The Park Service has listened so long to various and often conflicting positions it has become hamstrung by minor voices often arguing for historical precedent (an approach that would have negated the abolition of slavery, suffrage for women, and child-labor laws). Precedent here often means a status quo to serve not the common citizen but the direct pecuniary advantage of corporate enterprises. Even a few environmental groups have questioned some of the proposals. Olmsted, in his precocious 1865 report, put it cogently:
It should be remembered that in permitting the sacrifice of anything that would be of the slightest value to future visitors to the convenience, bad taste, playfulness, carelessness, or wanton destructiveness of present visitors, we probably yield in each case the interest of uncounted millions to the selfishness of a few individuals. It is an important fact that as civilization advances, the interest of men in natural scenes of sublimity and beauty increases.
THE VIEW FROM A DOME. In a quest to experience a Yosemite matching my expectation, I headed toward the heart of the almost twelve-hundred-square-mile park to one of its signature formations, a granite dome, this one comparatively small and so undistinguished it bore no name on any of my maps. I liked the notion, even though an illusion, that this outcropping in the Cathedral Range was ordinary and unvisited enough to have escaped notice by cartographers, and that raised the question of whether I should be there. A ranger answered it: “The problem isn’t so much total visitors—it’s the concentration in a few places.”
Zigzagging an ascent was like climbing the back of a mythically enormous turtle whose carapace was glaciated, white granite flecked with black biotite. I was walking what was once the floor of the Pacific Ocean, once rising magma, once the basement of numerous glaciers that left both polish and incised striations. I was on a hike upward through time, a geologic trek skyward. Halfway up, an assemblage of small stones, a writ, dispelled any illusion of no one having been there since the last Ahwahneechee passed: LOVE. Considering the Ahwahneechee point of view, the word was ironic, and I pushed the graffito back into natural randomness.
I weaved upward among glacial erratics as big as bison, all of them waiting for that last, grand slide down. Scattered among them were stones the size of quail eggs unlike the bedrock in color, texture, and shape: Those smoothly rounded gravels had been carried to the top from some distant glacial outwash at least ten-thousand years ago. That dome, so apparently solid and immobile, was of course still in movement: sandy grit forced up, boulders waiting to roll down, and—with the rest of the Sierra—the entire hump was continuing to rise a foot every millennium. I stopped to admire a peculiarly gleaming pebble that before my eyes got up and hopped away. Camouflaged to match the mountain, a frog was a thousand feet above the nearest standing water.
Conifers, mostly Jeffrey pine, had found crevices the width of a broomstick or a human hand and were drawing out a weather-tortured existence and twisting themselves into lovely grotesqueries. Clustered in the few places of scarce soil and shelter grew penstemon, Indian paintbrush, stonecrop, Sierra wallflower. Life, both rooted and legged, was extracting itself from a rock more barren than not, more hostile to organisms than otherwise.
Then I arrived on the top, prepared for a jolt of some contemporary intrusiveness to open: a long view of a valley parking lot or a gridlocked intersection. A jolt there was. To the east rose the magnificently jagged peaks of the snowy Sierra and to the southwest was the totem of Yosemite, Half Dome—but not its oft-pictured side. Rather, it showed only its humpy hindside. Looking at it was like watching a Shakespeare play from backstage where old and familiar lines seem different, strange, new. I’d found my Yosemite in its grand beyondness etching itself into memory as if crags, knife-edged rocks, the spines of pinecones were inscribing images. If my ascent was like a journey in time, what would a hike reveal in a half-century? In an eon? If the mountains were going up, where was the rest headed?
READING MUIR. My last night in Yosemite I happened to read this passage John Muir wrote almost a century ago:
The regular tourist, ever in motion, is one of the most characteristic productions of the present century; and however frivolous and inappreciative the poorer specimens may appear, viewed comprehensively they are a hopeful and significant sign of the times, indicating at least a beginning of our return to nature; for going to the mountains is going home.
