Kiwi On The Loose

There was a time when New Zealand held the Americas Cup, and even Dennis Connor and the New York Yatch Club gazillions and the legal wranglers couldn’t keep us from winning it. There is a Tutukaka connection here.When the defence before last was held in Auckland, New Zealand, the Tutukaka Yatch Club put in a bid the mount the challenge from here. It would have been amazing. In some ways I am so glad it didn’t happen. The lure of money doesn’t always result in development along environmentally conscious directions.

This is the speck of paradise where I am now living.

And I must confess I am living. Totally. In the sense of having a job, a regular income and being able to pay my bills and get out of debt.

As I think I stated in my last post about buying jandals, simple things hold a lot of pleasure in the face of a world that’s struggling with economic stability.

Last week I went for several evening walks down to the marina late at night and out to the breakwater. The reflections of the night lights on the water, the mullet jumping, the sights and sounds of boats at their mooring, all this is sensually captivating.

It’s  just lovely to immerse myself in at the end of long and hard days. I love the night and you can feel the marina a real sense of all the boats and bodies resting after a hard day in the elements and the sun.

29 Marlin have been caught and tagged or kept this summer so far.

It’s been a record year. The old timers are saying things like, “It hasn’t been like this since…”.

Zane Grey once went game fishing from here.

Interestingly enough, this season several punters have had injuries from Marlin swords after they have been landed. A rich mans occupational hazard I spose.

Being back in teaching is pretty consuming time wise, gratifying some days and down right frustrating on others. There are 31 students in my class. 9-10 year olds.

I am pleased that I see in myself a level of tenacity that I can only thank America for. You gotta do what you gotta do.

My working now is no longer because I have some need to prove, if only to myself that I can do it. I know I can do it. I found in America a confidence in my ability to survive and put into practice the well known ‘kiwi’ trait of versatility and of being ‘hard’ working.

And I thank those who allowed and helped me to do that.Not the least of which was Susan’s help and support.

Now I work to live. I have a purpose and getting through the tough stuff brings that grit I have discovered in myself to the surface.

That in itself is a simple thing again.

I want to build a base for my future, my future with Susan, my kids, and so you do what you gotta do. That’s motivation enough.

So when the few kids in my class are not tuning into the programe, I simply remember what I am trying to do here, why and for whom I am trying to do it, and I grit my teeth, take a deep breathe and say it again…….or wait until those off the programe get back on it.

These are simple things and I am a slow learner, but I get the message in the end.

Simplicity brings happiness.

I am a very happy man and excited about the future.

The best I believe is yet to come.

Well here I am back in the country of my mother. And my father. And it feels just like that. This was where I was born, it’s the soil I was planted in, and started growing in. These are familiar skies, seas. The familiar smells in the summer night as you drive home in the darkness with the windows all down. I cannot believe how much I felt that in coming home. This is my place and where at this point in my life I need to be.

I didn’t get all emotional landing @ Auckland or anything like that. It has been a wave that has slowly rolled over me as a realisation that things are familiar again, and I am relaxing into ‘the’ familiar. I honestly hadn’t realised how much I loved ‘familiar’ or how much I needed ‘familiar’.

So from this side of the Pacific and on reflection I can see that, yes I like adventures, yes I want to travel, yes I am a vagabond, BUT there is nothing like home, and the garden of my birth.

Always being lost is no fun.

This puts a lot of my obvious struggles with America in perspective, and you may have picked up on that struggle in my writing.

Now I understand that I was screaming out for the familiar, I wanted to be @ home there, I wanted to feel the familiarity of home over there. It didn’t all seem so different in the TV programmes.

BUT it was!

So forgive me America.

And thankyou America, I learned much from you.

I LOVED my time there, this time in my 52 year old life, (even my struggles to make sense of it all) and now that I don’t have to worry about working illegally, or saying anything that US Imigration might see and think Hmmmm….that boy wants to stay here! and come knocking on my door, NOW I can say anything I like without the worry. The ever present fear.

When I return some day it will be with a new plan that will work becoz of what I have learned this time around.

Part of my heart, my life, is still in America.

It’s in the form of the person Susan, and it’s in the form of so MANY wonderful memories. It’s in the form of a future together that is developing it’s own unique shape.

Yes America is special to me.

Susan loves her country, and helped me discover a speck of it (and Fox LOL). Those are the memories, our travels and the places we took photos of together, the hikes, conversations and music on the freeway. Screams when I was on the wrong side of the road………….yes so many great memories.

More of this can be found here. Some of Graham’s America photos

The rest are HERE in various galleries

Susan’s photos of America & beyond, AND her take on New Zealand can be found HERE

There were times over there when people would ask where I was from and I would say New Zealand,  and they would say, wow………thats a beautiful country, and be thinking what was I doing there!

I would think or say……..looking around me….uh helloooooo……with panoramic arm gestures. I found America the land absolutely full of beauty, wonder and awe.

I hope to return there in a different format and with a stronger base to work from in New Zealand.

I wouldn’t change the experience for anything. I made many friends and met some wonderful wonderful people.

I also learned a lot about me, things that I can’t change and need to accept. AND things that I like about myself, and things I need to change.

I think too much ( trying to give it up), I experience life generally at a deep emotional, feeling level. I interpret the world thru my feelings. Hence the homeless, and the beggars posed issues for me. Peoples statements about ‘America the blessed’ posed issues for me.

I don’t think I am intense, just an over active mind.

Back home I hope to unpack some of my travels gently, and enjoy the new eyes I have for my mothers country. GOSH I even love the plain ole pinetree.

