Aotearoa.
Land of the Long White Cloud.
New Zealand.
The last time I was here, six/seven years ago, I was watching home from outside our borders as rough beasts lurched towards Bethlehem, some of whom would eventually and famously wear Camp Auschwitz sweatshirts, in the name of red-blooded patriotism.
The ship seemed to right itself briefly, yet, here we are again. Things fall apart. The center doesn't always hold. We've learned absolutely nothing, and I still feel as stateless as I did then. Only this time not from the side of a Tasman highway with a thumb out and a cardboard sign.
Now, I'm in the seat of a somewhat late model Mitsubishi with a bottle of Antipodes spring water and a much better international phone plan. Not just looking for home, but looking for a home.
Something small. Something manageable. A life boat, in case I need to wait some things out. But that's a story for another time, and who knows if I'll actually do it.
But, I digress.
Tucked away under the earth's firm buttocks, New Zealand is palms up top, rodeos down south. A peculiar Hawaii-meets-Colorado culture, from Auckland and the Jafa's, to the sulphuric stink of Rotorua and the fury of the haka, down to Wellington's hip Montréal vibe, complete with a robust and storied music scene birthed on the South Island in Christchurch.
They still have their own sprinkling of nutjobs and pave-the-planet capitalists (name a country that doesn't have them), but those are far outnumbered by a society with a sense of collective responsibility to the land and its inhabitants.
To wit, along with the lowest global levels of "perceived corruption," the Kiwis were the first to introduce minimum wage, the first to allow women to vote, and the first country to introduce the 8-hour workday.
What's not to love?
The north is great, but the big sky country of the South Island is where I find my muse. I drive the roads I used to hitch on as they run through the small bush towns, moving through places I thought I'd never see again.
But here I am. Burning the roof of my mouth on a World Famous Sheffield Pie Shoppe pie like I did in 2017 with two back country trampers who brought me from Arthur's Pass.
It's almost Christmas now, but you wouldn't know it with the bright warm weather and the sweat rolling down my back.
It's also the weekend, and a handful of twenty-year-olds in rural Selwyn sit near the road with a piece of plywood spray-painted with the words you toot, we drink.
So nice to see a yard sign that's not up its own ass with jingoistic drivel for once.
I toot, they drink.
God bless New Zealand.
Further south near the Franz Josef glacier, it's raining and gale force winds force us to cancel our tour of its ice shelves. We spend the day in an old church converted into a living space instead, watching the sideways rain pummeling the mountains and replenishing rivers starved by drought and climate change.
(Farmers here talk of climate change as if it's an established fact.
Imagine.)
In the church, our laundry hangs from the rafters and countertops after a mid-trip washing. An off-day chore, now that the time has opened up. A day of sleep, fog, and Disintegration on repeat. A memory of how things were more or less the first time I was here surviving on a shoestring.
We drive on into Macraes a few days later where the only game in town is Chase the Ace at the Stanley Hotel - a hardscrabble roadhouse in the middle of nowhere kept afloat by farmers of the vast sheep-covered hills and workers from the local open-pit gold mine.
Stanley's gravel-voiced owner rolls his own cigs with his Māori wife, and they ply us with Speight's Gold Medal straight from the tap long after the last Otago miner leaves. We talk politics, both theirs and ours. They tell us about the farmers who come in some days for a drink, covered head to toe in sheep's blood.
Me, to the Māori wife: "Do you know the words to the haka?"
Her: "Do you know the words to your national anthem?"
Point taken.
New Zealand's drinking culture is like anywhere else. It has a beer scene and its own wine tasting rigmarole. I listen to vintners in Marlborough and Otago use words like minerality and fruit-forward like they mean something. Descriptions of dirt and terroir as if reciting liner notes from a 1980 Japanese import of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.
I've gotten quite good at all the performant wine things - swirling the glass, sniffing the nose, looking through it in the light with a furrowed brow. After all these years, I can tell the difference between a white and a red, but that's about it.
I suspect it's the same for most people, maybe even the somms.
But in the meantime, I swirl, I sniff, I sip, and I swish.
I try the rosé next.
Way down south, we fly in a single prop Cessna over the untouched fjords of Milford Sound. We see hidden mountain lakes in which no human has ever swum, and tree-covered mountains in which no human foot has ever stepped.
Breathtaking and primordial, except for the occasional faded cattle trail.
It's my first time in a plane this small and the motion sickness hits hard. The plane hits cloud banks between the mountains, making the plane shudder like a scene from the Yellowjackets pilot. Turbulence is easier to handle if you pretend you're escaping a country's final minutes as it collapses into war.
In the plane with us are some Indian nationals, a puking British woman, and an American Family from the American South hanging onto youth with tanned, active, rock-climbing faces and two tow-headed kids.
They operate with the peculiar and heroic certainty that Americans seem to have whilst traveling the rest of the world. Establishing dominance, as American Exceptionalism teaches us - a dominion over the land that looks over pristine untouched landforms like the ones directly below us and says we must build a Buc-ees here.
They seem like nice people, just...familiar.
In the admittedly unfair story in my head, they pastor other young couples in a wealthy suburban Atlanta church with a name like The Edge or ONELOVE. It probably has a coffee bar and a men's Bible study over craft beer where the hubs definitely refers to his spouse as his smokin hot wife.
But in the plane, their relationship seems performant. Their parenting seems performant. They say thing to each other that seem to be for the benefit of the rest of us within earshot.
Their kids keep farting.
The Cessna passes the mountain range that played the part of the Misty Mountains in the LOTR franchise. They're snow-capped, harsh, and god-like, compared to the bright blue glacier-fed river running directly underneath us.
The plane dips in a sudden, gut-wrenching drop toward the mountains and I try not to think about the three North American climbers who died on Mt. Cook this week. The pilot, probably slightly older than my son, seems unfazed.
I look at each passenger and try to figure out which one I"m gonna have to eat if it comes down to it.
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Substack coming soon...
What I’m reading: Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich (Harald Jähner)
What I'm listening to: The Pleasure Principle (Gary Numan)
So... who did you decide on in the end?