by Te Radar
I think they might be living in a space beneath the bed, so I seal the gap up with gaffer tape.
We are definitely suffering from a Bible-esque plague of rodents—there is no question about that. In the converted garage, attached to the old farmhouse, and now used as the editing suite, Brendan the editor has been trapping them for weeks. He has disposed of over forty so far, and their numbers show no sign of abating.
Our infestation is nothing like the one that occurred in Australia in 1993, where a perfect storm of conditions led to what has been described as the world’s worst mouse plague. Mice numbering in the hundreds of millions overran whole areas. Pigs trapped in their sties were eaten alive. Rivers of mice would flow through doors when they were opened. Even babies were attacked. When the government finally stepped in and a poison campaign was launched, the six-month-long plague was stopped in its tracks in a matter of days.
Instead of building better mousetraps, Australia is now considering using a genetically mutated herpes virus to stymie the mice. Quite how they’ll give herpes to mice, I do not know.
Footage of the plague remains some of the most frightening images I have seen on the Internet. Needless to say, each time I see a mouse pop its quivering little nose out from beside my mattress, memories of this come flooding back.
Mice may be the least of our worries though. Something lives in the roof of the old farmhouse too, and Wayne the other editor has to cope with the clomping of whatever it is that lives above him. You can almost set your watch by it: at 5 o’clock every day there is the sound of an almighty THUNK, followed by the thumpthumpthumpthumpthump of footsteps in the ceiling. All we can do is stare at the ceiling and hope that whatever it is doesn’t fall through.
Outside the house there are glossy-coated, bright-eyed rats poking their heads out everywhere. They even cavort in the daylight, such is their lack of fear.
Only last week I was standing in the paddock, enjoying the late afternoon sun, when two plump rats chased each other around my feet in a blur of frolicking fur. They bounced through the grass, leapt over each other, and appeared to be enjoying the hot summer sun as much as I was. Sometimes even pestilence can be cute.
Oddly, I was less worried about rodents when I was in the tent, which was no hermetically sealed environment. It was open all round, and should some animal of the night wish to slip in and investigate, there was little to stop it doing so.
The reason the caravan worries me more is for the very reason that it is a sealed environment, which means that if something does get in, it is more difficult to usher it out.
The caravan, green with a white canopy, is comfortable but suitably basic. The owners have installed plush, new red curtains. When they are closed it’s like being cocooned inside a cosy womb. The big red fluffy blanket I have only serves to accentuate the feeling. It is comfortingly maternal. Each morning I emerge, feeling reborn.
It is almost totally devoid of wood, with Formica doors on the cupboards, and lots of linoleum.
There are some cupboards mounted along the wall at eye level. These have doors that open downwards. I can never seem to close them properly, and they have a nasty habit of falling open on my head.
The worst offender happens to be the door right above where I sit at the table. It regularly falls open, and its crisp, hard edge scones me right on the noggin. Why I never get around to fixing it, or easier still, simply sit on the other side of the table, I do not know.
I think I get fixed in my ways, and spend an endless succession of long, cold nights nursing a sore head, wondering if this fixatedness isn’t a sign of some kind of mental illness. It is a potent and painful reminder of my inability to keep on top of minor repairs, and as such is deeply symbolic of my failure to achieve any of the things I have scrawled on my comprehensive List of Things To Do.
In the roof there is a skylight that opens to allow some much-needed fresh air to circulate. I leave it open pretty much the entire time, even as the nights get cooler, in order to maximise airflow.
I need all the fresh air I can get. Laundry is not something I do a lot of, as it is a little difficult to do. While washing socks and undergarmentry in the bath with me is easy, bigger items tend to be stored in a series of carefully constructed piles on the floor and then neglected (although washing them is on the aforementioned list). I may wear the clothes slightly longer than I should, but I never notice it as I am living inside the aroma.
I also enjoy the health-giving properties of the cool night air, due in part to the half-recalled teachings of Scouting founder Lord Baden-Powell. He always advocated sleeping with a window open at night, as this would prevent one from catching a cold.
He also touted the benefits of a rough towelling after your ablutions. This is a terrific idea, and one I can heartily recommend. Not for me a soft, fabric-conditioned towel. The rough towel, used correctly, provides a delightful exfoliation of the skin, leaving one invigorated and pink. It’s jolly revitalising, and after you have stood naked in a small plastic tub of warm water in the middle of a cold paddock, giving yourself a thorough soapy flannelling, the rough towel provides an almost intoxicating finale. At the very least the warming friction keeps hypothermia at bay.
While I expected a certain amount of dampness in the tent, it is the caravan that leaks more. Water drips in from the skylight, and trickles in above the door and around the windows. This leakage is mildly irritating because it makes my slippers damp when I pad the short distance from the table to bed.
Apart from being cold, damp and mouse-infested, the caravan has the added advantage of featuring several things that I am unable to use. These include light bulbs, power points, and even a small fridge. All are useless, as electricity is a joy forbidden to me. They serve as a tangible tribute to a world I have left behind (as if I need reminding).
