Perhaps in order to prevent collisions with its plate glass windows, the local swimming pool has near-life-sized transfers on the glass, of young swimmers frolicking. This morning, we watched the window cleaner charge his squeegee and make the first bold sweeps.
I walked into plate glass once. We’d just finished walking the Milford Track and I went to soothe my aching feet in the bathroom of the tourist information centre at Milford Sound. Coming back out, I stared at the sea and mountains straight ahead and smack. This might have been the cause of my otherwise unexplained deviated nasal septum. They should stick dolphins on the windows, or something that trampers crave and would never walk right through, like a bowl of fruit salad.
Now, I’d better get on with some work.
I was poking around the sunny vege garden on Friday when I noticed I wasn’t alone. A black rat was also sauntering and sampling, grasping and nibbling on salad greens.
In fright, I leaped into the nearest room and snatched the cat from the bed. She sat where I planted her on the flagstone, dazed and befuddled and ten inches from the rat, who carried on munching. Cat stared blindly at rat. Rat stared at spinach. Then cat’s head jerked as her nose lifted and she sniffed left, right, straight ahead, then — ah! She raised her front end and fell on the rat. I turned away in shame.
Could I not have left the rat to its indolent vegetarian meal (and backyard breeding programme)?
Anyway, rat gave cat the slip and half an hour later cat was still weaving in and out of the beans, lettuces, spuds and long grass, hunting. At day’s end she ate jellimeat.
In the morning, though, I found her gift outside the bedroom door.
Of course, the cat might not have committed the crime. The rat might have fallen from a biplane. I sure hope not. I hope it wasn’t this rat.
Rich pickings from the blogroll this week:
Claire commits alchemy with Emily Dickenson and a cheese grater.
Talking of rats, Isabel’s miracle cat-in-exile makes a second comeback.
Helen analyses a healthy writing group.
Talking of cats, the paradoxical one writes up the launch of Sue Wootton’s new poems, By Birdlight.
It strikes me, writing this, what a flimsy vessel a book is for recording the plethora of exploits Pat Deavoll has put herself through over the last thirty-five years. Nonetheless, in this handsome volume published by Craig Potton, Pat’s fine, unobtrusive writing makes vivid her favourite places on earth: wild, remote, very high places reached only by great financial, physical, and mental effort.
I met Pat when we were eleven or twelve, on her first day at secondary school. Her quiet and quirky determination to do her own thing and be her own person met with affection and respect. She got on and did things, sometimes extraordinarily; she was a voracious reader and brilliant at subjects that interested her, more or less ignoring (if I recall rightly) those that didn’t. My only claim to fame (besides my anxious resolve from day one that we’d be friends) is that I was there with Norman Hardie and Sal, trailing a little behind, when Pat made her first high-school ascent of Mt Binser in 1975.
Over the years I’ve been a watcher from the far wings as Pat has become arguably NZ’s most skilled woman climber — whether on rock, on Canada’s vertical ice, or on high and technically demanding peaks here and abroad. When she took a break from climbing in the nineties, she quickly became expert in extreme kayaking. Instead of going up, she made first descents of grade 6 falls and Himalayan cataracts.
The book opens with a whisk through Pat’s rural Canterbury childhood and youth, then lingers over the year or so when she learned to climb. She avoided the popular school-leaver’s route through holiday jobs then university, going instead to Mt Cook to take a series of climbing courses. That summer she became irrevocably embroiled in a life-long string of affairs with challenging mountains.
Most of the book’s themed chapters are shaped around a climb or series of climbs, and variously discuss: the critical need for the right climbing partner; learning to front-point up vertical ice on Canadian waterfalls in temperatures far below zero; the euphoria of climbing huge, remote Alaskan peaks; the tragedy of losing friends to the sport, and how, personally, to square with those risks; the history of women in the NZ mountains and why there are so few top female alpinists (biology or conditioning?). As Pat makes evident, women can manage extreme conditions as well as men, and often with greater courage and endurance.
