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| ISBN-13: | 9781775582359 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Auckland University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 208 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Waimarino County & Other Excursions
By Martin Edmond
Auckland University Press
Copyright © 2007 Martin EdmondAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77558-235-9
CHAPTER 1
Waimarino County
I
A wagon load of shattered glass on a siding beneath a sky bright with rain. A two-stroke motor, whining like a mason bee in the cells of my prodigal mind. A cross-eyed railway clerk and an enormous Maori in a swanndri. Two kids ride by on bicycles, weaving between the steel girders holding up the corrugated iron roof of the station veranda. In a forgotten nook between the station proper and the toilet block, a sullen girl in a checked shirt and jeans is whipper-snippering the waist-high grass. Soaking wet stems churn in the teeth of the blade, showing piddle yellow as the seed heads go down.
The rain falls from a white sky. Wisps of cloud catch in the greeny-black trees across the tracks, where three identical railway houses stand unnaturally far apart from each other, their back doors to the hidden mountain. The girl sighs and gives up her mowing. The cross-eyed clerk puts on a peaked cap and climbs down on to the rails. The Maori strides into a big red shed from which, impressively, he emerges at the controls of a diesel engine. This he hitches, with the help of the clerk, to the front of a long line of trucks. The goods train passes slowly through the station. The rolling stock is the property of the TransAmerica Corporation; some trucks are labelled Warning: Poison.
The two-stroke starts up again. The kids ride round and round, round and round. I walk up to the end of Thames Street and then I walk back down again. I buy two oranges at the general store and eat them under the leery eyes of the clerk. I read the Wanganui Chronicle from cover to cover. The front-page story tells how sixteen police outfitted in full riot control gear dealt with the drunken antics of a bottle-smashing, rock-throwing crowd outside a party on Saturday night in the River City. The rain gets heavier. I can hear it now on the tin roof of the veranda, the single event inside an immensity of time on a small town railway platform in the back country on a wet Monday afternoon. What am I doing here.
II
It was just before Christmas, 1980. I had ridden the daylight train down from Auckland, planning to meet a friend from Wellington at Ohakune Junction. He was driving up, with camera. I had this idea of using a series of photographs of the district to illustrate a piece of writing. Whether the writing would be about the photographs or the photographs about the writing, I didn't know. But I knew what I wanted photographed: empty, derelict houses. This is twenty-five years ago now and it's hard to recall exactly why I wanted these particular images. Perhaps I thought they could be an objective correlative to my rather studied melancholy. Maybe I thought they would say something about time and change. Or it might have been that I hoped to find in them traces of something lost.
When Barry arrived we drove into town and then out the other side again. We were going down to see the place in Moore Street where his grandmother once lived. It was a rundown 1950s weatherboard house inside a picket fence. The tops of the pickets were carved into reclining crescent moons with five-pointed stars in their cusps. Hearts, diamonds, spades, clubs from the playing card pack crowned other pickets outside other houses. You could see they had been painted blue and white and red and purple and gold. They were insignia of the Ratana Movement, which once had many adherents in this part of the country.
Our old family home in nearby Burns Street was a dilapidated wooden villa standing naked among the tough grass where somebody's sheep were grazing. It was for sale. I remembered the honeysuckle hedge, the snowball and the lilac, the beech tree and the palm tree. Round the back there was a walnut, an almond, a greengage, a nectarine, a quince. There were pungas, a row of outhouse sheds, a vegetable garden, the chook run, the back fence beyond which the river ran. It was all gone now, as were most of the other places where our neighbours with their hieratic names lived: Mrs Clancy, the Magees, the Rochforts, the Reynolds, the Williams, the Jenkins, the Chamberlains, Miss Seth-Smith, Charlie Herkt, the Aubreys, the Jamiesons, the Morrises, the Prams ... the houses that were still standing had shrunk with the years. Over the road, where my sisters kept their horses, where in the manuka the girl next door once pulled down her pants to show me her fanny, were a couple of brand new Neill Homes.
