On the bus ride down the east coast of the South Island, the jagged shape of the Alps retreated into the distance on their southwesterly march. “Just coming up on Amberley now, folks,” the bus driver said, in a charismatic Kiwi accent that I was still getting used to. “We’re in the Canterbury region now, probably the flattest stretch of land in New Zealand.”
From Blenheim, where I’d transferred from another Intercity bus from Nelson, the driver had been narrating our journey with guide notes like this. The Marlborough region was known for its wine, Kaikōura was good for whale watching, and out the windows on the right are the Southern Alps. It was February, and with the summer tourist season in full swing, I suppose more visitors than Kiwis must have populated the buses. The hostels I’d stayed at in Nelson and Wellington had been buzzing with enthusiastic travellers, all eager to set foot in landscapes that were rippled with rocky peaks and hanging valleys, shady beech forests clinging to the lower elevations. I wanted to explore the alpine region, too, though as of yet, I hadn’t started.
Not long after introducing the flattest stretch of land in New Zealand, the bus driver pulled over in front of a chain-link fence on the side of Highway One. I was the only passenger disembarking at Amberley, the rest destined for Christchurch, a city forty minutes south. The driver enthusiastically yanked my bag from the underside of the bus and told me to have a good day.
Amberley’s claim to Highway One contained a few one-story shops, cafes, and a Countdown grocery store, all lumped together. The map on my phone said to turn left at the Countdown onto Amberley Beach Road and to keep walking until I reached Lizzy’s house. Lizzy was an Airbnb host, from whom I’d be renting a room for the next four weeks. After passing a brief residential area, the sidewalk yielded to grass that tickled my ankles. As I walked, green pastures tugged slowly by, cows and sheep staring like statues in the fields. It was after six, and the lolling sun brought out a pink glow in the light bark of a tree. Eventually, I stopped to take out the backpack straps that came with my duffel bag. The bag was slightly smaller than a carry-on, but packed full; it was heavy, and backpack mode would be easier to shoulder on a long walk in the sticky February heat. Other than the occasional whoosh of a car, it was a quiet walk. The grass and the heat and the silence — they could have been a portal to another place with such things, and the universality of a summer evening reassured me. The fact that I was in New Zealand remained intangible. Sometimes the chasm of time and space in front of me felt like it was within, an emptiness that could be filled with disaster as easily as adventure. I guess that was what happened when you took the reins, and anyway, there were more intimidating things to have in front of you than a year of travelling alone, but I didn’t think about those things back then.
Landing in Auckland two and a half weeks earlier, in mid-January 2018, the temperature had been so startlingly warm after departing Philadelphia’s winter that I did something even bolder than quitting my job and getting on a plane to New Zealand: I borrowed scissors from Lauren, my Airbnb host, and lobbed a few inches off my hair. The mirror showed me a crooked cut that fell to my shoulders, but it made me feel better about the suddenly unmoored nature of my existence. Initially, a plane ticket to Auckland and five nights in Lauren’s living room had been all the plans that I’d intended to carry with me. The point of abandoning your career and travelling was to give the middle finger to structure, right?
But during my layover in Los Angeles, I’d panic-booked a bus ticket from Auckland to Wellington, the capital, and a bed in a hostel for a week. That way, I would have twelve whole days before I gave myself over to the thrill of living in the present, or whatever it was that was so appealing about not having any plans. I felt conflicted. At what point did you have too many plans? Too little?
What I’d gathered, from travel books and blogs, was that travelling solo long-term would involve a fair amount of uncertainty, but this would be far outweighed by the thrill of adventure. No one wanted to admit that instead of a master plan for life, the travel community preferred stifling labels for the road. Backpackers sported sixty-litre Osprey bags that they’d never take tramping and stayed at hostels with names like Nomad’s. Tourists guzzled pints of Shire-brewed cider in Hobbiton and slept in bright purple and green JUCY camper vans. Adventurers flew straight to Queenstown to bungy jump off Kawarau Bridge and then droned into everyone’s ear about the adrenaline rush later on at the Ice Bar. Working holiday visa holders were backpackers looking for a gig on an organic farm, globetrotters complained about having to fly so much to keep their Elite Status, and I didn’t know what wayfarers did.
