by Te Radar
So valued is the tiny fish that wars have been fought over them, or if not actual wars, then certainly spirited skirmishes, or at least feuds. I suspect there is nothing like a good feud to make a meal of the delicate little fish taste all the better.
Even though I have never been whitebaiting before, there’s a sense of nostalgia associated with it. They are a hallowed New Zealand food-based institution—although I suspect that many of us have eaten them with no real idea what exactly it is that they grow into.
Scotty, a local fishing enthusiast, has promised to help me catch ‘a feed’ of the wriggling delicacy. ‘A feed’ is such a wonderful New Zealandism. In its ambiguity it also neatly sums up the concept of the sustainable harvest.
Crashing through a stand of dripping ponga, clambering over a fallen log, and falling through a clump of flax, I look up and there is Scotty. He is crouched beside the rain-splattered creek next to his net, the top of which is barely protruding above the water. It seems a relatively random place to have thrown the net in, but I assume he knows what he’s doing. Personally, I have no idea.
Scotty is a slightly rotund chap, with a beaming, faintly lopsided smile, and is cloaked in an air of stale rum. He’s a little the worse for wear after having spent the night with a friend who has recently returned from abroad with the obligatory duty-free booze. Still, what better way to overcome a hangover than to sit in the drizzle by a creek, waiting for the vagaries of the whitebait to play out.
While the conditions may not be ideal for whitebaiting, they are certainly less than ideal for filming. Tom the cameraman has trouble with the warm rain, which continually fogs up his viewfinder, and as there are times he cannot see anything, he can only point and hope. The result is what appears to be a succession of artfully composed shots of sticks in the foreground of the action. It looks less like we are being filmed, and more like someone is voyeuristically observing us from the safety of the bush.
It’s been raining all day. It rained yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that, and the day before that. While the day before that had been fine, the day before that had not. It has been raining for so many days that each night before I go to sleep I check to see if any webbing is developing between my toes. While there does appear to be some kind of something going on with the skin between my toes, so far it appears less like the much-desired webbing and more like a fungal infection.
The weather is one of the things that people who don’t work outdoors tend not to experience in all of its varying magnificence. For most people, rain is something to be gotten through while travelling from one dry place to another.
When you are required to be in it all day, it takes on a different relevance. I don’t mind being in the rain all day. It can be immensely enjoyable, and the warm, slightly humid spring rain we are currently experiencing is delightful. It’s warm enough to muddle around in dressed in little more than a raincoat and gumboots.
This does have its drawbacks though, especially when guests arrive. It’s easy to invite them inside, and be halfway through making them some tea before you realise that you have neglected to put on your pants.
It is a fitting metaphor for my existence (the rain, that is, not public pantlessness). Despite the torrents falling from the sky, I am more isolated from water than I have ever been. For the first time in my life, I am, like hundreds of millions of the world’s poor, living without running water. It’s very quaint.
All of my drinking and washing-up water has to be carried in containers from the water tank. I miss the luxury of the tap. When I do encounter a tap it’s like a strange novelty. I use it with a hitherto unfelt sense of reverence. I find I am treating refrigerators the same way.
I have been to places where clean running water was not available, but there was always the option of bottled water, or beer. Having to carry all my water certainly made me aware of how much I was using. It also made me even more aware of the weight of water.
Water is a heavy, difficult weight to carry. It swills around, throws one off balance, and has a tendency to want to leak and spill. In short, I have no idea how the people who carry water immense distances do it.
I watched women in Mali carrying water in vessels on their heads, and they did so with a grace and poise that was both strong and sensual.
I have no such grace. I lug my water in buckets, or in containers, around the farm, and if I were to put them on my head, I imagine the weight of it would crush me. I would close up like a concertina.
At one point, while labouring with the sloshing, unruly weight of the water containers, I labour also for a few long minutes under the misapprehension that perhaps water in Africa is lighter than the water we have here.
Maybe the African heat keeps the water at a higher average temperature, which spreads the water molecules out, thus making it lighter. How else could you explain the amount of water the African women carry around on their heads?
Surely I couldn’t be so radically weaker than they are?
It seems I am.
Even the amount of bathing I do is governed by the water-weight scenario. As I want to remain without too much of a heady musk, I need to wash myself. Standing in the rain working up a soapy lather can only suffice for so long. As a system for remaining clean, it also falls apart when there is no rain.
Initially I constructed a rudimentary ablution block in the field. With some old warratahs (the same steel poles used to hold my fence up) I fashioned a frame for a sink, and a stand for an old mirror that was lying in the shed.
It worked well for a while, and it was a great pleasure to be able to stand in the field and subject myself to a vigorous alfresco flannelling. But then a storm came and broke the mirror. I wasn’t too concerned about experiencing seven years’ bad luck, because how much worse can it get than living in a field in a tent?
