Visit cardboard cathedral, earthquake memorials, Lyttelton, and the Tannery.  Last day in New Zealand.

In the light of a day born cold with a chill wind, downtown Christchurch seems like a desecrated graveyard, its stones defaced and toppled, its paths rutted and lined with debris. Seven years since the day, empty boarded buildings and entire blocks of nothing but rubble surrounded by a maze of chain-link fences and blue traffic cones shunt people and cars in haphazard directions.

Seven years since the day, the ruined cathedral seems a symbol of the city’s unsettled character. It sits forlorn, surrounded by heaps of rubble, the backbone of its slate roof broken and bent. The end where its spire toppled is now a gaping chasm into its dark interior. Much of the cathedral is secreted from view by high walls that seem designed to hide it more than to protect passers-by were another quake to occur. It is neither being rebuilt nor torn down, a monument to indecision and, perhaps, a lack of vision or absence of a concerted plan for what it and the city around it might become.

Unlike the Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima, this cathedral now appears not as a stark reminder of our destructive impulses but more as a monument to indecision and our inability to find common ground and cause. Here and there on blocks around it, ultra-modern glassy buildings of wildly different and clashing designs share walls with tall concrete buildings that are condemned, their windows boarded or simply holes in the facades. We wish the city were otherwise. It is not its destruction that depresses us, it is the absence of inspiration.

Nearby, the pop-up memorial of 185 empty white chairs representing those killed by the quake is on the corner of a block almost totally surrounded by sparsely filled parking lots. The empty chairs are eloquent: wicker, wood, plastic, leather, wheelchairs, rocking chairs, office chairs, recliners, bar stools, a baby’s car seat. The altar-end of the temporary “cardboard cathedral” faces the empty chairs and a construction worker in a large earth mover behind a chain link fence shifts piles of rubble from one spot to another between the two.

We drive out of the city to a small port town and return home to cook dinner for our final night in Christchurch. The meal is a welcome antidote to a depressing day. Stephen and Robyn and Hugh are lovely people and we are sad to leave them and to leave New Zealand.

Another bittersweet day in Paradise.