A week or two before my ferry to Te Waipounamu, I discovered that Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb—the man, the poet I’ve studied and translated for six years—hated Jews. “International Jewry,” al-Sayyāb wrote, used its “wide influence” to turn the world against Hitler. Lifting my head up from the page, I watched clouds move passively through Oriental Bay, turning the light on and off over ferns flickering silver and blue-green sea.
Was I disappointed? Certainly. Resentful? Probably. But I can’t say I felt much disgust or anger. I was too tired for that. Fascism was back on the move across the Pacific’s steadily churning indifference, and with family and friends planted like accidental dandelions in its path, what space or time did I have to tend to the paranoia of a long-dead ethnonationalist?
My concerns were—are—more pressing. Over 40,000 dead in Gaza, mainly non-combatants. Rashidieh, the Palestinian camp I taught at in southern Lebanon 10 and a half years ago, struck by Israeli war planes or mortars; reels of men shouting “owal ash-shuhada’ fee Rashidieh” next to shattered white concrete, appearing again and again on my Instagram stories. Trump “wins popular vote and electoral college”, claims “an unprecedented mandate”—a few weeks earlier, media buzzed with his talk of unleashing the military on “far-left lunatics” and “the enemy from within”.
*
Last night at my campsite outside Kā Roimata o Hine Hukatere, light rain spitting intermittently, I watched clouds drift past Kā Tiritiri-o-Te Moana’s low peaks: grey, teal, and snow-sparkling white in turns. A man held his young daughter behind me: “Vois, c’est ça la neige! C’est magnifique!”
I drew, painted, lit the first candle of my chanukiah as light drained over the mountains beyond the lake.
Aotearoa:
rain’s relief, wind’s release, brief
sharp sun—strike me dumb.
*
Two days later, before I left Haast for a four-day excursion through mountains, beech trees, ferns, an unholy quantity of sandflies, and—praise whatever deity may be responsible—no signal, I got a notification on my smartphone: the words I’d noticed. Nowhere to run sprung up next to WhatsApp’s green icon: it was C lamenting “New Zealand’s rightward shift” à la PBS. I flicked it away. Several hours later, I replied: Yeah just gotta find community and keep your head down I guess.
Early the next morning, stomach thumping with the chopper’s blades, I flew over silver rivers, bush collapsed into green masses, peaks still thinly topped with snow. After we landed, we drank beer, filled water bottles with river water, lazed in the sun, smacked sandflies. I sketched the valleys, the blue-grey glacial river, mountains like melting triangles.
At lunch, I picked at my bites.
“You really shouldn’t scratch them,” L remarked. “It only makes them worse. Try rubbing an inch or so away. I did that with some I got last night, and they’re really better.”
“Oh man,” I said, laughing. “I don’t have your discipline. I think I could do that for about 10 minutes.”
*
We headed off downriver the next day, most of us in rafts, some in kayaks. I took a probably-too-small, rented half-slice kayak. As we floated away, it rained and rained—steadily at first, then in short, spitting bursts. Clouds disguised the valley, mist seeping past thin waterfalls on distant, sheer cliffs. It was cold. At lunch, M made a fire under a log. I sat directly next to it, steaming, swiping at sandflies.
In the afternoon, we hit a rapid too hazardous for the rafts. Gear unloaded a piece at a time, slung around boulders, and dragged through the bush; the crew a colony of ants. The rafts were shoved over thick rocks: “1, 2, 3, push!”
Two hours later, the kayakers had to decide: through the thick of it or portage. One of us pointed out rock sieves river-left; suction cups for human bodies, gear. I eyed the line down the centre nervously—manageable, but not by much.
Three of the others hopped down boulders—one dragging his boat, the others leaving theirs behind. The two strongest kayakers, J and D, slipped down the centreline with ease, then returned to the top to paddle down the stranded boats. I went between them.
“This is a hard rafting rapid, not a hard kayaking rapid,” J reassured me. “Just have your nose pointed right down that first drop, take a big left boof stroke, and you’ll be sweet.”
I nodded, exhaled, settled into my boat.