AND I am enjoying having a job and paying my bills. Such simple pleasures.

My hope for America is that she gets better economically by realising where the blessings really come from.

That it rediscovers the God of the founding Fathers……….and that His thoughts are not our thoughts.

God created us in HIS image, in America I think it’s more the other way around.

It was very cool last night to see the New Zealand Rugby Sevens team, moments after defeat 19-17 by England in Wellington, circle and kneel on the feild and pray. Now not all those guys will be people of faith, but they acknowledged something greater than themselves.

It was not just lip service.

America it seems to me is mostly full of lip service, not humility.

New Zealand is more of a Godless nation than USA with 3- 4% ever darkening the doors of any church, Shawn Hannity would hate it, we have had a liberal government for 10 years, we have a partially socialised political system but there are people here who love this place as much as any American.

Me included.

It is a quiet, deep and most time silent patriotism. BUT it’s there and we play our part on the world stage.

I found American styled patriotism pretty ugly because it has narrow vision and  is distorted, and has a bloated perception of it’s importance on the world stage. If it does have vision it is permeated by self interest and gain. Oh yes we appreciate that America exists, and our blood lies mingled on battlefields having fought together. We were in Veitnam, Korea………..and other greater wars.

New Zealand due to it’s geographical location has had to have ‘world vision’ to survive, and done a lot of thinking about our position relative to market places and economic powers in order to compete. ll that thinking gives use a perspective on ourselves.

Our little island.

I am glad to belong here.

Great to be back.

Stay tuned.

As recounted by Murvan Hughes. The year is 1956. The neighbour John Walker had reported to Dad a pig gutting sheep and killing lambs. They had tried all sorts of methods to get this pig, but they couldn’t get him, he was too cunning. Paddy Riley a friend on a neighbouring farm, much older than Dad but full of wisdom, gave a Dad a few detonators to use on catching the pig. It was lambing time and Dad found on visiting the stock that the pig had eaten the guts out of a couple of dead lambs and left the skins. He got to thinking about putting a couple of detonators in the guts of the dead lambs intestines. The lambs were left in the paddocks adjacent to the forestry where the pig was getting under the fences. The next morning after setting the trap, the skin was still there, the flesh gone and the detonators had been spat out and Mr Pig had got away. To this day Dad doesn’t know how he sensed they were there.

The next thing was to try and put the sharp blade of a pair of hand shears sticking up about 3 inches out of the ground in the holes under the fences he had been digging through. Several mornings later there was a big boar lying dead a couple of yards into the paddock from the hole with his stomach ripped open. Dad thought that he had got him, however dead lambs were still being eaten out in the paddocks. so the gutted boar wasn’t the marauding pig. Dad borrowed his brother in laws pig dogs, (Doug Hohneck) and started to hunt the pig with the dogs. There was pup that Dad wanted to break in as a pig dog so the pup ran with the other dogs. So off they went with the pup and Uncle Doug’s main dog after the pig.

On a ridge named Sinai the main dog started barking. By the time dad arrived he couldn’t see the pig apart from his eye visible through the fern. Since the dogs had stopped him and Dad only had his.22 he shot him in the eye, hoping to incapacitate him and the dogs finish him off and dad get another shot later. The pig took off down hill and got away from the dogs, and they couldn’t catch him again that day.

Several weeks later, the dogs bailed the boar up again on top of the ridge. Dad didn’t know where they were so he waited. The lead dog came back gasping, and wheezing with his tongue hanging out obviously very hurt. Dad went to check on the stock and left him in the paddock. The dog was in a very bad way, the pig must have crushed him up against a tree. He was taken to the vet but died later on.

Changing his strategy Dad mounted a 303 and a 110 gauge shot gun in a fence, over one of the lowest holes the pig was coming through. The guns were mounted and rigged so that when the pig lifted the wires to get under the fence the trigger was pulled. To get rid of his scent dad placed aniseed in the bottom of the holes.

Ten days later when Dad inspected the trap, which he did daily, the pig was found on the bush side of the fence. He had tried to get under and just poked his head through and the guns went off and got him clean between the ears. It was the talk of the valley, and to this day Dad laughs and says he must have got a surprise and wouldn’t have known what hit him.

He was a very big boar and probably over 200 lbs. They were surprised to find one front leg was shorter than the other which explained why he traveled the steep side of the bush, and that one of his eyes had no eyeball but the eyelids were joined. This was proof that here indeed was the problem pig.

I have this very moment just returned from a ‘mens’ camp. The concept may kinda stick in the throat of most men perhaps like the gagging on swede or silverbeat from your childhoods. Or mashed swede with carrot. Horribly good for you…….but it just got stuck in your throat.

Well the mens camp wasn’t just the touchy feelly share your heart stuff only, though that did happen I am sure while 8-10 boats fished the seas for 5 hours for Saturday morning. And it would of happened during the wonderful meals, and the communiion on the beach at dawn this morning. I came back early by necessity but as I sit here and think it was altogether awesome, a bunch of men getting together, young and old and from diverse walks of life, faith stages, perspectives and histories.

Being a man isn’t always easy in a world thats been caught in a pendulum swing and feminised to a large extent. And just being a man isn’t easy as you try to juggle whats expected of you, with what you know you can do and know you can’t do, as well as what you know you can’t do now but used to be able to.

From a kiwi perspective, I guess being a man is no different to anywhere in the world. I just know at the beginning of the camp I looked around and thought, hmmmmm…. what a strange bunch. By the time I left even if early…I looked around and saw others who were in the same boat as me. I saw brothers.