One thing that must go is the attitude that I must have everything here that I had in San Francisco. I don’t mean walking access to a world class city, but cheap and plentiful organic food in all seasons, non-stop gaming, hours a day to while away surfing the internet, heavy socialisation. As we work toward adapting the land around us to ourselves, we must first adapt ourselves to this land. And both roll with, and direct, this process. So many stages to go through—settling in Christchurch, starting a garden there, making friends. Developing the property. Figuring out what kind of land we want, and where. Finding the specific place. And all the establishment that will happen once we do that, years-long projects to start the garden, build the house, tame the forest, plant the orchard… So much to do that we cannot put off what we want to do someday while we are preparing for it. This is our life, right now, for a long time. We must live the way we someday want to live =right now=. Time to exercise J

(The next day…) Left Mara Whenua today. At first I felt happy; the exhilaration of the open road. There was something of a good feeling of getting away from the overpowering environment created by other people as wonderful as their vision is. Very quickly this good feeling faded as we drove along the rolling hills of pastureland. A depressing monocrop. A coffee shop zipped by on the right, promising in BIG letters good coffee, good food, good service. Suddenly I was ravenous for some of civilization’s treats. We went in, got a pair of lattes and a tasty looking muffin. Baked goods!

The idea turned out to be better than the reality. My first coffee as a New Zealand resident was unexceptional and even the sweet baked treat failed to push my buttons. I am reminded of when I used to continually gorge myself on Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream, or rather, when I had stopped gorging myself on Ben and Jerry’s, had it some long time later, and didn’t receive the electric jolt of pleasure it had given me formerly. At the time I had decided that this was what happened when one was no longer addicted to a substance—the actual stuff was flat and unexceptional and all the magic had come from me: my addictive response. This same thing happened to me earlier in life with soda (pop). After two and a half weeks of being in New Zealand and eating things that were grown organically and plucked right off the tree for just one week, suddenly the more civilized equivalents lacked magic.

We visited the Ancient Kauri Kingdom shop and café where Kauri wood excavated from peat bogs, perfectly preserved for 40,000 – 50,000 years (about the lifetime of the species homo sapiens), is made into sometimes lovely and sometimes rather sad furniture and knicknacks. Unborn baby heartbeat monitor? Well worth a visit according to the Lonely Planet guidebook. Lacking that august distinction was the Gum Digger’s Park which we passed by. Out in the parking lot were various ancient giant Kauri stumps. I thought I felt something when I pressed against the cross section of one ancient tree as old as my species.

Kauri is a big fat tree looking like an elephants leg with a disproportionately small dusting of foliage at the top. The vast majority of it was logged like crazy in the early years of New Zealand European settlement, the main wave of which started less than 150 years ago. That’s part of the attraction of New Zealand—that it is a country which was being settled by Europeans right around when San Francisco was getting going. A very young country where there has been less time to screw things up, less time to fill it. It’s one of the closest places to a frontier left on the planet. Ten years ago when the World Wide Web was really kicking in, Yvonne and Wayne were just getting their own phone line, having previously had to share theirs with five other families on a party line. For the first couple of years for them in the early 90’s there was no phone service at all.

The Maori weren’t here so long either as these things go, maybe a thousand years back. Enough time to drive the Moa into extinction and introduce rats and pigs. The rats did more of a number on the native bird population than the Maori themselves could ever have accomplished. There were some extraordinarily cute wild pigs on Yvonne and Wayne’s land, grubbing around for fallen fruit no doubt, scampering away when we walked to the loo.

Wayne said that the buildings in San Francisco erected before the big quake/fire of 1906 were built of New Zealand Kauri wood. I wonder whether our apartment, scheduled for its first open house just one week from today (and, it turns out, shown a week ahead of schedule, so just one day after I wrote this), was possibly built of Kauri. The year of constuction according to the city was 1900, but that’s what they recorded for all buildings whose original records were lost in the fire. I had about four feet of framing that I had saved from when we took out a closet wall to install the furnace for central heating. I burned the wood on Ocean Beach three nights before we left. I thought it was old growth redwood. Every time I picked it up I was astonished anew at how light it was. Kauri wood is notable for its lightness, as was explained by an Ancient Kauri Kingdom informative display. I think we might have spent our last nine years living in a building built of old growth New Zealand Kauri. That’s as good a reason why we are here as any, depending on what sort of view of the world’s workings you find most enjoyable.