An unforeseen swirl of current hit the sharp tail of my half-slice, knocking me too far left. I nearly flipped. Not a fortuitous start, I thought. Then the drop: pushed right, the boat’s nose caught on protruding rock; I was sucked down around it backwards.
“Ah fuck,” I managed before I found myself upside down in the hole, loud water throttling my ears.
Arms down, I caught undercurrent, flushed out, and rolled myself back up. Lucky. Plummeting sideways, then backwards, I planted and pulled hard, stroke after hard stroke. Arms, chest heaving, I missed the second hole by a hair.
D came crashing through the eddy behind me. “Fuck me, you sure made that interesting! Spicy!”
“Thanks, I do it for the fans,” I said.
“Not gonna lie, mate, for a minute there I was scared for you!”
“Well…here we are,” I shrugged.
That night, around the campfire, we got drunk, talked politics.
“You can be centre-right, centre-left, I don’t care,” A said. “Just don’t be far-right or far-left. If you can’t talk to people you don’t agree with, understand they have different views and experiences to you, you’re a fuckin’ eejit, I don’t care.”
“I don’t even know what I am anymore,” R said, smiling hesitantly, then turned toward me. “I used to be far left, but…I don’t know, everyone’s just so in their bubbles. Now I just talk about random weird shit with weird people.”
I laughed, scratched my bites.
*
The last day on the river, my hands swelled red. As we packed up the tents, I called out, “Hey J…you’re a paramedic. You reckon this is anything to be concerned about?”
I held up my puffy, red hands. J paused, turned my hands over, pinched the right one gently, laid the backs of his hands on mine.
“It looks like a combination of sunburn and sandfly bites. You might’ve just been so fucked that you’re having a mild allergic reaction. Do you have any antihistamines?”
I shook my head. J sighed briefly.
“Well, what you’re looking for is pain, redness—especially red streaks going back up your arm—and heat. They feel a little warm, but that might be the sunburn. Do they hurt?”
“No,” I said. “Just itchy.”
“Well, we’ve got the paddle-out today. Can’t do anything before we get back. Try dunking your hands in the river as we float down. If the swelling doesn’t get better in a few days, you might have cellulitis. You’ll need antibiotics then. Where you heading after this?”
“Wānaka, probably.”
“Yeah, they have a medical centre there.”
“Cool, well, I’ll keep an eye on it.”
*
Back in Haast in the late afternoon, heart beating slightly faster than normal, I turned my phone on—four days of cat videos, heaps of Instagram reels, but no new, unforeseen tragedies.
As the sun began to settle, five of us took a truck to the beach, gathered driftwood for a fire.
“Well, I’m going for a dip,” M announced.
“Are we doing this naked or are we doing this naked?” said B.
“Well, I didn’t bring any togs,” K chimed in.
I walked toward the sea, then back to the truck, kicked off my flip-flops, and stripped down. Ahead of me, pale butt cheeks jiggled, sea splashing past bare torsos.
Then briny water crashed in my face, salt on my lips, sand blowing through my hair, sun ahead of me low, blinding.
New year: Pacific
presses relentlessly in
to horizon’s blue.
*
En route to Wānaka, I tried to keep my eyes on the road, distracted by my red hands, still itchy but beginning to deflate, and the hills, subtropical flora giving way to mountains rising above throbbing blue rivers. Tititea lurked in snatches between passing alpine trees.
“Fucking hell!” I remarked several times, pulling over to grab inadequate photos, videos. When I hit Lake Hāwea, mountains surging abruptly beyond its azure blue, their granite a massive gate, I muttered, “Jesus, fuck, how is this even real?”
*
Birdsong, children screaming, giggling, cars tearing over gravel woke me late the next morning in the packed holiday park. I flicked my phone on. Message from Mom: Did you hear about New Orleans? If not, look it up.
Fifteen people dead, including the attacker, two cops. ISIS flag found in the attacker’s car. My sister had lived in the city for almost 10 years—moved to L.A. about a year ago. I messaged her:
Hey just heard about New Orleans :/ hope your friends are alright and that you’re doing okay <3 love you, let me know if I can do anything from over here.