I’d heard that the trick was to be the traveller. The traveller managed to wrangle all the best traits from the above, like the resourcefulness of backpackers and the pluck of adventurers, while shedding the more embarrassing ones — like being a tourist. The traveller tucked a Rough Guide into their drawstring bag and only cracked it open when they were utterly exhausted by so much ‘off the beaten track’ action and in need of things like a ‘well-earned’ beer (never a fruity cocktail), or maybe a guesthouse so that they could finally shower. Typically, travellers pestered ‘the locals’ for ‘insider info’ on what to do, receiving answers that could have been Googled or found in their guides, because at this point, the travel guide publishers, the locals, and the Internet were all in sync with one another about what exactly it was that would send a traveller on their merry way. Usually something ‘under the radar.’
From Auckland to Wellington, and from Wellington over Cook Strait to Nelson, I hefted around an Eagle Creek duffel bag that could be converted to a backpack, my working holiday visa paperclipped to my passport in a zippered pocket. I did not have a Rough Guide, but I did have a short story collection someone had gifted me for Christmas. In Hobbiton, I’d gleefully snapped hundreds of photos of the bright round doors. I took the bus, and I slept in an Airbnb and in two hostels, and now I was headed for another Airbnb. Who was I? Where was I going? Why were these questions so intertwined?
I wanted to turn back the clock and decide what kind of person on the move I was going to be before I left. I wanted a great escape from the great escape, to pause and get my bearings. More than anything, I wanted to go home, even if that meant witnessing my only New Zealand mountain summit from an aeroplane window. I imagined the view, a white splash of snow with the dark landscape splayed out around it like a skirt, passing by until it was only a memory.
*****
I opted for the pause, via the room in Amberley, which was cheaper than a hostel bed in one of the busier cities. The drawback was that no public transit linked the Intercity bus stop to the rest of the town. On my phone, the map said it would take an hour and fifteen minutes to walk from the bus stop to Lizzy’s house. Which was fine, seeing as I had a year and all.
About an hour into my walk, the straight, level road suddenly descended. Shortly after, an SUV appeared going in the opposite direction and halted beside me. The woman inside had a thin face and cropped blonde hair with strands of grey. She asked if I was her Airbnb guest.
“I’m Lizzy,” she said. “I was just going to shuttle my daughter in town, but I’ll take you to the house first. Did you take the bus?”
At her home, our introduction was hurried: the key was under the cushion on the porch chair, the room with the blue blanket was where I’d sleep, and Lizzy felt bad for leaving me so soon. Her seventeen-year-old daughter, Amy, lived alone in a flat in Amberley, and Lizzy was driving her to Christchurch, where Amy had a dance rehearsal.
While Lizzy was gone, I looked around the house. I’d entered via an indoor porch adorned with potted plants, rainbow garland wrapped around the rafters, and a decorative butterfly pinned high on a beam. Through the front door was an open kitchen and living room, with a vacant room off to the right. In the back and through another door, my room was on the left, the bathroom was on the right, and the washing machine was in the mudroom in the back. Up some stairs were two more rooms and another living area. From here, you could step out on a balcony overlooking the road, then a stout hill blocking the shore, and finally a shimmery sliver of the Pacific, the water silver and calm.
I went back downstairs to wait on the porch for Lizzy. A black and white cat slipped through the open door and tiptoed across the floor, eyes on me. Seeing her, I thought about my parents’ dog, Bailey, barging into my room on my last morning at home, teasing me with a toy that had lost its stuffing long ago. I’d always looked forward to seeing her after returning home from work and never turned down an opportunity to play tug-of-war. I stopped my brain just shy of picturing Bailey at home, with no one grasping the other end of the toy, by holding out my hand palm-up to the cat. She promptly turned away. Strutting around the corner of the porch, she disappeared.
“I saw a cat,” I said to Lizzy when she returned.
“Ah, that would be Sheba,” said Lizzy. “She comes and goes.”
