***
January 28th, 2010
Christine and I are taking our time and not letting the lack of swell bum us out to much. We are in Waipiro Bay right now, having parked our home under a N.Z. evergreen across the quiet dirt track that outlines the cobblestoned south side of the bay. I think this place needs a good extra foot or two of swell from the northeast to really start to take off and show some form and function for a solid dance routine between the surf starved and the lonely long legged wavestress that I observe rolling along the point, but not breaking, in a tortuous mother natured strip tease. “Wow, this place has some serious…,” and Christine chimes in and finishes my thought, having heard a few days of the same comment, “potential, right?”
I took the fish[1] out last night after the tide had dropped and caught a few knee high dribblers breaking just inches above the boulders. Another couple joined us here at the bay, an English couple from Cornwall, Hugo and Rose. We had seen them the day before, as both of us were driving the same southerly path, pulling over at a couple of the same bends and viewpoints on the East Cape to look for swell. This spot was too much of a coincidence, and demanded a formal greeting, as we are well off the main highway, and toward the end of a narrow, bumpy and secluded empty road well north of the Gisborne area. We communed our food and cooked up a nice big pot of Mae Ployed pasta and silver beets with extra butter and sardines out of the tin. We passed the peace pipe and talked about our journeys so far, with Hugo and Rose having spent a month here already.
Before eating, Hugo and I were standing along the heaps of driftwood and cobblestones, overlooking Wapiro. The rugged hillside is awash with evergreens, rough lipped shrubs, seaside grasses and rocky faced cliff drops facing the sea and wrapping this entire natural splendour around the bay, coming straight from the depths of the western Pacific and rising several hundred metres or more. Wide winged hawks drift up and down with the shifting pockets of wind kissed air. Mozzies buzz and dive for any of our flesh they can find. The sun had set behind the hills, and small, too small to ride, sets of waves were breaking in uniformed regularity along the sweeping point. So much potential…
“Sometimes I feel so lucky to have this as the thing that I do…surfing…surf travel…having this as such an intrinsic part of my life, it all seems so unreal, so ridiculous,” Hugo mentioned as our bodies and eyes faced the northern landscape. The dusk was turning our view into a Wolfgang Bloch painting. The bay and landmass turning multiple shades of dark grey, with small brush strokes and scratches of brown and red visible amongst the darkening hillsides streaking across the most natural canvass, adding dramatic nuance, depth and complexity.
“Yeah man, to have this as what you do, surfing, travelling off to places like N.Z. in search of waves and all that is attached to that search; like this,” as I motion with my hands from right to left, to drive home the overwhelming grandeur of our immediate environment. “We are pretty fuckin’ lucky. And sometimes I think about other people’s passions; the things in their lives that keep them going, give them that fired up excitement, like NASCAR or college football, and I just don’t get it. I think they are fucked up and crazy. But I know that is a closed minded thought to have…self-righteous…judgmental…There are other ways to feel what we feel…We are lucky though, so lucky to see and feel the world through our surfers gaze.”
January 30th, 2010:
Spent the day in Gisborne City. Making contact with potential farm hosts to show us around their fruit tree, shorn sheep and bee hive lifestyles.
The library is a noisy adventure with no restroom. Have to head next store to the police station. Put 20 cents on the counter and pee away.
At Woolworths we buy real, authentic New Zealand minced lamb for pan fried burgers. Silver beets for vitamins and ruffage. Mineral waters for drink. Cheese is already in the chilly bin. Whittaker’s chocolate for pre-dreamstate indulgence.
Head down a dirt road, north of town and on the beach. There is a nice grassy knoll off to the right, just need to scoot our house across a patch of sand. Steadyyyy. Steadyyyyy. Tires begin to bury themselves. Chassis sits up real nice and comfortable on a patch of grassy hard pack. We are fuckin’ super stuck.
Dig and dig and dig. Shove timber under the tires. Punch the van and scream obscenities. Repeat. Back door lock seems to break. Continue the madness for one hour. Bloody knuckles and hungry bodies.
The sun begins a final descent beyond the hills. We are debating a hitchhike into town or a night buried in the sand.
“Someones coming…,” Christine says, “…pickup truck…yep, GDC on the side.” Gisborne Dept. of Conservation. Paid land stewards and enforcers of law and order amongst the sand dunes and tide pools.
Curly haired beer belly man gets out of his government vehicle. Che Guevara’s face printed on his red t-shirt, ‘Cycling Revolution’ printed below.
“Looks like you could use a hand. Thought I’d come down, take the dog for a walk and pull you out. Been watching you from town for awhile; from the camera up there,” he mentions as he points out the survelliance machine up on the hill, pointed right at us. Big Brother here to save the day. “You got a tow hook under there?”
Christine blushes, thinking to herself of how she had changed her top awhile ago, hoping he hadn’t been zooming in for a closer look. “You guys ever see the movie Whale Rider,” he asks, while reading my anti-capitalist punk rock t-shirt, “filmed right around the corner here. Pretty good film I reckon.”