No response. Unread.
I made coffee, picked up antihistamines, hydrocortisone, charged my phone. That afternoon, she replied: all her people okay.
I left for a hike over Lake Hāwea, hurrying up the steep path, trying to beat rain. The lake shimmered further and further below; the wind blew me back and forth, kicking dirt, gravel, grass into my face. By the time I reached the summit, dusk was approaching the lake, the mountains rising above; muting them, the wind howled, groaned. I scrambled down, sore, exhausted.
That night, I wore ear plugs. No backfiring cars, no wheels spinning out, no pop music pounding late into the night.
*
I woke tired, achy, but well-rested, hands largely returned to their normal size and shape. Turned on my phone: 2 pm. I squinted, restarted it. Still two. Flopping around on my air mattress inside my warm tent, I doom-scrolled on my phone. On Facebook, an older, distant cousin announced the death of her father, Fritz—the only Holocaust survivor in my family.
As I loaded up the car with my laundry and kayak, I read the story of Fritz’s return to the small German town he was raised in. After he and his parents fled Nazi Germany, Fritz’s grandmother and her sister were deported to Theresienstadt, a dual concentration camp and ghetto, a way-station for elderly Jews before being sent on to killing centres. Nazi propaganda depicted it as a ‘spa town’ and ‘retirement home’. Both died shortly after their arrival. In 2008, Fritz became the first Holocaust survivor to be made an honorary citizen of Ronnenberg, his hometown. In a news article, Fritz was pictured talking to German reporters, smiling.
I blinked away unexpected tears, squinted, pulling my eyebrows inward. I jumped in my car and drove to the Wānaka Wave.
*
Laundry swirled and sloshed into the evening as an older French woman sought advice on finding one-dollar coins from German and Dutch twenty-somethings, then departed for the neighbouring liquor store. When she returned, I asked, “C’est bien?”, struggled to make conversation in broken French.
“Schuis desolée,” I tried to explain. “J’ai étudié français quand j’étais à l’université juste pour deux ans.”[1]
With the help of Google Translate, we discussed American hustle culture (la culture de l’agitation), Kiwi hospitality (les peoples ici sont gentil), New Zealand’s slow pace (la vie ici est plus tranquille), travelling.
“Voyager ouvre la personne,” she remarked. “Chaque pays a son…charme.”[2]
“Uhhh…ouais, c’est vrais,” I replied. “Et des problemes.”[3]
Sick of camp food, I picked up yellow curry with chicken and carted it lakeside. Sunset was closing in on the mountain tops as families recorded their children running about, tweens zipping by on electric scooters.
Wānaka—seagulls,
ducks harass girls below blue
mountains clouded pink.
*
The first day outside Aoraki, I cruised by Lake Pūkaki, Takapō—such pure, bright blues I could’ve sworn they were dyed. Aoraki emerged beyond, an impossibly imposing spear—snow, rock, wisp of cloud. At Takapō, I caught the last few hours of the release at the whitewater park, then sat back in hot pools, watching clouds cling to foothills below my floppy hat, sweating.
Chatter from family back home arrived in short bursts throughout the day: a snowstorm in Kansas City, Dad shovelling the driveway, then flopping backwards into the snow, waving his arms and legs up and down, struggling to stand without destroying his angel. My aunt’s grandpa’s cousin Rose—P.E. teacher, player of the ukulele, world traveller, collector of exotic dolls my aunt was allowed to look at but never play with, occasional teacher of the hula to my aunt and her sisters, never married—had somehow managed to rescue Fritz and his parents, snatched them from the Nazis and landed them in suburban Kansas City. She died of bone cancer in 1965, refusing to let family see her as her body withered.
*
It was cold overnight. Air mattress deflated, I rolled around on hard ground. I woke late and took my time boiling water for coffee. Made a second cup but haziness still pressed on the corners of my eyes.
“Fucking asshole,” I muttered as a car shot around me in the short spurts between one-lane compressions in the road approaching Aoraki. Cars lined the road for what looked like a kilometre out from the car park.
