* * Day 3, Whakatane

My body clock is still askew, so I get sleepy around 9:00 pm and awake before dawn. On this morning, in the East Coast beach town of Onemata, I had visions of watching the sunrise over the ocean. Alas, with a cloudy sky it was not to be. But before Jane and Whitney stirred, I took a walk around the village.

The town is situated on a half-bowl shaped cove. There is one road in, which ends in the village center, which has one commercial structure, a café with a “For Sale” sign on it and a realty. Otherwise, there are vacation homes strewn about, linked to the winding roads emanating from the center. The homes are modest, only a few are ostentatious. Lawns have grass as tightly shorn as a golf course and fragrant plants growing alongside picket fences. Everything is neat as a proverbial pin, and I try to do my part by picking up the few pieces of rubbish I find. Nobody is awake and there is no movement of cars.

At the end of a cul-de-sac, a marked trail leads into the woods. I follow it through lush, tropical woods. Birds flit around; I’ve brought binoculars but not the bird book. I try to make note of their markings. The forest is lush and exotic, with hardwood trees undergirded with huge ferns and yuccas. I reach a clear-cut where the entire hillside was shorn of trees. Clear-cut forests always depress me, whether in my native Appalachia, in the Pacific Northwest where I lived for ten years and the clear cuts were visible from space, or here. We all use and appreciate wood products, but I wish the destruction of forests would stop.

Whitney’s roommate at Tech has spent the most recent semester here in New Zealand and our only chance to cross paths is today. But she needs to do her part and contact us.  I give it no better than 50/50.

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We hit the road and drove southwesterly paralleling the coast, sometime with the ocean in sight and sometimes not, to Whakatane. Where we could see the ocean, it was a frothy, roiling thing, with a typhoon somewhere in the area. Locals say the ocean here is seldom as angry.

We finally got a message that Kelly wasn’t going to be able to meet us, so we continued on to our host’s home. After one wrong turn, we met Janie Story at her spotless home in a suburban development on the side of a hill around the corner and above the city center. Shortly, her husband Kim returned from his run. Janie is pert and energetic. She works as an administrator in town and is the family Rotary member. Kim works outside the town, erecting fencing. He is reminiscent of Crocodile Dundee, preferring to spend as much time in the bush as possible. He regaled us of his tales of hunting wild boar, something he’d been doing since his teen years. These feral hogs can be anywhere from 80 to 200 pounds. The animals grow huge tusks and can easily kill his dogs or himself. He uses dogs to find and corner them. Then he’ll approach and shoot them in the head. He cuts their head off, then guts them, and then carries the carcass home draped over his back.

Janie had arranged for Whitney and me a horseback ride with a woman named Annette. We arrived five minutes late and the horses were already tacked and Annette sat on the ground, looking impatient. In response to our best, “How are you?” she said she’d had an awful week, had a toothache, and was generally pretty miserable. I shrugged it off but Janie said later she was taken aback by the woman’s rudeness. Anyway, Annette got increasingly cheerful as our ride progressed. Whitney thought Annette could tell we knew something about horses and weren’t totally green and ready to fall off. Fortunately for me, I didn’t fall or otherwise embarrass myself. We had a pleasant walk over hill and dale, going over some steep terrain, sometimes with distant views and sometimes through dense forests. Annette often reached down to yank some of the taller invasive plants from the ground. She was also adroitly able to open and re-latch the fences without getting off her horse. She said her horses were free to range over many acres, so she and her family had named the various places to assist with giving help finding them. One area she called, “the last place,” as in the last place you look. My horse was a Morgan, very responsive and well trained.

On our way back to town, Janie took us through her small city’s downtown. It was delightful, with prosperous looking stores and a charming streetscape, with marked pedestrian crossings and planters filled with flowers. On the edge of the downtown, the road dead-ended with a cliff on the right literally spilling into the back of a row of homes and apartment buildings and on the left the river meeting the sea. Janie stopped when she spotted two pedestrians strolling the sidewalk, and it turned out to be Barney and Pru Grey, two other Rotarians I’d communicated with. So we spoke for several moments, we in our car and Barney crouching to our level.

 We took photos of some Maori long-boats, locked in an open-air covered cage. They were elaborately carved and painted.

We stopped by to pick up Kim who was visiting his cousin a couple of kilometers outside town. The cousin Allen and his wife Shirley lived in a modest home fronting a busy highway, but the local river, the Rangataiki, flowed outside their back yard. The strolled us around the yard where they grew three sheep along with several ducks and geese. In a covered, ventilated box, a momma duck sat with newborn chicks, yellow and adorable, that we held. The cousin was startlingly friendly and outwardly delighted to meet us and show us around, although we only spent 20 minutes or so there. He gave us a couple of containers containing tiny fish that is a local delicacy.

Back at the Storey home, Janie fed us a sumptuous dinner of lamb roast, sweet potatoes, broccoli, and green beans. She also cooked up the fish in egg patties. Their son David and his wife Louise had left their 15-month old son for a couple of hours, and we chased the hefty, round-faced baby around the house. We talked more about hunting along with traveling and politics.

Janie had recently returned from traveling around the world, spending most of her time in England. She had stayed as a guest with several Rotarians, partly explaining I think her eagerness to share the favor with us. “What goes around comes around,” we agreed.

When David and Louise returned to retrieve their baby, we chatted with them for awhile. David was a truck driver. His job was to drive an enormous Kenworth out of the bush with two trailers filled with logs. We discussed the difficulty of the driving and the wear-and-tear on the vehicle, which required frequent maintenance although if done properly it would last for many years. He had a body-builder’s physique, with elaborately tattooed arms. He had owned a Harley Davidson motorcycle, but he and Louise were seriously injured when a driver pulled out in front of them. Both of them had sustained broken pelvises and required lengthy recoveries. So he didn’t ride bikes any more.

The sun set over the nearby hill casting a rosy glow into the sky. Kim and I sat up talking as late into the night as I could still function. I like him very much, Janie too.