Looking west

I’ll have you know I have become a chicken carrying pro in the past few days. The trick is to secure their legs between your fingers and nestle them firmly (but gently) against your chest. You pick them up when they are settled down for the night and they barely even raise a sqwark, they just quietly bok bok bok at you. My uncle has been endeavouring to re-settle his adolescent chooks. Great change is afoot in their lives, and they really don’t seem to like it. They are being shifted out of the cosy barn of their chickhood and being taught to roost in the chicken coop with the grownups. Only every day they strut and flap their way back to the barn and every evening, we pick them up and carry them back to the coop, hoping they will get the idea. Either they are resistant to change or their pee-brains really cannot fathom what it is we are trying to get them to do. Or perhaps, they just know were home is. Either way, I have recently discovered that not all chickens are cute and friendly. Some in fact, are vicious beyond their size and position in the pecking order. Yesterday evening for instance my aunty was attacked by a rooster. As she bent to fill their water bowl it jumped onto her head, sinking its talons into each side of her skull before running away behind the coop he shares with his three girls. I know now to avoid the rooster with white ear-flaps, especially when he’s at home. (Although let’s be honest, if he turns on me, I’ll get my chicken and cashew nut stir fry recipe out faster than you can say “I feel like chicken tonight.” Consider yourself warned Mr Rooster.)

The other day we packed up the mountain bikes, hiking gear, the two horses Katie and Sam and a picnic lunch and drove out to a National Park near Rotorua. Rotorua reeks of the sulphur steaming and bubbling up from the earths’ core that attracts thousands of tourists every year. They come to admire mother earth’s power – trust me, not even the worst fart compares to the stench she can emit. Holding our noses we wound our way past Lake Rotorua, its surface so peacefully undisturbed the mountains around it were perfectly reflected in it, and drove on up through some mountains, past a Redwood forest towards the Blue Lake. Only this funky smelling but otherwise picturesque story of our day trip ends here - on a patch of grass beside the road where we pulled over when the horse float brakes jammed on and literally brought the whole escapade to a screaming halt. Two hours later, with the brakes finally released, the horses were coaxed back onto the float and we turned around and headed straight home. Back on the farm Katie and Sam, stressed and sweaty from the trip, tore down the hill into their paddock and gleefully rolled all over the grass, glad to be out of the silly box on wheels and back in their paddock. Home sweet home, they seemed to say. Yesterday we took a drive out to where my mum grew up. The old family house was on Barrett Road, a road named after my family, who opened the first self-service supermarket in Tauranga in the early 1960s. The Barrett empire was a family affair, the supermarket and butchers were jointly owned by my Poppa, his two brothers, sister and their families. Long since sold off and renamed, the supermarket and butchers still stand there at the end of Barrett Road. It was an unfamiliar feeling standing in the butchers looking at the board of photos from 50 years ago of my Nana, Poppa and great aunties and uncles. It is unknown to me to have family history with stories going back two or three generations that connect me to a place. Although on my Dad’s side of the family it’s a similar scenario, our family lineage goes back to the pioneering days of the Waikato region. There’s so much I don’t know about this place, I’ve realised, although at the same time I am inextricably tied to it.

Looking westward whilst my uncle tossed chicken feed between the barn and the coop, trying once more to coax the chickens towards their new home, I watched the last bit of day disappear behind the distant pines. Here, surrounded by family I am at home. But even so I know that out west, far away west is my home. It is where I grew up, where I can pronounce the place names, where my heart lies and where right now, I most want to be. Home is a funny concept, so crucial to our sense of self. It exists at the nexus between people and place. The people that are dear to you can make you want to run away from a place and they can make you never want to leave it - they make a place home. Right now, gazing out my window at the westward bound mid-morning clouds, I know I belong were the day is only just dawning, where Yellow Betty waits and where still curled up in bed (quite likely with a hangover) lies a whole pile of happiness.

I seem to be full of potential beginnings. A hundred million so varied and diverse there is no conceivable way to follow all along their paths.

There are things I want to tell you. But I must admit I don’t know where to begin. This time last week, I was spitting blood. They were driving under spectacular clouds that day, going from nowhere to somewhere worse with intoxicating smiles. She was scared, she realised, of wanting more than she was wanted. Paul Mallet was learning how to “Get along with others”. Julie just wanted to put all the growing up business behind her and go back to being a 15 year old. She opened the conversation like you might open a door. When I walked away I left the flywire banging hopelessly against the door frame in the wind...

They could lead anywhere, take me everywhere, only with them, as with the threads of my life, I have no idea what to do. But that wasn’t what I actually wanted to write about today.