“Just to get there 10 seconds earlier,” I grumbled, then pulled over at the first available parking spot.
I’d meant to take a steeper path in hopes of a road less travelled but misread the map and found myself taking a gentle walk with hordes of fellow tourists—tired, I didn’t mind so much. Snatches of German, Japanese, Hindi, Cantonese, Mandarin, French—along with a wash of American and Canadian accents and the occasional Kiwi—drifted past me as I lumbered ahead, glaciers pressing in on the steep valley, grey river rushing below.
As I approached the peak, an American couple locked in behind me, matching my pace.
“Like, I feel like it’s about creating those little opportunities, like even during the week,” a woman about my age intoned. “Like even if it’s just like, hey, we’re going to the trail, we’re stopping by the taco truck, you wanna join?”
“Well, yeah, for sure,” her partner said. “I mean, if you live in a small town and never leave your house, you’ll never meet anybody.”
Their conversation repeated itself, reformulated, slightly rephrased until I turned a corner and Aoraki appeared suddenly above, thrusting violently into thin passing clouds above the ashen lake.
I reapplied sunscreen, then skipped down pebbles to the lakeside, wound around the edge, planted myself beside a large boulder, and broke out my sketchbook and pen. Lost in the intricate sloping lines formed by snowfield and jagged rock, I muttered, “Well, that was shit. Not my best work,” and pursed my lips. “Let’s give that a second shot.”
I devoured a can of Thai chili-flavoured tuna, emptied out the cup, and filled it up with glacier water before readying my watercolours. Blues sloshed into sparkling browns and oranges, which neutralised, clouded into clumps on the page. My pen followed lines of rock and snow with relative ease as the sun began to lower behind me.
Aoraki, I melt
through thee like cirrus clouds you
pierce without remorse.
*
Ōtautahi was meant to be a rest. I picked up kayaking supplies, grabbed coffee, read at a café, then hopped in my car and headed to the gondola. As I wound through suburban sprawl and industrial buildings, a large electronic billboard loomed on the left side of the road: Isn’t it okay to think we should all have equal rights? Pass the Treaty Principles Bill.
“Oh, fuck off,” I muttered. “Pseudo-universalist bullshit.”
When I arrived at the gondola car park, I spotted a wide, gravel trail and decided to save $25 and stretch my legs. Before I started, a Signal message arrived from my aunt: It is now permitted to call women “household objects” on FB after guidelines updated pre-Jan 2020. This is how things used to be.
The way up surprisingly steep, I took short, slow steps, stopping occasionally, hands on hips, breathing more deeply than I’d expected. I passed by signs describing the trail’s role in early European settlement: Our march out of Lyttleton that day resembled nothing so much as the flight of the population from some besieged city, a settler had written. Every article of household requirements, bedding, etc., had to be carried on our backs…
Similar to many signs I’d read on childhood vacations to Colorado, Minnesota, even Oregon Trail crossings at home in suburban Kansas City. The American Frontier, my eighth-grade history teacher had taught us, was believed by one American historian to have shaped the American Character: Civilization encountering, subduing, re-/displacing Wilderness, Wildness, Savagery—characters in a Manichean drama consuming whole epochs, peoples. Such horseshit.
At the summit, the South Pacific emerged in its characteristic turquoise before fading into the hazy shores of the peninsula wrapping around the bay. The hills rose dry, orange, barren— suddenly overtaken by chunks of cadmium green, viridian—rows of fields, clumps of trees.
On the way down, a new Signal message from my aunt: Am also watching LA bees closely. As the path flattened out, I opened the app. Message corrected: LA news closely. R, T&A. Wildfire. (News, not bees as phone would have it!)
Nearby hills glowed orange in the darkness on my sister’s Instagram story. I messaged her. Bag packed. Plan to evacuate to our aunt A’s and uncle T’s or her friend J’s if necessary. Her golden retriever sticking his nose between her legs as she made coffee in the smoke and haze.
O Ōtautahi—
imagine you’re flickering:
quaking orange flames.
