before we have completed the previous one. You would think he was driving a Formula One car on a racetrack and not a bus on a gravel road. The front wheels are often dangerously close to a precipitous drop down steep cliffs into a river valley. Despite the driver’s reassurance that he has driven this route for twenty years, I feel apprehensive. It would be my bad luck to be with him when his good luck runs out.
Hours later and much to my relief, we pull up at isolated Lake Waikaremoana. It is cold outside and grey clouds hang heavy in the sky. Judging from the open pack and unfurled sleeping-bag inside the spartan DOC bunkhouse, someone else is there to keep me company.
To shake out the stiffness in my joints from the bus ride, I walk down to the lake. A woman dives into the dark waters, swimming some distance before returning to climb up onto the pebbly beach. She sees me looking at her and smiles with a broad, toothy grin. Crow’s feet spread from the outer corners of striking blue eyes. Her strong facial features hint at an equally resolute personality. Her hair is pulled up in a topknot, revealing the softness of the skin on the nape of her neck.
Ingrid, my bunkhouse-mate, introduces herself and extends her hand in greeting; her grip is firm. As we walk back to the bunkhouse together she tells me she has been driving around New Zealand in a second-hand car. She has a barely perceptible German accent.
‘You just decided to take the year off and drive around New Zealand?’ I ask, holding the bunkhouse door open for her.
‘Yes,’ Ingrid answers. She adds, hinting at some dark secret as she enters the cabin: ‘I’m just taking it one day at a time. The headmaster of my school told me to take as much time as I need. I teach remedial kids.’
She talks about her pupils and laughs: ‘I miss them.’
Ingrid puts the water on to boil to make tea, and changes out of her one-piece swimsuit into warmer clothes. She must be in her mid-thirties, but has the lean, muscular body of a much younger woman.
We sit outside on the doorstep, drinking herbal tea. Low, dense clouds obscure the sun. She recounts some of the highlights of her trip to New Zealand. ‘I climbed Mount Aspiring and Mount Cook,’ she says, matter-of-fact. ‘I like climbing mountains. In Germany, we rode motorbikes all the time, my husband and I.’ She hesitates momentarily, before continuing: ‘We rode everywhere in Europe and did a lot of climbing. We climbed Mont Blanc, from the bottom up, using no lifts.’
She tries to warm herself against the outside chill, holding the mug tightly cupped in both hands. ‘Some things happened here that made me really happy.’ Her face is animated and full of vitality when she speaks. She has a child-like demeanour, emphasised by a barely disguised giggle as she relates her experiences. ‘I was on Dusky Sound in Fiordland. We were several tourists in a boat after doing a dive and saw bottlenose dolphins swimming in the fiord. We put on wetsuits and jumped into the water.’ Her excitement is infectious. ‘One dolphin stayed to play with us. We formed a circle, holding hands, the dolphin swam up from underneath and jumped out of the water from within our circle. You can imagine our surprise. He did this several times,
sometimes almost landing back on top of us. I touched him often. The dolphin seemed to like it, did not swim away and always came back, especially to me. The others climbed into the boat because they were so cold, but I stayed in the water. The dolphin was big and kept circling so close to me. It was too tempting not to, so I reached for his dorsal fin and he dragged me through the water. When I couldn’t hold on any longer and let go, he came back, as if to pick me up and take me somewhere far away.’ She laughs at the memory. ‘He pulled me around for almost half an hour, returning many times if I let go. It was a wonderful, strange experience.’
For some time she is quiet and when I look at her I see she is crying. She wipes the tears from her eyes. ‘Really, it is impossible to describe my feelings.’ She continues: ‘It happened again at Akaroa. I swam quite far out from the shore because I heard there were Hector dolphins there. I started to sing underwater. Maybe five or ten minutes later, six Hector dolphins came and played with me. When I was tired, I swam ashore. There were people watching me on shore and they told me the dolphins swam all the way with me, although I did not see them. That was magnificent, too.’ She reflects for a while. ‘In Abel Tasman, I rented a kayak for some days and several times seal pups climbed onto the kayak.’
It is almost sunset. Dark clouds break in the west, revealing a golden horizon. A breeze picks up, scooting white crests of waves down the lake. We take advantage of the clearer skies to go for a walk. Ingrid leads me up a well-used track through dense bush. The lake shimmers like molten gold, reflecting the colour of the sky. The bush is thick with ferns, vines and moss, but on the edge of the cliff the slanting rays of the sun cut under the canopy of vegetation. We reach a giant rata tree more than eight hundred years old, according to a sign at its base. Craning my neck to look up, I see two levels, floors of vegetation where you could build a substantial tree house.
The last rays of the sun filter through the vegetation. As the light fades, the forest rapidly becomes sinister and threatening.
Darkness embraces the gaps and clearings, and it is easy to imagine goblins amongst the shadows. I follow Ingrid’s shadowy figure as we descend through the bush.
Back at the bunkhouse we prepare hot chocolate and, dressed warmly, escape the confines of the cabin. We sit outside by the lake again, watching the stars and looking for satellites. There doesn’t seem to be as many satellites here as there are in the northern hemisphere. Sometimes we talk, often there is silence; but the stillness between us is comfortable. The breeze pushes waves onto the pebbly beach with gentle, invisible splashes.
‘Where do you live?’ she asks, turning to look at me. I hesitate. ‘You don’t know?’ she prompts, misinterpreting my silence.
‘I’ve been living in Norway for the last five years.’
‘With someone?’ she asks.
‘Yes. That’s why I moved there.’
‘And she is still special?’
‘Yes. I mean … I just don’t know how to explain it exactly. Even though I have not seen her for some months and do not know when I will, or for how long, somehow I feel I still have her in my heart.’