There’s a chapter, too, about the black dog that’s followed her since her twenties, which she’s determined at last to speak about, rather than hide. Always the climbing feats (and occasional defeats) are woven through with Pat’s questioning of motive and worth — signaling the self-doubt that led to the eventual diagnosis of and treatment for depression. Pat’s willing to admit at last that as a climber she’s good … better … even best, but that knowledge — entwined as it is with her sense of self-worth — is very hard won and in the past could be entirely destroyed by a climb that didn’t turn out optimally i.e. with the summit included.
Around the middle of the book Pat ducks back to the mid eighties when she and husband Brian discovered India and Himalayan Asia. They spent months on end exploring, carrying huge packs to far-off mountains — living on reduced rations, will-power, and their love of wilderness. (Reviewer goes off to shuffle through huge plastic bin of old diaries and correspondence and comes up with the following from Kathmandu, dated 30 March 1985, the day before our Alex was born, the baby referred to in the letter as ‘?’)
In the new century, Pat rediscovered the mountains of Central Asia; she has made numerous forays and done some monumental climbing, including first summits, one in Pakistan — of Karim Sar— alone. Pat makes it clear that the hours spent creeping like a fly up exposed Himalayan faces are what the effort’s all about. The months of planning, training, earning, applying for funding, coordinating expeditions from afar, and getting there by fair means and fraught, are all simply preparation for the cold, exposure, terror, extreme toil and — hope against hope — utter elation of the climb itself.
The most intense passages in the book are classic fare of the sort I used to pore over in NZ Alpine Journals — blow-by-blow accounts that gave you clammy feet and heart palpitations. But those exuberant, meticulously narrated events often took place a few hours from home. Magnify the distances, heights and stakes to international proportions, add a dose of Pat’s stoical understatement and you get an idea of reading Wind from a Distant Summit.
I looked at an early draft in which Pat elaborated on her love of Pakistan and her grasp of its history and politics; in the interests of her own compelling story that seems to have been edited back to a few concise paragraphs, but she’s evidently chewing on the question of what she might contribute in years ahead to a region that’s has given her so much joy and satisfaction. Pat’s rightfully proud of all she’s done and is still doing in a body now into its sixth decade of hard yakka, but there seems no question that, even if it does wear out (did I mention the knee replacement, or the broken back?) to the point that carrying huge packs and making multi-day ascents are out of the question, in some sense Pat will always be ascending; for one, she has this great love for Pakistan and Afghanistan to work out, and it’s obvious from her story that she’s developed extraordinary mental and emotional capacities that can be steered along any avenue she chooses. Then there’s her writing — as stylish and riveting as all she undertakes. I look forward to the next book, whatever it tackles.
But I feel compelled to add, Pat, if you decide to curl up in a corner for the rest of your days with a cat, and a pile of books, cakes and knitting, you’ve totally earned it. Besides, you’ll be no less admired or loved if you ever choose to grow plump on a cushion.
Wind from a Distant Summit is available from Craig Potton Publishing.
Here’s Pat’s website and the FB page for her book.
The day started with a lit candle that I sat and didn’t look at while I tried not to think either.
A nice young man cranked my arm and shoulder into positions it was reluctant to adopt. However, progress is being made.
I blogged over at Rosa Mira Books, wondering where in a sex shop an author might position herself to deliver a talk about erotica in the old days, the bits that didn’t fit into her novel.
I proof-read the final chapter of Michael Jackson’s anthropological memoir Road Markings, which Rosa Mira will publish soon. The cover will be by a collaboration of daughters. And it will look a lot flasher than the image above.
These seedlings found homes today: beans beside path, basil in pot, pumpkin ringed about by rainbow silverbeet.
I admired the freshly painted doorstep and freshly oiled door.
Our son comes home tonight. The bed is welcoming but not wide. It’s all set up for early rising.
It was 27 degrees C here today. The vased peonies silently exploded.
Now it’s Key versus Goff. Glib and smug versus honest and earnest. Take your pick.
Thanks to all my friends and family and the sun and the dog and birds and people who inspire me, not to mention life itself…
Oil is spilling. Marchers are occupying. An egg is cooling.
