Ao Toa

by Cathie Dunsford

  “Ka pae, Iri. Reckon it’s too late for a hot tub tonight?” Koa looks exhausted.

  “Never too late for that, my love. You get the towels and I’ll throw another log on the fire under the tub.”

  “Thanks.” There is a full moon tonight, beaming down on them as if affirming their korero. The giant mamaku lifts her arms toward the heavens, black against the light behind, magnificent in her strength and power. Her ferny fronds wave in the gentle night air and send shimmering fingers over the water, mimicking the dances of the wahine where their hands move like ferns in a breeze.

  Behind Maata, Waka sees the fin moving closer. He knows a disturbed or hungry shark can lunge from fifty metres away and attack in a matter of minutes. It’s too far to surf to the shore. There’s no choice but to wait and remain as still as possible. But if the shark looks up, their feet dangling off the edges of their surfboards will appear to the mako like enticing food, two seals waiting for the crunch. It’s just a matter of which one first. Maybe they should try for the shore.

  Maata is still blissfully unaware of the shark or Waka’s weary watching. She’s seen him gaze into the far horizon so often that it is second nature to her now. Yet this time, his eyes are very focused. Closing in on something. Maata turns around but does not see the fin. She thinks he is fixed on the driftwood floating past. Waka is always collecting interesting pieces of driftwood for his artworks.

  Waka is not sure if Maata will panic, given her past experiences and especially her near-drowning when the current took her out to sea while collecting kai moana with Cowrie. If she does, then the shark is likely to panic also and attack. But how can he get her to remain still enough that it may get closer and decide they are not a good feed after all. Waka leans over carefully and takes Maata’s head in his hands. He gently strokes her face, watching the shark circle nearer and nearer.

  Maata is touched by his gentleness. She wonders what has suddenly inspired him out here in the oceans, while she’d hoped this might happen in the warmth of the dunes or the comfort of his bed. Stay present. Enjoy the moment. Stay with it. She hears the voices of her counsellor in her ears, the affirmation of the kuia who took care of her. Don’t question the place, just affirm the feeling being shared. She balances carefully on her board so that she does not fall in.

  The shark moves closer. It’s now about twenty surfboard-lengths away. Waka holds Maata’s head in his hands, crooning to her, whispering into her ear, as if these might be the last words he ever gets to share with her.

  Tena koutou katoa – Kuini here. Cowrie is out bodysurfing with a few others on the hikoi from Ahipara. The Tawharanui Coastal Walk was stunning. We hiked across the farm, over several fields and a stream to a beach. From there, up a cliff path and over the far hills, looking out into the wide Pacific Ocean with Kawau and her sister islands to the right of us. The local community are replanting the hills in natives: pohutukawa through to manuka and kanuka. There’s a working farm on the land and they have many visitors from schools and people from overseas as well. One of the community helpers also works two days a week at the Goat Island Bay Marine Reserve in neighbouring Leigh, and she told us how they are trying to convince the government to retain at least 10 per cent of the total New Zealand coastline in marine reserves like these two. The water is teeming with fish from blue maumau to piper and red schnapper and they say the whole coastline of Aotearoa would have been like this once. They asked for our help in their cause as the issues we are fighting for are so similar. They are opposed to any kind of genetic engineering of fish species and to the cruel and polluting methods of fish farming and have already lodged submissions on these issues to the Royal Commission.

  We had some great korero but went to bed very late. I asked the park ranger if I could do a brief email to you today while the others surfed before breakfast, then we are off again. Talk to you again. Hope you are all well. Mere – please contact Ahi for me and let her know we’ll try to email her and meet up later on the hikoi. Thanks.

  By the way, we’re all in a state of shock over the US invasion of Afghanistan. The park ranger’s wife, Sheila, read out a wonderful article by novelist Barbara Kingsolver. Remember how much we all loved the political power of The Poisonwood Bible and her dealing with the issues of colonisation? Well – wait till you read this. Best we have seen so far – and we surf the net at every break when we email you. It’s empowering and enlightening. I’ll copy it into the end of this email.