*****
Lizzy’s house was on Chamberlain Avenue, a straight road bordered by houses on one side and the beach on the other. Between the road and the beach ran a thin line of trees, which halted just before the bare hill in front of Lizzy’s. Two houses up, Chamberlain formed a right angle with Amberley Beach Road, leading back to Highway One and Amberley town. On Lizzy’s way to work the next morning, she dropped me off at Countdown so I could get groceries. On the walk back, someone stopped to offer me a ride, but I declined. It was a nice walk, even if it was long.
When I was in Nelson, there’d been a narrow dirt trail from town, snaking up a grassy hill to the ‘Centre of New Zealand.’ This was not the actual geographic centre, but a surveying point used by early European settlers. Atop this perch, overlapping purple mountains climbed into the distance, cradling grey skies in deep valleys. From there, the trail continued for another forty minutes through farmland before ending in a residential area near a Japanese garden. Nelson was sister cities with Miyazu, Japan. Inside the garden, narrow stone paths wound past green bonsais, bisected a plot of lofty cattails yielding to the breeze, and crossed wooden bridges over trickling, transparent streams. The pamphlet I’d grabbed at the garden entrance said, “To wander here is to experience paths that, like life, avoid a direct route and take you on a journey.”
At the sight of a stone lantern, I was reminded of the one sitting back home in my parents’ garden. My great-grandfather, a stone mason in Japan, had carved it in the 1960s while visiting his daughter and her young family in suburban Philadelphia. When I was a kid, I imagined looking at the lantern in the garden so that it filled my vision, and then looking away to find that I’d somehow transported myself to Japan. I didn’t know much about Japan, but I knew enough from my grandmother to picture stone lanterns and cherry blossom trees, to recall the scent of beef sizzling in a sukiyaki pot, to listen for the sound of a cuckoo at the start of summer. Sometimes I pictured myself in Japan with my grandmother, introducing me to her first home. But as I grew older, I also imagined myself alone, and in faraway places that weren’t Japan. I imagined walking the narrow alleys of a nameless city or threading the high spine of a green mountain, landscapes fashioned out of descriptions in books and photos in magazines, letting all the unfamiliar sights and sounds and smells fill my head. These scenes played on a loop in my mind, refusing to stop until they could be supplanted by real memories instead of imagined ones.
*****
Lizzy invited me to eat dinner with her the next night and declined my offer to help with the preparations. Over pumpkin soup, she revealed that in her twenties, she’d gone to Iceland, mainland Europe, and India. Her travels sounded more exciting than mine. “My backpack was stolen while I was in Iceland,” she said. “Luckily, the police caught the guy. But they said, ‘Well, you know, it’s Christmas’ and didn’t officially charge him with anything until after.”
It was Lizzy’s love of travel that had inspired her to host when she settled down. “It was fun when the kids were small, and we lived up north on a farm,” she said. “We used to let travellers stay with us in exchange for work, and the kids loved meeting everyone.” Other than Amy, Lizzy had an older daughter, Sarah, who went to the university in Christchurch, and a son, James, who was a ski instructor in Canada. Her husband, Matthias, had recently relocated to the North Island for work, and Lizzy — tethered to Amberley by her daughters, her ageing mother, and the elementary students for whom she was an aide — held onto the house by the ocean.
Lizzy said I could borrow a bike to get around, so after dinner, we went out to the shed to excavate one from the shed-things. There were two — a blue bike and a yellow one — reclined at awkward angles on the concrete floor like dead bodies heaped together. I chose the yellow one and, finding a rag, erased layers of dirt and webs while Lizzy hunted for a tyre pump. “Usually Matthias would do this,” she said as she fiddled with the device, “but I think I can get it to work.” Slowly, the tyres took shape, and together, we marvelled at the zombie bike brought back to life.
*****
Over the next couple of weeks, Lizzy’s house came to feel like the true ‘centre of New Zealand,’ or at least of Amberley. She invited her friend Anne, recently addled by an illness that’d restricted her diet and left her feeling haggard, for a few days’ stay by the beach. Polly, Lizzy’s neighbour and a new Airbnb host, sauntered over whenever she needed advice for guest maintenance. One Friday, another of Lizzy’s neighbours, named Robin, stopped by and, catching us cleaning, chastised us for doing chores on what she called ‘Frivolous Friday.’ Lizzy made the three of us tea, and we sat upstairs and looked out the open balcony doors to the hill and the sea.