Yes, we too would be lost without our Apples.
By these means we have bitten into the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We are changed.
The question’s being asked, who can take the place of Steve Jobs? I guess the answer has to be no one and everyone.
David Pogue says in his eulogy: ‘Suppose, by some miracle, that some kid in a garage somewhere at this moment possesses the marketing, invention, business and design skills of a Steve Jobs. What are the odds that that same person will be comfortable enough — or maybe uncomfortable enough — to swim upstream, against the currents of social, economic and technological norms, all in pursuit of an unshakable vision?
Zero. The odds are zero.’
In fact such multi-talented individuals aren’t uncommon; I know more than a handful. Uncommon is the person who develops and fulfils those talents and capacities and brings something of beauty into being; who brushes aside the extraneous, and flies quick and true toward the goal s/he has set for her/himself. Whether it be caring for children, setting up a business, creating a garden or tidying a bedroom, most of us sigh and prevaricate, look around and dabble instead of doing this One Thing Well.
There’s a groundswell these days, of talk, dreaming, experimenting and reaching for the concept of the ‘possible human’, which is to say the apparently impossible human who leads a life of high endeavour. The concept might have replaced contentment as the ideal state. (Although, I like to think that contentment and aspiration can walk hand in hand.)
Hundreds of books have been written about this; thousands of websites offer methods and courses for ‘neuro-linguistic programming’, ‘quantum jumping’, ‘integrated enlightenment’, and most of us know that we’re here not to live by rote but to apply ourselves to discerning and following the impulses that arise uniquely in each of us. We do this not for our own sake alone.
There was only one Steve Jobs.
But there are millions of us. We each have at least one particular strength. Many have potent visions. Surely it‘s best now if we look not for one person to save us, but find ways to put ourselves together; seek complementary components amongst our friends, colleagues and cyber-groups. Become the greatest human invention of all: a living web of affinities and abilities. Such is the vision that Steve Jobs and his kin have ushered, wittingly or not, into the realm of human imagination, and therefore of possibility.
I felt myself to be in skilled and steady hands with Laurence’s (6th or 7th?) novel. Boden Black is a young butcher who spends a formative few summer days in 1955 helping build a hut high on the flanks of Aoraki-Mt Cook. His consciousness is pierced by events — the relentless narration by a conscientious objector of his imprisonment during WW2 (its cause and consequences) and Boden’s own climb of the mountain with Edmund Hilary and guide Harry Ayres. Poetry is also at work in him.
Boden broods, listens, writes poems (none of which, alas, we get to read), cuts meat, ponders and occasionally converses, and we witness over decades the gradual accretion of character and motive as he, without haste, processes his life — from his lonely, troubled Fairlie childhood, to a maturity in which he is making peace with his people and his past, and with his calling as a poet.
There’s restraint and a deep calm at the heart of The Hut Builder, which makes for quietly impressive reading.
I thought the tomato probably wanted to speak for itself. I brought it inside and had a look at it:
When it’s grown up, closer to Christmas, we’ll hang a few of these on it:
While in Australia I went out looking for wildflowers but it was too hot to snatch more than a couple. Well, that’s my excuse. All that foliage is a fiddle to draw. I chose simpletons.
I read only one book (and started another):
May Sarton writes in Journal of a Solitude: ‘… we have to make myths of our lives, the point being that if we do, then every grief or inexplicable seizure by weather, woe or work can — if we discipline ourselves and think hard enough — be turned to account, be made to yield further insight into what it is to be alive, to be a human being, what the hazards are of a fairly usual, everyday kind.’
We were given tickets for a dress rehearsal at the Sydney Opera House:
Add a pair of black leather underpants; pop snugly into all four items Teddy Tahu-Rhodes and you have Don Giovanni, Sydney style. Splendido.
That’s all.