  Kia kaha- Kuini [and your Turtle in the Waves!] xx.

  LA Times Headlines 10/14/01

  No Glory in Unjust War on the Weak

  By Barbara Kingsolver

  Barbara Kingsolver is the author of, among other books, “The Poisonwood Bible” and “Prodigal Summer.” This article will appear in a forthcoming collection of essays.

  TUCSON – I cannot find the glory in this day. When I picked up the newspaper and saw “America Strikes Back!” blazed boastfully across it in letters I swear were 10 inches tall – shouldn’t they reserve at least one type size for something like, say, nuclear war? – my heart sank. We’ve answered one terrorist act with another, raining death on the most war-scarred, terrified populace that ever crept to a doorway and looked out.

  The small plastic boxes of food we also dropped are a travesty. It is reported that these are untouched, of course – Afghanis have spent their lives learning terror of anything hurled at them from the sky. Meanwhile, the genuine food aid on which so many depended for survival has been halted by the war.

  We’ve killed whoever was too poor or crippled to flee, plus four humanitarian aid workers who coordinated the removal of land mines from the beleaguered Afghan soil. That office is now rubble, and so is my heart.

  I am going to have to keep pleading against this madness. I’ll get scolded for it, I know. I’ve already been called every name in the Rush Limbaugh handbook: traitor, sinner, naive, liberal, peacenik, whiner. I’m told I am dangerous because I might get in the way of this holy project we’ve undertaken to keep dropping heavy objects from the sky until we’ve wiped out every last person who could potentially hate us. Some people are praying for my immortal soul, and some have offered to buy me a one-way ticket out of the country, to anywhere.

  I accept these gifts with a gratitude equal in measure to the spirit of generosity in which they were offered. People threaten vaguely, “She wouldn’t feel this way if her child had died in the war!” (I feel this way precisely because I can imagine that horror.) More subtle adversaries simply say I am ridiculous, a dreamer who takes a child’s view of the world, imagining it can be made better than it is. The more sophisticated approach, they suggest, is to accept that we are all on a jolly road trip down the maw of catastrophe, so shut up and drive.

  I fight that, I fight it as if I’m drowning. When I get to feeling I am an army of one standing out on the plain waving my ridiculous little flag of hope, I call up a friend or two. We remind ourselves in plain English that the last time we got to elect somebody, the majority of us, by a straight popular-vote count, did not ask for the guy who is currently telling us we will win this war and not be “misunderestimated.” We aren’t standing apart from the crowd, we are the crowd. There are millions of us, surely, who know how to look life in the eye, however awful things get, and still try to love it back.

  It is not naive to propose alternatives to war. We could be the kindest nation on Earth, inside and out. I look at the bigger picture and see that many nations with fewer resources than ours have found solutions to problems that seem to baffle us. I’d like an end to corporate welfare so we could put that money into ending homelessness, as many other nations have done before us. I would like a humane health-care system organized along the lines of Canada’s. I’d like the efficient public-transit system of Paris in my city, thank you. I’d like us to consume energy at the modest level that Europeans do, and then go them one better. I’d like a government that subsidizes renewable energy sources instead of forcefully patrol
ling the globe to protect oil gluttony. Because, make no mistake, oil gluttony is what got us into this holy war, and it’s a deep tar pit. I would like us to sign the Kyoto agreement today, and reduce our fossil-fuel emissions with legislation that will ease us into safer, less gluttonous, sensibly reorganized lives. If this were the face we showed the world, and the model we helped bring about elsewhere, I expect we could get along with a military budget the size of Iceland’s.