One Sunday, Sarah visited, and Lizzy invited me to eat dinner with the two of them, a visiting friend, and the friend’s two young children. Lizzy put crepes, creamy vegetables, and strawberry ice cream on the glass table on her porch, and we alternated between dinner and dessert. “Matthias usually makes this,” Lizzy said, eyes on her plate. The friend said it couldn’t have been better. Sarah looked silently at her crepe.
While Lizzy worked during the day, I fell into a neat rhythm in Amberley. I was writing for two travel websites to supplement the money I’d saved to travel, and Lizzy and Anne suggested a few cafes in Amberley that would be pleasant for writing when I tired of the house. The bike ride to and from Highway One became one of my favourite parts of living in Amberley. There weren’t many cars, so I could swerve around as much as I wanted to, and the cows were cute. Evenings, salty air drew me out to the beach, where the rocky shore rolled beneath my flip-flops, and the setting sun reluctantly tugged pink and orange tendrils behind the earth. From the east coast, with the rest of the South Island splayed out behind me, I watched the waves methodically pull back and push forward in their teasing, languid manner.
*****
One afternoon, after two weeks in Amberley, I was pedalling to Countdown when a sudden gust shoved me off the road and onto the grassy embankment. I was very conscious of the staring sheep. Weird, I thought of the wind and set off again. Not long after, I found myself again toppled over in the grass. Now I imagined the sheep choking on the grass in their laughter, and I wondered if sometimes the animals spoke to one another over the fences, if further up the cows would hear about me. I turned around and walked the bike back to Chamberlain Avenue, the wind howling.
The next day, the gusts persisted with the addition of rain hammering the roof, yet still the combination of elements didn’t elicit any alarm until we lost power. Lizzy knocked on my door and came in staring at her smartphone, saying, “Um, I think we’re supposed to be evacuating. Apparently, there’s…a cyclone?”
A little bell of remembrance chimed in my head. I’d skimmed a news article about the system that was to split up when it hit the South Island, one storm heading down the west coast and the other making for us in the Canterbury region in the east. I vaguely remembered the words “follow the instructions of local authorities.” Naturally, without power or access to water, as the pump was run electrically, Lizzy embarked on a reconnaissance mission next door to see why Polly was still able to watch T.V. (we could see it on through the windows.) She returned sans intelligence on the electricity, but she had secured us a dinner invitation.
Delaying a decision on the evacuation, we suited up in waterproof jackets and rainboots, which Lizzy loaned me. After struggling to push open the door against the wind’s hand, we dashed to the one-story blue house next door. Outside, rain and wind conspired to send streams through every open orifice of my clothing. I was dripping from the sleeves and swimming in chilly pools of water inside the boots when we arrived, drenched outside Polly’s door.
Polly was a grandmotherly figure with grey hair and a soft voice. Usually, her Airbnb guests stayed outside in her campervan, but due to the high surge warning, they’d been brought into the house for the night. In the kitchen, baking sheets blanketed the counters, little brown lumps dotting their surfaces. A stern-faced young woman pulled a pan with puffy brown lumps out of the oven, while another woman stood on standby, tray in hand and ready to feed the oven.
“Here, try this bread,” the stern-faced woman said when she saw me. “It’s German bread. Healthier.”
Healthier than what? I wanted to ask, but before I could, she shoved a puffy brown lump into my hand, and I, both a terrific listener and easily distracted, relayed it into my mouth. It tasted like bread. Eager to make friends, I wagged my head in approval.
Pretty much everything in Polly’s fridge was fair game, and she and her German guests, Hannah and Emma, whipped up bread, chicken, pasta, cooked pumpkin, and mashed potatoes. Someone put wine on the table. While we ate, Hannah explained to Lizzy and me that they were taking a gap year before university. They’d finished their working holiday in Australia and were in New Zealand for a short getaway before returning home.
“How long are you in Amberley for?” Hannah asked me. She’d been the one to give me the bread.
