DRIVING to work, the fields along State Highway 2 are a hard, pale brown.
It isn't the sort of soft brown that you get with a pair of Italian moleskin trousers. It's a near-white, glaring, nails-on-a-blackboard kind of brown. The wrongness of the colour shrieks to you. It's painful to look at.
I pass the centre-pivot irrigation system on the left just south of Carterton, and marvel at how ridiculously clumsy the contraption looks, and how irrigation machinery looks so primitive. We might be able to miniaturise our wonderful electronics, but you can't miniaturise water, and the means to deliver it.
Inevitably, the radio station plays Katrina and the Waves' I'm Walking On Sunshine, a song to rejoice the summer and all long, hot summers of our childhood. And of course, they are good memories. When you're a kid, long summers are just peachy.
As the entire world stops for Auckland Anniversary, the city folk flock to Tauranga, Mahia, or stay close to home on the North Shore in places like Devonport or Mairangi Bay, stocking up their barbecues and beer and watching the kids play in the sea in the last week of school holidays. Life is good.
I suppose when I was living in Wellington I never looked beyond the limits of my own garden, although I remember the horror two years ago at not being able to water my trees. Now, in Wairarapa, you can't live here and not feel the wrongness of a near-drought. In a community so inextricably linked to farming, whatever good feeling you might have for the "perfect" summer is tainted by being only too aware of what it is doing to farmers. We're in a situation now where to actually have your window wipers running continuously is a marvel, a feeling of relief. You feel just a little bit cleansed, even if it was just the windscreen.
I've been in Wairarapa for two seasons, which has probably buried the romanticism of a perfect summer for good. There's no practical benefit to farmers in my declaration that I grasp how bad the situation is, but this is one townie who rolls his eyes when Aucklanders describe the magic weather of their 175th anniversary. I have had enough of this weather, and I am looking forward to my wipers getting a lot more action by this weekend - if the forecast holds.