Halfway to the falls, a dun-colored bird rose from the heather like a tossed clod, cut loose with a sharp song, and kept it going, rising into the wind, higher, singing, higher, still in song, climbing almost to the low clouds scudding into the mountain. For five minutes the show continued, then the small drab thing, yet in melody, dropped back into the scrub and sat silent. Never before had I witnessed the aerial show of a skylark, a creature unable to find suitable habitat in the topographically wide and varied United States. Much of the flora and fauna Europeans have brought into New Zealand has proved deleterious to native species, but the English skylark is a sweet exception. Although living harmoniously with native birds, it does depend on alienheather which has created problems by crowding out indigenous vegetation. After the skylark number, Taranaki Falls, a narrow cascade from a blackened cliff, seemed almost inconsequential.
The following morning, I came upon a path into a dense beech woods verging on the narrow but noisy snow-melt waters of the Whapkapapaunui River. Perhaps good birding grounds. Without the narrow trail the mountain forest would have been passable only behind a bulldozer. In the past week, I’d learned one of the glories of that virescent land are tree trunks of immense girth, bizarre convolutions, and branched permutations that could take the aspect of gnarly old men, or rearing unicorns, or they might interlock limbs like Pyramus and Thisbe.
Even though New Zealanders use Euro-American names for certain of their native birds, the various species are usually markedly different and often unrelated. To have seen in America a goldfinch or a robin or magpie is not to have seen the New Zealand bird of the same name. While I was trying to sketch a massive and strangely trunked tree that looked something like a manticore, a small, green egg with feet began hopping smartly from branch to branch. Perhaps speaking of its footwork, it muttered, time and again, Zip-zip, zip-zip. Behold, a rifleman! All three inches of it in colors supposedly resembling the uniform of an early-British-era volunteer soldier. The measure of my joy at finally spotting a rifleman was inverse to the size of the creature, something explainable, I think, only to the odd minds of dedicated birders.
A rifleman, Acanthisitta Chloris
As with other things there, the halves of the New Zealand boot show two topographies—one of fire, the other of ice. The North Island, the foot, is comparatively lower and rippled and ridged by volcanoes, whereas on the South Island, high mountains and glaciations determine things. At Wellington, I crossed from north to south through narrow and windy Cook Strait, a three-hour ferry ride, and arrived at the waterfront village of Picton and there continued south down the east coastal road. Much of my course lay squeezed between the tourmaline sea and black mountains tipped in snow, creating a grandeur almost beyond the word scenery. After a while, I needed something to thin the richness, a helping of some palliation, this one a plate of boiled crayfish.
Raised on the edge of the Great Plains, I must take alpine scenery in moderation to avoid overdosing on the spectacular; I gained balance on the levels around Christchurch, a city lifted from early Victorian England. A day there prepared me for the rock eminences, ice rivers, and massive perpendicularities of Mount Cook, widely considered the greatest mountain in that land of marvelously varied—if compressed—terrain.
Lacking an ice ax and crampons, I approached the mountain glaciers by hopping aboard a little ski-plane that flew over the shingled Tasman River. The pilot turned the wings nearly vertical to show the steep mountainsides and precipitous drops and ragged crests of hundred-million-year-old rocks still rising as much as a meter every century. Later, when I looked at a snapshot I made from the plane, the horizon is vertical and the crest of Cook points not up, but sideways.
After an hour of occasional horizontal flight, we landed at the head of the Tasman Glacier blindingly splendent in new snow against the dark greywacke, mudstone, and schist of the mountain. Everything up there seemed to be one thing or its opposite: black or white, rock or cloud, wet or dry, up or down. When again on the river-valley floor, I looked back at where I’d put a chip of glacier in my mouth to taste thousand-year-old water: Mount Cook loomed so impossibly, to have walked around up there seemed something dreamed.