We seem to be on a camera-free holiday (is it a holiday? perhaps a 75 percenter) but have a few pics from when we were here last year in the Bouddi National Park. I didn’t make it quite as far along the rocks this time — I had bare feet; the stones were sharp, and big black ants were running over my feet, pausing only to bite them. But it’s the same crew (mate and brother):
plus Barbie who took the photo. R couldn’t walk as much as he’d have liked to because of a flaring toe infection that puffed his foot up and took up several hours’ waiting in emergency rooms and the advice of five doctors before he was sure it was under control. Today we came back to the Blue Mountains where a ferocious wind inflated the machinations of an arsonist 30 miles west of here. Tomorrow we’ll have another bush-smoke sunrise before R and I get whisked into the city to watch the dress rehearsal of Don Giovanni at the Opera House. Woohoo!
Tomorrow morning will be 100 percent holiday.
Biddy’s deaf now. She can’t hear the cracked tones with which she asks for her dinner. Or the caught-a-mouse yowl that’s replaced her former mild enquiries. From being stand-offish and remote, she’s moved in close. Where I am, there Biddy wants to be. What could be nicer than a sunny table top with a lumpy pencil case?
There are so many deep and serious questions to ponder at present, in particular, which is also to say, in general, how to make the best response to each moment of life in this ravaged, beautiful world. However, I find that my drawing pen refuses sobriety. When it revels in absurdity, what can I do but abdicate responsibility and follow its lead?
It made me wonder how and why we’ve chosen particular physical traits to celebrate, covet, lust after, and even augment, and others to hide, banish, or reduce.
Why don’t we, for example, fixate on toes, and develop unguents for turning short stubbies into willowy beauties?
Why do we make a fetish of straight teeth, when elsewhere on the body curves and curls are far more interesting? With a little application we could turn them around, I’m sure.
And haven’t you ever felt bored by neat pink ears? Probably it would take only a sprinkling of this or that to cultivate a pair of lovely cauliflowers.
First, there was high tea at the high table in the Hippopotamus Room for the BNZ Literary Awards. (This article highlights Chiao Lin, the young writer I chose as winner of her section. Too typically, she is under-mentioned elsewhere.)
From Wellington, Kate and I hit the road. Pretty much the first thing I did was throw my whole, hot cup of coffee over the car floor. (Sorry, Kate!)
Nevertheless, Kate shared hers.
Craig drove us up the narrow Wanganui River road. The roadsides were studded with goats and pigs. We saw no one on the hour-and-a-half- trip in to Hiruharama — Jerusalem.
We were on the lookout for James K’s grave. Someone said he was buried on the riverbank somewhere. Kate got a bit close to the riverbank. We decided not to carry on over the old swing bridge with missing teeth. (Thanks for a lovely time, Kate!)
Next day I tried to fly home and made it as far as Christchurch. The day after, I sat in the falling dark and stared at the little plane ready to fly me south.
My prayer for a cancellation was answered.
I flew home 24 hours later. Hardly a bump.
Today I was remembering Can Serrat as I blogged there about the link with Rosa Mira Books.
In the mail today:
Next week I will shuck off my slippers and therapeutic neckscarf, and scratch about for something that will pass as ‘business attire’, catch a plane to Wellington airport, and thence be professionally driven to the BNZ Literary Awards, where I will add my voice in praise of NZ writing, especially that of some very talented teens.
It’s an odd thing to contemplate from the quiet fastness of this Dunedin living room where I work.
Polly wrote on the footpath this morning.
How’s that for a neat dog?
Then I happened upon Helen Lehndorf’s tantalising Pinterest page, where I spent a few minutes gleaning ‘sartorial inspiration’. I was rather taken with the ‘naughty dog‘ brooch, and created my own, dangling into it Polly’s favourite scoffings.
I saw this small one on my way down to town at lunchtime. S/he (I couldn’t tell which) was tucked well away from the school playground, where the other children were zooming about. I couldn’t help thinking it looked like the kind of child who would be absorbed by the fiction of Joan de Hamel, who died last week.
From the NZSA newsletter: ‘Joan de Hamel was the award-winning writer of many wonderful books for children and teenagers. She was one of the first authors to write books specifically for teens that were set in New Zealand amongst our unique flora and fauna with X Marks the Spot in 1973. Take the Long Path won the Esther Glen Award in 1979 and her children’s picture book, Hemi’s Pet, won the A.W. Reed award in 1985. Her books brought the gift of adventure and of laughter to generations of young New Zealanders.