We took an unsealed road (gravel) to the imprecisely named 90 Mile Beach which lies along 65 miles of the northernmost feathery tendril of the northernmost spine of New Zealand. We passed through a pine forest on the way and I started to feel good again. The beach was lovely — water and shells and fantastic sand dune shapes carved by the tide; no one’s foot prints there but mine. I seem to have become a nature lover, now preferring Gaia’s environments to Man’s. It will be interesting to see how I feel about suburban Christchurch.

7:30 – 8:00 am: Wake up. Step outside to the nearest tree for a pee. Light the small gas cooker we had outside on the deck to make morning tea. The milk we had brought up from the house the night before and left outside our cottage door for the evening was nicely chilled from the cool night; we used it for our breakfast museli which we ate out on the deck. Accompanying our organic museli typically were some freshly picked grapes or apples from the orchard. Walk down the hill to the open-air composting toilet which was for WWOOFERS only (the family had a differently designed loo in a separate building adjacent to their living quarters). At first I was a little freaked by the loo, but I’ve done my business in the woods before and this was actually quite nice — a 7’ high semi-circle made of giant recycled Green Party campaign mini billboards + corrugated tin around a ‘throne’ which was a wooded box with a toilet seat carved into the top. You open the lid and do your business into a big plastic barrel while gazing out into the orchard with total privacy. Once done, you scoop up some sawdust from the adjacent bin and sprinkle on top (helps quench any smell, protects from stray flies, and also aids with the decomposition). We read that once the barrels are full, they are sealed and left for one year to form compost which is then spread as mulch for their timber trees; the family pooh is used for the orchards (we speculated that WWOOFER pooh was just not good enough for food producing plants – you couldn’t be sure just what WWOOFERs were made of!).

9:00 am: Change into work clothes – long sleeve shirts and shorts to combat nasty mosquitoes which managed to get us anyway – and set about for the four hour+ task at hand. One day we worked the driveway clearing gorse (prickly shrub which requires one to wear thick leather gloves and use clippers or cutters to get it down); one day we helped with the house building and mulching; several days we were tasked with mulching the sub-tropical plant/fruit orchard which required us to clear the tall grass surrounding each plant, lay down sheets of newspaper around each one, and then shovel large piles of sawdust around each. This area was a bit secluded and we had to shovel off from a big mound of sawdust and wheelbarrow it in. I think we must have done at least 50 wheelbarrows full. We also had a short stint picking fruit (figs, grapes, and apples) and I got to grub out some weeds along the driveway.

1:00 – 2:00 pm: Stop by the house to have lunch. Yvonne makes the most delicious and dense homemade bread I’ve ever had. Scrumptious. Bread, avocado, cheese, tahini, peanut butter, vegemite, lime pickle, mustard, tomatoes and all the fruit one could want was available and all was organic.

2:00 – 6:30 pm: Free-time. Almost each day by this time we were wiped out from the intense physical activity and needed to sit or nap for an hour or two to recuperate. A week of this and we couldn’t figure out what our problem was – were we that out of shape (didn’t think so)? Around 4 pm each day we head to the swimming hole down by the river for a quick rinse. This was basically our ‘shower’ time. The family has an outdoor hot shower by the house which is solar powered, and Yvonne said we could use it, but we didn’t feel comfortable doing so (except on the very last day when the family left for the afternoon and we had a whole day to putz around by ourselves). We could make do with a quick dunk in the river and it was quick because the water was quite cold. On a couple of days I treated myself to a warm shampoo – I heated up water on the gas cooker and then washed my hair over the outdoor sink. Generally from 5 – 6:30 we hung out doing exercise, reading, or me playing with my new friend, 6 year-old Rewa, who was a real cutie and loved to play games, especially a battered copy of “Memory.” True to the spirit of the game if not the letter of the rules, he had memorized the backs of about half of the tiles and was unbeatable.

6:30 – 8:00 pm: Down to the house to have dinner with the family and chat for a bit. Again, Yvonne whipped up some delicious meals. Lentil stew, mashies, sausages, various veggies. Veggies all from her garden; the rest locally made and store bought. The most amazing thing I witnessed related to food was that this family of five (with three of them being growing boys) only needed a very tiny half-size refrigerator for their needs. They had no ice box; they typically did not eat meat; leftovers stayed in the pot on the stove to be eaten the next day. I could not imagine doing this in the States.

8:00 –10:00 pm’ish: We’d retire to our room for some reading on permaculture design and gardening and chatting and just general lying around listening to the birds and the night critters and the call of the kiwis (sun was setting around 8 pm). This was good thinking time.

