Wild Journeys

by Bruce Ansley

  We were taken to the start line by John’s father, leaving home, according to my journal, at 8.40 a.m. He bought us an ice cream on the way. I hadn’t been sent into the wild on my own before, and certainly not when I had to provide all essentials — food, water, shelter — for myself. For some reason the ice cream made me feel even more desolate, like, perhaps, the condemned man’s hearty breakfast.

  It was a very long way to the edge of the known universe. At 9.20 a.m., my log records, we arrived at the Tai Tapu Memorial Gates. The journey into the wilderness had taken forty minutes. It only seemed like hours.

  We unloaded our gear. There appeared to be an awful lot of it. Possibly because there was an awful lot of it. Spare clothes. Raincoats (parkas came later). Food, including a big cake my mother had made. A large, heavy canvas item known jocularly as a pup tent. Poles. Pegs. Cooking gear, kerosene primus, something you tried to start with methylated spirits and never, ever, worked. Toilet gear (we did not so much as clean our teeth, of course, but you had to keep up appearances.) Toilet paper and spade for emergencies, for by now the old Horlicks highway was so puckered with fear I could not imagine passing anything ever again. Our Scout motto was ‘Be Prepared.’ We packed all of this stuff into borrowed packs only slightly smaller than we were.

  Recently I read an article in National Geographic, which noted that when Ed Hillary and Tenzing Norgay climbed Mount Everest, they carried loads of about twenty kilograms apiece. A mere twenty kilograms? Perhaps we carried the same weight, but we were less than half the weight of Ed and Sherpa Tenzing.

  We could see something very like Everest as we stood at that lonely roadside.

  That illustration on my frontispiece showing a resolute Scout striding along with a perfect pack square on his back was rubbish, of course. No matter how we packed and repacked them the result was the same: two very large packs with stuff — pots, poles, pegs, bags — hung all over them, so that when we eventually staggered to our feet we looked like a garage sale with legs. We clanked off up the road, the start of a very wild journey indeed.

  I remembered all of that when I opened that old logbook. The next time I was in Christchurch I resolved to retrace my steps.

  That’s why, this fine spring morning, I’m standing at the Tai Tapu Memorial Gates. The day is much the same: blue sky, slightly chill in a way that precedes a baking-hot afternoon. These handsome portals are made of the red volcanic Banks Peninsula rock. They commemorate the servicemen and women of both world wars. The dead have an X beside their names: thirteen of them in World War I, four in World War II. The gates are impressive and they make a full-page drawing in my log. Years later they’re exactly the same. They lead on to the Domain and playing fields, but then, John and I were looking in the opposite direction, towards the hills, and the long haul upwards to the rim of the old volcano that is now Lyttelton Harbour.

  Banks Peninsula is close to the city but it’s pretty much as wild as ever. In Christchurch’s early years, and even later ones, people died up there, either caught out in the dark as they stumbled along the paths linking settlements, or snap-frozen by the southerlies which can fall upon the place in an instant.

  We all knew the story of the two young boys who’d left their Christchurch homes to climb over the Bridle Path and go fishing in Lyttelton Harbour. They set out to walk back over the Port Hills as night was falling. A sudden storm swept over the hills. Three days later one small body was found clutching his fishing rod and ‘staring peacefully at the sky’. Almost two months after that the second was discovered, not far from the first.

  So we were prepared for the worst. What’s more, we were expecting it, for those hills seemed a very long way away as we set off on the endless shingle road leading towards the bottom of them. Twenty minutes along, my log records, we ‘arrived at first bridge. This was wooden and the wood was fairly rotten.’

  Five minutes later (the times were recorded meticulously), ‘arrived at second bridge. This was also made of wood but in a lot better condition.’

  Obviously, I was describing a foreign landscape, one where men and women had seldom trod before: ‘The surrounding countryside did not appear to be affected by the drought. Everything was green and I could not see hardly any [sic] dry places. The road is lined with willow trees on one side and silver birches on the other. Sheep and cattle are grazing and lying about on the fields.’