  How can I take anything but a child’s view of a war in which men are acting like children? What they’re serving is not justice, it’s simply vengeance. Adults bring about justice using the laws of common agreement. Uncivilized criminals are still held accountable through civilized institutions; we abolished stoning long ago. The World Court and the entire Muslim world stand ready to judge Osama bin Laden and his accessories. If we were to put a few billion dollars into food, health care and education instead of bombs, you can bet we’d win over enough friends to find out where he’s hiding. And I’d like to point out, since no one else has, the Taliban is an alleged accessory, not the perpetrator – a legal point quickly cast aside in the rush to find a sovereign target to bomb. The word “intelligence” keeps cropping up, but I feel like I’m standing on a playground where the little boys are all screaming at each other, “He started it!” and throwing rocks that keep taking out another eye, another tooth. I keep looking around for somebody’s mother to come on the scene saying, “Boys! Boys! Who started it cannot possibly be the issue here. People are getting hurt.”

  I am somebody’s mother, so I will say that now: The issue is, people are getting hurt. We need to take a moment’s time out to review the monstrous waste of an endless cycle of retaliation. The biggest weapons don’t win this one, guys. When there are people on Earth willing to give up their lives in hatred and use our own domestic airplanes as bombs, it’s clear that we can’t out-technologize them. You can’t beat cancer by killing every cell in the body – or you could, I guess, but the point would be lost. This is a war of who can hate the most. There is no limit to that escalation. It will only end when we have the guts to say it really doesn’t matter who started it, and begin to try and understand, then alter the forces that generate hatred.

  We have always been at war, though the citizens of the US were mostly insulated from what that really felt like until Sept. 11. Then, suddenly, we began to say, “The world has changed. This is something new.” If there really is something new under the sun in the way of war, some alternative to the way people have always died when heavy objects are dropped on them from above, then please, in the name of heaven, I would like to see it. I would like to see it, now.

  Tony has reroofed his barns with clear plastic as instructed by his new lease-holders. He’d got a good deal from a mate in some truckloads of the stuff discarded because they were the wrong lengths for a government job, bought it cheap and pocketed the rest of the bikky. Felt they owed it to him really, taking such risks with his property. If the GE freaks found out what was happening here, they’d be down on him like a Greenpeace rubber ducky onto a whaling boat.

  “So whad’ya gonna grow here?” he asks one of the botanists.

  “We’re not s’posed to say, really. Top-level secret and all that.”

  “Well if ya can’t tell me, who the hell can ya tell? I mean, I’m not about to blab and stuff up my future income, am I?” Tony takes a plastic packet from his chest pocket, unfurls it and begins rolling some tobacco into the paper. “Wanna rolly?” he asks the chap.

  “Haven’t smoked in years. Then again, I miss it like hell. Why not then, eh? The missus’d never know.”

  “Too right,” smiles Tony, handing over a rolly and making another for himself. He pokes the end into his mouth, lights up with a match, then holds the other fella’s ciggie against the tip of his own.

  “It’s rituals like these I most miss. And the mateship that goes with them,” admits the fella.

  “What’s yer name, mate?”

  “Steve.”

  “Stevie Wonderboy, eh?” Tony laughs.

  It’s lost on the young man who has no idea what Tony is on about.

  “So what’s the big secret then, eh Steve? Ya gonna clone the body of Marilyn Monroe onto the head of Helen Clark and fuse the two together?” Tony guffaws. “I know which bloody half I’d take.”

  “No. Nothing like that,” answers Steve, drawing in the sweet taste of the tobacco. “It’s actually much more simple. We’re experimenting with more productive patterns of growth. We’ve transferred genes from the fast-growing Pinus radiata into the native kauri tree to see if we can increase the pace of growth a bit.”

  Tony looks disappointed. “Why the hell d’ya wanna do that? Bit of a letdown after all that Frankenfish stuff, eh?”

  “You don’t want to believe all that rubbish the Greens put out. They’re all into conspiracy theories.”

  “Yeah, bloody academics and liberals. Too much time at university on our bloody taxpayers’ bikky, eh?” Tony puffs his smoke into Steve’s face, little realising he is talking to a PhD graduate.

  Steve decides it’s best not to reply to this one. Tony’s not very bright, but he seems a decent enough chap. “The point is that the timber of the kauri tree is worth ten times that of a Pinus radiata. If we could increase the growth rate, and still produce giant trees, then we’d be growing gold in them there hills, mate.”