We did have some ‘off days’ too as we’d worked an extra hour here and there earlier in the week. The day we drove into the ditch, we’d been heading into town to purchase some groceries for Yvonne so we could feed the boys and this counted a bit towards our WWOOFing time. The only thing we really did in terms of ‘watching’ the boys was fix and have dinner with them. They were quite fine on their own, getting themselves ready for school, having breakfast and making lunch. After school they played and busied themselves and then came in for dinner. Not a problem and we had fun chatting with them about kiwi and teen life: music, books, school, vacations, etc. One day we spent four hours hiking the tracks Yvonne and Wayne had created. We hiked up the ridgeline through native bush (manuka, kauri, eucalyptus, puriri trees, palms, and the dreaded gorse) to the top of Toa Toa mountain where we saw spectacular views of the valley and the ocean beyond.

Sound like fun? You bet. I know some of my more delicate friends would not have enjoyed this WWOOFing one bit, but we thought it was grand. This was a one week intensive, immersive, permaculture farming lesson and we wholeheartedly embraced it. Our minds continually absorbing and spinning — wow, that’s so cool; gee, we can do this; oh my god, no way; constantly interpreting the lessons learned and trying to figure out just where we wanted to head on the spectrum. It was exciting and exhausting at the same time. We certainly didn’t come away with any hardfast conclusions as we need more time to digest and explore, but we definitely made the right decision to come here and witness this amazing family and their land up close and first hand.

It was a bittersweet departure – we’d gotten accustomed to our routine yet were also eager to be on our way to see new things. Yvonne stocked us up with a box of apples, figs, and grapes to take with us along with a giant jar of homemade honey (yes, they have beehives too). We hugged and all agreed it would be grand if we could keep in touch; no worries, we plan to wwoof at Mara Whenua again! How could we not?

That driveway came back to haunt us again today as we left to go back to what I have been calling “the world” to stock up on supplies for the kids we were watching. I was trying to drive with the right wheels in the center of the driveway, which is raised to allow for rain runoff. Kathy had taken us in and her slow cautious approach had served us well. Now that we felt more comfortable here, I was driving us out at a faster pace. As I brushed the encroaching bush (semi wild or native plant growth) with the passenger side of the car, Kathy began screaming that I was going to kill her (I didn’t) and that I would put us into a ditch (I did). No worries, though—it seemed to take forever to walk over to neighbor Chris’s cob (homemade adobelike substance) house but we found him there and he was able to help us with a tow out of the ditch. The rearview window popped out but popped right back in again, the car as good as new or at least as good as 15 years old.

Wait, what, kids we were watching? Yes, Yvonne and Wayne had left us with two of their boys, Jarra and Miro, aged 13 and 11, for four days while they drove down to a garden sculpture show in Auckland. Hmmm, maybe I need to rewind a little farther.

After that first endless trip down the driveway, marveling at the increasing lushness of the scenery, we finally saw some buildings along a path off the side. I got out of the car and went walking down the path where I encountered Yvonne gardening away like mad, as is her wont. As is typical of the kiwis (us kiwis?), she was extremely friendly and quickly began showing us around. We saw the campervan that was one of our choices of accommodation, the giant grape arbor and tree nursery that held our dedicated outdoor kitchen, the outdoor composting toilet, some of the many gardens around the property, and finally our other choice of accommodation, a huge beautiful warm sunny room in a building made of exposed timber and a variety of homemade earth/adobe/cement materials, Yvonne rattling off details about the composition of the mixes of various walls amid instructions on how to use the limited solar power to run a light in our room at night.

Kathy and I set ourselves up and went down for dinner, meeting Wayne and their three children, the two above and Rewa, age six, the whole family all very well mannered, intelligent, and deeply sweet. We exchanged stories, ate dinner, discussed when we would show up for work the next morning, received a pile of several spiral bound documents written by and about Yvonne, Wayne, and the property, and went back to our room shell-shocked.

Of course we were shell-shocked. We were shell-shocked before we even got there as should be obvious from my last post. As of today we’ve only been here in NZ two weeks and it feels like a lifetime. When we checked our internet today after being off for a few days, we were perplexed that it seemed like nothing in the external world had happened, when for us so much has.

Back to that first night. Despite the lovely surroundings and our kind hosts, we were quite tense. We calmed ourselves by reminding ourselves that if we could go tramping (backpacking) for several days, we could certainly do this. The next day we didn’t have a chance to ruminate as we were quickly thrown into learning how to cardboard mulch a garden bed and fetch and carry for the new addition they were putting on their house. They let us go after about five hours but continued working nonstop themselves until dinner, where we returned, having enjoyed the quick bonding that working together on new things and watching them come forth from nothing will bring.