  Lying about this morning are languid locals, for a well-known café sits on one side of the road now, although on the other cows still graze and do their bit for local water quality. This is affluent country suburbia now. Rhodes Road, our long-ago path, is nicely lined with poplars on one side and trimmed macrocarpa hedges on the other, a long straight thoroughfare. A concrete truck passes, then four women on foot. That would have made this road a bustling thoroughfare then, although we probably would have wondered about the women: they’re doing this for fun?

  ‘The hills formed a semicircle around us,’ I wrote. ‘I could see two or three farmhouses.’

  From this distance I can see the beads of sweat on that composition, the despair of a young writer with little to write about. The raw material is rather skinny, until: ‘Arrived at Otahuna. Otahuna turned out to be a very pretty place. We saw a large grey house which looked to us like a mansion. It was half hidden by trees with a large lily pond in front of it. John and I took a photo of this and moved on.’

  Oh, such masterly understatement. In fact, both of us were stunned. Such beauty! Such perfection! We had never seen anything like it, not even in the flicks. Who could own such a place? Even Mr Reeder was not grand enough.

  We didn’t move on for quite some time. We lay in the green grass outside the fence, overcome by splendour. We didn’t know such a place could exist in Christchurch. Porticos, arches, verandas, turrets, vast windows, a thicket of windows, a panoply of grand architecture spread across the green lawns. Pools, ponds, fountains, sculptures and hedges were set amid the finest gardens we’d ever seen, far back from the road, a metaphor for the distance between the mansion and the two awe-struck boys lying in the long grass outside. This wasn’t just a journey, it was a transcendental experience. We had found paradise, and it wasn’t very far from Tai Tapu.

  That image stayed with me for many years. I couldn’t bring myself to explore it, for fear of puncturing the dream. But one day, a very long time afterwards, I was researching an article about the Rhodes family and I discovered the truth. This wasn’t just a house. It was Canterbury to the core, its heart and soul.

  Heaton Rhodes had built it, and Heaton Rhodes was as much ingrained in the Christchurch consciousness as the First Four Ships and the Four Avenues. We always believed that Rhodesia was named after him, and probably rhododendrons too. He possessed not just one but two knighthoods. He and the future King George VI collaborated over their stamp collections. He gave land for a Christchurch school, named Heaton Intermediate. It stands in Heaton Street. He could speak fluent Maori. He was, in short, a big noise, although we heard it only faintly in far-off New Brighton.

  Rhodes was educated in France and England and Oxford, in that order, became a lawyer, inherited his father’s fortune, built a fancy house in Christchurch and a fancier one at Otahuna with forty rooms, three storeys of wood and slate, and became a country squire, or rather, the country squire. Horses galloped over the polo ground and the good burghers of Christchurch clippety-clopped over hectares of manicured lawns, and flower beds, and woods. A yellow storm of daffodils heralded spring.

  The great man was not long dead when we peered through his fence and marvelled.

  I find the spot where the two awe-stricken boys paused that day. The place is as grand as ever. It’s a very expensive lodge. The gardens and the lily pond are immaculate. The lawns run up to the white house in perfect stripes. The trees and shrubs clothe the house just so. The wood is half a century older, more a forest now.

  The neighbourhood has changed, however. Much subdivision has gone on, of the lifestyle-block k
ind. Lots of rustic architecture. Signs warning of horses on the roads.

  The two Scouts had to get permission to cross the farmer’s land before tackling the hills. We knocked on the door of a neat little storybook house, which I sketched for my log: cream walls and a red roof. The log says, ‘The farmer was a nice sort of man and told us the way to the track. When he answered the door, he said, “Oh, more Boy Scouts.” He finished by saying, “I’d rather you than me.”’

  I follow a gently curving road and find the farmhouse all right, but it no longer seems to command access to very much. My map shows two public tracks running down from the crater rim, both of them ending, well, right here.

  Perhaps I was better at reading maps then. I walk hither and thither. I search. Darned if I can find even one track from the road. Fences and gates bar access. Signs forbid it. There’s a broad driveway leading in from the road in the place a track should be. Several other driveways branch off it.

  A man stands by a gate marked ‘Private’. Tanned legs below tailored walk shorts. Short-sleeved shirt. Very clean, well-trimmed, kempt, like Rhodes’s gardens. The kind of fellow who’d refer to the shop down the road as ‘the village’.

