There and back again

With less than a week now to go before our flight back to the States, I'm starting to get asked: how does it feel to be leaving New Zealand? And let me tell you, no one is more interested in finding an answer to that question than I am. There are a lot of thoughts and feelings flying around right now, and not a lot of them are very articulate.

But here's the best analogy I've come up with so far: it feels like you're nearing the end of a truly delicious dessert. And even though you know you're not really hungry anymore, and so it's really the right time to run out, you still feel a little anxious about being finally, irrevocably out of mouthfuls. Because it's so incredibly scrumptious, and because you don't know when you'll get a chance to have it again, and so part of you still wants the dessert to go on forever. Or at least, if you have to be done eating it, you wish you could keep tasting it whenever you wanted to. You feel nervous that the memory of the taste just isn't going to be enough. And yet at the same time you know that in a while, after the "where did my pudding go?" sadness wears off a little, you'll be glad that you didn't overeat. You'll know that your portion was that "just right" amount that leads to maximum appreciation of your dessert experience.

So here we are, taking our last bites of New Zealand, trying to enjoy every one. And watching New Zealand like you watch loved ones, when you know you're going to be apart, and you want to memorize every little detail about them to keep with you while they're away. Here's some impressions of what our last road trip to the Coromandel had to offer.

Will Work for Beer

Tommy and I were quite keen to have one last WWOOFing experience before leaving New Zealand, so we'd been keeping our eye on the WWOOF "hotlist," which features last-minute requests for workers. And when we saw the listing for Mike's Organic Brewery, just outside beautiful Mount Taranaki, we knew we had found our place...

Good Beer

Good Views

Great People

WWOOFing is one of those exciting opportunities to work for something other than money. Not that the cash overfloweth at this stage of the trip, but our time is even shorter. And it seems to cut out the middle man somehow: instead of menial labor in exchange for petty cash that probably would have gone toward pasta and beer anyway, now we can go straight to the source. We can clean, rake, paint, and bottle and seconds later have a cold lager in our hands, great new friends all around, and the afternoon off to explore. It makes the work itself seem so much more intimately connected to all that goodness.

Neverland and camp sites at the end of the rainbow

There's more than a little magic in New Zealand, and sometimes you know for sure that it's gotten inside you. This is our cliff, at the northmost tip of New Zealand, where we napped and made up fairy tales.


And here's our campsite at the end of the rainbow. I know...it's a little gratuitous.


If there's one thing I really hope I can hang onto from this experience, it's the sensation of moving through mythic space. We weave ourselves into new stories every day, whether we write, speak, sing, or walk them, and here I know that being a storyteller is sort of like being a magician. Choose your own adventure. As Captain Planet would say, the power is yours.

Car meets curb and we meet friends

Once upon a time, Tommy and Lauren set out in their friend Kev's car to visit Northland. Several hours into the drive, that car met a curb, and jumped right over it in excitement. Which, as Lauren and Tommy now know, is not good for either tie rods or drive shafts. Things seemed likely to get a bit pathetic. But who should happen along at that moment but an ex-pat American couple with a swanky, Victorian-style B&B overlooking the sea. "Come stay with us," they said, "and we'll give you food and a room you could never in your life hope to afford in exchange for painting walls in our new house." And so Lauren and Tommy got to experience the flashest, most unexpected WWOOF stay imaginable while their car got a whole new set of parts.

There's another way to tell that story, which would involve some supernatural narrative structuring and the drawing of some divine-type conclusions. Our hosts put forward the idea that the whole ordeal was possibly "meant to be." And I can't deny that there is something that feels extra-coincidental about it all: the timing of it, our increased ability to accept and let go at this stage in the trip, our hosts' incredible generosity. But I also feel a sort of postcolonial, postmodern inhibition about implying that we were somehow singled out by the universe for special treatment. I feel nervous about making a religion out of being fortunate, overextrapolating from being incredibly lucky. In equal measure I desire and fear to construct universal principles from the experience of being taken care of. Is it possible to talk about blessings without talking about their opposite? Not curses, necessarily, but even the absence of good and comfort and care? Why me, yes, and also why not someone else?

And so, since that particular question seems unlikely to resolve itself anytime soon, having kept many quicker and wiser minds awake for centuries already, for now I'll stick with the more straightforward story and allow you to come to your own conclusions. We had an accident that could have been much worse. We were taken in by a lovely family and got to stay in this house...

in this room...

with this view...

and we were filled with gratitude and wonder.