Storyland

“There is nothing better than a friend unless it is a friend with chocolate”

-Linda Grayson

With our “survival chocolate” supply fully stocked, we set off packing along the river gorge, back-dropped with alpine peaks. We haven’t lived on the same continent for years, but Melanie and I have been friends since 1990. To certify this fact, we even have a hard copy, type writer-inked proof of this in the form of a letter her mum snail mailed to mine (and yes, you read that correctly, it had been written on a type writer). It was an introduction letter she had sent upon hearing that my family had decided to homeschool. Her family was somewhat of an unofficial hub to Silicon Valley homeschooling back in the nineties. After that, we quickly became friends, carefully dividing and equally sharing chocolate (whenever we got our grubby little hands on the stuff) and this trip would be no different.

Though I’ve never been anywhere like the Copland Track, I have the distinct sense that I’ve been here before. The books I’ve read and movies I’ve watched have taken me to a place like this before, and at every turn my favorite characters and scenes come alive.

Our Avatars might as well be soaring ahead over the cliff tops, barely clearing the Jurassic palm tree ferns and beech trees. We carefully tiptoe across the raging creek beds and I imagine that we are carrying KatnissEverdeen bows at the ready atop our quiet hunter’s feet. Around the corner, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Indonesian medicine man’s fern/tree-haired stone headed figurine stared back at us, larger than life.

But no, this is not like the Forbidden Forest. There are no giant finicky Aragog spiders (in fact there is only one rare poisonous spider in all of New Zealand), there are no snakes (READ: NO SNAKES), no deadly virus-carrying mosquitoes, no bears, mountain lions, or coyotes, no poison oak and they don’t even have scavenging raccoon. In fact, we note that the lack of peril is rather ominous. There are few land-dwelling mammals at all. Though there are the weka which are flightless birds that steal your socks when you hang them out to dry. Supposedly, there are no Centaurs either, but I have my suspicions.

And then the sky opens up, slowly at first. The rain continues as the sun lowers toward the mountainous silhouette. With each fatiguing kilometer, the temperature drops, eating away at our body heat like an Edward Cullen embrace. (I know, cheap shot making a Twilight reference, but I will slightly abashedly admit to actually liking those trashy offences to literature). Several go-rounds of “surely we must be twenty minutes away”, and a few blocks of carefully rationed survival chocolate later, we reach Welcome Flats. This valley is blessed with bubbling natural hot springs, a mountain vista’s answer to digital surround sound, and a well-placed tramper’s hut (tramping= trekking. I know what you’re thinking, but no. Sorry to disappoint). We pile into our hut like two scared little hobbits, relieved to have conquered Mount Doom. We protect against hypothermia onset with clumsily prepared hot chocolate and our best down-aided mummy impressions. Enlisting the help of Harry Potter to provide us with requisite fire-starting newspaper, we (eventually) get the potbellied stove going. To say that Harry Potter was our Hut Warden is a bit of a stretch, I suppose. But despite his de-spectacled state, I notice the resemblance (at least in my imagination). Come on, he is a brown-haired, blue-eyed British teenage boy and you can’t blame me for at least projecting this image onto him. (Though I will note that we later stay in a youth hostel that is literally called “Hogwartz” and I’m not making that up. It was fabulous). After two weeks of friend request and like notification withdrawals, he is glad to have our company, so we teach Harry Potter to play rummy with our rather soggy deck of cards.

We further thaw ourselves, dipping into the epic wilderness of the hot pools. Sandflies dive bombing our serenity like the full force of the Formic Fleet before Ender blew the Hive Queen’s home planet to bits. These buggers wage dermatological and psychological warfare only when one becomes still. I take a brief pause from my annoyance to note that these buggers could sell for big $$ on the American weight-loss market as a way to get fat people to move constantly. I develop a roll-face swipe-roll-face swipe technique which I use to try to enjoy the hot pools in a kinetic state of rest. But this too is ineffective and after a 20 km hike and this pesky distraction from natural beauty that could defibrillate a dead doornail, I find myself wanting to call by ansible to get ahold of the Little Doctor so I can blow these blood suckers out of the water (so to speak). As much as I despise them, they seem to love me, which leaves me wondering… If I spoil them with love and care, will they want to leave me, too? Recent events in my life would predict so, but anyways…

In the morning, we learn that reconstituted leftover couscous previously flavored with vegetable broth flavoring cubes from the previous night does not work well as a method of thickening up blueberry oatmeal packets. But still, we are happy here and we have the valley to ourselves for a few hours until the next batch of trampers arrive. Peering up at 1000 meter waterfall after 1000 meter waterfall spilling off the mountains after the rains, I think that if only we had a few more days here, I might just develop the ability to incarnate Orson Scott Card’s imagination to develop Rigg’s pathfinder abilities to see all paths ever traveled by humans in the form of colorful light beams that hover in place for all of time. This place certainly feels as old as time, mostly unchanged since the Maori first discovered the brilliant contrasts of the steamy waters and chilling glaciers of the area. If I just reach out and touch those beams of light, maybe I too, like Rigg can time travel to meet the people who took those routes. Here more than anywhere the continuity of times and places and people is staggering. If ever I were to look up and see 100 years into the past at the path of a brave mountain climber attempting a treacherous rock face with low tech gear, this would be the place.

Fortunately, we are greeted with sunshine on the way back as we prance across swinging rope bridges, quickly navigating the avalanche risk zones. We entertain ourselves with a series of ridiculous hypothetical assumptions to arrive at our inaccurate but reasonable estimate that there are four sheep per person in New Zealand. This later turns out to be wrong, as we wiki’d that there are in fact about ten sheep per Kiwi.

Motivated by our last chocolate morsels and by Harry Potter who catches up to us in the final few kilometers in his escape back to civilization, we are inspired to pick up the pace on the flats. We reach the final stretch, which is a knee-deep 50 meter wide river-crossing. Though our feet hurt and we are weary of our packs, we hesitate a moment before leaving Neverland. It seems that our pixie dust has all but run out and it’s time to leave this place to the lost boys.