A Central Otago hoar Frost. Photo / Andris Apse
To experience a hoar frost is to be in a dream where time has no currency, and everywhere movement and life are captured and encased in ice: resonating in stillness. You know that you're participating in something that's not entirely of this world. It's nature at her most generous.
The first time I saw a hoar frost was in 2001: I was driving early one morning from Wanaka to Dunedin via the Maniototo - Central Otago's rural heart. Leaving State Highway 8 at Clyde, I turned north and deeper into the hinterland.
From Clyde onwards, a dark mat of thick, low cloud - almost fog - imposed itself on land, choking any colour and turning the atmosphere into a universal joyless grey. As I drove on I noticed that the tussocks and trees were all completely white, as if they'd been liberally spraypainted just so. I stopped my truck, clambered over a barbed-wire fence - itself encased in ice - and walked across a paddock towards an old, lone wilding pine, each step crunching on the frosted grass.
I couldn't believe what I was looking at. The tree was, from root to branch tip, enveloped in ice; so much so that when I grabbed a handful of needles they remained stoically rigid.
There was no movement or sign of life of any kind. No wind, not a breath. No stock at all; not a bird. There weren't even other cars on the road: I was in a postapocalyptic world where nothing stirred with life - except me.
I got back into my truck and drove on to Omakau and followed the road up and over the Blackstones and down into the Ida Valley.
And then something extraordinary happened. Within the space of some 30-odd metres and about five seconds, I escaped the oppressive greyness, drove through the cloud cover and burst into a cloudless, azure-blue, radiant sky soaking up the sun's morning light.
The contrast couldn't have been more dramatic.
I stopped at the apex of the pass, got out of my vehicle and looked in all directions. All around me, above the thick low clouds, were hills and mountains cloaked in snow. Everything sparkled brilliantly in the sun's fresh rays.
It was such a powerful, emotional moment. I was trying to think and make sense of what I was feeling: to understand where on earth all of these emotions were coming from, but my brain wasn't made for such a task. It wasn't made for understanding something that is visceral and elemental. It wasn't designed for moments like this, moments that are outside of conscious thought and control: where feelings reign.
Completely overwhelmed, I cried.
To put this into context, I'm not one for spontaneous waterworks: I think the last time I had cried was at my grandfather's funeral some four years previous. But there I was, on the top of the Blackstones, staring out over the Ida Valley and beyond, the current All Black captain, alone, leaning on my Ford Courier truck, completely overwhelmed by Central's magnificence and sobbing like a toddler.
Where did that come from? Why did I have such a strong gut reaction to Central when I have no historical connections to the place - no family ties, no holiday crib, no long-lost ancestor buried in a forgotten paddock guarded by tussock and schist?
Over a decade on and I still can't answer those questions: Central Otago's roots exist in me, planted there by some unseen hand, without a why or a how. It's clear to me from my time in the outdoors that it's possible to have a spiritual relationship with landscapes. They have the power, through a strange arcane pathway, to evoke emotions and memories that we can't explain with our conscious minds.
Each of us has a special natural place that, for whatever reason, carries meaning and significance, that produces pungent evocations of lives lived, real or imagined, from the past or the future. They bear silent witness to who we are and what we may become. They are our emotional totem poles, our home bases: waypoints, spiritual maps, safe ports to anchor. So much of ourselves can be discovered and reinforced within our special natural places.
It's as if, when I stare at the Hawkduns, they're holding a mirror and directing it back towards me: saying nothing, suggesting nothing, just present.
I don't have that relationship with any other landscape; I know of nowhere else where the emotional soil is fertile enough for me to have such a dialogue. I do enjoy the infinity of the sea and how its intransigence is constantly interesting and demands respect. But the sea's horizon is no match for a mountain vista.
Everywhere in Central Otago the land reaches skywards, making the vast blue backdrop seem larger and more vast, when logic suggests the opposite should happen.
To me Central means space; a space that is empty of the usual culprits that I interpret as "noise" and that are present almost everywhere else: ubiquitous humanity, cheek-by-jowl cityscapes, pestilent honking traffic and "sale ends soon, must buy now" nonsense.
In Central I can relax, exhale, think and feel. Its skies are emancipating, its terrain wide and generous - as well as imposing and downright intimidating. In all of Central's personalities I find wonder and beauty.
This is a place of polarity and contradictions. I feel safe here and yet diminutive; the mountains' squat permanence a constant reminder that I'm but a visitor with a temporary pass. Time spent in Central makes me feel more empowered, more sure of myself and my life's direction; and yet the landscapes and the weather are constant reminders of my limitations and that, here, I don't make the rules.
Everywhere there is evidence of the early goldmining days: derelict mudbrick cottages only just hanging on; old water races, now barely discernible through the scrub, snake around dry, scarred hill faces; rusted, mangled sluicing machinery shares paddocks with wandering stock and modern life - unwanted echoes of what used to be.
My relationship with Central has had the most profound effect on my life because it has answered one of the most pressing questions any human being can ask of themselves: "Where am I from?"
Viktor Frankl, a Jewish psychiatrist who survived four years in Nazi concentration camps, wrote about his experiences in a book called Man's Search For Meaning. In it Frankl suggests that the primary motivational force of an individual is to find meaning in their life. Frankl's 'meaning' is subjective: there is no universal truth that we all adhere to; it is for each of us is to find within and for ourselves.
I figured that in order to arrive at my own sense of meaning I needed to understand more about myself. And to know more about myself I needed to know where my gravel road started: where am I from, where is my home base, where do I belong?
As I type this from my London flat in Britain, roughly New Zealand's Antipodes - literally on the other side of the world - knowing the answers to these questions couldn't be more pressing.
Connected as I am to Central by an invisible umbilical cord stretching across land and sea, my resolve and determination are strengthened and fortified by my relationship to a land so far away. The sense of societal and spatial dislocation of residing in London - compressed living within a foreign culture - is made bearable; when I'm under pressure the stress is less severe and I know I can handle what life throws at me. I don't feel status anxiety, or insecure about the car that I don't have or the house that I don't live in because, underneath it all, I know where home is and where I'm from.
I can feel the stretched, pleated Hawkduns' calming presence: to me they've always been a dependable and trustworthy companion. In my mind I can hear the Dunstan Creek burble and chuckle as it to's and fro's its way down to greet the Manuherikia. I can visualise being on my mate's verandah, staring at the sky above Mt Saint Bathans when, at dusk, the low level of light and the high lenticular winds create the most spectacular palette of shapes and colours.
Whatever happens I'm going to be okay because I come from this place, it's called Central Otago, and it runs through me like a small alpine stream, crystal clear, wherever I am. I feel its tug and pull. I can hear its whispering sounds.
And that makes all the difference.
Extracted from Spirit of the South by Andris Apse (Penguin $90), out now.
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