a wee story - Travelling to Somewhere - the end

I shut the book. I could still hear the gentle rumble of the traffic – it was almost like the sea. I went to see what message had been left on my phone. It was from work. I wandered over to check the email, but I clicked on my web browser and started to search for secondhand tents. I still had my sleeping bag and everything would fit in my pack. The boxes I could dump on my way south. I checked my bank account. There was enough money for a tent. I listened to the traffic. I slid the arrow over the buy now button. I did not click.
I sat back on the box I was using as my chair. It wouldn’t be the same. I have heard there are hotels in Punakaiki now. I bet they have built a boardwalk over that flax swamp. The West Coast had moved on; not back to the great days of the gold rush and the coalmines but no longer how I remembered it either.
I left my search and clicked to check the email. It was just like the phone message - another piece to add to the corporate puzzle I was assembling. I had never bothered to build a career before. I had taken whatever jobs were going until I had enough money to move on.
I started to type a reply to the email. I was on my career path, like the cars outside, heading somewhere. I hoped it would be worth it.

A wee story - Travelling to Somewhere - Part two

Yet inside, upstairs I could see the motorway heading south out of the city. From that motorway you could go anywhere, down towards Tauranga, or to the Lake or keep going to the Capital and the Mainland. I guess some people would hate it – that room overlooking the cars. But I liked watching them zipping past when it was empty or inching slowly when it was full. They were like pieces in a board game. On the near side, cars flicker past just out of my view. Those cars were heading into the city and I felt sorry for them.
The flat was just one of a block – flat, cream painted, tilt slab concrete. At night in the halogen spotlight that spilt out through the double glazing, I noticed the potted herbs in one window, the fake crystal hanging in another and through mine there was nothing because it was all still in a couple of boxes. Boxes wearing the lint of gathered dust, shaken off on the courier trip north. The writing on the sides of them, was careful, rounded black marker for if I ever came home to open them. They hold an old life; perhaps they should just be taken to the dump. All these years, they have stayed closed, untouched, and unrequired.

January 3, 1984
Tonight Mum made damper dough with flour, sugar and water. Dad looked after the fire and we went looking for damper sticks in the bush.
We wanted long straight sticks that we could mould our damper onto the end. It had to be long enough that we could hold the mixture over the fire without our hands becoming too hot. Dave found the best stick. We got handfuls of the damper mixture and squeezed it over the end of the stick. We held our damper over the fire. We kept tapping them to see if they sounded hollow and cooked.
A couple walked past from a campervan that had just arrived. The campervan couple went away and came back with golden syrup. We filled the middles with the golden syrup and got very sticky fingers. The man from the campervan said he hadn't made dampers in fifty years. The lady hadn't made them at all.
When the damper dough was gone, we had hot milos with a tacky taste from our plastic, camping cups. The sandflies were fierce and now I itch. When we were in bed we heard thousands of frogs but they didn’t say ribbit and there was something else.

January 4, 1984
Today we packed up and drove to Reefton and put the tent up again.
We looked around the town. The shops were wooden and there was a cinema with a sign that was made up of thousands of tiny silver disks. It was supposed to sparkle but the disks were rusty. They shook in the wind against the peeling, white paint. On the way back to the tent, it started to rain. It rained hard and soft.
After tea we went for a walk and Dad took us to have a look at this thing. It was the ruins of the first hydroelectric power station in the Southern Hemisphere. I looked down into this pit and there were just heaps of bathtubs lying around with pipes.

This first box had been mostly old certificates, reports and my academic record from university, typed up in black courier font with Degree Conferred, not even in bold. I should probably keep them. I had worked so hard for them and I thought they held my future. Then I found the diary. My cellphone started ringing in the lounge. The laptop replied with a ping of new email arriving.

A wee story - Travelling to Somewhere - Part one

It was salmon pink, covered in velvet and did not suit the room. It was a grown ups room with its dark stained, wooden floor and white walls, waiting for my stuff, that had been packed away at Mum and Dad’s in Christchurch for so long. There was only my pack, grubby grey and red, leaning in the corner, its top dangling open like the pout of a little kid. This was the least interesting place it had been in the last ten years.
Mum was so pleased her youngest was back with a proper job; even it was at the other end of the country. Mary had stayed in Christchurch, now married with two little kids, who were quite good at pouting when I had seen them. Dave was in Sydney climbing the corporate ladder with ease and confidence, unlike my recent nervous jump onto the lower rungs here at home.
I flicked through the pages of the pink diary from when I was ten.

January 2, 1984.
Today was very exciting we went camping for the first time in our new tent. Dad said we should have got the new dryer Mum wanted.
We started travelling at 9:38.
There were lots of little hills in the road and they left my tummy behind. We stopped at Culverden and got a Moro bar each and some plates because Mum forgot to pack them.
Tonight we stayed at Marble Hill. We were in the middle of the mountains with tall peaks and bush covered hills surrounding a meadow of knee high grass. Mum said it was proper camping using our gas cooker and a long drop toilet. Mary said a long drop toilet was not a proper toilet and I agreed. It stinks.
Just beyond our tent was the bush - the tree trunks covered in black mould, disappeared into darkness. I collected drops of yummy bush honeydew off the mould while I tried not to think that it was insect wee. The ground was covered with fallen beech leaves and patches of green moss that was springy to walk on. A little way into the bush, there was a small stream with three tiny waterfalls close together, surrounded by moss. It looked like a dreamland. It was so quiet I thought I could be all alone in the world.

Out the window Auckland’s traffic was filling on the motorway. My new flat was hidden away around a series of back street corners like a cheap backpackers searched for in a foreign city late at night.