NORTHWARD ACROSS A DESERT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 390, 13 December 1946, Page 8

NORTHWARD ACROSS A DESERT

OVER THE BANK

SOONER or later everyone who drives a car in New Zealand has an accident or a near-miss, I don’t suppose our accident rate is high in relation to the

number who drive and the difficulty of our roads, but the total is hich

in the course of a year, and there are not many motoring families who have never been concerned directly or indirectly. I could not help noticing when I was towed into Taihape on Sunday morning after going over a bank on the Desert Road that, what had been a sensation to me was such an ordinary: event in the town and the garage ‘that I excited neither curiogity nor. pity. I. don’t mean that I was ignored or -+had difficulty in obtaining assistance. I mean the very opposite-that assista was so readily available it was clearly a matter of routine. The competence shown

in getting me back on the road and towing me 32 miles, the equipment available, the lack of delay by the foreman in estimating the damage done dnd by the insurance agent in getting. a price for repairs, all pointed to a state. of affairs that was routine rather than emergency; and I have no doubt that it would have been the same if I had been towed into a dozen other towns. The roads are neither better nor worse near Taihape than the average for the rest of New Zealand, and if the provision against accident is so good here I suspect that it is equally good elsewhere. In any case, the handbook issued by the Automobile Association lists the tarages roughout the Dominion that are equipped with breakdown trucks and there are not many centres of any size in which salvage equipment is not available. It is clear therefore that motor accidents are common enough to be a part of our lives, but it is not so clear that we accept and remember the lessons of them. I am still reluctant after five days to agree that I was careless or incompetent or ignorant or the vic‘im of some mechanical fault. I deny that I lost my head. But if my vehicle was as good . as I still wish to think it is, anti I showed no personal fault, I would’ not have gone over the bank unless the road had collapsed or rocked. The road did nothing but remain what it was to begin with-too difficult in that © particular stretch for my speed and tyres; in other "words, too difficult for me in that vehicle -at that moment. My speed was very low

-between 20 and 25 miles. But my. tyres were very high-45lb. to begin with, and after a hundred miles of bitumen probably 55lb. Whatever the figures were I was driving with far more ‘than average care and still left a straight and almost level road in broad daylight.’ The lesson of course is that safety is . the speed at which a given driver or a given vehicle does not leave a given stretch of road, and I suspect that other drivers are as reluctant to accept it as I have been. ale > che

NIGHT IN THE DESERT

~~) _- " ‘THOUSANDS of New Zealanders have slept in deserts; some of them bigger than the whole Dominion. I have done it myself many times over. But I had

only once before slept in a New Zealand desert, and that was 40 years earlier.

#he guide books in fact Say that there is no genuine desert in New Zealand but that on the Onetapu plateau between Waiouru and Lake Taupo; but that is not correct. There is a desert near Cromwell in Central Otago which is as genuine as the Sahara or the Kalahari and has exactly the same cause: drought. It is not very big or very difficult to cross, but it is shifting sand and nothing else, and the tracks you make across it in the morning are quite likely to

be buried a foot deep in the afternoon. I slept in that desert in November, 1906, and can still remember how cold I was before sunrise. I was cold also in the Waiouru desert, but that was partly because it is over 2,500 feet above sea-level, partly because it is not sand, but volcanic, ash, and partly because I followed a snowstorm which had coyered Ruapehu to its feet. But it is one thing to be cold and another thing to be miserable. I was not miserable. With another blanket I would have been extremely comfortable, but would of course have gone to sleep and forgotten where I was. As things were I woke half-way through the night and lay listening to the silence, It was not complete silence. Twice a motor car passed, filled (I suspected) with anglers bent on being first at a Tongariro pool, and there was a distinct noise from the Wangaehu coming down from the feet of the mountain. But there were no animal noises or bird noises; no wind; no sound from the railway trains that must have passed about 15 miles away; no voice or bugle or tumble of truck from the distant camp. I remembered that when I slept in the desert at Cromwell a dotterel!l called at intervals all night, probably because I was near its nest; but although I dis--turbed two paradise ducks when I went at daybreak to a little tarn about a quarter of a mile away, they did not once call in, the night after I woke,. Nor did. a rabbit approach me and thump or a deer cross my scent and bark, On my way to the tarn I saw the marks of a

hare that had passed. within 20,.yards of me, one only, but there were no other signs of life or movement except near the . water itself, where a duck had dropped a feather and there were two or three foetprints in the mud. Thoreau says somewhere that Nature is either winged ot legged. After a night on Onetapu I could almost be irreverent enough to contradict him. ~

SEA SECRETS

aK T is a shock to landlubberg when the Yea suddenly throws a creature at them of whose existence they had only known dimly, It happened,to me when

