Steve Braunias: There’s nothing you can do to stop the weather

At the funeral for firefighter David van Zwanenberg in Muriwai, the old red fire truck drove slowly towards the sea. Photo / Dean Purcell

OPINION

“We are starting to feel trapped and a bit hopeless because there’s nothing you can do to stop the weather,” Helen Amanda told the Herald on Monday after the latest flooding in Gisborne. It was a line out of a dystopic future already lapping at the New Zealand present — the weather gone mad, creeping in after dark and laying all to waste, the same old force of nature but with the added strength of man’s most powerful contribution to life and death on Earth, climate change. Yeah. Good times.

We are starting to feel at peril because there’s nothing you can to do to stop the weather. I was assigned to report on the two funerals held at Muriwai this past fortnight for the two firemen killed in Cyclone Gabrielle. It’s nice out there. A lot of ocean, curving like a bowl on the horizon; at the funeral for Dave van Zwanenberg, his wife Amy had asked that media stay away from her view of the sea when she gave the eulogy. She got into an old red fire truck and sat with her two little kids in the passenger seat when it left with the coffin. The old red fire truck drove slowly towards the sea. All she could see was ocean.

We are starting to feel our dreams take on new disturbances because there’s nothing you can to do to stop the weather. My girlfriend texted last week from Wellington, “I had a scary dream. Extreme landslides & tsunamis etc. Full end-of-the-world scenes. I was watching people die everywhere. Everyone was running for their lives. I was trying to get to my mum’s house and help my brothers and sisters.” Dreams are like emblems of the latest anxiety; we all used of dream of Covid, the threat of poisoned breath, eternal lockdown. They were better dreams than climate change dreams.

We are starting to feel surrounded because there’s still only so much you can do to stop Covid. Wairoa Star journalist Anna Rankin wrote on the Twitter machine on Tuesday morning, “People are self-evacuating in Wairoa, the mayor, the volunteers helming the evacuation centre at the marae + half the town have Covid, it’s a modern disaster predicted and written about by Mike Davis years back.” She means the author of The Monster at Our Door (2005), which warned of a coming global threat of viral catastrophes. One catastrophe at a time, please — but there’s nothing you can do to stop the weather.

We are starting to adapt to the fact there’s nothing you can to do to stop the weather. Soothing, maybe, to think of Auckland mayor Wayne Brown with his old head in a drain, thinking of ways to cope with the next deluge. Inspiring definitely, to see the way the civil and civic services have responded to Cyclone Gabrielle. A few years ago I interviewed a woman who had been forced to take emergency accommodation in a horrible little motel in Henderson. We stayed in touch, and I heard from her the day before Cyclone Gabrielle was due. She said she had nowhere to go. “I’m a little stressed and afraid.” I asked Waitakere councillor Shane Henderson to help. He directed her to the Hub West community shelter. They gave her a bed, and she texted that night, “I’ve had a beautiful dinner and a shower and now I’m ready to sleep like a baby.”

We are starting to wonder what the hell comes next, because there’s nothing you can to do to stop the weather. It’s the age of the bag: everyone is now a doomsday prepper, with a grab-bag at easy reach in case some new weather emergency forces us out of our homes. It’s a bag to pack to hold onto life. At the funeral of van Zwanenberg, his wife held up a black canvas bag she had packed for him on his final journey. “I have packed a bag for you, just in case you do need to take a few things with you,” she said. “I’ve packed your trainers, your boardies, and a book you never got to finish.” Her black dress, the black canvas bag, at a seaside settlement on a beautiful day of bright sunshine.