Hooligans

Standing on Queen Street today I heard behind me a loud, cheerful commotion. Turning to look I was surprised to see an army of about 200 school children in navy blue uniform marching up behind me. Mildly relieved, I received the all clear to cross the road, and as I began to do so the children broke into song, momentarily transforming the pavement outside Smith & Caugheys into a Wembley football stadium stand. I continued diagonally across the road, safely out of the way of this giant busking ensemble, glancing back over my shoulder to take in the whole experience. Overtaken with the excitement of a buzzer command, and abandoning their orderly chant for lively yelps and squeals, the children began running across the road, breaking ahead of the pack like water spilling over rapids. Predictably, from across the road a bystander was busy reducing it onto his one-inch movie screen.

Poems

Mornings

I love mornings, everything is fresh and brand new
The cool air is latent and filled with possibility
Sunlight pierces the shivering particles
It’s the same old sun that’s been going around for ever
But a brand new sunrise for today
Not like reheated leftovers – although they have a magic all their own
But like an old pair of jeans that have shrunk in the wash and have to be broken in all over again

Fire

I made a fire
In the house
In the fireplace
The place of fire

I built a fire
Out of building wood
Wasn’t sure if I built the fire
Before or after I lit the match

I made a fire
In the fireplace
Out of wood
My house is made of wood so I call it my tree hut
And I call my tree hut my large bird box
It's where I keep my moa.

Printing

I have seen the printing press come and go
All the while I’ve been writing in pen
The pen and the printing press both use ink
I am a printer
At school I was taught printing
Then running writing
Reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmetic
Alliterate Always
- Two different sounding A's
Followed by a different number of l’s
All as in ‘always’, not as in ‘alliterate’
I never stopped learning English.

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.

Boarding school

On Saturday I went snowboarding for the first time in about 15 years. I was expecting to see some revolutionary new shape of snowboard, or at least a throwback to a retro design – a bit like how the latest skateboards look like the long, thin, downhill boards of old. But unlike skateboarding, snowboarding doesn’t really have much of a history to throw back to. On hearing that I virtually hadn’t snowboarded since the invention of (the) sport, my helpful bro-in-law John brought me up to speed on a few skiing essentials, including that you are now in the minority if you don't wear a helmet. My first thought was, “what, even including snowboarders?”, because, you see, I’d always thought that snowboarding was the cool thing to do on the mountain, while skiing was just for conformists. But that all changed when I asked John, “are your skis wider than normal skis”, to which he replied, “it depends how you define normal skis – anything goes these days.” …Okay, I’ll just be over here twirling my 90s dreadlocks. After hiring my boots, board and helmet, and figuring out how to do up my boots, put on my complimentary wristguards (they go on the outside of the gloves) and lock my front foot into the bindings, it was time to join John, my twin five-year-old nieces and eight-year-old nephew in plopping backwards into the chairlift for the tranquil, scenic ascent to the point of uncertainty. As soon as the top of the chairlift came into view I got some slight jitters about the all important slide with your chairlift chums down to where you are well clear of the turning chair. Adding to the pressure was the fact that I only had one foot in the bindings, but I found some spare plank on which to put my back foot and made it down ok. It was such a beautiful day (it felt more like a day at the beach than on icy snow), I was determined not to ruin it on my first run with a stinging face plant or dislocated shoulder, so, after making the whole party wait while I clumsily secured my back foot, I gently began my descent, stopping every metre or two to look in awe at my already tiny relatives disappearing ahead of me. I was happy to find that after such a long hiatus, snowboarding is like riding a bicycle, except you face sideways, and you don't hold onto anything... so maybe skiing is more like riding a bicycle than snowboarding. I digest. Next day my nephew and I went skateboarding and I discovered I can still ollie - there is now probably some cooler word for it - so I must say I'm tempted to get back into skateboarding... I'm just not that excited by having to get my old job back at the chicken hatchery to pay for it.