Whereas others may choose to civilise their caravan, I keep mine in a raw and rugged, frontier-like state. It’s very much a man’s world. Tools lie strewn near the door, out of the weather—hammers, toolboxes, even on occasion chainsaws and drills. Work boots are kicked off inside so that they won’t get wet. Piles of work clothes litter the floor. An industrial-sized container of sunscreen sits on the bench, waiting to be slathered liberally over exposed skin before I venture out.
The manliness of the environment prompts a conversation with a visiting lady friend about the civilising role of women on the frontier, with special reference to their role in the mythology of the old Westerns.
‘Women’, she says, ‘represented civilisation, in opposition to the cowboy, whose untamed manliness echoed the wilderness of the frontier. Women brought with them teacups and linen tablecloths. Men moderated their language and actions around women.’
I have a nagging feeling that she is trying to make a point about something.
There is little evidence of any womanly civilising in my world, despite Jane’s best efforts. I like to think of my caravan as an archetypal single man’s dwelling, existing as I do on the borders of society, on the frontier, positioned on the furthest outreaches of the civilised world and the unexplored never-never.
I consider myself to be the post-modern personification of the iconic New Zealand Man Alone—all of this in a paddock surrounded by million-dollar lifestyle blocks and a golf course.
The frontier isn’t where it used to be, it seems.
I blend into the environment, rather than attempting to civilise it. Whereas other people see a landscape cluttered with drums and timber and half-finished projects, I simply look past the clutter and see the landscape.
Of course, I am not exactly alone. I have the mice. My battle with them is hindered by the weapons I have at hand. The traps I am using don’t seem to be very efficient at killing the mice. They just grip them by the nose or the leg.
After I have gone to bed, I will hear the trap go off in the dark, followed by the scuttling feet of the trapped mouse, which means I have to get up, turn on the light (assuming I can find the torch) a
nd deal with a live mouse.
Sometimes I will throw them far out into the paddock, thinking that if they survive the fall, then all power to them. Mostly I have to put them down. This presents challenges. What does one use to kill a mouse?
I use a small curved sickle that I have rescued from the trash some chums were getting rid of. They were attempting to move decades of family clutter from their mother’s home, and it was heartbreaking to see what was being thrown away.
It was the old tools that were the worst of it for me. Old tools have a magic to them. They are solid, well balanced, and dependable.
Their family collection included pick-axes, adzes, forks, saws, hammers—it all seemed such a tragic waste, and a sad loss to the country’s tool-based history. Sadly I wasn’t in a position to take them all with me, so I took only the sickle.
With its rough wooden handle and curved blade, it isn’t specifically suited to the task of executing mice. But it seems a better option than the hammer.
The last thing I want to do is to hit a mouse on the head with a hammer.
Actually, that is the second-to-last thing I want. The last thing I want is to have a mouse in my bed.
No. Wait, that’s actually the second-to-last thing I want. The last thing I want is a rat in my bed.
17
Floundering
How much net’s out there?’ I ask, trying to sound useful.
‘About four hundred metres.’
‘And you want me to haul it in by hand?’
‘It’ll toughen you up.’
The wind-battered, chain-smoking slab of belligerent humanity that is the master, commander and entire crew of the good ship Donna stares sceptically at me as I struggle to haul the net in over the bow.
‘Can I sing a shanty while I’m hauling?’
‘Shit no. Gawd.’
There are few people who fit the phrase ‘larger than life’ quite as well as Swampy. He wears it as comfortably as the ragged camouflage waders he’s clad in. Even the vast Kaipara Harbour seems almost too small to contain his personality.
The Donna is no floating pleasure palace; it is four metres of utilitarian aluminium functionality. Some fish guts, the remnants of a previous catch, still swirl around in the murky water in the bottom of the boat.
Rolling yet another cigarette, Swampy says: ‘They’re a bloody great little fish, the flounder. They can change colour, y’know, depending on what’s on the bottom.’
As interesting as this titbit of information is, it doesn’t serve to endear me any more to the flounder. I have never really been a fan of them. Someone must love them though, for day after day Swampy is out on the harbour, casting his nets and hauling in the slippery little bottom feeders.
The flounder swim close inshore at high tide to feed, then when they head back out on the tide Swampy is waiting for them, day after day, governed by the wind and the tide, and the mountain of paperwork and regulations and quotas that mark the state of the fishing industry today.
He still has the refrain of the fisherman: there’s plenty of fish out there. ‘They take a thousand tonne of fish out of the Kaipara every year,’ he says.
‘That’s a lot of fish,’ I exclaim.
‘It bloody well is,’ he replies.
Swampy represents the last gasp of the small players in a fishing industry that used to thrive along the coastlines of New Zealand. Nowadays only a few lonely boats litter harbours and ports where once the great fleets rested.
If there is any industry that has struggled with sustainability, it’s the fishing industry. From the beginning of European interaction with this country, the sea around our isolated island nation has been regarded as a source of endless bounty and untold riches that were there to be exploited as briskly as possible.
