Next year, unless someone creates the groundbreaking technology that in someway begets me a life partner, I shall be going off the map. To those of you who visitate this ramble, if you go to New Zealand on google earth (its those strange islands which look like an upside down japan next to australia) and zoom in enough until you can see the roads: where the roads are not is where I will be. In gods own, it is somewhat of a rite of passage for you to go over seas before you are considered grownup. And I shall do that: I've been informed that a Phd from my current univerisity means next to bat shit in a mountain cathedral if I want to pursue a career in academia, so I shall be going overseas for further study.
But there is so much of my own country that is not well trodden. In the southern Fjords people have believed they have sighted moose, which, unlike the sasquatch, was actually introduced to NZ at sometime in the history of European's coming over and fucking up the ecology. There are places on our islands where a blind carpenter can count the number of people who have stepped there on their remaining fingers. And since I was a child, my father has treasured a basket of rocks he scavenged from Mason Bay, one of the largest coves on our southern-most isle, Stewart Island. A number of those stones were greenstone, or what is sometimes called jade, still en-coated by the geode it was found in. Even as a child, I found it smooth, cold and entrancing.
It has been my dream of many years to travel to the south of our land.
In fact, I have always had a hankering to go south. If it weren't for my friends, and the fact that it would have been more difficult for my parents to send me food parcels during my first year of uni, I probably would have migrated further south. The south has an hypnotic pull on me: the cold, the solitude...its all that I wish for on those mornings when I wrap the duvets around me and keep hitting the snooze button late into the afternoon. Like I said in the post immediately previous, I'm getting sick of things. And hopefully this trip I am planning will be an acceptable compromise between being the sociable creature you all know and love and actively shutting myself off from the world, its inhabitants, its worry.
I called my parents today. I wanted to ask my father about the challenges of traversing Stewart Island. He said he wants to come on the hike with me. I'm not opposed to the idea, as long as I am left alone in the Fjords, but I know why he is offering. My parents are worried. I could hear it in my father's voice when he hopefully asked if all those people on facebook were wanting to hang out with me, if I was doing alright, said he was comforted by the fact that I was still making my usual status-update jokes.
Hah.
But I know they are thinking back to when I was 17 and, after a breakup, had a depressive episode and asked to retreat up into the mountains for a couple of nights. Those were bad times- these are bad times, but the difference is, I guess, that I am older. A difference that parents are often quite blind to. Sometimes I wonder why at that past time my parents let me go up that mountain alone. It must have stressed them like nothing else on the planet could.
Well, this really has no point. Someone once said that they could sum up life in three words: Life goes on. I'm not so fatalistic, I think. On my good days a least. And so I'll leave you with these encouraging words:
Herrings communicate underwater by farting.
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