On Wednesday, it’ll be a year since Cyclone Gabrielle swept across much of the North Island, most devastatingly in Hawke’s Bay, Gisborne Tairāwhiti and Auckland’s West Coast beach settlements.
Homes, businesses, farms and infrastructure were no match for the torrential rain and powerful winds that thrashed communities, cutting some off completely. Eleven people lost their lives including Shona Wilson, buried as she slept when a landslide crashed through her bedroom in rural Hawke’s Bay.
Her partner, Bill Chrystal, speaks to Cherie Howie about the night the Earth thundered into their home, life without Shona, and his determination to make her last dream come true.
Each night, Bill Chrystal climbs in to bed and puts his arms around a pink dressing gown he loathed before a savage weather system spun down from the tropics and took the love of his life.
Shona Wilson, a 58-year-old mum of three, environmentalist, trained teacher and speaker of four languages, died when a landslide triggered by Cyclone Gabrielle filled her bedroom to its eaves with mud on February 14 last year, Valentine’s Day.
Among personal items later retrieved from the wrecked remains of the home Chrystal and Wilson shared in Tūtira, 45km north of Napier, was his partner’s “horrible pink dressing gown”, Chrystal says.
“I didn’t like it. But she wore it for most of the nine years we were together, until she got another one. And so that dressing gown survived, and I find myself holding it every night.”
It’s a wee bit funny, he agrees, that a piece of his late partner’s wardrobe he once so abhorred was now a source of comfort.
“But as I said to her daughter, it’s got so many memories. So when I hold it - when I sleep - I feel like I’m holding her.”
A year ago, home for the couple was the split-level Matahorua Rd property owned by Chrystal’s brother, across the road from the family farm where the brother’s dad still lives.
Chrystal’s grand-daughters were frequent visitors, with Wilson reading them bedtime stories and teaching them to ride, and they had planted a big, organic vege garden near the house.
Every night they told each other, ‘I love you’, and each morning they’d wake to a chorus of birdsong in their rural paradise.
“We’d watch 15 or 20 kererū flying around, and there’d be 20, 30 tūī. It was her dream, what we had. But we didn’t own it, so we were working on getting our own dream.”
That dream - their own off-grid property large enough for their 10 horses and any of their blended family of children and grandchildren that wanted to join - didn’t die with Wilson, Chrystal says.
For now, the farming contractor and business owner is living in a caravan damaged in the landslide, but liveable after “Band-aid” repair work and parked up at his mum’s in Napier.
“It’s dry, it’s warm and Shona loved it, so I feel her in there all the time.”
But by the end of next year, he hopes to have work on their dream under way.
“What this cyclone has taught me, and how it took Shona, is that tomorrow is a gift. If you get to live tomorrow, you’re damn lucky. So I’m treating every day as my last.”
Chrystal had just got up from the couch for bed at 3am on February 14 last year when the ground began shaking.
It felt like an earthquake and sounded like a couple of big rigs going right through the house. It was neither.
“This big pile of wall and dirt and mud just went flying through the kitchen, out through the bathroom [and] out through the other side.
“It was right in front of my face. How it didn’t turn five feet and kill me, and get my stepdaughter upstairs, I don’t know.”
When his stepdaughter, Skye, opened her bedroom door, the hallway and stairs had disappeared.
Because the house was split-level the 18-year-old was able to get out, and Chrystal told her to look for her mum in the paddock, in case the slip had taken her there, while he tried to find where the couple’s bedroom had been.
“All the walls, all the drawers, everything was gone. The only thing that was there was the roof, sitting up on top of the mud.”
As Skye screamed for her mother, Chrystal battled “slushy mud”, sinking to his waist before using raincoats to roll towards where the bedroom had been.
He began digging with his hands, before realising he and Skye were still in danger.
“It took a while for that to kick in, because I was just focused on trying to find her, and Skye is down in the paddock screaming out for her. And I’m doing the same and the rain is just so thick and torrential.
“There were more slips coming down further up around the paddock. You could hear them - you could hear the water, you could hear the river, you could hear the trees crashing down. And I had to make a call to try to save me and Skye, because I didn’t know what the hell was happening.”
Grabbing a torch and managing to start an old quad farm bike he bundled the teen on to the back.
“I said, ‘We need to try and save ourselves’.”
The danger was far from over as they rode through a long paddock.
“All these slips were coming down at us as we were driving through it. We’re trying to navigate this, and it was just carnage. Our horses were running everywhere. Cattle were running everywhere. Everything was freaking out.”
After finding what he thought would be a safe place up a hill the pair held on to a fence and tried to shelter from the elements under a blackberry bush, Chrystal says.
“You’re just in a state of shock, and obviously it’s pissing down with rain and you’re soaking wet. I just couldn’t wait for the daylight to arrive, so I could see what I could do, because it was such a dangerous place to be.
“I said to Skye, ‘Just hang on to the fence, because if the hill goes, at least we’re hanging on to the fence and might be right’.”
It was about 6.30am when he was eventually able to return to the house, after telling Skye to stay on a ridge they subsequently walked to.
Miracles were in demand as the sun rose on the battered Hawke’s Bay region, where eight of the 11 cyclone victims died and across which a rescue operation to pluck hundreds of stunned survivors from their rooftop sanctuaries was under way.
But Chrystal got one as he made a desperate call for help.
“I managed to get one phone call out, for about 10 seconds, to my brother. I said ‘Shona’s gone. Hill went through the house’. There was no time for him to say anything.”
His brother called a friend with a helicopter, and a rescue team was pulled together, but they couldn’t reach the scene.