As I heave the net in over the bow I’m surprised that there aren’t as many fish in it as I had imagined there would be. It’s hard to see how a living can be eked out in this manner.
The fish that are there are enmeshed in the fine silver thread of the net. I reach for the first of them tentatively, trying to grip it delicately between my thumb and forefinger. It’s slippery and firm, and I’m worried about damaging it. I am struck by the knowledge that, at this moment, I am both literally and metaphorically floundering.
I swiftly realise that the only way to deal with the flounder is to firmly clasp them behind the head and wriggle them free from the net. They are well and truly tangled, and it takes a deft wrist to prise them free.
As more of the net is hauled in, the large black fish bin slowly fills with flapping flounder.
Motoring across the harbour to where Swampy has another net set, I’m perched in the bow to keep the weight evenly distributed. The Donna surges forward in response to Swampy’s smooth push of the throttle, the wind catches my hair, the light shining on the water dazzles my eyes, and sea spray washes back into my face as a stiff breeze tugs at our collars. It’s a great day to be out on the water.
It gives me time to soak up the scenery. Low mangroves give way to rolling hills of pasture. Here and there, houses dot the hills between the patches of bush that remain. On one point there are signs of an exclusive new subdivision going in, roads that lead nowhere, and it’s all very civilised, a far cry from the conditions encountered by those who found themselves here at the beginning of European exploitation of the sea.
One of the things that Cook and his crew noted on their early voyages here was the sea’s bounty, specifically the abundance of sea mammals. Word of their abundance spread throughout the South Pacific faster than the venereal diseases the European crews left with the natives, so that from the early 1790s onwards, people flocked here to make a killing.
Imagine, if you will, that you are standing on a rocky foreshore. You’re watching the ship that deposited you there sail off over the distant horizon. You look back to the impenetrable bush that presses down onto the beach, threatening to push you off your tiny foothold. You’ve heard the tales of the horrors it contains, stories of tattoo-faced man-eaters only too willing to pluck out your eyes and feed them to their children, while their womenfolk eat your liver, the blood running down their faces. You turn again, and in front of you is nothing but the desolate, empty sea.
For now there are only two tasks: the first is simply to stay alive, and the second is to kill and skin every seal in sight. And there does seem to be rather a lot of them. As you set about systematically harvesting them, a nagging fear lurks in the back of your mind…what if the ship never comes back?
This was the reality for the first Europeans who came to these far-flung islands at the end of the earth to harvest the bounty of the sea.
During research I conducted for my show on the history of the South Island, I happened upon the story of four men, who in an attempt to escape from the penal colony that was Australia were discovered stowed away on a sealing ship prophetically named the Adventure.
As they were well out to sea when found, the captain could do little with them but initiate a ‘work for your stay’ scheme, until it was discovered that with four extra mouths to feed, there was too little food to last.
It was suggested to the men that they might alight at The Snares, a tiny island group some 200 kilometres south of the South Island. Armed with little more than some rice, an iron pot and a few potatoes, they were rowed ashore to busy themselves clubbing seals until the ship returned to pick them up.
Between them they killed and skinned 1300 seals, which seems like quite a lot, until you consider that they were there for seven years.
At that point, an American whaling ship, the Enterprise, happened past, and its crew were shocked to be confronted by three ragged hairy men leaping from the bush.
According to the three survivors, the fourth man had gone mental, and as care facilities for the mentally ill were scarce on the small island group, they had decided that the best way to treat his condition was to throw him off a cliff.
Despite my ineptitude at fishing, I
am pretty sure Swampy isn’t going to maroon me on the desolate coast of the southern Kaipara, but fishing is a dangerous activity. There is always the danger of being impaled by a fish hook, or drowning.
Despite the proliferation of television ads urging me to do so, I am not wearing a lifejacket. It is a little worrying, especially considering the Kaipara’s history as a maritime burial ground. It’s notorious for drownings. The entrance to the harbour has several treacherous bars (and my experience as a landlubber suggests there are more than a few perilous bars located in communities around the harbour’s edge).
One of the bars at the harbour’s mouth is known as The Graveyard, and is the site of somewhere between 43 and 110 shipwrecks. The fact that no one is really sure how many there have been is disquieting. When a place has so many wrecks that people lose count, it often develops a certain mystique. Here though, it is as if tragedy has become so mundane that people no longer pay it any attention.
Should we come a cropper, I am sure that my body will wash up somewhere along the Kaipara’s staggeringly long 3200-kilometre shoreline. As someone who doesn’t spend a lot of time at sea, when I do I always feel a little nostalgic about our maritime history and the immense dangers and risks associated with it. Sitting just off the beds of mangroves that line so much of the Kaipara, with the gentle waves flip-flipping against the side of the Donna, a seagull drifting lazily on the wind, it’s a far cry from the dangers faced by the early sealers and whalers.
At its best, sealing and whaling was filthy, squalid and downright perilous work. It required long hours toiling in all weathers, seven days a week, with little to no safety equipment, knee deep in offal, on ships that were infested with rats, with nothing to look forward to but profit or death, mostly of the agonising kind.