Breakneck

Ollie back to 1989, when I was saving for a new skateboard. I already owned a Santa Cruz Tom Grosso(?) mini that I bought off a guy at school with one blue and one green eye who loved to talk about skateboarding, and who once instructed me to find out for myself a bit more about one particular aspect of skateboarding, to which I replied, "I'll do that for homework." His nickname for me was "runner boy", because I was doing a lot of distance running at the time. I needed $340 to buy a new deck, trucks, wheels, bearings and accessories from Cheapskates in Henderson, and the obvious pathway to my dreams lay in sacrificing my two-week school holiday for a job breaking necks at the Waitakere Chicken Hatchery, where my sister had worked before me. She had the unenviable task of sorting the reject chicks from the good ones, then breaking their necks using a special thumb technique. I wasn't given that job, and instead ended up on forgettable tasks like cleaning and stacking plastic trays and hosing out tanks etc. I saved my $340 and proceeded to Henderson to get me some wheels etc. The skateboard deck I picked had graphics depicting death, eg skulls and/or demons, which didn't impress my dad, a church pastor, so he gave me the choice of either returning the deck to the shop or scraping off the graphics using a brick. I took the deck back and swapped it for a Santa Cruz Jeff Grosso 'toybox', featuring a picture of a toybox.

National labour

We took 17 days to sail from Fiji to New Zealand, landing in Opua in the beautiful Bay of Islands. From Opua we sailed overnight to Crusader’s final resting place in Auckland Harbour. Despite it being winter, I had a strange desire to continue traveling south, so I went and lived in Christchurch with my sister for a while. I had decided that I wanted to be a yacht designer, so I went around the boat yards looking for labouring work, and wound up working for an old guy who made Olympic row boats. I can’t recall exactly what purpose I served, but I remember one day drilling bolt holes in seats, and making a mistake, which caused the old man to exclaim, “stuff in Christ!” – obviously the dyslexic version of “Christ ‘n stuff”. Pushbiking to work in sub-zero temperatures wasn’t for me, so after two weeks I quit my job and headed back to West Auckland, where I got a job in a large fiberglass yacht factory. I was helping an old man called Martin to assemble a large fleet of small inflatable/fiberglass, see-through-bottom fizzboats, ready for shipping offshore. Martin liked to call people nerds, and complained that over his lifetime he'd paid over a million dollars in tax. One of the other boatbuilders, a mate of mine, was helping to churn out a new yacht design called a Farr Platu, or as he called it, “plaadu”. Sometime in January I either quit or was laid off the job, and with my yacht design ambitions behind me, I asked a builder friend of mine for a labouring job.

Three months in a leaky boat

We never made it to Kiribati. A week after setting off from Fiji our boat sprung a leak and almost sank, so we turned back for Fiji. We approached Suva Harbour at night, and decided to negotiate the channel to the anchorage in the dark instead of heaving to and waiting til morning. We didn't read the channel lights properly and our boat came to a grinding halt on top of a reef. Skipper Sam was in conniptions, so Mike sprung to and radioed the coastguard, who told us he'd knocked off for the day and couldn't help - laid back Island styles to the extreme! Fortunately some other yachties in the harbour were listening in on their radios, and on hearing our plight, donned wetsuits, jumped in their rubber duckies and selflessly came to our aid. Using two anchors they cleverly lifted us off the reef. During our three week layover in Fiji we hitch-hiked around the island of Viti Levu, went to the movies and saw Schindler's List, did some token missionary work and took a token dive over the side of the boat to check for damage in preparation for our return sail to New Zealand. We set sail once more for the last leg of the voyage. As we were nearing New Zealand we saw an air force Orion fly low over us a few times so we turned on our radio and received instruction from them to change course and head toward a stricken yacht in the area. (Mum and dad later told me that they had an anxious wait between the first phone call from the coastguard telling them that a yacht in our area had activated its emergency position-indicating radio beacon, and the second to say it wasn't our boat!) About four hours later we found the tiny yacht bobbing helplessly and with its two crew looking quite relieved to see us. We threw them a line and started towing them back to New Zealand, which, given the headwind and our unreliable motor, turned out to be a bit of a hopeless task. A charter fishing launch came out from New Zealand and took over the tow, costing the two guys $5000 including bait.