  I ask him whether there’s a public track through here. He gives me a hard look, shakes his head. Public? Will I have to go up to the top and climb down? ‘Yes.’ Abrupt. It is loathe at first sight.

  So back I go, down Rhodes Road to the domain, around the foot of Banks Peninsula, up Dyers Road through Cashmere, past those grand old Christchurch emblems of the Summit Road, the Sign of the Takahe and the Sign of the Kiwi, the rest houses built by the dream of Harry Ell, who saw this wonderful scenic highway reaching towards heaven, past the remains of the Sign of the Bellbird, past charred hillsides, bare rock, scorched pines, ruined bush, blackened and barren, awful reminders of the Port Hills fire a few months before. I drive along the summit road until I reach the Omahu Bush, a protected bush remnant at the crater rim.

  Now I’m at the top. My Scout log starts at the bottom. So, a walk down a good track. It doesn’t take very long, really. The climb uphill in the opposite direction, however, seemed to take two Scouts forever.

  ‘We started up towards the given map reference,’ I wrote then, ‘but soon forgot the farmer’s directions. We picked up what we thought was the right track. We walked up the hillside but the track soon petered out. We looked around for a place out of the wind to have lunch. We ate in the shelter of some rocks. When we had finished we left our packs and went looking for the track. Failing to find the right one we decided to carry on towards the summit road. It was very hard going as the hill was very steep.’

  Oh, what living hell is disguised by that sentence. It was also very hot. We were very tired. Our packs were very heavy. We were very sick of the whole thing and we’d hardly started. Mutiny was threatened, although I cannot remember by whom. Perhaps both of us. But as Scouts we swore cheerful comradeship. So we had our own version of the old ditty: ‘When in trouble, when in doubt, don’t run in circles, don’t scream and shout — lie instead.’ My log sanitised the disagreements.

  ‘We found Rhodes Springs. It is a stone building about two metres square. Inside is a pipe pouring water into a trough that never seems to fill. I sketched this and set off towards the summit road.’

  Sure enough, here’s the sketch. A red rock building with what looks like a palm tree at the side. (Perhaps we were starting to have delusions, like marooned sailors.)

  The Springs building is still there, but here’s the thing: it’s closer to the bottom of the hill than the top. It might take a fit walker twenty minutes to walk up to it. For the two of us then it seemed to take hours, days, and my word, that had to be a mountain dead ahead.

  For Gibraltar Rock reared its pointy head far above. ‘We didn’t have to look at a map,’ I wrote. ‘We guessed it was Gibraltar Rock as soon as we came within sight.’

  Within sight? That’s like the Tibetan Buddhists in Rongbuk Monastery saying Mount Everest is ‘within sight’ instead of just being rather big.

  Gibraltar Rock glowers over the landscape. Its virtue is that once you’re up and onto it, you’re quite close to the top of the hill. We didn’t see much virtue in it then. The log reports matter-of-factly, ‘We could hear the crash of guns.’

  Guns? Could that have been the final stages of exhaustion, the thudding of two tormented hearts?

  But I remember those guns. They were up in the Godley Head battery overlooking the Heads into Lyttelton Harbour. The last gun was fired in 1959, so we could in fact have heard the artillerymen popping off. Let’s give the two Scouts the benefit of the doubt.

  I follow their path up to the summit. It is quite couth now, and hard to lose your way, and it doesn’t take long. Wild pigs have been rooting on the track. Wild pigs, this close to civilisation? Later I talked to one of the invaluable band of volunteers who foster the Omahu bush reserve and tracks here, Paul Tebbutt. He said pigs had often been released here, possibly by hunters. They also battled possums, rats, stoats, wild goats and the occasional deer. If we’d known about all this wildlife then, we’d have retreated, rapidly. Maybe there was a badge for that too.

  Omahu lies at the top, sixty hectares of bush regenerating so successfully in this harsh climate that the understorey has returned and bird life is flourishing. This reserve, and Gibraltar, and surrounding land, 148 hectares in all, was sold to the Summit Road Society by a family of property investors — for a dollar.