I ran alongside a beach the morning after a school of bleackfish -had been

stranded. Whales we have heard about since Jonah, and even if we haven't seen them. we are somehow on terms with them. Most of us, too, have seen porpoises. But blackfish «are» monstrosities, mammals as heavy as cart-horses living and loving right under ‘our noses but entirely (apart from these rare accidents) without our knowledge. And now because a treacherous wave caught them or a bigger monster still had them on the run, here were 20 or 30 of them ‘lying helpless in full view, big and little bulls, cows, and young heifers, nothing hidden, nothing toned down’ as with mammals on land, but the whole story moulded in black and white for prying eyes to read. Yesterday two tons of masculinity driving away marauders from his harem, To-day a helpless, mass of blubber_ proclaiming his impotence to the gulls. ry é >

SOME VARIETY

T is often enough said of New Zealand that we have a little of everythingmountains and plains, Swamps and deserts, glaciers and boiling pools, and

so on, 4 thing Alan ae used "Land of Everything" as the secondary title

of one of his books about us. But I had not realised, till I drove from Palmerston North to Hamilton, via Taupo, that nearly everything is encountered on that brief journey. For an hour after I left Palmerston I saw only green grass, fat sheep, and sleek cattle. The land was flat or undulating, and nothing suggested unrest but the wind. Then I, came to Hunterville, and nothing suggested re-

pose. All the way to Waiouru I was climbing hills..or dropping down into deep gullies, with cliffs or sharp peaks or curious knobs lining the road on both sides, and disaster waiting for me if I went to sleep, But it was still, except for the last few miles, fertile country sending wool and mutton and beef and butter and cheese to the other side of the world. — F At Waiouru all that ended. Production of food just about ceased until I was

well on the way to Rotorua, and there were long stretches without even trees. It is just about the worst country in New Zealand that is not too high to be settled; but many people find it. the most interesting, Topographically it lacks hardly anything but ocean’s coral strands; icy» mountains, swirling rivers, drifting sands, lakes, smoking volcanoes, geysers, boiling mud-pools, natural forest, destroyed,forests, man-made forests, tussocks, fern, swamp, and rocky wastes. Meteorologically it provided everything but a heatwaye the day I crossed it: rain at Waiouru, snow in the desert, sunshine at Turangi, hail so heavy along the shores of Taupo that I had more than once to stop and wait for the track to become clear, and such violent wind on the road to Rotorua that I travelled half the. way in a dust storm. To fill the traveller’s cup on this route there are first the terrifying Huka Falls and Aratiatia Rapids and then the long run through millions of blackened trees left by last summer's fires. How the fire started: does not now matter; but it used to be permissible, if a man pointed eyen an empty gun at you, to knock him down; and I hope it will soon be the rule to knock down every man who drops a burning match or cigarette butt, and to send him to jail without the option of a fine if he leaves an unquenched fire. » te ye

NORTHLAND JUBILEE

te al MISSED the Jubilee in Whangarei by four days, but not the Jubilee spirit. While the people of some towns -Taihape, for example-seemed to have

lost interest.in their "surroundings, everybody I met in Whangarei seemed proud

of the borough and confident of its future. When I came in the first night I noticed that although the shops were shut, most were lighted, and many occu-

pied. It was partly the Show and partly the Jubilee. When I climbed Parahaki Mountain I feund the tracks all sign posted, the big trees all labelled, and the steep places provided with steps and seats. The mountain was celebrating _ too. Even in the motor-camp where we were all birds of passage. the atmos-

phere was’ confident and cordial. No one said it, but the message was unmistakable: "Welcome to Whangarei." This is the kind of thing I mean. I had parked under a fig-tree about 50 yards from the kitchen and conveniences, It had been raining, and the grass was wet. But when I returned after my first walk abroad the custodian had run the lawnmower as far as my caravan, and round it, giving me a chance to come and go with dry shoes. (continued on next page)

I left in rain, but I believe that there was sunshine for the Show. They deserved it. The night before I left I met a boy of 11 or 12, riding one pony and leading another in pouring rain, with his schoolbag bulging through his waterproof coat and the covers of his ponies hung in a roll round their necks. How far he had come I could not say, but by the look of his ponies I thought many miles, and he must have had thunder, lightning, and rain most of the way. Next day I met a girl riding home from the Show, 35 miles away, horse and rider both a little tired, but jaunty still and retaining most of the Show Ring polish, I don’t know how well the older people stood up to the Jubilee showers the next week, but that was the spirit of Whangarei when I left. And what a satisfying town it is, with its parks, its hills, the wonderful view of the heads as you approach on the Auckland road and the beautiful approach through puriri and taraire from Dargaville. Why the railway station is so drab I don’t know, and it astonished me to see a rubbish dump smoking in full view of every passing train, but we have almost a delight in New Zealand in exposing our municipal hind ends, and there is perhaps a good local explanation. (to be continued)