A couple of days later I went on south, down among the dry scrubland, through low mountains, over the Kawarau Gorge with its opalescent water, and on to Queenstown on Lake Wakatipu, a long and slender zigzag apparently cut in by the sword of a geologic Zorro. The city, once a livestock shipping point, had come to depend on tourism, and its degree of pleasantness was contingent upon one’s view of numerous people clad in thongs and floral-patterned shirts.
I was itching to board the famed lake-boat, the TSS Earnslaw, a seventy-five-year-old twin-decker that once carried more cattle and sheep than people, but to watch the jam-up at boarding, perhaps the change wasn’t all that much. The coal-fired boilers threw a deep dinge across the lake to create a brief sunset sky, and the old vessel chugged out a course under a range of grooved but nearly barren mountains that caught shadows and held them like so much mist; it’s the quality of light trapped in the eroded sides that gives the Remarkables their name: Over the next hour, the slopes changed from pink to orange to blue to gray to black, and the next morning the progression would reverse. A woman said, “I see why they call them the Impossibles.”
Had the old boat still run all the way up the lake as it formerly did, we could have steamed to within about twenty air miles of Milford Sound on the Tasman Sea. The way by auto is 170 miles of lakeside road through hill country and then up along Lake Te Anau where the slow travel gives time to take in landforms deserving close observation. From the forest and alpine meadows, the road swung into the Earl Mountains before dropping down the steep slant of the Homer Tunnel which a claustrophobic may wish to undertake while blindfolded. The last miles twisted beneath treeless massings of high rock that in spring drop thousand-foot strands of snowmelt into a narrow, glaciated valley. Twice I stopped just to see the black walls: Their height, sheerness, and utter volume made it seem I was crouching.
Milford Sound—actually a fiord, since glaciers created it—is to New Zealand waters what Mount Cook is to the mountains—renowned beyond all. Scenic flights were popular, but why look at water from above when a boat is available? I boarded the Mitre Peak II for a trip along the high cliffs lining the fiord all the way out to the Tasman Sea. The peak, standing five-thousand feet above the sound and extending a thousand beneath it, is one of the highest mountains in the world to rise directly from the ocean floor.
The slopes were in new leaf, and the granite cliffs, stained by residues of copper and iron to the color of roasted barley, were striated with upright water. At the biggest of the cataracts, Stirling Falls, the captain eased the bow of the stubby vessel into the long cascade turned to mists by the height of its drop. Of several people on the forward deck, one ran to cover, but the rest of us briefly left the sunshine to enter a more typical weather of watery air: During a single year at Milford Sound, twenty-eight feet of rain once fell.
That area, Fiordland, contains one of the oldest and most famous hiking routes in the world, the Milford Track, a thirty-three-mile hoof down alpine valleys, but its fame exacts a price: reservations and a requirement to move at a prescribed pace. For trampers of a more independent mind and idiosyncratic gait, other nearby tracks—the Hollyford, the Routeburn, the Dusky—suffer less from human overload but are as scenic and challenging. So I heard.
From the sea-indented mountains, I took a curving line, still southward, through grasslands of such importance to sheep farmers that in front of city hall in coastal Invercargill is a statue depicting a blade of grass. There I came at last to the bottom of the nation and the top of the upside-down boot.
The January crush of New Zealand vacationers was now bumper to bumper on the narrow roads (highway wasn’t a word I used much there). Trying to escape, I made a run for the city of Dunedin. Although my birding had been of limited success, I yet had hopes of closing the trip with two t
hings I considered the essence of the far, southern ocean: penguins and albatross. Opposite the city harbor, along a century-old lane atop a seawall built by Maori prisoners, far out on the Otago Peninsula, was one of the few albatross colonies in the world with a breeding ground on humanly inhabited land. Even among its kind, the royal albatross is one big bird: From the front of its bill to the tip of the tail, a royal can be the size of an eight-year-old girl, and its wingspan more than three meters. Because the nesting season was on, a small shed above the edge of a cliff provided a concealed vantage for watching the birds. Every so often one would raise its immense wings and go into a cumbrous and seemingly suicidal run toward the sea far below until, at the last moment, the dead air could hold it aloft, and then instantly its footed clumsiness became winged grace, and its white feathers slicked it quickly downwind and out of view.