As luck will have it, the previous inhabitants have abandoned a cast-iron bath under the totara tree. I intend to set it on some concrete posts, and then light a fire under it to heat the water when I need to bathe.
The Land Rover serves as a useful tractor, especially when it comes to towing things around, so I fasten a strop around the bath, and haul it across the paddock to the point that I have calculated will be the best position for it.
That position may appear to a casual observer to be simply a random spot in the middle of the paddock, but it was determined by a complicated formula:
Desired position of bath =
distance from things that might burn = tree/tent
÷ distance water is to be carried
where distance = amount of exertion I can be bothered exerting
× depth of bath required for satisfactory bathing experience
With additional factor:
How far is too far to walk nude across field (= estimated average air temperature × proximity of neighbours)?
In retrospect this formula radically underestimates both the amount of water I can be bothered carrying and the distance I can carry it, which are: not much, and not far.
How full I choose to fill the bath is also governed by whether I utilise water from the nearby trough, which receives its slightly murky supply from a pump that pumps it out of the creek at the bottom of the farm, or whether I choose to cart it from the tank, which is full of rainwater collected from the roof of the farm buildings.
The trough has the benefit of being much closer, but full of potential contagion, whereas the water tank is cleaner, but is some distance further away.
I suppose I could just buy a hose.
The reason I don’t is because I want to truly experience the ordeal that is the inability to access running water. I feel there is a certain degree of romanticism attached to the Spartan monasticism of the experience.
I have also deluded myself into thinking the enforced exercise will be good for me.
As the ordeal of water carrying becomes apparent, I begin to reason that if I am to live more sustainably, then there is no need t
o use so much water. Ergo: there is no need to change the bath water every day. After all, there is only one of me and I’m not that dirty. Surely it can last a few days?
I also theorise that if I fill the tub to the brim, a certain amount of water will be displaced every time I lower myself in. All I will need to do is replace this water each time I get in, and over a period of days the bath will be almost self-cleansing.
If any of this indicates anything, it’s the fact that I have a lot of time on my hands for unnecessary thinking while trapped in the tent as the rain continues to fall.
In the television programme I am often seen bathing in my swimsuit. This only really happens when the crew are there, in order to spare both them and the viewers from witnessing me in a more natural state.
At other times I get quite used to strolling from the tent to the bath in the buff. While I don’t do it too often when it is light, once dusk comes the field is mine and there is little danger of prying eyes peering in.
Even if the neighbours are looking, I judge the distance to be sufficient that it will be difficult to tell if I am in a bathing suit or not, unless they have binoculars, or a telescope. If they do have either of these, then good luck to them. After all, there’s surely no crime in bathing in the middle of one’s own field as nature intended, is there?
I have toyed with the idea of erecting a screen of some kind around the bath, but in the end decide it is unnecessary. I prefer the view. Whether the neighbours do, I shall never know.
Over the course of the experiment, the pleasure of a steaming hot fire-bath never wanes. It is always there in the paddock, waiting to soothe aching muscles, and to wash off the dirt and sweat and blood.
Lying in it with all but my face submerged, either just on dusk or late at night, the steam rising off the water and mingling with the smoke, cocooning the bath in a layer of heat that creates a warming thermal layer extending a foot or so above the water, and looking up at the stars or the clouds, is utterly pleasurable.
All is quiet, bar the sounds of cattle and night birds, the occasional swoosh of traffic on the nearby road, the intermittent sound of neighbours laughing (hopefully not at me), and the occasional unidentifiable night sound that is simply not worth wondering about in case it is something scary.
I am certainly looking forward to the bath’s warm embrace whilst we are out whitebaiting. The rain has been unrelenting, but Scotty is an interesting character, and the chance to simply sit and exchange tall tales is a welcome break from working for a living. We sit, staring at the creek pockmarked by the incessant drizzle, and wait.
It would have been nice to have a snug whitebait stand, but even they have succumbed to the clutches of the property speculators. In recent years, stands have gone for record prices, bought by speculators and fanatics for exorbitant prices that the locals can only dream of.
Every so often we emerge from the faux shelter of the trees and check the net.
While the glory days of the huge whitebait catches have mostly passed, there have been reports of a Hokitika whitebaiter netting 300 kilograms off a single tide just a week ago. With the delicacy variously priced from $70 to $150 per kilogram, this represents a potential day’s earnings of anywhere from $21,000 to $45,000.
I know the chances of us catching that much are slim, but it is always a possibility, although that may lead to a skirmish with Scotty over the rights to the haul. I’m not sure of the etiquette in such a circumstance.
As I pull the net from the water my heart leaps. Its weight indicates that there is something in it. Jubilation is halted when it appears I have caught little more than a stick. However, on closer inspection, there do seem to be a few tiny, pale whitebait in the bottom of the net. Reaching in, we fish the few fish that are in there out, laughing at what the old timers would have thought as we fossick around after single fish trapped in the net’s many folds.
