Skip to main content

Stewart Island

A selfie. My reflection in the engine nacelle of a Stewart Island Flights Britten Norman Islander

 It's a two and a half hour drive from my place to Invercargill and a short wait at Invercargill's very modern and surprisingly large airport before we board the flight for Stewart Island. We fly in a Britten Norman Islander, a two engine, robust, no nonsense, ten seater, plane known affectionately as the Landrover of the skies. I cram into the very back seat for the 20 minute flight and peer out at the surging, frothy surface of Foveaux Strait beneath me. Flying at about 1000 ft there is more of a sensation of height and of speed than in any jetliner travelling at ten times the height and eight times the velocity.  There is a bit of a southerly but the flight it comparatively smooth. The ridiculously young pilot dots it down on the runway on top of a bush clad hill and we creakingly unfold ourselves onto the ground. 
****
There are ten people in church on Sunday morning and it's bitterly cold while we are setting up the service. We sing and pray and break bread and then have a pretty lavish morning tea. I chat to a ten year old who tells me he and his family have just flown in the Islander to  the other side of the island. The pilot buzzes the beach where he intends to land to make sure there are no sea lions on it, and then uses the firm sand at low tide as a runway. He comes back to pick them up a few days later after they have had their fill of fishing and walking and sitting around in the very comfy old homestead which serves as a DOC hut. When he was out deer hunting with his dad, a kiwi ran over his foot. It's the nearest he's been to one. He's never got closer than about two metres before, although one did come onto the porch while they were there. Such privilege. The lucky kid.
****
I line up for the ANZAC dawn parade. It's even colder than yesterday. My job is to pray, and a soldier reads out an address about how the day is no longer about remembering war heroes, and more about celebrating the values on which our community is founded. The last post is played and we go to the RSA for tea and sandwiches and scones. I don't really understand what is going on with ANZAC day anymore, except that I think it's in the process of becoming some sort of folk religious celebration of origins. 
**** 
 By Monday afternoon the wind has really picked up. We go down to the little office in town to catch the shuttle to the airport, but the planes aren't running. Barry from Stewart Island Flights swaps our plane tickets for ferry tickets and we go to the wharf, but the boats are stuck also. There's nothing for it but to head back to Peter and Iris Tait's place and remake the bed. This is no great hardship. The Taits run Sails Ashore, a very upmarket little lodge. There are large windows looking out to Halfmoon Bay, and there is underfloor heating in the beautifully tiled en suite and everything is space and light and polished rimu.  Noah Skypes. Why are you stuck on an Island Amma and Pappa? he asks, and is answered a half dozen times. It's a privilege Noah. We are so lucky.
 ****
This morning the wind has dropped enough for the tough little planes to fly. We are back in Invercargill by 10.30 and drive home chatting and listening to music. We have been away 4 days. It feels like a month. 
Labels:

Comments

Elaine Dent said…
Four days like a month-a good month, that is. Sounds like God's time.
26 April 2016 at 22:28
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incomp...
10 comments
Read more

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and...
3 comments
Read more

The Traitor

A couple of people have questioned me privately about the Leonard Cohen song The Traitor , and about Cohen's comments on the song, "[The Traitor is about] the feeling we have of betraying some mission we were mandated to fulfill and being unable to fulfill it; then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it; and the real courage is to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you find yourself". What on earth does he mean, and why am I so excited about it? For the latter, check with my psychiatrist. For the former, my take on the song is this: The Traitor is another of those instances, as in The Partisan , where Leonard Cohen uses a military metaphor to speak of life in general and human love in particular. Many of us hold high ideals: some great quest or other that we pursue. These are often laudable things: finding true love, finding the absolute love of God, becoming enlightened, spreading the Gospel, writing the great novel or some such ...
8 comments
Read more

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede...
Post a Comment
Read more