“I’ve been here a couple of weeks,” I said.
She inquired as to what I’d been doing all this time, and I briefly told her about the writing, the coffee shops, and the beach. She stared at me blankly, as though I was holding my wine glass upside down, and continued to grill me. “Have you been to Queenstown yet?” Queenstown, known as New Zealand’s Adventure Capital, was a popular stop for visitors to the South Island. I said that I was planning to go in April. “Well, what will you do until then?” she asked. Feeling a bit unprepared, I rattled off some vague ideas that had been forming in my head about taking the train over to the west coast and travelling down via bus to the Otago region. “And how long will that take?”
I could scarcely finish an answer before Hannah posed another question. Attempting to switch gears, I asked, “Are you going anywhere else before you head back to Germany?” I mentioned that, in the hostels, I’d met a lot of European backpackers planning to fly home via a few days’ layover in Singapore, which sounded exciting.
“I would never go to Asia,” Hannah said, not even looking at me. “It’s all cities. Cities are the same anywhere.”
At this, several possible responses tumbled into my brain, landing in a tangled heap of disgruntled thoughts. Like, had Hannah ever seen a map? Or, for argument’s sake, let’s pretend Asia was all cities — surely, they would contain something new and interesting to Hannah’s eyes. Architecture? Food? Attitudes about when pedestrians could cross a street? The thought that loomed the most was, how could someone write off an entire continent like that? But before I could say anything, Lizzy turned to Polly and diplomatically inquired about her grandkids. The moment passed.
As Polly talked, I stewed in disappointed silence, chasing circular ideas around my head. I despised the attitude that the traveller was a specialist — well-informed in her field, whether it be tourism or adventure or whatever else, and thus possessing irrefutable opinions about the world, simply because she’d seen parts of it as some variation of a guest. Hannah was like a bridge pile in a river. Sure, she was supporting a new path that defied the current. But she was so caught up in carving an individual way that her existence, as it was, depended on her remaining stationary in other respects. Also, I thought that the German bread had actually tasted a bit gummy.
Eventually, I tuned back into the conversation. The wind continued to roar outside, and rain plopped on the roof, and, unaccustomed to these churning weather patterns, Hannah and Emma were concerned about whether Polly’s single-story home would survive potential flooding. Hannah proposed that they drive up to the Countdown and spend the night in their car, more inland. Polly, who’d already brought them inside for the night rather than letting them hunker down in the campervan, sat in silence.
Lizzy swooped in. “I really think we’ll be okay,” she said with an unwavering tone and casual shrug of her shoulders. “You’re all welcome to stay on the second floor of my house if you want, but I don’t think we’ll need to.”
“I’ve seen worse back home,” I said, suddenly wanting to be present instead of absently sour.
In the end, our collectively blasé approach to the situation wore Hannah and Emma down. Except, now that their fears had been stamped out, they were keen to witness the storm up close, and Lizzy and I couldn’t back down now. We all donned waterproofs and ran across the street, dodging the swaying trees in favour of the bare hill in front of Lizzy’s house. Though the wind retained its aggression, the rain had slowed. From the hill, we watched the waves heave, creating mountain ranges and then flattening them from shore to horizon, spilling over every invisible edge. It was like watching the Earth form. For days after the cyclone, squiggly foam lines would snake up the beach, as though a toddler with a white crayon and no supervision had had a stroke of inspiration.
After parting with the others, Lizzy and I retreated to her upstairs living room. With the balcony door in front of us and windows on two other sides, it felt like being in a snow globe, but with the violent shaking and swirling happening outside. The cyclone raging on, our conversation got around to another natural calamity — the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes that had shattered the region. The 7.1 and 6.3 quakes and their tremors had mutilated roads, homes, railway tracks, and other infrastructure, and one hundred and eighty-five people had lost their lives during the February 2011 quake, many perishing in a building collapse in Christchurch.