On the other side of the peninsula, just above a fur-seal colony, I crept up behind a spread of yellow lupines above a beach where a half-dozen dark humps were pulling themselves out of the surf. They shook, waddled, stopped, shook, and waddled a little farther toward a tall dune against the sea cliffs. The sand was so steep and treacherous, the humps had to tack north, then south, then back again to gain their nests in the lupine at the top where they were at last close enough to become yellow-eyed penguins.
Yellow-eyed penguin
The yellow-eyed is the rarest penguin on Earth, and its survival is anything but assured. In all of New Zealand, I’d seen nothing that let me feel the antipodean world and its imperiled creatures so much as that slow trudge of an improbably configured bird. The climb must have been tiring because every dozen or so steps the yellow-eyes rested, an act not usually apparent in birds that can take wing. When the penguins at last reached their nests, a fellow watcher said, “They made it!” For that day, one more time, indeed they had.
On the flight homeward the next morning, I got an aerial look at the penguin beach and an hour later a splendid view of snowy Mount Egmont rising through low clouds, yet what remains more indelibly now is not its marvelous eight-thousand-foot summit but a ninety-foot hillock of sand laced with footprints of yellow-eyed penguins.
A CRIMINAL TO REMAIN ANONYMOUS
I won’t honor by giving his name the young man I speak of in this story, but I will say a judge found him mentally incompetent to stand trial. He was incarcerated in the Federal Medical Center at Rochester, Minnesota, and the last I heard he is still there.
On the Staked Plain
I’m writing this first draft of a sentence with a ballpoint pen given me three days ago by a geographer friend. Above his name and address is an imprinted proposition:
ALL LANDSCAPES SPEAK….
While the phrase is not mine, nearly all of my writing over the last three decades seeks to test and express his hypothesis—or is it a prescript?—behind that trio of words. At the least, many of my stories could employ his motto as a subtitle, since to me it is a perpetual subtext not just for some assemblage of words but for the assemblage that is my life. I believe as I do and I am who I am because of the perpetual murmur—and an occasional huzzah—from the land.
His ellipsis is part of the slogan, and from the emptiness of the unwritten words I hear the rest of the implied sentence as if from the Christmas carol “Silver Bells”: Are you listening? And from that question comes a second, one of import: And so?
Americans believe in the spiritually redeeming efficacy of travel almost as if it were prayer. We are prone to try to modify our lives simply by just going, whether on a walk around the block or on a coast-to-coast trek. And why not? We’re all descendants of travelers who reached these shores from the other hemisphere. Were stars not so splendidly cosmic a symbol, the blue union of our flag could well be composed of little footprints.
Not long ago, a Minnesotan took up a specific and peculiar itinerary. Motivated by philosophical questions not uncommon for his twenty-one years, this polite college student of graphic design set out to awaken Americans to issues he felt we are ignoring at our peril: pillaging our environments, suppressing human potential, failing to legalize marijuana. In one of his wandering manifestos he blithely wrote, “I’m dismissing a few individuals from reality, to change all of you for the better.” Open to various ways of learning, he explored formal logical-discourse but the import of propositions of conjunction, negation, and disjunction apparently evaded him. He took up meditation, channeling, astral projection, and even gave a shot at communion with ghosts. But, in the end, his response to our heedlessness was to embrace a ready-made, moronic symbol to alert what he perceived as a gaggle of fools. Using an automobile like a pen, he planned to draw that image hugely across the very face of the country, and he employed that most American habit: He went on the road.
To strike out into the continent is not only a national obsession but a long and honored method of inquiry for us. We will use a highway as monks do holy texts: moving along yellow stripes on asphalt as if they are lines of scripture, and growing ever curious about where the journey will lead and who we will be when we finally fetch up somewhere.