Joan will be remembered with great love and affection as a wonderful writer, supporter and friend, and as her family wrote in her death notice, ‘she died peacefully after a long and happy life.’ Joan’s cheerful and adventurous spirit and love of nature shines through in the plaque dedicated to her in the Dunedin Octagon Writer’s Walk which quotes her 1992 novel Hideaway: ‘What more could anyone want than their own land down to the shoreline and the whole Pacific Ocean as a boundary fence.’
At her memorial service in Dunedin, one of her sons read from an essay she wrote after her initial poor prognosis was delivered (eighteen years ago). She was busy with the beloved donkeys and goats that she bred, and commented (sorry, I can’t quote directly) about life’s relentless drama — concerned, if not with birth, then with death.
I’d visited her a couple of years ago, wanting to be sure that the donkeys in Island were written accurately enough. I reworked this scene with Joan’s advice in mind:
Martha put on a warm jerkin and took her dinner up to the vegetable garden. She had time enough to swallow half a plateful of half-warm mutton and kidney pudding before the impending foal forced its mother into the lee of the macrocarpa hedge. Martha dropped her plate on the grass and knelt up on the stile. Over in the dark cove, Merry’s hoofs were planted wide, her head low and facing away. Across the paddock her mate made bewildered forays along the fenceline, shaking his head at the injustice of being kept at bay.
This is why we have the boiling of water and the tearing of sheets at human births, Martha thought. To give the poor father occupation. But a jenny was an independent creature and neither Martha nor Joseph would be welcome at Merry’s side just now.
Merry’s flanks heaved, and her head hung low.
Watching her struggle, Martha thought of Captain Swathi struggling up at the hospital, each of them towards an opposite end. Or were they so opposite? An end that might be a kind of beginning, a beginning that led to an end. Anyway, this one was a fine distraction from the ward — if only it didn’t look so painful.
Martha picked up her plate again but found that the white-nubbed sac she could see emerging from Merry spoiled the cooling cubes of kidney on her fork.
As Merry’s knees gave beneath her, Martha stood up on the stile, half-inclined to run and offer help, while Joseph planted his feet on the first rung of the gate.
A squalling bray from Joseph brought Rose hurrying from the kitchen, as the jenny delivered herself of a shiny package. At once Merry knelt to lick away the wrapping from a pale nose … a dark head … a neatly folded donkey.
Joseph threw himself at the gate and broke the latch. He clambered through the open wedge and the vegetable garden, the new peas and the tepee erected for the climbing beans. Martha caught him around the neck but now he was stock-still, shocked rigid at the sight of the wet head wobbling on its neck as Merry, half-risen but still on her knees, licked her baby clean.
Martha surprised herself by sobbing. She hid her face in Joseph’s shoulder, and prayed no one come to witness this scene of dishevelment and joy.
You may have noticed that the things I draw are simple and relatively small. For example, I don’t know how to draw acres, or even square inches, of snow. I was glad to see yesterday that the oaks on the edge of the golf course were holding it in modest handfuls.
Today I had to go a couple of km over the frozen snow so I cut up some old socks and pulled them on over my boots. They made walking possible on the glazed footpath. It was easier to stride along the gritted vehicle tracks.
There were only about six of us in the supermarket — three were staff. Everyone smiled as they passed on the street. We were all creeping, slipping, eyeing the ground ahead.
Long things I have used today:
I took the ski pole walking, just in case, but in fact the socks did the trick.
With the spade, I scraped up snow and tossed it over the deck railing. With the broom, I swept loosened snow into heaps.
With the axe I split medium sized logs into quarters that would actually burn.
The file is the fire poker.
The sock was a surprise. It came up to my knee while the one I know covers only the ankle. I wore both.
The glass holds a refreshing infusion of sage leaves — 5 or 6 young ones steeped in a cup or two of boiling water. Served with a squeeze of lemon juice.