“The first earthquake, I remember I had a really bad mom moment,” Lizzy said. “Sarah’d just gone to university, but she was home for a visit. We were all asleep, and when the quake hit, we got James and Sarah and went outside. The telephone poles were swaying. Then, Amy came out. In all the confusion, I thought I had her, and Sarah was still at university, but really, I had Sarah instead.” She paused. “I felt awful. Amy was crying. She was scared waking up like that, alone in the house while it was shaking.”
I didn’t know what to say. The event was unfathomable to me, but the words ‘Lizzy’ and ‘bad mom’ didn’t sound right in the same sentence. I was someone else’s wayward kid masquerading as a traveller, and Lizzy had generously folded me into her brood.
During Sarah’s visit, she and Lizzy had taken me to a nearby wetland reserve, where bugs emerged from thick green bushes to nibble our skin. It had been an unusually cool evening, the world muted under cloud cover. “You can eat the blackberries,” Sarah had said, and we’d plucked a few from the bushes. They’d been sweet and tangy. Maybe it’d been Matthias who first told Sarah they were safe to eat, but the way Sarah and Lizzy exchanged looks over their blackberries, it seemed like something that was theirs. That I’d been let in on this mother-daughter secret about the blackberries, that I too was welcome to find my footing at Lizzy’s house before I went forth, seemed an unmatchable kindness.
*****
Six days after the cyclone, I spotted two familiar faces at Countdown.
“Hey! I thought you guys left,” I said. Hannah and Emma were outside the store, a group of plastic bags gathered at their feet.
“We moved to an Airbnb in town,” Hannah said, a bit sheepish. “Polly’s was unavailable.”
Lizzy’s had still been available, and I’d extended my stay until mid-March. With two and a half weeks left in Amberley, I scrambled to complete Things I’d Been Meaning To Do.
On a hot day, I chased down a distant hill at the northern end of the beach, where a narrow path cut into the ascending land. I walked amongst the scent of pine trees and an eerie silence, the bay sinking as the terrain climbed. Another day, the yellow bike got taken out for more than a jaunt to the grocery store. After turning up a road I always passed on the way to Countdown, the smooth tarmac turned to bumpy gravel, then back to pavement, eventually traversing the slim Waipara River. I just wanted to see what I would find. Under a mean sun, more cows roamed wide green spaces bisected by the river. Higher summits and wider rivers lurked in my mind, but if all I saw in New Zealand were Amberley’s cows, that wouldn’t have been such a bad thing.
*****
Lizzy hung a sign outside her house that read ‘Room 2 Rent’ and included her phone number. One person came to see my room, which was really Sarah’s room, but she didn’t take it. I wondered if that was a sign I should stay longer. Three days before I left, Lizzy had a bunch of wood delivered in preparation for winter, and we spent a few hours piling it into her shed. I was clinging as much as I could to regular life in Amberley, dithering about where I was meant to be going all over again.
Two days before I left, Lizzy said, “I always do something fun with my guests, and I feel bad I haven’t done anything with you.”
“Really, we’ve done so much,” I said. Recently, she’d taken me to see her two horses, who lived on her mother’s property. They’d been grazing outside their fenced enclosure, and though they pulled this trick often, Lizzy said they made a show of having leg injuries whenever she tried to ride them. After she’d opened the gate and brought the pair back in, they’d nuzzled my hands in search of food, exhaling into my palms, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been that close to a horse.
Usually, Lizzy said, she took her guests up Mount Grey, the green and brown mountain I saw far off in the distance when I biked to Countdown. Because Mount Grey required a few hours to ascend and we were out of weekends, Lizzy picked me up after work, and we drove south to a shorter trail instead. I don’t remember what we talked about as we walked, just the image of thick woodland strangling a flat, muddy path before the monochrome beach — grey stones, grey waves, grey skies — opened up before us. It was windier, the waves rougher, than in Amberley and cool in the absence of the sun. We picked up fish and chips on the drive back, grease seeping through the newspaper, and ate on the floor of the upstairs living room as light withdrew from the outside world. Lizzy went downstairs and came back with a pint of strawberry ice cream, the kind we’d had on crepe night with Sarah and the friend and her kids, and at the taste of it, I suddenly remembered the look on Lizzy’s face when she’d said Matthias’s name.
The names of Lizzy and her family members have been changed to protect their privacy.
