Untamed

It may as well have been a family holiday to outer space. The winding metal road definitely seemed galactic in length – signaling the increasing distance from civilisation as we knew it. But arriving at the final frontier was worth it. Just beyond the diminutive kaikoura grass carpark, a wild scrub and scorching black sand path led out to a lunar landscape: to the left, a short walk to the small, coarse-sand beach, dirt cliffs sinking to jagged rock pools; to the right, the long, distant, shimmering beach meeting the charcoal horizon. Base camp had its own unchanging vista: the timeless, brown painted fence and chipped walls standing constant against the changing seasons and fashions.

Despite the grandeur of the landscape, two memories from our holiday at Whatipu beach really stand out for me. The first was a frog hiding at the tube-like base of a flax bush in the garden just outside one of the cabins. One of the other kids must have heard the frog and we all gathered around to try and find it. Was it really there? Did frogs actually exist outside of Beatrice Potter books? Shunning the common garden path, it maintained an air of intrigue, (so as to segue smoothly out of our picture-book imaginations and into reality) by choosing the flax-tube portal to another world. We peered into the tube, into a timeless place so accessible to boys and girls short on years but rich in imagination.

The second was an older boy – tall, gangly, with fair hair and skin, wearing a horizontal red-and-white-striped T shirt – who broke his arm. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Older boys were tough and invincible. He was what they called a teenager, but to me he was as good as a grown man – sure, slightly younger than my father – but certainly as commanding, perhaps with an added mystery due to the extraterrestrial setting. With his older-boy broken voice he let out the most heart-wrenching older-boy screams. I’d never seen someone in so much pain before. He appeared to me, at once, both brave and broken, and I felt for him a strange, raw mix of pity and admiration.

Whenever I go back to Whatipu I scan the brown camp to see if it is as I left it, and imagine the frog still hiding in the flax portal, intriguing a new generation of space travelers. I wonder where the boy with the broken arm is now; what he looks like as an older man, whether he still remembers Whatipu, or if he shut it out to make his home in another galaxy. On one of our early dates I took my now wife to Whatipu, where we climbed the not very galactic dirt cliff and sat shivering and exposed, politely enjoying ourselves.

My entry for the 2012 North & South magazine essay writing comp.