Sunset at Hokitika

David at Hokitika Gorge

Hokitika Sunday: Carnegie building and museum, Hokitika Gorge.

Hokitika: 7 a.m. kaleidoscope. Endless series of small waves froth onto the black sand under the rocky beach. A few campers … maybe hung-over Wildfoods Festival revelers … are sealed inside their sleeping bags on patches of sand. A light wind off the Tasman Sea blows straight onshore. Gangs of aggressive seagulls prowl the edges of the path above the beach. Three campers, dressed in black clothing, stand around five-foot high flames from a massive tree stump with tangled roots, gray smoke wavers, dissipates into the morning sky. A small field near the edge of town looks like Woodstock: multicolored tents with mounds of clothing and debris around them disgorge groaning men who wrestle their t-shirts on, women with tousled hair poke their heads outside zippered flaps, assess the morning. Several young schoolgirls in bright yellow and orange vests scour the parking lot of the local supermarket, spearing trash and putting it in large bags.

All this makes us wonder how we become the people we are. Why do we notice certain things and not others? Why do we incorporate certain experiences, good or bad, but not others? What makes an image, an action, a phrase, a memory stay with us … or not? Can we choose to revise this amalgam at will? Begin using new rules or criteria to determine what we allow in or let out?

Travel to places we’ve never been, allowing ourselves to see and hear, taste and touch without prior principles and predilections to influence reception, is certainly one way to change one’s self. Maybe not as quick as a half-bottle of gin, but longer lasting (or merely debatable).

How do each of us at our many stages of life determine our preferred balance between, for lack of better comparative terms, civilization and the elements, between tasting a drop of dew from a dark forest or drinking in Diaghilev’s Afternoon of a Faun? The Nijinsky Principle? Find the perfect point where the elemental and erudition intersect?

What’s this all got to do with travel? Not sure. Tramping through territory that is untouched and as old as the planet one day and touring the ephemeral talents of men and women in a city museum the next is a whipsaw. It’s wonderful. There’s nothing like being in the wilderness to lower your needs. Life becomes deliciously simple and there’s an elegance and grace in that. But there’s nothing like sipping a Sauvignon Blanc with a simple salad and cheese surrounded by Seurats near the Seine.

What a waste of words. All that to say, “Travel IS good for the soul.” Yes, it is. Yes … it is.

By late morning, we’re in Hokitika’s Andrew Carnegie Library building, which looks exactly like hundreds of other libraries he paid for: a heavy stone box with massive columns all around, classical cornice over the entrance. But this one is slightly different since it was rattled by frequent earthquakes. The top frieze around the building is made of styrofoam whose painted texture so resembles the gray stone walls beneath that you have to be told to look for it.

Inside, it’s now a museum and houses very informative exhibits on punamu: New Zealand jade, most of which comes from this region and was used by Maori for a variety of sacred and profane purposes. The next exhibit tells us that, by the 1850s, foreign settlers wanted more agricultural land and sent a fellow named James MacKay to negotiate with the Poutani NTahu Maori tribes. The English Exchequer allotted MacKay 400 pounds sterling and the ability to let the Maori retain some land in perpetuity. He tried without success in 1859 but, after sweetening the deal … a little more money and a little more land … he was able to purchase most of the south island’s southwestern coast, from Kahurangi Point in the north to Milford Sound in the south. The Arahura Deed, signed May 21, 1860, by the Maori chiefs with an “X” by every name spelled in English, bought almost two million acres for a whopping 300 pounds sterling — the remaining 100 were lost when MacKay’s canoe capsized in a river some time after the deed was done — and 10,224 acres for the Maori to keep. Brings new meaning to the art of the deal.

The next exhibit is all about the gold discovered in the newly purchased territory: How it propelled Hokitika to become the sixth largest city in New Zealand by 1864, its port the busiest harbor on either island even though it was a rather treacherous one. Thirty-two ships wrecked — about one every five weeks — and many more foundered on the harbor’s shifting sand bars and had to be hauled back into the water between 1865 and 1867, a period that saw 1.7 million ounces of gold leave the newly purchased territory.

And a final exhibit on whitebait, a delicacy that almost rose to the heady levels of gold in value and endeavor. Whitebait are actually the 50mm-long babies of five kinds of Galaxiids (named after the Milky Way); they are the transparent young of fish native to New Zealand and they used to be caught by the ton as they returned from the sea to spawn in the rivers. They are controversial these days. As you might imagine, as you kill off all the babies, you reduce the population kinda ricky-tick and are left with … well … nothing. So there’s a growing movement to regulate and ban fishing for whitebait in various ways. Time will tell.

We left the library and drove inland through a flat valley surrounded by the foothills of the southern alps — it looks a bit like parts of Montana, maybe south of Bozeman —- to the Hokitika Gorge where a suspension bridge  — puny in its 150-foot span … we are soooo jaded … after all, we’ve swayed on one 150 meters long — hangs above a river totally fed by glacial waters full of schist and graywacke, which makes the water a brilliant turquoise.

We drove on to Lake Kaniere, a beautiful small lake with two uninhabited islands in it. We could have been in the Adirondacks: A few “batches” (second and vacation homes) look over the lake; families lying on the grass while their kids jump off a wooden dock into the sparkling blue water; a small motorboat whizzes by; two teenage couples in kayaks have a splash fight with their paddles. Serious cyclists wend their way up, down and around the roads around. Just idyllic. I can’t help but think my brother, Michael, Carmen his wife and Rachael his daughter would spend a very contented week here.

We return to town and have dinner in a black tablecloth place, served by a pretty waitress who approaches us tentatively and has to ask the kitchen how each dish is prepared and what comes with the “mains” as entrees are called here. We discover that Gretchen is 15 years old and a full-time student who works four nights a week.

And we walk along the beach to catch the sun set behind the town’s name spelled in driftwood. Another somewhat lazy day in Paradise.