In the past, people talked of vast shoals of the tiny fish darkening rivers as they made their way upstream. People would fill kerosene tins with them. Quite why they always seemed to use kerosene tins, I do not know. Whitebait were so plentiful that they were thrown onto gardens as fertiliser, or fed to chickens to such an extent that the hens’ eggs were said to taste fishy. Much of this waste was attributed to the fact that for many years there was no real way of storing the fish.
There are some great photos of some of the early pioneers of the whitebait trade, loading tiny, fragile-looking planes full of tins of West Coast whitebait that was to be flown out over the Southern Alps. Those trips must have been mightily perilous, and I suspect those people who eventually consumed the whitebait probably knew nothing about them.
We certainly haven’t caught enough for matters of storage or transportation to be an issue, and the most danger I may encounter, other than falling into the creek, is to incinerate myself with a malfunctioning gas cooker.
Shielding the matches from the rain, we light the stove under the shelter of the dripping trees, heat the fry pan, and throw in a little butter. As I have only brought eggs laid that morning by my chickens, all we really end up making is a basic whitebait and egg scramble. I have also forgotten to bring any utensils, so in lieu of a spatula I use a stick to stir the mixture around. Luckily I had caught an ideal one earlier.
The stick isn’t much use when it comes to trying to lift the piping hot mass to our mouths, so Scotty and I are forced to share the lid of the butter container to eat it.
It’s delicious. The whitebait couldn’t have been any fresher unless I had put my head under the water and attempted to suck them into my face.
And still the rain falls.
Photos
Just in case Te Radar forgets where he is, a handy sign marks his boundary.
Pansy the goat rightly wonders why Te Radar is bathing in her drinking water.
There’s little that makes one appreciate electricity like having to light a fire to boil water every time one feels like a cup of tea.
Several concrete posts, some bricks and a cast-iron bath make for a wonderful outdoor hot tub.
Te Radar cooks his lunch in the kiln while Bevan the cameraman and Frank the soundman record the process.
A fire rages in the heart of the kiln, in preparation for cooking more tasty morsels of animals that once ranged in the paddock beyond.
Hay trial garden; little grows but grass, of which there is clearly no shortage.
Sawdust trial garden; even hope fails to grow here.
Soil trial garden; marginal success, which proves little but that potatoes will grow virtually anywhere.
The land provideth a turkey…
…and the turkey provideth a meal.
Christmas the turkey performs another futile mating dance in front of a disinterested Te Radar, who is engaged in idle contemplation. More idle, perhaps, than contemplating.
Bevan the cameraman catches a moment of evening intimacy in the caravan. Note the squalor.
The kitchen of ‘The Chapel’. No women dwell here.
Fruits of thy labours: goat rug, peaches, goat salami, lemons, and apples.
Building code violations are compounded by fashion crimes.
A man in a meadow. The enclave is complete.
16
The mice will play
I am having an uncomfortable stand-off with a mouse. Or mice. I’m not sure there is only one mouse, for despite never having seen more than one at a time, I can’t be sure there aren’t more, as they all look essentially the same—mouse-like.
I have moved out of the tent and into a caravan, a luxury that I have paid for by swapping my Hereford calves, Campbell and Sainsbury, for a loan of it for six months. I hadn’t anticipated it would bring with it the night terrors I am now experiencing.
I am sitting at the table in one end of the caravan, and the mice are at the other end on (or worse, in) my bed. I am not sure what to do about it.
I don’t know why I am so fearful of rodents. My mother would say, ‘Don’t be s
o silly, they are more afraid of you than you are of them.’ If this is true, then the mice sure have a funny way of manifesting abject terror.
It’s not so much that they frighten me. It’s more that I feel uneasy about them. Maybe it’s their darting speed, or their sharp, pointed teeth. More likely it’s their tail. There is also the reputation they have as vectors of disease. While rodentophiles will argue that they’re a clean animal, there’s no forgetting that they did bring such events as the Black Death to humanity. Sure, it was actually transmitted by fleas, but the fleas lived on the rodents, ergo, the rodent is a dirty bearer of bad tidings.
I have been trying to trap the mice by placing plastic mousetraps around the caravan. I place them in corners. I leave them in cupboards. I put them under the bed and on the bed where they seem to be poking their heads out. I’ve put a little camembert that I had kindly been given by a cheese vendor at the Matakana market on the traps. Once again my prey is being lured with better food than I have.
Before I go to bed, I have to tentatively go through all the bed blankets and sheets. There are a lot of them, as the caravan is totally devoid of insulation. It’s a nightly routine, lifting the bedding up and shaking it out, hoping the mice aren’t clinging to it with their grippy little feet.