We kept busting knots and rope braids, the bastard van acting like a rock wedged between two boulders. Our Marxist angel drives off to get reinforcements, as darkness blankets the day. The stars come out and unseen waves break gently on the offshore reef. Somewhere near here, Moko the dolphin patrols the Gisborne coast line.
With crayfish rope procured from a buddy’s house, the van is ripped from the granulated stone, one pedal to the metal surge that sends the van in a mad fishtail. Up and over the ditch, wanting to tip over as I struggle to control the unexpected herky jerky climax from the drivers seat.
“Yeah! Just a little bit of fun for the night in Gizzie for ya.”
“Yeah, piece of cake man. Nice and smooth. What was your name by the way?” I’m a bit stunned really, so is Christine.
“Jamie.”
“Cheers Jamie. Thank you so much dude.”
“Yeah, well now’s when I pull out my Colt .45 and rob ya! But seriously, no worries mates. I had a good buddy driving round the States once. He broke down and some good folks took him in, fixed his car for free and gave him the keys to their cabin for the night. I reckon that’s what people should do for each other.”
Off he drove, leaving us to calm down and figure out the rest of our evening.
“Holy shit. I can’t believe you didn’t tip over. The van was like a feather in the wind. Jesus Christ.”
“I wasn’t expecting that. At all.”
We pulled around the gravel cul-de-sac, a few meters from where we had been stuck. Cheese, bread, tomato and mustard feast. Lamb burgers will have to wait. The chocolate doesn’t. Swatting at a handful of mozzies diving for our earlobes, we pass out in exhaustion.
Daniel Duane was right, the surf trip story lies not within the details of ridden waves, but of the rides to those waves. He says in his novel Caught Inside, “The broken truck axle and the six hour hike through the Baja desert for help are far more likely to be repeated years later than how “I made this superlate drop, and then the wave hit that inside bowl and just throated me.” The story is imbedded in the people, places, and things one encounters while on the search, or even while pocketed into an empty perfect wave session in the confines of paradise.
January 31, 2010:
A north east swell was supposed to come in today. I woke up a few times during the night to the sound of waves crumbling along the bouldered point and manic moments of heavy rain and wind. My dreams were deep animated wave songs that curved and melted off the backs of my eyelids in bleeding reds and blues; no doubt feeding off of the aural songscape drifting in through the windows of our van.
A cup of green tea and walk around the bend with the sunrise reveals no wave party. Swell lines rise and fall as the ocean tidal surges ebb and flow over shallow and deep contours near the shore. This swell just isn’t quite big enough, not at the right angle or just not in the mood to curl her turquoise top into a walled up face capable of inviting a wave rider onto the undulations of her cheeks and chin. The rain takes a break, but only for a moment, and Christine and I have a cup together and I move the van under the cover of a open aired, but roofed, dirt floored parking area attached to the vacated fishing clubhouse. With camping chairs and books in hand, we read and wait out the rain, hoping that the rising tide will us bring us a gift.
In Leonard Lueras’s, Surfing: The Ultimate Pleasure, he points out that flat spells have long driven surfriders to frustrated lengths. He references a 19th century Maui circuit court judge, Abraham Fornander, who authored, An Account of the Polynesian Race: Its Origins and Migrations, which details a specific ancient Polynesian “surf coaxing ritual,” where distraught surfers, with the help and guidance of a kahuna, would whip the water’s surface with strands of pōhuehue, or beach morning glory, until the waves returned. A chant would accompany this action. Translated, the pōhuehue chant reads:
Arise, arise you great surfs from Kahiki,
The powerful curling waves. Arise with the pōhuehue.
Well up, long raging surf.
Fornander, as Lueras describes, also documented chants of demigods intervening with oceanic quietude for the sake of discontented surfers.
A chant about Laenihi, a Hawaiian woman with celebrated mystical powers,
recalls how she forced winds to blow and caused “the sea to be aroused from
its calm repose.” This wave generating wind, called the Unulau (or trade wind),
did its mystical thing, and as the chant notes: “Early that morning the surf
began to roll in. When the people rose from their sleep and saw the surf, they
all began to shout and yell.”
And with the stoke flowing through their bodies, they no doubt paddled out and had an epic session. Unfortunately, I know of no kahuna, and have no demigoddess to plead to. I have the stories though, and the meditations that they invoke, to help ease the ever so slight growth of anxiety over our inability to find a pocket of perfect, empty waves. So we sit and read, eat apples with peanut butter, drink tea and grow a bit nervous with the rain squalls. Eventually, we decide to drive out of the Bay, before the road washes out.
There is a visitor’s center in Ruatoria, a one horse town off the main highway, just north of Wapiro. There is internet access there and telephone, so we hope to make use of it to check the weather and make contact with WWOOF hosts.