*
After I checked in at Murchison’s Riverside Holiday Park, the unofficial gathering place for visiting kayakers, I set up a tarp above my old fading tent—a hand-me-down from my dad—and used the park’s temperamental Wi-Fi to update the L.A. Times’ live fire map: the Palisades fire was hovering at the edge of Santa Monica, a neighbourhood away from my sister—the fire had been stuck there for the past two days. T and A can’t even see the fires, but the air quality sucks, my mom messaged me.
I spotted a small playboat with gear stuffed inside, two spaces over. When its owner—a short Kiwi woman, hair greying—returned, I said, “You the proud owner of that Bliss-stick?”
“Ah well, I’m using it—borrowed it for the weekend,” she replied.
“How do you like it?”
“Well, today was my first paddle of the season—just rolled in here after lunch and went for a quick one. But it’s good!”
“Ah, nice,” I said. “Same here. Well, I ask because I’m looking for people to paddle with—you gettin’ on the river tomorrow at all?”
“Yeah, probably,” she said with a small smile. “There’s a few trips going—we can check in in the morning.”
"Great! I’m S. What’s your name?”
“P,” she replied, sticking out her hand.
“Nice to meet you, P.” I gave it a firm shake.
*
We wound round Highway 6’s tight turns late the next morning, wind and cicadas’ screech rushing through the truck’s open windows.
“So, what’s the political part of your thesis?” P asked me.
“Well, al-Sayyāb was really into Arab nationalism, so I’m looking at the role of that in his work and comparing it to contemporary nationalism here and in the U.S.,” I explained, then rambled on.
“Actually, he was a lot of things. He started off as a Communist, but he broke with them pretty early. He was too bougie for them, and he thought they weren’t nationalist enough and promoted bad poetry. Then he had this strongly nationalist phase, but it was complicated—he would talk about these big, universal ideas that are really appealing to most people, I think—freedom, democracy, self-determination, stuff like that—and he tried to use Arab identity to override Muslim sectarian differences and included Christians in it. But he was also quite prejudiced against Jews, Kurds, Persians—anyone who wasn’t ‘Arab’ enough—which, you know, in a place as diverse and multi-ethnic as Iraq is a bit of a problem. But then he had this more sort of contemplative phase as Iraq got more real independence from Britain and things didn’t exactly work out.”
“You see it in his later poetry, in the last few years before he died. And I don’t know, he died really young—he was only 38. He had ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease. And his mom died when he was just a kid, like nine if I remember right. He had kind of a tragic life. So, I don’t know, it’s complicated.”
“Well, it sounds like he was a person who cared a lot about ideas, who was passionate about them,” P said. “Maybe the next step in your thesis is to think about where he might’ve ended up if he’d lived longer. Like for me, at my age. I think you’re idealistic when you’re young, and then you have kids, a career, family, and that isn’t really the focus. Then you hit my age, and you kind of realise that none of it really matters. So, you just go for a paddle. And it sounds like he never really got to that point—so maybe the next step is for you to imagine what he would believe if he had.”
*
I slept in the next day, missed the morning trips, wandered the park at noon, looking for companions.
“Any of you up for a paddle?” I asked a group lounging in the shade. “I was hoping to find someone to do O’Sully’s with.”
“Could do,” a blonde woman around my age replied. “When were you thinking?”
“No rush, really,” I said. “I’m S by the way.”
“N,” she said, and shook my hand.
We put together a small group—a family to help us run shuttle, a kayaker just arrived from Picton—and headed out in the late afternoon. The run was quick, cruisy, bouncing between large rocks and over popping waves.
On the way back, we talked religion, kids, family.
“It seems like the trend I see out of the U.S. is rural versus urban—people getting married young, having tons of kids in the country, but not in the big liberal cities,” N said. “In New Zealand, it seems like it’s linked to education levels. Like people I knew in high school who did polytechnic are married with kids, but amongst my friends from university—doctors, lawyers, engineers, that sort of thing—I’m the only married one. Like, I’m 28, and that was…a decision.”