The art student with the boyish Nordic face had played in a three-man grunge band called Apathy that recorded a CD titled “Sacks of People.” If that name described his emotional state before lighting out for the territory, to use Huck Finn’s phrase, his act of leaving home ground suggests engagement and a turning away from indifference. Like Huck, that All-American-boy traveler, the Minnesotan started out along the Mississippi. Using rural-free-delivery roads on each side of the river in Iowa and Illinois, with his automobile wheels he began drawing his chosen, revelatory image across the landscape. He stopped at predesignated places to leave in a mailbox a message, a kind of letter. Call it a Nailgram. Then he moved on a few hundred miles west into eastern Nebraska and took up a second gyration similarly marking out his design with more postboxes he’d selected. Charted onto a map, his route of letter drops created across the upper Midwest two large circles like hollow eyes.
Then he headed on to Colorado to begin driving a curving southeasterly route, and in it his master picture started to emerge across America: The student of design, now a deliverer of hazardous tidings, was coloring in his sketch with intellectually jumbled handbills accompanied by pipe bombs packed with hardware-store shrapnel. Putting a pen to the route of his map-sketch and connecting the mailboxes at last revealed a portrait: a gigantic, hollow-eyed smiley face drawn in victims’ blood.
After three thousand miles, as he was initiating the smiley grin, something happened to him in the Texas Panhandle, a landscape that can work upon a traveler in ways deep, even if at first unperceived. It may intimidate, dominate, it may stupefy or awaken; its immensity of sky and sprawl of level ground all but force a wanderer to redefine the meaning of solitude and reevaluate the importance of connections and conjunctions, some of the very things the young Minnesotan tried to hawk but had found words insufficient. If only he could have come across this sentence of Pedro de Castañeda, contemporaneous chronicler of the 1541 Coronado expedition through western Texas: “I very much wish I possessed some knowledge of cosmography or geography so that I might render intelligible what I want to say.” The student’s urge to draw across a community of the damned a giant design to mock American foolhardiness changed, because he suddenly altered direction and abandoned his bomb art by turning west once again to follow a nascent longing to see the Pacific Ocean, unaware he had been driving the whole time on the bottom of an ancient sea.
Why he divagated just there, I don’t know because I’ve not talked with him, but I have traveled a staggering number of miles over the southern Great Plains. I do know he turned away from his gigantic smiley in an area of Texas so ostensibly and famously faceless that early Spanish wayfarers allegedly set up sticks to find their way back and forth over it, and from them comes its name today: El Llano Estacado, the Staked Plain, the largest level land in America.
I believe few visitors go into its long miles across a nearl
y boundless vacancy without sooner or later feeling the cosmos pressing down as if to call attention from the typical mundanities clogging a human life and thereby enable them to enter things greater and more lasting. A frequent response to the “Nothing’s out there,” to use the Llano’s other name, often begins with a loathing of its monotony and an encroaching sense of disorientation and disjunction in a place once notorious for maddening mirages—not just of water holes but of entire towns. Yet for travelers who stay the course but yield to the landscape by accepting its restriction of trees and its apparent interminableness, if they get out from behind the steering wheel and walk into the Llano to hear it speak in its own tongue of wind and thunder and to see it look back at them through the slotted eye of a serpent, a clarity of mind can begin. That arid land has power to flush a brain clean of the fluff and fuzz from the feather bed of contemporary living. The grandly inescapable and wondrously level and forever distant horizon becomes a colorless and flattened rainbow promising not a pot of gold but something more immediately important—arrival: arrival somewhere, anywhere. The Staked Plain, especially now that the stakes are long gone (if they were indeed ever there), can be a wilderness composed of a nothingness that almost assures one of losing the way until the straggler searches within long enough to discover some internal reference point for establishing a line of emotional and intellectual stakes which create direction and prevent doubling back into absence. The goal is to turn terra incognita into a knowable land where a soul can find its bearings. Eventually, the roamer, if persistent, ends up somewhere, the destination no longer as important as simple disembarkation: Did the unsettling openness speak? And to what end?
Here, There, Elsewhere: Stories From the Road Page 26