ONE SWEET TALKER
In late 1987 the offer of an assignment to do a story on what turned out to be a place I’d long wanted to visit came my way, but with the unappealing proviso to write something “free of complicated expression and overt environmental, social, political, or ethnic topics.” I asked what would be the point of such a story. Replied the editor, “Beyond the challenge to a writer like you, a good point might be a first-class, round-trip flight with all additional expenses paid for three weeks.” To where? “New Zealand,” she said. The woman had a way with words.
Into the Antipodes
Consider what must be the most well-known topographical outline of any nation in the world—the boot of Italy. Move it to the South Pacific, turn it upside down so that it’s poised to kick Australia sitting like a deflated rugby ball to the west. That musketeer’s boot, though severed, is the twin-island-nation of New Zealand. Nowhere else in a region called “down under” is the other term for it—the Antipodes, “opposite feet”—more appropriate than for that buskin. As if to confirm the reversals, even the Man in the Moon and the constellation Orion the Hunter stand on their heads there, and the Big Dipper and North Star never show themselves to correct this seemingly topsy-turvy world. Instead, old-style mariners turn their sextants the opposite direction to sight the Southern Cross for a bearing or they read a compass answering the magnetism of the South Pole: While the magnetized tip seems to respond to the pull of north, it is actually being pushed away from Antarctica.
One mid-December evening, I was standing on the instep of the New Zealand boot, on Queen Street, the main mercantile thoroughfare in the largest city in the nation. Auckland is a place of wharves under low hills, and a bay greenly occluded like old jade. Where Queen and Shortland streets intersect, the White Lady pie cart sat every suppertime until early morning. In truth, the “cart” was a bus-like contraption dispensing “burgers”—beef or egg or vegetarian—and ham-and-pineapple sandwiches, rump steaks, and even a salad or two. The White Lady hadn’t sold English-style meat pies in several years, and that shift from flesh pies to so-called burgers is a capsule history of post–World War II New Zealand where British names and customs remain, but products and attitudes, more and more, can suggest America or Japan. The automobiles parked around the White Lady, if older than five or six years, were Austins, Vauxhalls, Jaguars, but later models were Hondas, Toyotas, Datsuns. New Zealand, in its outward aspect, now resembles the mother country only slightly more than does Canada. Let me except speech: While I waited for an egg burger, a young woman, her Polynesian features glowing in the streetlamp, ordered a beef burger; in an Eliza Doolittle voice, she said to the frycook, “Oy luv ya ambuhgahs, mite.” Indeed, the egger was good, although the slices of pickled beets were more curious than tasty.
As I ate, I formulated a route to follow a line north from the pie cart into the human history that lies so lightly atop the land (humans have been here scarcely a thousand years) and then drop south along the broken backbone of mountains that dramatically form the New Zealand landscape.
Along the way I wanted to do some walking to get the feel of the place and, more particularly, in a land of unique ornithological richness, to see birds quite unlike those in the Northern Hemisphere. Not just kiwis and penguins, but also birds bright of name or colors: yellow-nosed mollymawk (an albatross), rosella, mud peep, dancing dolly (also called the Jesus Christ bird; why, I didn’t learn), blue billy, wandering tattler (the writer bird), and maybe—if lucky—one of the iconic k birds: kookaburra, kakapo, kokako, karoro, korimako, kotuku, kaki, and of course kiwi. For some inexplicable reason, I es
pecially wanted to see a rifleman, a modest, almost tailless wren able, if it chose, to nest easily in a shirt pocket. The decline or extinction of native birds that marked the nineteenth century in New Zealand suggests a traveler should get to the seeing while the seeing is still possible.
I set out for the Northland, the toe of the boot, where both Polynesian and European settlement began. Highway 1, an asphalt two-lane, followed the Hibiscus Coast of green bays and easy hills, the land at one moment appearing subtropical with tall palms and kauri trees, then at the next view seeming temperate with pines and myrtles. On that day, the grandest vegetation was the pohutukawas, called the New Zealand Christmas Tree, a broad spreading of feathery, crimson blossoms which, as if in celebration, often open briefly right around the twenty-fifth of December. On a day of sunny sky, warm air wafting over green fields, from my car radio came a carol, something about the weather outside being frightful. Another piece of topsy-turvydom in a realm where Santa needs not runners but wheels.
