We drive over the winding hill towards the small town of Tākaka in Mohua (Golden Bay). The pace shifts. The light. The water. The silence. It’s so gorgeous, it’s almost a cliche. It is a place of sacred springs, limestone bluffs, canopies of rātā and kānuka and capricious currents.
Thesmall town has brightly painted shops that sell dreamcatchers and bead curtains; in the window of an art gallery there is a giant white crocheted conch shell I covet; there are cafes and a Thai restaurant. At the Dancing Sands gin distillery, Nikki, who’s lived and worked in hospo around the world, and who’s dry and funny as hell, makes us a cocktail of Wasabi gin and soda. There is industry and there is nature. There are old people, babies, scientists and hippies; there’s the righteous and the quiet. The opinionated and the observant. A microcosm, then, of any city in Aotearoa.
I was here, as another version of myself, two decades ago. Two of us sailed from Mana, in Porirua, via Rangitoto ki te Tonga (Durville Island) and Te Aumiti (French Pass). A vast pod of dolphins stayed with us, shimmying and leaping like a party of ecstatic ravers. We anchored in little bays that looked benign but had a habit of changing and churning up in the darkest hours of the night when you’d found your deepest sleep, so that we’d have to haul ourselves and the anchor and move on.
No holding in life, or at sea, is guaranteed. The places or people you might think provide safety can reveal themselves differently at the depths.
That version of me still looks like a girl. Familiar, the same dark hair, but weirdly foreign. And I no longer admonish her (though I used to). She will jump right off that boat and into the water with the dolphins. She will go on many more adventures, with others, but she doesn’t know that then. She is sleeping. She’s hauling anchor. Moving. Finding a home. Changing direction.
Time is like the rushing currents, constantly redirecting and renewing our perspective on place and the tributaries of ourselves. I gaze out the open car window. The mountains of Abel Tasman and Kahurangi National Park are leviathans, guarding.
What does home mean to you, I ask and the driver replies, I am still trying to work this out. But I always come back to people. Same, I reply. Always.
And the cold, clear air rushes in and rushes past. And we drive.
