Shrink rap
Wellington's west coast scene. We would borrow steel carabiners and lots of old tape and old ropes and stuff from school, and drive off in the Valiant to Mt Cooper, Titahi Bay, playing songs from the fifties on the tapedeck.
Don't need a doctor, don't need a pill,
Anything they can give me, will only make me ill.
I need rock therapy, give it to me.
On the brittle cliffs we'd frighten ourselves out of our wits pulling bits of tussock out of routes like Gollum Crack. The seashore is a marginal place and that suited our frame of mind. We were the blank generation, the new leisure class, leaving school to go on the dole. Adolescent existentialists, the fluidity and impermanence of human existence was heightened for us on the rock. Attempts to forestall these inexorable processes with bolts, pegs or other impedimenta were comic – and therefore totally worthwhile.
Ten years later I came back. Past the new K-Mart in Porirua, stopping for ice cream at the food court. Now in a Mazda. Still got a tapedeck.
And the skies always had little fluffy clouds
And they moved down, they were long and clear
And there were lots of stars at night.
After parking the car and walking across the grass beneath the radio masts, the glowing ocean horizon still stretched far beyond the top of the cliffs. But it’s not like it was: I hold my joints carefully, taking care to stand straight where once life was a possibility to be leapt into. Lost friends linger in my head: I remember how, lurching out in an instant of indiscretion, possibilities can be lost forever.
Down at the beach, flies cluster deliriously on a sheep that has fallen and now lies bloated on the boulders. Breakers crack against the rocky coast. Beauty and horror, life and death, exist together and forever. In the rocks of Northwest Nelson, the oldest in New Zealand, scientists have found fossilised pollen from kahikatea trees. Our preconceptions are irrelevant, our desires more so, and the hold the world has over us is stronger for those reasons. From the south come vast murmurings: the rubble of Tapuae-o-Uenuku and the empty ice of the alps are a distant tension, a memory over the horizon. The world is turning, passing, streaming through the strait.
We made ourselves busy on the shore. Colin and I bridged across a narrow gut where waves foamed in and out, and traversed along the steep wall above the heaving water. Feeling childishly pleased with ourselves for escaping a drenching, we scrambled up muddy scree to a wall hidden behind boxthorn bushes. Two men were diving for paua in the small bay beneath us. Our preoccupations were ignored. We eyed up the problems, the moves, the landings. Standing on each other's shoulders we brushed possible holds. We gave each other the slow concentration and commitment needed to gain confidence to launch up off the ground. For us both this would be a trial, recovering from different, slowly healing injuries. For me it was also a reconnection with a past, before painful years when loved ones died slowly and died suddenly.
The world is shrinking. Curving, the overhung wall wraps around us. The first move is tentative, laying off a curving rib of green stone. The unknown is close up there, and I'm unsure about leaving what I know, reluctant to make the commitment to forgetting the ground. After swinging out on the off balance start, I discover I too can make the huge reach into the centre of the wall that Colin has figured out. Life is small now, just me and what I'm holding on to, and when you're holding on that hard, that intense energy fixes you into the wall. Boundaries get blurred in the concentration on holds and moves. To start, with a body and mind unused to the strain, it's difficult, awkward and painful, but soon you know you can put your mind into that place and your body will respond, holding its weight, balancing in space against the cliff.
I'm at the crest of the wall now. This is the moment I love, where conscious thought almost ceases and you move instinctively, with total concentration. Often, later I can't remember what I did. I find a smeary kneebar almost at shoulder level and reach up, stretching to wrap my fingers into a small incut hold above a small and dried grey moss.
The crags bring total absorption. They can also give utter detachment. Another day, at Boom Rock, further down the coast, where cliffs of soft crumbling argillite rise 50 metres out of the deep water of Cook Strait. The rope trails behind, clipped to imaginary runners. Kahawai flash in the calm. The sky grows vast and close. Space is empty but it presses in against you.
– A version of this story appeared in the 1994 New Zealand Alpine Journal.