16 March 2009

The sun came out yesterday, after two weeks of dramatic cloud dances choreographed by the push/pull of incoming weather from the Tasman Sea on the west and the Pacific on the east (and having the Pacific on the east coast is a reminder, like the inversion of seasons, that I’m not in Kansas anymore). Yoke and I dropped everything and bundled arthritic Oskar, her 10 year old Dalmation, into the car and headed west, through the lovely bush-clad Waitakere ranges, to the black sand beach of Piha. We joined about a hundred surfers on the beach north of Lion Rock, some in wet suits, some clad only in bathing togs and Kiwi bravado. There were a few swimmers as well, but they were officially confined to the very narrow stretch of beach deemed safe by the Piha Lifeguard Club. The sea was calmer than I’d seen it in the past on this stretch of the west coast made famous to foreigners as the arrival site for The Piano in the eponymous film. The Tasman is often in a rage, giving the westies who live in the houses barnacled to the hills in the bush great views of wild surf but swim-at-your-own-risk beaches.

I remember being on this beach early in our first visit to New Zealand, when my sons were about 7 and 9, and happy to jump into deep rock pools, to dig in the sand and to explore the caves at the base of the promontory that bookends the opposite end of the strand from Lion’s Rock. Yoke remembers the beach and the drive to it 25 years ago, when the windy road that maneuvers the Waitakeres wasn’t sealed and the population, a bit thinner than it is now, included her mother and father who had come out to the west coast for a vacation from their native Holland and didn’t go back to The Netherlands for 7 years. That puts my two month stay into perspective.

Oskar forgot he was ten and creaky as he calmly ambled down the beach, greeting all the dogs sniffing the sand (all leashless; I’m not sure why anyone bothers to put up signs about dogs here, since no one obeys them). From the tiny yippy pseudo-dogs to the black bear Newfie look alike, Oskar regally greeted them and walked on. I think a sunny beach rejuvenates all of us with memories of other sunny beaches in different parts of the world, when we were younger and we assumed every day would be filled with blue skies and breaking waves.

In the evening, back in the city, just forty five minutes and a world away from the warm black sand, we traveled to the north of France at the cinema, where I understood not one word of the Bergue dialect spoken in the film. It hardly mattered, as Yoke drank her champagne and I my decaf flat white, both served in real glass and crockery. When we returned home, Yoke phoned her son and spoke in Dutch, then we ate dinner with her Japanese student and we attempted to communicate in Janglish. Auckland is like that – the largest, most racially mixed city in New Zealand. Awash with Pacific Islanders (whose NZ population often exceeds the entire population of their native PI states), Asians who immigrated from China and India and points between, Eastern Europeans and native Maoris, Auckland is the Ellis Island of New Zealand. Few immigrants make it as far south as the South Island. Reaction to this influx is mixed among the pakeha (European-descent Kiwis) who are learning to live in a more crowded, less familiar city. For them it means the corner dairy isn’t run by a familiar ginger-haired Kiwi, but by someone named Patel. It also means the ATMs I’ve used have a list of 10 languages to choose among – and that the food has greatly improved from that first visit when the kids frolicked on the beach but the cafes mostly served buttered white bread and canned asparagus sandwiches. Of course, if I’m really longing for home after all this international flavor, I could always turn on the TV and watch some American shows. But there’s something about watching reruns of Mr. Ed dubbed into Maori that reminds me I’m watching what happens when you put lots of disparate bits and bobs into a blender and hit “pulse”: some happy accidents, some grating annoyances, and a great many head-scratchers.

Oskar exploring the No Dog Zone

Piha, with Lion Rock in the foreground