This morning, covered up to my knees in a potent mixture of cow shit and mud, I held a tiny chick, born only the night before. It sat meekly in the palm of my hand. It wasn’t scared at all, being too young to have been taught to fear big things without feathers yet. My Uncle, somewhat of a chicken collector, has 22 different breeds of chickens in all. From New Holland Blue, to Rhode Island Red, Andalusian, Campine, White Rock, Silver Spangled Hamburg, Buff Orpington and on and on. They are calm and docile birds, well cared for and happy to scratch around wherever they please. The chick, tucked safely against my coat, with its tiny wings and oversized feet made my sister and I coo at its cuteness. But in actual fact, it smelt terrible, like the inside of an egg I suppose. And that was even before it shat in my hand, a warm, runny brown liquid that dripped through my fingers. Despite its indiscretions against me, the chick and I have a deep and meaningful connection – we share the same birthday. Although it doesn’t feel like my birthday today. It doesn’t smell the way birthdays did when I was younger, the scent of excitement and suspense has been blown away by the wind. I guess that’s a sure sign I’m getting old.

Up here on my Auntie and uncles farm, like most of New Zealand, it has been raining and raining. But I’m still not sick of the steady stream falling from the sky yet. It’s distracting, or perhaps just relaxing, to stand and watch the rain roll off the shed. The drops fall in a perfect line every time, so much so that I can put my nose right up to where they fall, look out over fields at the pine tree pierced fog and stay perfectly dry. Small things amuse small minds. This morning’s work was to drench the larger mob of cows, steers if you want to be precise. My job really, was to watch at a safe distance. To me, city living vegetarian that I am, cows are quaint, milky smelling things that dot the rolling green hills of this New Zealand farm. They are also large, relatively dumb creatures that are strangely more scared of me than I of them. More to the point, they apparently don’t speak English. Considering that I can walk at them waving my arms and yell out “I am a vegetarian” and they will still try to high tail it over the fence. The irony seems to have escaped them. Now, in the afternoon, I am tucked away inside drifting away. I have been watching the flames flicker in the fireplace. The black smoke residue on the glass looks much like a dragon, wide mouthed and roaring, its tongue dancing in the flames. The cat is staring up at me with its bright beady eyes, requesting with the full extent of his politeness that I move my laptop immediately to make room for him. Unluckily for him, I don’t plan on being charitable. I’m trying, I inform him, to write a middle. But he knows I think, in all his cat wisdom, that I would be better off watching the flames, and waiting for these chickens to hatch before I count them, and really – who can argue with that logic?

If this is an end, I have no idea where to begin.

I’ve always wanted to have one of those moments, walking away from a place for the last time, when you know it’s the last time. When you’ve cleared your desk, painstakingly removed every post-it note you scrawled so fast god knows how long ago, handed in the key, walked down the stairs out of the building with the knowledge that you will not be returning the next day, or in a few months, or maybe not ever at all. In my head, there is music playing, there’s a slow turn-of-the head, a last glance over the shoulder and then that long, panoramic shot as I walk away, for the last time. None of that happened of course when I handed in my last essay at uni. I was entirely empty of feelings, nether excited nor sad, just occupied by a thought – how many pages upon pages of sentences answering obscure questions have I printed out (and then reprinted with my name spelt correctly), how many chapters have I photocopied (and then recopied because the photocopier stuffed it up the first time), how many pens have I chewed up here, how many staples, highlighters, bull clips? I can tell you exactly how many bull clips in fact; two - one to hold each copy of my unbound dissertation together. A dissertation surrended with only a little relief, and a lot of panic. Walking away I wondered to myself, how many books have I borrowed, ‘read’ in the cafe and returned late? How many words have I forced together with poor grammar and a complete disregard for the argument they amounted too? How many coffees have I had in this place, on the run, in the late afternoon sun, by the library moat; cheap and sugary, fuelling hours of procrastination and intellectual duals. I have probably spent months on buses and trains and cycling, back and forth. In storms, in searing heat, in wind and driving rain, wearing headphones, giggling at my book, highlighting countless journal articles... “And all for what?” I hear you shout, waving your arms, throwing exclamation marks. To learn, I answer defensively, to do what interested me, to understand the world a little better. To get cheap public transport, to lie under the trees by the river all afternoon discussing life in all its intricacies. I could console myself with the argument that my Bachelor of Arts with Honours in History improves my employment prospects, but that, at least most people would have me believe, is probably wishful thinking. So here’s the fact – at this moment, sitting by the fire in my aunties farmhouse in New Zealand, while it rains and howls outside, I have reached the very edge of my plan, and I have no idea what it was all for. I am goalless, ambitionless, with not a tiny blinking clue. I’ve only the vague notion that university for me, is now over, and the big questionmark of the rest of my life is in fact, the present moment.

To be continued....