Puhoi is a village with its heritage of Czech immigrants showing in a wayside shrine and crucifixes tacked below the eaves of red-roofed buildings. Just beyond the ten-by-fifteen-foot library, I took a Devonshire tea, now more common in New Zealand than in Devon: scones topped with heavy cream and strawberry jam, a meal that made up in caloric potency what it lacked in volume; more than enough to make me regret it all the way up to Waitangi, a historic reserve, on a coast of sand beaches and rocky interruptions and green headlands rising out in the Bay of Islands.
Across the water was the town of Russell, once the center of European settlement in New Zealand and known as “the Hell-hole of the Pacific,” named by sailors who jumped ship, released convicts from the Australian penal colony, and the usual lusty characters attendant to whaling ports. In pursuit of sin, to the Hell-hole soon followed missionaries with, according to one Maori native, “faces so solemn they looked like a relation had just been eaten.” The waterfront was alive with the descendants: excursion fishermen and people booking a chicken-and-champagne lunch cruise.
The European incursion that started at Russell in the late eighteenth century brought the inevitable clash between whites and the indigenous Maori, a conflict that spread through the islands and was not formally ended until 1840 across the bay and just west of Russell at the Treaty House in Waitangi. There, New Zealand formally became part of the British Empire. Without full cognizance of what the treaty implied, the native people accepted sovereignty of the royal crown, a Caucasian hegemony that still chafes many Maori.
The national reserve at Waitangi (“weeping waters”) is seascapes, clipped grounds, and restored buildings like the Maori Meeting House. Although only a half-century old, it’s splendid with dozens of carved and colored rafters and pillars radiating the ancient life, and the exposed roof beams painted in interlocking, white designs to give a sense of standing within the rib cage of a monstrous sea-beast—perhaps just what the seagoing Maori, arriving generations gone from far across the Pacific, intended. They built wooden war canoes holding 150 men, and at Waitangi one boat that still puts out to sea each year on Treaty Day is more than a third of a football field long.
The road north went into the orchard country around Kerikeri, a high-street town with what may be the tiniest and most picturesque waterfront in the country. Only 120 miles from the northernmost tip of New Zealand, I began feeling grounded enough in a few basics of its history to start a thousand-mile drop southward toward the farthest end where one can almost smell the Antarctic.
At Kaikohe I took the smallest road I could find, one without a number on my map, and wound through modest valleys and compressed canyonettes, following for miles courses of streams that made passage seem almost like a little voyage. There was no other traffic, a good thing since even passing a goat cart on the narrow road would have been, if you will, dodgy; it was a region of pastures and farms rather than the vendors and motels of Route 1.
I did what I could to avoid, again if you will, a crash course in the language of the New Zealand highway signs: METAL ROAD (gravel), SLICK ROADWAY (paved), GREASY IF WET (slick), SLIPS (falling rock). Typically, bridges bore English names and streams Maori ones with a Polynesian piling of vowels. The route forced attention: Even along precipices, the road was without guardrails, instead turning the job over to trees and rocks crowding the shoulder. I had a better chance of glimpsing a Dieffenbach’s rail (last observed in 1840) than seeing a guardrail.
Along the grassy lane, tethered goats nibbled like hooved lawnmowers, and wedge-shaped walls of stacked, volcanic stone kept in sheep, and high fences contained domesticated red deer, future venison steaks holding heads steadily to the grass as if grazing cattle rather than continually jerking them up like their nervous wild kin. Sheep trails cut the hills into terraces, and the valley filled with dozens of shades of green as the sun dropped and illuminated a pied fantail which the Maori call a piwakawaka, a name more colorful than the bird.