Barry knew the address of a boarding house. The Lodge was the property of the Teachers' Training College Mountain Club in Palmerston North, run by a bloke called Gil. He was about sixty, lean, tall, sandy, balding, wearing thick glasses before swimming eyes. Genuinely affable, especially when we handed over the money. We went inside to meet the wife. They had a black poodle called Smoky. The TV blared. A smell of dog and cigarette smoke mingled with stale cooking fat. A closed interior in a cold climate. You stay there long enough, you don't notice any more.
Out the back where the rooms for hire were, you could look away over emerald green grass to the shrouded mountain. In the still falling rain, the rotting wood of gone dwellings leached back into the soil it was milled from only fifty years before. I remembered something curious about this town: in his MA thesis my father mentions that the houses here were too few and built too far apart from each other to make rating economic. A disproportionate distance had to be covered if the Council was to provide essential services like water and sewage to each domicile. It seemed an apt index of the desolation all around.
III
We went down Dreadnought Road to see the Ruapehu Hotel. It was still there then. You could make out the letters of its name fading along the weatherboards of the right-hand gable. In the overgrown garden, red-hot pokers raised their vivid cones in the air. The veranda sagged. One of the dormer windows, broken, was stuffed with boards and straw. The front door opened and a woman came out.
She was big-boned and barefoot and did not look her sixty-five years. She said she'd raised seventeen children and six grandchildren in that house. No regrets, except perhaps the lack of royalties from the many who came to photograph her gothic mansion. Mr Smiles, selling pictures of it in his shop on Cuba Street. Someone else had made place mats. There were tea trays too. There ought to be a law. What else? You have to be patient. You have to wait out the silences, staring into the white distance between one remark and the next. The slight rain drifted down Dreadnought Road towards us.
It rains more since they milled the bush, she offered.
She remembered when there were thirty sawmills within an eight-mile radius of the town. Then the bad years after the boom was over, the Depression, the War, the long slow postwar decline, which the opening of the ski fields reversed. A fifty-year slump between the bush and the mountain. She didn't ask us in, but through the half-open door I caught a glimpse of wonders ... a glass-doored tallboy full of bric-à-brac ... a painted plaster parrot won at the Taihape Show ... little ornamental dolls a sailor son brought back from Japan ... pieces of kauri gum ... postcards from Spain ... a cuckoo clock. In a falling-down garage round the side of the house was a 1955 FJ Holden Special, pristine, before a lawn edged with white-painted car tyres upon which stood a single cabbage tree.
IV
The day wore on. The sky, without clearing, became more brilliant, turning a transparent yellow. Below, in the mortal world, that heavenly light illuminated less and less. The electric grass, the macrocarpa hedges, the wet grey fence battens covered with pale green beards of lichen, reserved their contours to themselves, without insistence, without shadow, until they faded to mere presences in the gloom.
Driving out along the Rangataua Road, we came across an abandoned four-room cottage whose twin windows and gaping door resembled the face of some gaunt survivor of the deluge. We climbed the fence, walked through the dripping grass to the house and went inside. It was full of ghosts. Cold fingers on shivering flesh, tears starting in my eyes. That their lives had come to this.
Through a broken window, dark green foliage of the macrocarpa looked like hectic paint strokes. On a wall next to the fireplace, someone had scratched the word HELP in high quavery letters. And again by the doorway leading into the hall. Across the floor, a scatter of barbed wire, broken glass, rotted wood. In the tiny kitchen, as if built for dwarfs, the red rust and debris of the shattered coal range. And on the bedroom wall, torn from newspapers and pasted up, image after image of brides and grooms on their wedding days, the men's dark suits greying, the brides' white dresses gone brown with the years.