I paused to read signs we flew by. On the left, Reality Check Radio: We Cover The Issues The Legacy Media Won’t appeared next to an early-middle-aged, smiling Pākehā man. A few metres further along on the right: DON’T SUPPORT PEOPLE WHO VANDALISE OTHER PEOPLE’S PROPERTY / STOP CO-GOVERNANCE.
“I think in the U.S. it’s regional,” I said. “Like, yeah, the rural-urban divide is definitely a thing—it’s way more religious and conservative in the countryside, for sure—but like, where I grew up, in Kansas City, and it’s kinda split 50-50 liberal-conservative, I’m always seeing people on Facebook from high school, same age as me, married with two or three kids. But in New York, my friends from undergrad, I only know one couple that got married, have a house and kid, and they moved to Colorado.”
*
My shoulder ached as I lay on the couch in the park’s TV room the next afternoon. I’d meant to find a group to plunge some 30-plus feet off Maruia Falls with, but I’d slept badly, woke achy, and felt my right shoulder strain on a quick, easy morning run, so instead I alternated between napping, reading, writing, nursing cups of coffee as the heat of the day dragged on.
Sitting at a table, reading and scribbling thoughts into the early evening, I heard, “Hiya S”, and turned to find F, a kayaker from Wellington, behind me. He sat across from me. We planned a quick morning run before I’d hurry to Picton to catch my ferry the next day.
“We got a big, brand-new tent for the family,” F said. “I reckoned we’d spend thousands on accommodation, so what’s a few hundred in comparison.”
“Yeah, I’ve just got my dad’s old tent from the ‘80s; it’s definitely seen better days,” I said, laughing. “But you know, we don’t have campsites with facilities like this in the U.S. I mean, you might be able to find one with a shower, but with a kitchen, couches, laundry? Definitely not. So, this is like living large to me.”
“Really?” F asked, genuinely surprised. “Why not?”
“I dunno,” I said. “’Merka, I guess. You’re free to…figure it the fuck out yourself.”
I paused. “Freedom from freedom coming soon.”
F raised his eyebrows, sighed. In the corner, a Scottish couple glanced at me, smiling.
*
As I approached the coast the next afternoon, the sun gave way to clouds, dry mountains to rolling green hills and vineyards. In Picton, the bay was dim; mist cloaked the water.
“We’ve been informed that conditions in the Cook Strait are less than ideal,” a pre-recorded voice announced on the ferry’s intercom. “Passengers are advised to stay in their seats and take care when moving about.”
As the ship heaved up and down, a chippy German girl exclaimed, “Look! A dolphin! No, that one was a dolphin, not seaweed, I swear!” for the umpteenth time. Her Kiwi neighbours laughed, smiled. I sucked ice, lay my head back, hat tilted over my eyes, my stomach sloshing, throat tight and warm.
After some two hours of rough waters, lights began to blink over the dark sea, larger and larger in the diminishing distance. The sea was calming, the boat levelling out.
Te Waipounamu:
jade green waters take me to
what I always knew.
*
Back home, I sit on my deck, my cat meowing periodically behind me, wind rustling tī kōuka, huruwhenua’s spiny fingers. A few clouds linger above the bay, pulling the sky’s cerulean towards white.
A ceasefire and hostage exchange have been tentatively agreed to in Gaza; the Israeli cabinet are due to vote on its finalisation tomorrow, delayed after accusing Hamas of reneging on parts of the deal. A ceasefire was declared weeks ago in Lebanon; I’ve no idea what else has happened in Rashidieh. The fires in L.A. still burn, some partially contained as new ones emerge, the Palisades fire still hovering at the edge of Santa Monica. Trump’s inauguration is set to place on Monday.
Cicadas sing more faintly than they did in Te Waipounamu. Kākā cry, tūī chirp and croak. The bay is slightly teal, somewhat dark blue: its waters calm. Strips of low mountains fade into atmospheric grey below the strangely still clouds.
Winds of Te Whanga-
nui-a-Tara, disperse
me, scatter my home.
[1] “I studied French when I was at university for just two years.”
[2] “Travel opens a person,” she remarked. “Every country has its own…charm”
[3] “Yeah, that’s true,” I replied. “And its problems.”