‘But you have left her, and Norway?’
‘Officially, yes.’
‘Unofficially?’
‘Unofficially, as well.’ I look over at her. It is not a very satisfactory answer, but it is an honest one.
‘But why?’
I try to explain but my words seem inadequate.
She nods anyway, as if comprehending despite my tongue-tied justification for leaving behind someone that I love. ‘And where will you go after New Zealand?’
‘I don’t honestly know yet. I just want to think about things for a while. Coming here, I am far away from everyone and have lots of time to think.’
‘And heal.’
‘Yes.’ My monosyllabic reply is hardly a conversational gambit. It’s funny, or perhaps not so funny, how us guys become
unintelligible or mute when it comes to our feelings and emotions. Comes with the territory of being a male, I guess.
‘And you, what happened to your marriage?’ I ask, changing the focus. Let’s see how she answers the same question.
‘My husband died.’
Waves continue to lap on the shore, filling the breach in our conversation. She picks up a pebble, examines it carefully and then tosses it into the lake with a splash. ‘So I too am here to heal.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, the response inadequate. We have not come here to escape reality so much as to grow again. If I wanted to I could turn the clock back and still return to a love I left behind. She cannot.
‘It’s OK. I came to New Zealand to get away and I have not talked about it for a while. Maybe it is good to do so, sometimes.’ Her voice, just a whisper before, becomes stronger, the tone gentle and resigned.
‘How long ago?’ I turn to her. Even in the darkness, I see the girlish look on her face has gone. She seems tired now.
‘A year ago.’ Her fingers are locked together and she studies the backs of her hands. She takes a deep breath. The waves ripple on the shore. It seems as if she is silent for a long time, although it is probably only minutes before she continues, her voice less steady, her emotions barely in check: ‘I took a month off teaching after he died. We had met there at the school. He was the children’s bus driver. We were married for nine years.’
She pauses. The night air suddenly grows colder and I shiver.
She perseveres, her voice small, as if she were far away. ‘We were riding our motorbikes, not far from home in Germany. I was behind. An old man in a car pulled out into the road. My husband accelerated, trying to go around, but the old man tried to drive out of the way across the road. My husband crashed into the car.’
A morepork’s lament disturbs the rhythmic lapping of the waves. She is quiet before adding: ‘He was going fast. The bike and car burst into flames. When I reached him, I pulled him from the burning wreckage but his body …’ Her voice fades into a long silence.
She turns to me and asks: ‘Are you sure you want to know?’
‘Yes, if you want to tell me.’
Ingrid picks up a pebble and studies it before continuing. ‘He lay in my arms, he was still alive.’ She breathes heavily, her voice small, barely audible. ‘I screamed. Someone pulled me from him, then more people came and took me away.’ I turn to look at her. Tears slide down her cheeks, leaving wet streaks, and she takes another deep breath. ‘It was awful. You cannot imagine.’
As if suddenly physically exhausted, she rests her forehead in the palm of one hand. She leans forward, studying the pebble, and remains like that for some time, before looking out over the dark expanse of lake. ‘I just wanted to be with him. I knew … Somehow, I knew, it was all finished. One minute we had our future in front of us, full of life, and the next moment it was all gone … It happened so quickly. People were holding me back. I became calm, so they would let go of me and I could hold him. A doctor was there soon.’ She speaks in a monotone and closes her fingers around the smooth stone. ‘They let me hold my husband’s hands. I could see his legs were broken, as if they did not belong to him. I couldn’t look at his body. I squeezed his hand and asked him if he could hear me. I looked at his face and felt him squeeze my hand back. I told him I loved him and he pressed my hand again, three times. “
Ich liebe dich.
” I love you.’ Her fist clenches the stone three times as she speaks, the veins on the back of her hand dilating. ‘He always did that.’
She opens the palm of her hand, the pebble a pool of darkness against the paleness of her skin. ‘His eyes couldn’t focus. He was staring straight ahead, empty. He couldn’t see me any more, but he could still hear me. Blood was coming out of his mouth, nose, ears. He was dying. The doctor told me he would be OK, but I knew. He was letting himself go; he wasn’t fighting, his hand was no longer pressing mine. A helicopter arrived from the hospital and then fire trucks and ambulances.’
She is silent a long time. ‘His leather suit was burnt.’ She inhales deeply. ‘It had a strong smell.’ She breathes out, then in deeply again and holds her breath. I sit there equally still, not sure
what to do or say. Not even the morepork cries now. ‘It’s cold,’ she says finally, with a shiver, letting the air out of her lungs. But she does not get up.
‘After a month I needed to get back to work, to keep my mind occupied, otherwise I would go crazy. The children helped but when the school year ended, I wanted to go away. The headmaster told me to take as much time as I needed; the job would always be waiting. My husband had been dead for almost a year and yet I felt as if he were looking over my shoulder all the time. It was so real, I could feel him beside me, hear his words. Sometimes I would conclude unfinished conversations with him; I could imagine him whispering to me, as if he was physically there, but had suddenly become invisible.’ She is quiet some time before she says: ‘I decided to come here to New Zealand. The night before I left Germany, I had a dream about him. He said he couldn’t follow me if I went so far away. He wasn’t angry in my dream, he was letting go, letting me let go of him. I was sad, but happy somehow that he couldn’t follow me, as if I could begin life again, and begin to forget.’ She adds, as if reciting a memorised line, ‘It is better that I forget and smile now, than remember and be sad forever. He will always be with me anyway.’
She grips the pebble tightly, reaches back and throws it so far into the murkiness of the lake that we neither see nor hear the splash.