V
Further on is Karioi, where the first sheep stations were, the site of race meetings, feasts and hui a hundred years ago. Further on again, is the railway bridge at Tangiwai, replacing the one a lahar out of the crater lake on Ruapehu tumbled into the turbid waters of the Whangaehu on Christmas Eve, 1953, taking with it the northbound Limited Express. One hundred and fifty-three people died that night. The engine and some of the carriages remained in the river bed for years, for years you could find debris from the wreck down there; the concrete piles of the old bridge still lie out in the water.
A quarter of a century later, the only signs we found were a rusty bolt in the sand and a cross nearby made of two bits of wood nailed together. It was painted white and on it was written in black the time and the date of the accident, the name of the place, the number of the dead and the words: In Memory Of Those Who Died Here. Beyond, the sinister, yellow-grey waters of the Whangaehu swirled. We used to come out here sometimes to get sand for the sandpit. As kids we believed if you went too close to the river you'd be sucked under and drowned, mouth and nose and eyes and ears clogged with fine sulphuric silt, the voice of the volcano grumbling in your skull as the water closed over.
There was also an effluent pipe discharging into the river just down from the new railway bridge. The colour of the discharge was the same as that of the river, but it had a distinct, pungent, chemical smell, making the brimstone waters seem wholesome in comparison. This pipe ran from the Winstone Pulp plant up the way, where pine trees from the 17,000-acre Karioi State Forest were being mashed. This was perhaps the final destination of whatever poison was in those railway trucks belonging to the TransAmerica Corporation. They chased us out of there with a jeep.
VI
Next morning we went up the mountain. To get there you have to pass the elephant's grave. The ghost of Rajah stands gate-keeper at that entrance to the Tongariro National Park. He came with Wirth's Bros Circus back in the 1950s, and remains because he ate tutu berries in autumn when they are poisonous to animals. For the burial, they bulldozed a hole in the ground just across the railway tracks, winched the elephant in then bulldozed the earth back over him. I remember as a child going to look at the mound of dirt; perched on top was a tiny bouquet of flowers, bittersweet, so funny, so sad.
We entered a forest of huge trees, tawai, rimu and matai. As we climbed the trees shrank, thinned out, changed, until the bush was mostly just mountain beech and mingi mingi. The sealed road gave way to a dirt track that got rockier and rougher the higher we went. Errant watercourses cut across it, scarring the bare earth. The wind was moaning across the razorbacks, skidding great rent sheets of cloud down the valleys. A cold, wet rain fell in violent showers. In between, the blazing white sky cleared so we could see red rock stretching for miles in the intermittent light; the foaming, bubbling waters running off the mountain made it look like a huge ice-cream cone, melting.
We had Talking Heads' Remain in Light playing on the tape deck, the song was 'Once in a Lifetime':
Letting the days go by
Let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by
Water flowing underground
Into the blue again
In the silent water
Under the rocks and stone
There is water underground ...
We stopped once on the way down. I walked out on to a bluff overlooking the beginnings of the river that would become the Mangawhero, the one in which, further down, lazy mountain trout swam in golden pools, the one that ran behind our old house in Burns Street. The waterfall was a vivid slash of white across the red rocks and brown volcanic earth. The air was very cold. The tall columns of the rain strode from ridge to ridge behind me. I remember thinking if I was going to make bones, this would be a good place to leave them. It would be like ending where I had begun. I was very melodramatic in those days.
VII
On a high green hill just outside Raetihi stands a Ratana church with twin domed towers upon which Arepa and Omeka, Alpha and Omega, are traditionally written. We stopped the car by a clay bank on one side of a cutting through the hill, stepped through the fence and climbed up a steep slope luxuriant with gone-to-seed grass towards the church.
Flags were flying on the marae next to the church — the Ratana flag, the Union Jack, the New Zealand flag, the Rising Sun. A light rain was falling as we walked over to where a young girl sat on the steps of the whare kai. She got up and went into the building. Peering after her into the gloom, I could see the long trestle tables covered with newsprint, the orange and yellow and green and red of the bottles of soft drink, the big plates of sliced buttered bread. A man with red-rimmed eyes and a distracted air came out. He looked doubtful.