  Tony looks out toward the Waipoua Forest. “Ah, now I see what ya mean. You could have another Tane Mahuta in ten years and rope in heaps more tourists as well as flinging the axe at the other thousands of trees around it. Shit. Not a bad idea. I could be interested in planting a few trees at that rate. Got a few spare acres out the back. Keep me posted on the progress, eh?”

  “So long as you keep it quiet. I could lose my job over this.”

  “No worries, mate.” Tony winks at Steve. “Me too!” He laughs, picking up his newly acquired cellphone and sauntering off to his new four-wheel-drive. “See ya later. Off to town for a while.” He grinds the silver car into gear and drives off, leaving a cloud of red clay dust behind him.

  He cradles her head in his hands. “I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone on this earth, Maata. Remember that, no matter what happens, always remember that,” whispers Waka into her ear. Maata wonders why he is so intimate, balancing on their surfboards, out here on the sea. Behind her head, the shark circles in closer. Then again, Waka always did like the sea and maybe this is his chosen place to be so romantic. She loves hearing his words, but tries hard not to giggle because the surf keeps pushing their boards away and she has to cling to him to remain so close. Their lower bodies swirl in and out as their heads remain locked together. She’s grateful for this embrace that she has waited so long to experience and thought might never come. She melts to his touch, her senses swimming with the sea, her soul leaving her body, as if winging its way up into the heavens and looking down on them from above.

  “Gidday, Ray. Howya goin’, mate?” Tony slaps a tankard of Lion Red onto the counter and burps appreciatively.

  Raymond pretends he has not heard and tries to pass him to get to the toilet and have a wash before his Friday night wine in the quiet without the family. Tony grabs his arm and yells into his face “You deaf from flying all those choppers too long, mate? Or too much hanky-panky with the missus? They say it zaps yer hearing like DDT on a field of cabbages.” He laughs, proud he has come up with an appropriate metaphor for his new flying friend.

  Raymond realises he cannot escape. “Hi Tony. I didn’t see you there. Too much on my mind.”

  “Well, I can relieve you on that front.” Tony swigs another drop. I’ll bet, thinks Raymond. “I gotta preposition to put to yer. Might bring in some good bikky too.”

  Raymond’s ears perk up at the mention of money. He decides not to correct Tony on the pronunciation of his proposition. “Fire away. No – let me buy you another tankard and let’s take a booth over in the corner. I presume this is of a s
ensitive nature?”

  “Yep. Lion Red. See ya there.” Tony is pleased he has managed to garner such high company in the local pub. He saunters past his old mates, making sure they all see him heading for a private booth and will watch Ray following behind with their beers. That’ll show ’em who’s boss, now. All those fellas who doubted him after his missus left. All those rumours about him abusing her. Well, wait’ll they find out how important he really is, being courted by scientists, genetic engineers, FarmCorp. And mixing it with the head of the Rawene Business Association, Mr Chopper himself.

  He sits himself down and splays his legs out wide, taking up as much space as possible. He lights up a fag, dropping the ashes onto the table, then remembers to wipe them away with his sleeve before Raymond arrives with the beers. Bit of a fussy fella, this Ray. He’d noticed this before. Raymond negotiates his way past many of the association’s members before arriving at the table, much to the delight of Tony. In a loud, booming voice he announces, “Thanks Ray. Very good of yer. Cheers, mate. Here’s to better business deals!”

  Raymond clinks his glass of wine against Tony’s tankard but whispers in his ear at the same time. “Keep it quiet, mate. D’ya want the whole pub to find out? If we botch this job, we’ll never get another chance. My future relies on this.”

  “Sure, mate. No worries. Mine too.” Tony takes a few swigs to calm his nerves.

  “So what’s the big deal?”

  Tony lowers his voice. “I found out that these botany fellas are going to breed giant kauri trees by crossing them with pines. You know, so they grow even faster. Probably gonna stick in some eucalyptus genes too. They grow like ruddy Ozzie rugby players, two a bloody minute,” he adds for good measure. Just to make it sound more impressive.