Chrystal would find out later Skye had also managed to contact his son, who called the Pūtōrino Volunteer Fire Brigade.
“I didn’t know all this, so I’m down there digging away.”
Help would come first from his young neighbour, Greg Myers, reaching Chrystal after tying two gates together to cross floodwaters.
“He threw them across the river and then climbed across.”
Using only their hands, the pair dug for hours, even though the conditions - and Wilson’s chances of survival - were hopeless.
“The more we dug, the more it just started filling in again. And you were trying not to sink yourself because it was about 6m or 7m deep, maybe deeper.
“There’s always a hope that there’s an air pocket or something. We dug for three or four hours and then I just said to the young fella, ‘I don’t think we’re getting anywhere, we need help’.”
His dad’s house was only across the road, but there was reason to be nervous.
”The amount of rain [we had], it just blew out a huge culvert about 100m down the road and there’s a great big chasm, so we weren’t sure what was actually under the road we were about to cross.”
Tying a rope to a fence, Chrystal waded in to the chest-deep water and found - to his relief - the road remained.
“So we went over to my dad’s, and obviously there was a lot of crying, a lot of hugging. And then I was just sitting there not knowing what to do, because the digging was futile.”
But help was on the way.
First, two neighbours arrived - one turning around to get his digger - and then three Pūtōrino volunteer firefighters in a helicopter.
“They were the ones my son got a message to. The only reason they could get to me was the local policeman at Kotemaori saw a chopper heading out to sea, and he radioed them to pick up the firefighting boys to come to me.”
After the firefighters made the scene safe, digging began again, later aided by the farmer’s digger, Chrystal says.
“They did it very slowly, because they thought … she might be in an air pocket.”
Eventually a blanket was spotted. Then, Wilson’s leg.
“That was emotional. I knew she was gone, but you sort of hope.”
Chrystal was led away, watching from a distance.
“You feel you need to be there. But they said, ‘We’ll look after her. We’ll get her out for you, bro’.”
Some encounters that day, and in the days following, left Chrystal feeling authorities have lessons to learn.
Just as firefighters and neighbours were about to remove Wilson about 3pm, a person - Chrystal doesn’t know who - arrived by helicopter to say it was a “crime scene” and not to touch anything until police arrived.
“The cops flew in about half an hour before dark and it took them about five seconds to pull her out.”
His request to see her was turned down.
“I said, ‘I’ve seen dead bodies before, I know she won’t be looking like she normally looks’. I know they’re doing their job, but I really could have done with holding her, just that one last time.”
Wilson’s body was then flown against his wishes to Wairoa, rather than Napier, as the police officers were Wairoa-based.
“They said, ‘We’ll fly back tomorrow and let you know where she is and what’s going on’. And I’ve never heard from those cops again.”
With roads closed and communications down, it wasn’t until his brother flew in a couple of days later that he learned Wilson’s body was at Wairoa Hospital.
He would also be told later his niece’s mother-in-law - a nurse at the hospital - had sat with Wilson.
“She recognised her name. So that made me feel a bit better.”
Wilson’s body was flown from cut-off Wairoa to Hastings Hospital three days after the cyclone, his brother having called iwi contacts to help, Chrystal says.
“We’re (Ngāti) Kahungunu, and it was culturally insensitive to keep her from me. I wanted her back.”
Chrystal - now flown to Hastings - and Wilson’s family were able to spend 15 minutes with their loved one before she was taken to Palmerston North for an autopsy.
But family were again forced to agitate to get Wilson home for her funeral earlier than authorities initially planned, because embalming was against her wishes, he says.
“I realise people have jobs and they’ve got to follow protocols, but a little compassion goes a long way.”
Chrystal’s pleased authorities’ preparedness and response to the cyclone are the subject of several reviews.
“I don’t want anyone to lose their job. It’d be good if they all learned some lessons from it.”
Police didn’t respond to a request for comment before the Herald deadline.
One solace from the autopsy, Chrystal says, was learning Wilson died from a blow to the head.
“That would’ve been from the first impact and I hold on to that. Because if I knew she suffered, it would just kill me.”
He still talks to his lost love every day, her ashes at his bedside until he’s ready to take some of them to a spot high on the family farm, where views take in both the ranges and the coast, and where Wilson once told him she wanted to return when she died.
“I say, ‘Thank you for the time we had, for being there for my grandchildren and children, and for just being part of my life’.”
Even with family support, grief is a ”journey you’ve got to go on by yourself”, and some days are harder than others, the 59-year-old says.
“I wouldn’t wish [this] on anybody … the fact I couldn’t save her, that’s something that will haunt me forever.”
The hardest question, he says, is ‘Why?’
“In the whole East Coast, why was there only one person killed from a slip that went through the house, and why did that slip only go through Shona’s bedroom … and why wasn’t I in bed with Shona, because I normally I would’ve been but I watched TV and fell asleep.
“So you’ve got all those questions you ask yourself over and over, but there’s no answer.”
One question he doesn’t ask is whether Wilson would approve of a future relationship.
They talked about everything before her death, including that neither is “designed to be alone”, Chrystal says.
“We’d agreed that when you feel the need, and you meet the right person, it’ll just happen, and there’s nothing wrong with it because it’s your journey.
“I talk to Shona all the time, and I say to her, ‘If I’m ever to have another relationship, I know you’ll guide the right person to me. And if it’s not to be, it’s not to be’.”
Cherie Howie is an Auckland-based reporter who joined the Herald in 2011. She has been a journalist for more than 20 years and specialises in general news and features.