The church? he said. It might be a bit difficult, you know, because we're having a tangi here today.
He stood on the porch looking out at the falling rain.
I don't know about the church, he said at last. I'm not a Ratana, see. There's a fella in there who's a Ratana. He might be able to help you more than I can.
He turned and, stooping slightly, went back into that dark interior. He came out again with a younger man, short, stocky, well built. This man radiated that inner certainty and strength called mana. The deep, regular lines round his eyes were like the ravines we had seen up on the mountain.
Well, it's a bit difficult really, the Ratana began. It's not us younger ones you see, it's the old people ... maybe not if it was any old time, but today, with this tangi on for one of our elders ...
Both men lit cigarettes, Rothmans, using a Bic suspended in a leather pouch on a thong round the Ratana's neck. A scatter of kids drifted nearer.
How many go to the church? Barry asked.
About two, said the Ratana. No, I mean it. Two or three.
The church is down there now, said Redeye, gesturing with his thumb towards the town.
Down the pub, said the Ratana.
A thin woman came up, trailing a couple more kids. She lifted a smoke from Redeye.
I'm going home now, she said. There's no place for kids here.
She rubbed her thumb and forefinger together. Redeye reached into his pocket and pulled out some crumpled notes. He offered her a two, but her bony fingers extracted a five instead. While this was going on, another character appeared out of the darkness of the building. He was very black. The whites of his eyes glittered strangely in the gloom of the afternoon. He looked like a Dravidian.
Hey, why don't you get Him to turn the tap off up there? he said to the Ratana, jerking one hand towards the sky.
It would just come down again somewhere else, was the equable reply.
The Dravidian's eyes gleamed. He went off down the side of the building muttering to himself. There was a pause.
You can go in, but you can't take photographs. You can photograph the outside and you can have a look inside.
Inside was a little piece of heaven. The same segmented five-pointed star inside the cusp of the crescent moon was carved into the pew ends. Each segment of the star has its own colour: blue for the Father, white for the Son, red for the Holy Ghost; purple for the Angels and gold for the Mangai, T. W. Ratana. Everything in the church was painted, even the altar, which was strewn with flowers. On the wall behind it were murals, copies of the originals at the temple at Ratana.
They had been painted by a youth who was held to be a reincarnation of the prophet's son, Arepa; like Arepa, like Ratana's son Omeka, this boy died when his work was done. The murals tell the story of the movement, especially during the 1920s, when a crusade went out into the world: to the USA, to the League of Nations, to England to see the king. At Geneva the New Zealand representative to the League made sure the delegation was not received. In London, George V, King-Emperor, refused Ratana an audience.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Waimarino County & Other Excursions by Martin Edmond. Copyright © 2007 Martin Edmond. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
1 AUTOBIOGRAPHIES,Waimarino County,
The Hallelujah Chorus,
Going South,
Prospect Bay,
On Trains,
On Film,
Diptych,
2 MEDITATIONS,
Gold Tops,
Satin Brush Superb,
Folk Tale,
Rosetta,
an.aesthetic,
... among the ruins with the poor,
Lighting Out for the Territory,
The Oblate of Unknowing,
The Abandoned House as a Refuge for the Imagination,
Entoptics,
The Inconsolable Song,
Strangers in the House of the Mind,
3 ILLUSIONS,
Series of Dreams,
Marine,
El Camino Real,
Words on Maps,
Three,
Hawthorne Canal,
Mighty Dread,
Westbound Train,
Occultation,
Welladay,
Local History,
Oasis,
Rain,
There is Joy in Being Where the Angels Are,
B, D & M,
Realia,
The Avatar of Venus,
Arrivée d'un Départ,
Cirque,
The Impossibilities,
In Crocodilopolis,
4 VOICES,
Ghost Who Writes,
Afterword,