Rotorua, a hot-spa town known for “thermal holidays,” sits amid a volcanic zone. Because the day was Christmas, the place was nearly deserted, the emptiness filled only with the scent of sulfur steaming from rocky vents all about. In the vacant streets of early morning, the air redolent with hydrogen sulfide, it was as if the Second Coming had at last indeed come and gone and left behind a land emptied of everything but vaporing pits opening to a chthonic afterworld.
At the edge of town is the Maori village of Whakarewarewa—locally shortened to Whaka—with its fractured rocks and steaming mudpots, geysers, and pools of Hadean waters. Residents use the thermal upwellings for heating, cooking, bathing, and laundry. That Christmas morning, a Maori woman with skin like polished mahogany was boiling her holiday ham in a natural pool, and in an exhalation from a crevice nearby she cooked a plum pudding. Later she would add to her meal a cranberry sauce with stuffed muttonbird (a shearwater), fermented crayfish, and preserved corn in strawberries and cream. At her children’s insistence, their day of crossed traditions was to conclude with high tea at an American chain hamburger-stand.
When she told me that, I grimaced in the manner of an ancient Maori mask: lips pulled back, tongue thrust far out and down, eyes wide. As chance would have it, she happened to work with the Rotorua culture-center and did not respond kindly to what she explained was a sacred expression, one not to be linked with burgers and fries. Called pukana, for centuries the Maori have carved it in wood to show defiance, challenge, aggression, but also beauty. She said, “We’ve survived the impact of Western civilization, the power culture, because we’ll take on anything, but what do we do about American fast-food? But, for today, seeing how it’s Christmas, I’m not going to growl about it.”
From the vents vapors rose above the trees, and it seemed the land itself burned rather than the magma below, and gray mudpots jumped and croaked like frogs, and a geyser called the Prince of Wales’ Feathers blew out a hissing, twenty-foot headdress of sulfurous, watery steam, while a small encrusted basin named the Brainpot lay in a bluish, quiet heat, a proper place, the Maori once believed, to cook the heads of enemies, or perhaps Polynesian children wanting a Christmas high-tea at an American franchise.
Because Rotorua is known for hangi—traditional Maori feasts cooked by Vulcan—that Christmas night I partook of one offered to outsiders: venison stew, lamb, green-tipped mussels, white potatoes, sweet potatoes, squash, squid-and-crab salad, steamed pudding. During the feasting, eight Maori performed traditional dances with music, the stiff-leaved skirts of the women wonderfully clacking in time to the foot-stomping men, the performance punctuated with pukana after pukana that might have been aimed at an ill-informed foreigner.
Maori mask
My route lay through closely cropped hills where lambs grew like wildflowers, Scotch broom yellowed fence lines, and Lombardy poplars cast skinny shadows into the morning. On a walk along a marsh I glimpsed a blue flash from something making a jaunty step through wet grasses; it was a pook, a gallinule also called Old Swampie.
Nice, but I’d still not come upon any totemic k birds or a rifleman.
Lake Taupo, the largest lake in the country, sits near the instep of the New Zealand boot like an eyelet, and a few miles to the southwest is Mount Ruapehu, a big and snowy active volcano surrounded by Tongariro National Park. Symmetrical Mount Ngauruhoe rises to the northeast, and between the volcanoes lies an expanse of tussock grass and heather; there I stopped at the grand lodge of the north island, Château Tongariro offering a big-windowed parlor and a buffet lunch of European fare generally free of pickled beets in unexpected places.
I hiked off under the fire mountains and toward a stretch of shattered volcanics cut by streams intertwined with fingers of beech forest. Despite eighty inches of annual precipitation, the woodland wasn’t considered rain forest, but the green dells were thick with mosses covering rocks and logs and anything else that might pause a little too long; to sleep overnight there could be to arise as more a mushroom than a man, a strange thing in such a volcanic land. The track to Taranaki Falls went through tussock scrub, into richly verdant sloughs, across more scrub, to descend an eroded wash lined with blanched roots. The late December air blew moist and warm, and birdsong seeped from the damp shrubs, and twisting streams purled, bubbled, splashed, trickled, dripped, and frothed over and around rocks pitched from the volcano ahead—more confusions of fire and water.