"It's a long way to Pipiriki; it's a long long way to go, It's a long way to Pipiriki, to the nastiest taniwha I know. Goodbye Whanganui, farewell old Aramoho, It's a long long way to Pipiriki and the bridge I used to know."
I began this column claiming the place of explorer. After three years here my sentiments are largely unchanged. Anzac Day this year dawned as usual, commemorating a costly and colourful historic botch-up in international politics that shattered landscapes and households for generations. I missed the dawn and the day drifted in a grey fog of familiar wartime rhetoric. In an effort to reach sunlight and freedom, about lunchtime I headed up river to Pipiriki by way of SH4. I had never been to Pipiriki. My father, Peter Cape, as VSA recruiting officer in Wellington, made a film based on the canoe trip down river to Pipiriki in the mid 1970s. History is inescapable. The route to Raetihi was relatively easy except for the endless roadworks. Heavy machinery hid in crevices round every other corner and trenches were marked by tape and orange road cones where the grey papa had slid off cliff faces. Raetihi to Pipiriki was a narrowing single detritus-strewn track.
Pipiriki in late afternoon sun was a green oasis. In the overgrown playground a father and son sat as a self-possessed goat fossicked. Down the road I knocked on a door. Hundreds of bees swarmed in the chill sunlight and a stooped Maori with a wry twinkle in his eye and a walking stick came to the door. I was invited inside. This was Te Wheturere Robert Gray and he proceeded to tell me the history of the place. The local taniwha met its match in the whirlpool below the settlement. Returning soldiers were given plots of unmanageable land beyond the Bridge To Nowhere. The bees belonged to Joe Adams. He'd taken their home and manuka honey down river and they were in pursuit, but got lost. Politics, a numbers game, was devious. The only way to outwit was to outnumber "them" by raising "our" birth rate. Apparently I was "the journalist" and was encouraging him to talk.
An hour later River Rd beckoned. Narrow, one lane, cliff edged, in the failing light, it was no worse than Purau to Camp Bay or the high roads of Banks Peninsula, and, with another peg in the board, I'd seen Jerusalem too and survived.