A friend once remarked that he wished he could be at Burning Man all the time. He might want to consider buying 400 acres of badly logged, deeply rural valley and reforesting the whole thing, putting in plumbing powered by the river water and electricity powered by the sun. Add a serious ongoing commitment to green politics, restoration of giant native Kauri hardwood populations, planting and maintaining a variety of fruit bearing trees, intensive gardening, and raising a family. Oh, and of course, ways to make some hard currency like a tree nursery, honey sales, or a permaculture design and a hand cast garden sculpture business. Along the way these incredible people continually make the effort to reach out to others to share their knowledge and experience and to continually organise and give a voice to the exceedingly common, but mostly ignored, pro-environment views that the majority of people share.

After a day or two of work around the place mulching gardens, clearing gorse (a pervasive and thorny implacable plant enemy of all ranchers that appears whenever land is cleared, nature abhoring a vacuum…., but wait, it’s actually quite helpful as a pioneer species for an impoverished ecosystem like a pasture, fixing nitrogen and dying away once mature forest returns), and eating dinners and playing games with the kids, we were left here by ourselves to work on a list of tasks and cook dinner for our new, albeit temporary, family.

All of this hard work, clean air, pure water, and fresh raw food, along with sudden inclusion in someone else’s family, is hard on the bodymind. Being here and experiencing the good things they have made for themselves from ugly scrubland and reading their documentation of the process makes quite an impression. In fact this immersion is somewhat disorienting, being part of someone else’s creation. I found myself thinking, yeah, I could do the same thing, it would be a little different, of course, but I could homestead into some neglected tract of land in the back woods. I was also starting to feel a bit cranky and crunchy.

It wasn’t until we drove out to town today, had lunch at a really incredible fresh seafood restaurant and had a beer in front of me that I started to get some perspective. I need lots of my own time and energy to sit around and contemplate things, to work on my own projects, to dream my own dreams. This experience is really, really wonderful. These people are amazing and I’d like to have a permanent connection with them; I am incredibly lucky to be here and am having a fabulous and invaluable time, but I also need to chill out and remember that it’s all a process and the journey is the goal. Pacing!

As I munched on mussels, shrimp, and scallops so fresh and perfectly batter-fried that to use the same word as the carpet covered hockeypucks that one typically experiences in the States is libelous, I made a list of all the good things here that I want to try to emulate and came back to myself about the way that I could achieve those things. If the world gets gnarly I can be the guy feeding himself off the land and providing his own electric power and building his own house by hand out of creatively sourced materials, but if it doesn’t, then the power I can generate comes from directing abstract financial forces to provide just so much of those things as are fulfilling, but no more.

Because I now remember as I write this that one of my new lessons is that the maintenance of things, no matter how wonderful, is a burden. Witness the degeneration of the state of my room in San Francisco as I ceased needing to direct my real estate business from there but had no desire to properly file those last few boxes of papers; the slow accumulation of materials from different projects in different corners of the room as I went from one to another. The sheer bounteous size of the room allowed me to accumulate far too many things in every unused corner. Right now I think one of the best lessons I may have learned from Yvonne is that it is best to do things right the first time. Things for yourself, for your own personal infrastructure, I amend. It’s OK to do a real estate project half-assed, over budget and behind schedule, at least in a crazily rising market, because at the end the payoff is a number, and one number or another is not so much of a maintenance concern. But when you’re talking about creating your new life out of thin air, maybe it’s time to do a little more research. A lot more research. The adventure continues. At the proper pace.

Take a look at these few which have websites:

Otametea Eco Village

Manganui Global Village

Wairua Creative Retreat

Dorie Chang Institute

Church Bay Studio

Huming Hill Homestead & Farm

We’re interested in finding places implementing permaculture techniques and we’ve spent hours going through the booklet to identify potential farms.

We feel quite fortunate to have secured our first assignment at a family farm where the couple runs a garden scuplture and permaculture design business. We’re there for eight days! Here’s what their blurb had to say:

Mara Whenua is a beautiful sanctuary featuring streams and river, kauri, kiwi, waterfalls, high country, and magic mountain. Excellent swimming, pure drinking water, marked bush tracks from 20 minutes to 5 hours long. We began this eco-project in 1990 and now have established permaculture gardens, orchards, and a growing forest of hardwood and naturally durable timber species. We are involved off the land with our garden sculpture and permaculture design business. Wayne is keen on Green Politics. We offer 100% vegetarian food, private accommodation with basic facilities, solar power. We have 3 kids. We prefer motivated, self-reliant people who speak reasonable English. Musicians and good cooks most welcome. Please bring a torch and gumboots in winter. We encourage long term Wwoofers and permaculture students.

Sound cool? We’ll let you know.