That Noah must have been a panicky sort. If the Bible is to be believed – and who wouldn’t believe a revealed text from thousands of years ago? – the Good Lord told him He had decided to wash away a sinful world with 40 days and 40 nights of rain. What did Nervous Noah do after hearing this extended forecast? He freaked out, and on advice from the man upstairs, built himself an ark.
Lord knows how he would have coped out here on the North Island’s east coast in 2023, where it has been raining for what feels like 400 days and 400 nights.
At Lush Places, by the end of June, we had had showers or rain on 97 of 180 days – delivering about a year’s rainfall in six months – and there will be many more days of it before winter and the spring rains are done.
With the water table now so high, it takes little more than an hour of steady rain for big pools to form around the place. One of our paddocks has even started growing rushes, while our gardens have become watery graves.
Despite this, during a brief pause between downpours, Michele, ever the optimist, planted some celery seedlings. Ever the pessimist, she is resigned to the prospect of them floating away.
And then there is the mud. You cannot walk anywhere without turning lawns into sludge. Out by the chook house, our daily traffic has created big, grim patches of churned brown ooze into which gumboots, chickens and hearts sink.
It’s horrible. It’s depressing. You might even say, it’s biblical. But have I panicked? Have I built myself a goddamn ark? No, the Noah of the Wairarapa made something else.
One of the things about living in the country is that you always have lots of stuff lying around the property that you keep “just in case”. Our neighbour, Tony, for example, has a pile of giant, high-voltage ceramic insulators, and I have two huge crates of untreated fence battens. To a townie’s eyes, these are collections of useless junk. But we country types know better.
Among the “just in case” stuff I had lying around for these rainy days were several lengths of fencing board, a roll of chicken wire and a container of staple nails. Out of these materials, I decided, rudimentary, non-slip duck boards could be made.
After an hour of cutting and hammering and swearing and doing my knees in, I had fashioned five of them for the worst mud patches. How proud I was – until the next big downpour, when Michele reported seeing a couple of them floating about. Those two have since disappeared into the muddy water. Perhaps the Wairarapa’s Noah should start building an ark. Just in case.
By the time you read this, I’ll be 50-something. Happy birthday to me, etc.
I have, of course, been 50-something for some time, which means in almost no time at all, I will be 60-something, something I never thought would happen.
Way back when I was a 20-something, and a fool, I thought my becoming an old fart was an event with roughly the same probability as me being shot into space by Nasa. Now here I am, almost an old fart.
Of course, much has changed since I was 20-something, with the modern 60-something completely unrecognisable compared with 60-somethings from way back when.
In my memory, the old farts of yesteryear were small, white-haired, wrinkly, decrepit duffers who had sold up their quarter-acre pavlova paradises and retired to God’s waiting room – Tauranga and the like – so that they might spend their few remaining years playing Housie and bowls in a warmer climate.
These days, old farts, through cunning use of hair dyes and Botox shots, are able to blend in with the young crowd. They are groovy, go to gigs, get tattoos, make TikTok videos and all the rest. Perhaps 60-something really is the new 40-something.
I hope so. But does the modern 60-something feel 40-something because they’re “young at heart”, or because they still have an enormous mortgage, kids cluttering up the house, bugger all savings and the prospect of another 20-plus years of hard graft before they’re finally allowed to “retire”?