  A lovely, rare white clematis laces the bush. A riroriro trills, a bellbird answers. A stream tinkles at the top, rushes into waterfalls below. But I remembered crashing through scrub and falling into holes (the packs made us top-heavy) and staggering from one side of the valley to the other. Did we stray into that frieze of golden gorse on the other side of the valley? I don’t know, but according to my log the climb took four or five hours. A photograph, taken on my huge bellows camera, shows a pile of gear apparently struggling up the hill on its own. Looking closer, I can just see a tiny John below, on all fours.

  Now, I can see far across the Plains to the mountains on the other side. Canterbury is not short of splendour.

  ‘We had a lot of trouble finding a track on the other side,’ I wrote.

  I’m not surprised when I look over the edge. The way down is a lot steeper than the climb up. I’m gazing into the crater of an ancient volcano. In parts here the drop is all but sheer. I skirt the cliffs now, as I did then, and look for an easier route.

  My log says, ‘We could see a track down the bottom of a valley leading to a non-metal road which led to a metal road going along the coast. We set off down the hill which was very steep and slippery. We had to go through a lot of bush and found that a bush with milky white spikes can sting very badly.’ Welcome to ongaonga. Not much of that in New Brighton.

  I make my way down. It is still very steep and slippery. What’s more, there seems to be a lot more bush getting in the way. I’m not sure whether this is public land or private property. I worry about trespassing. But if it was good enough for a couple of small Scouts . . .

  ‘We were just getting a bit fed up when we sighted a tent which turned out to be the Cashmere Scout Camp.’ We found those other Scouts a rather prickly lot, actually. Perhaps they hadn’t heard of the world-wide fellowship.

  But now, oh joy. I’m on more or less open ground. I slink along, trying to stay out of anyone’s sight. I reach the bottom.

  ‘Found coastal track (an old road),’ my log says. It’s still there, the old coach road from the early 1880s, which carried passengers and mail twice daily around the edge of the harbour.

  Rounding a bend the two boys came across some Rapaki Scouts, Rapaki being an old Maori settlement near Lyttelton. The Peninsula seemed full of Scouts this weekend. They asked who we were. ‘Upon being told they called out to us and said we might as well camp with them as they’d had a hard time finding a camp site . . . We made a fire and pitched the tent.’ The worldwide fellowship was
back in business.

  After tea (lamb chops, peas, tinned peaches, bread and jam) we walked up to the Governors Bay shop and sat down on a seat. A sinister note crept into the narrative: ‘A man was watching from the bar window of the hotel opposite. He remained watching until we went away.’

  The Scouts went back to their camp and found the others had tea and biscuits ready. I fished out my mother’s cake. Oh the joy, not only of eating it but knowing that something the size and weight of a brick would be missing from my pack next day. I offered everyone another piece. ‘While we drank they told us they had seen movements in the bush that definitely (so they said) were not opossums. We hunted for a while and went to bed.’

  Late that night, the Rapaki Scouts woke us up. ‘They had seen a torch flashing. We searched around in pyjamas for a while but all we could hear was a few opossums. We went back to bed.’ I should have added that we were terrified. The night was black. Monsters were afoot. One of us cried. The great brotherhood of Scouts still prevents me from saying who it was.

  In the bright light of morning the night’s alarums seem to have vanished. ‘We packed our kits and gear and burned or buried all the rubbish we could find. Somebody had left tons of rubbish lying about.’ And, having done our good deed for the day, we set off for Lyttelton.

  The road between Governors Bay and Lyttelton hasn’t changed much. It still bends and bumps its way around the harbour edge. It is still ten kilometres. Then, it seemed much, much longer. ‘The day was boiling hot without a breath of wind,’ I wrote. ‘In the cool, green sea below we could see people swimming. It was sheer torture.’

  Then came a gap of three hours in my timeline. I still remember that day. It was, indeed, boiling hot. The road was hard. It shimmied. Each bend brought nothing but another bend. We were convinced it would never end. We were lost in an alternative universe, and it sizzled. Now, I drive it in perhaps fifteen minutes. But then, we struggled on, hour after hour. One whole day passed, then another. It must have, mustn’t it?