The visitor’s center was all closed up though. We go across the street to Mijo’s Dairy to ask around about it opening today, and the woman behind the counter thinks for a moment and says a bit apologetically, “nah, probably gone home for the weekend. What were you needing, the internet?” We told her we did, wanting to check the weather, see if this rain was coming to an end, to check the swell, get in touch with some people.
“Well, I guess if you just need it for a few minutes you can use our computer. Don’t think it would hurt anyone,” says the man now standing next to her.
Twenty minutes later Christine and I are in the back room of John and Mihi’s dairy, eating fresh smoked kahawai, drinking hot chocolate and talking about the world, the Pacific Northwest, Maori-dom (John is Maori from Ruatoria and Mihi is a born and bred local Ngati Porou woman), shearing sheep, the university and the love of not having to travel. John used to surf, has an old 9’3’’ back at the house, but his knees have given up on him.
The rain continued to rain. Wasn’t supposed to stop for days. Mihi gifted Christine one of her hand knitted unspun wool sweaters. John told us to come back to carve some whale bone. They insisted that we call up their friends, Louia and Scrubbs in Anaura Bay, about an hour south of Ruatoria. They are long time WWOOF hosts, and real good people they told us. John said that Scrubbs was an old kiwi surfer with a cache boards and of knowledge and stories about this place, and Louia a Maori woman who organized fashion shows with the local kids, amongst other artsy endeavors.
John needed to get on with washing the outside walls – best done when the rains came because it saves water – so we leave for Anaura, cruise along Hwy 35, where the rivers and streams swell up and wash out the tar sealed road around this bend and below that dip. Our windshield wipers squeak across the glass in mad dashes, and the defrost struggles to keep our line of sight clear with all the humidity from the outside surrounding and emanating from us.
***
World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) came to New Zealand in 1973. A UK woman named Sue Coppard had initiated the program in 1971, based off her own desires to get out of the city and learn about farming and home gardening. Kiwi Philippa Jamieson wrote The Wild Green Yonder, a book about her 10 month experience wwoofing around her native New Zealand explaining, “The idea of WWOOF is about learning…an excellent opportunity for wwoofers to gain practical experience in organic farming and gardening, and at the same time the hosts benefit from having an extra pair of hands, and enjoy the cultural exchange with their wwoofers.” Signing up for the program is as simple as picking out a country with a WWOOF program (at last check, I counted 36 programs/countries around the world, many of which are in wave blessed areas. In New Zealand, there are over 1,000 hosts within the program!!), pay a membership fee and you’re in. There are WWOOF programs in other wave blessed countries like Portugal, Mexico, Ireland, India, Costa Rica or Chile. Besides New Zealand, surfers can re-visit Ghana and Australia as Brown and company did in The Endless Summer. When you are travelling through your host country, you simply ring up or email a farm host (hosts are found on the WWOOF website, or through the WWOOF book that you can purchase with your membership) a week or two in advance (although, as in our experience, hosts often can use your help immediately) and see if they can use your help. In exchange for room and board, generally you volunteer 4-6 hours/day around the property/farm with whatever needs tending too. In our experience here in New Zealand, each WWOOF stay has been a unique experience. Our first hosts simply needed help with their homestead upkeep, leaving ample time to surf and hang out talking and sharing in the daily lives of our hosts and their kids. The next host was a bit more labor intensive, as they had a decent sized home garden, as well as chooks[2] and a handful of cattle to look after. We were left on our own, as the couple we stayed with were off in town and busy leading lives off the farm, and we were encouraged to work a few hours and play a few. Go check the surf, tramp[3] around the bush[4] and parks in the area, or just to relax. In the late afternoon, Christine and I would dig up potatoes and carrots, snip some kale or other greenage, and cook up a family feast. Now, we are staying on a beautiful property south of Dunedin, and are fully immersed into the workings of a functioning family farm. We have been working alongside Jack and Debra, helping them with their goats and bees and wood piles and fences. The coal and wood (that I stock up first thing in the morning) fired stove heats the house and shower water, and is used for cooking our evening tea where we gather around the table and discuss life until our day grows dark and our beds call for our company.
I thought that this program sounded like a great alternative to the current dominant idea behind surf travel that hadn’t strayed from the Endless Summer paradigm of the early 60’s. One that would give back to the communities that I travelled to, while consuming their waves and enjoying their landscapes. It would also serve as a learning tool for both Christine and I in our future home gardening, self sustaining, low impact lifestyle that we’ve been working on together. Plus, when traveling for surf, there is never a guarantee that the waves will be there waiting for you, so in the downtime why not learn and share and build cross-cultural bonds? Sure beats going stir-crazy, or travelling up and down the coastlines burning fuel and getting pissed at the lack of perfection that the surf mags and movies had promised.
***
[1] A ‘fish’ surfboard is characterized as having a deep ‘V’ carved out of the back end of it. A design that helps shorter surfboards catch smaller waves.
[2] Kiwi for chickens!
[3] Kiwi for hike!
[4] Kiwi for woods!
new surf dialogue 
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