Love at first site

As the famous real estate motto goes, the three most important considerations are location, location, location. But let’s face it - most of the best locations are already taken, taken, taken. And there’s nothing you can do about it ...
You can stare at that concrete monstrosity with the million dollar view forever, but it’s just not going to crumble into sand in your lifetime. You can stalk the owners, spread malicious rumours about them at the bowls club, harass their poodles and pour sugar in their letterbox, but they’ll never sell, especially not to you. You can impersonate their relatives and spend an entire year of Sunday afternoons drinking swimming-pool tea and eating stale gingernuts, but they’re not leaving it to you in their will. You can expose them as War Criminals, uncover irregularities in their Building Permit, plead your case before the Human Rights Commission or the Waitangi Tribunal, prove categorically that they’re bad, near-sighted, ugly and insane, but no-one’s going to force them out of there. So leave those poor old people alone!
You can visit that deserted stone cottage on the banks of the river a million times, and you’ll never find a For Sale sign sprouting from the daffodils. You can regale friends with a million proprietary tales about the state of your rhododendrons and your latest colour schemes, but it’s still not your name on those deeds. You can fulfil the obligations of honorary caretaker with gusto, chasing cows and thieves out from the hedges, electrifying gates to keep nosy passers-by at bay, becoming personally acquainted with every tree and stone in the process, but although the sheep and birds might come when you call, you’ll still have to leave when the owners arrive for their yearly vacation. So forget about it and keep searching!
You can stroll through a hundred turn-of-the-century villas, shaking your head in despair at each one of the owner’s ‘improvements’ (the aluminium bay windows leering obscenely like false eyelashes on a corpse; the authentic laminated artificial wooden beam running uninterrupted like an express railway line across the ceiling; and the ‘burning log’ electric heaters glowing red with embarrassment beneath every Chiquita, Bonita or Enza-stickered mantelpiece), but you’re simply too late. You can find a thousand perfect building sites during a two hour stroll through the back-blocks, but no matter how much you plead with the owners, no matter how genuine your vows to live there virtually unnoticed, I’m afraid a National Park is still going to be a National Park. So stop obsessing about what might have been, and keep your eyes open for what will be!
OK, so there is no justice in the world. Of course it would have been much better for you to live on that site instead of those unappreciative, tasteless philistines! Of course it’s ridiculous that such a wonderful house lies dormant for most of the year! Of course it’s a shame you didn’t buy that little cottage before the latest owner! Of course it’s bad luck that you weren’t around just 50 years earlier! But there’s no use getting too worked up about it. Good locations are scarce, and getting scarcer every day.
Look on the bright side. Once you have found your site and built your dream home or renovated that old villa to within an inch of its life, it’ll be you who’ll be smiling at that young couple staring daggers as you shuffle down to the bowls club because that ‘monstrosity’ will be your monstrosity, simply because you were around 50 years earlier!!
In the meantime, it’s no use entertaining notions of building your own house until you’ve found somewhere to build it. Sounds logical, of course. But once you start seriously looking around for a site, the nesting instinct sets in and logic flies out the window.
The longer the search continues, the less objective and rational you become until you suddenly find yourself entertaining all manner of strange lifestyle options and complicated routines - no compromise is too great, as long as you can get your name on a deed ... any deed! The current owner’s bison herd retains grazing rights? No problems, I love the smell of fresh bison! It’s zoned rural so you’ll never get a permit? Wonderful, I’ve always wanted to live in a teepee! The bottom paddock is on the Highland Games circuit? Och, I canna think of a better way to spend the holidays than watching lamp-post throwing and bare-bottomed can-can!
You can throw away that carefully-compiled list you’ve boldly labelled “The Bottom Line” or “What no civilised person should have to do without” containing the 1764 features a section must have before you’ll even deign to look at it - including a 360 degree uninterrupted view of erupting volcanoes and 1000-year-old sequoias; no neighbours within chain-saw hearing range; essential amenities - hardware megastore, avante-garde cinema, continental bakery and 24-hour library - within easy walking distance; all-day sun; shelter from wind of every description except gentle sea breezes on those days where the temperature rises above 26 degrees; prize-winning garden and exotic fruit orchard; a resident colony of 250 bird species including kakapo and kea (though these must be of a non-destructive variety); no less than 30 minutes drive along a traffic-free highway from a crime-and-pollution-free buzzing metropolis; and it absolutely must be in a rates-free area.
Unfortunately, the ‘perfect’ section just doesn’t exist. Once you balance what’s available with your budget, you’ll be lucky if your final resting place ends up having more than two of those ‘essential’ features you were so devoted to when you started searching.
So maybe you should try going through your list and somehow trying to prioritise? After all, if you can just find a section with your two most important features, then you’ll certainly be satisfied, right? Wrong! Because determining priorities may seem, in theory, a useful and relatively simple exercise, but in practise, it can only lead to disappointment and frustration.
In theory a million dollar view might seem worth any sacrifice including that million-mile-an-hour wind and the Mongrel Mob headquarters next door (after all, gangsters like views too). But if you enjoy collapsing in front of the television every night, then you really have to ask yourself some serious questions like - Am I going to be content collapsing in front of a view, especially one without a remote? If I’m already complaining about TV repeats, then how will I handle the same view repeated over and over every night? Perhaps it might be better to have a thousand dollar view with good reception?
In theory lots of fresh air, clean water and fertile soil might seem unquestionably necessary to your future happiness, but if it’s that early morning latte and croissant at the corner bistro which sends you into raptures, or if you harbour delusions that earthworms are really just small, poisonous snakes waiting to bite people who don’t have green thumbs, perhaps you shouldn’t be straying too far into the rural wilderness.
What may seem important in theory, may not, in fact, have much relevance to your lifestyle, or to your true personality. Sure you might have always dreamed of having a small, self-sufficient farmlet in the country with a lots of children and goats, but it’s not only the farmlet which has to be self-sufficient.
Rural New Zealand is still, largely, not for the faint-hearted. It’s a cultural wilderness where nothing is ever happening, so you always have to create your own amusements. It’s an intellectual wilderness where discussions about sheep and cows are generally as satisfying as discussions with sheep and cows. And it’s a social wilderness where the prevailing personality monoculture means meaningful social interaction is limited to those three locals whose worldview extends beyond the front gate.
Although this may sound discouraging, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll have to settle for living somewhere which doesn’t inspire you. Because a section is more than the sum of its features. Your final resting place may seem unremarkable, and you may never be able to list any obvious reasons for being there, but if you feel so good there, so right, then it just doesn’t matter.
If all your planning now seems futile, don’t worry, because finding the ‘perfect’ site seems to have as much to do with planning as sheep have to do with knitting ...
After all, I ended up here in Millers Flat, and I certainly didn’t plan that!
So why am I here?
Good question.
Maybe it’s because I’ve always loved the sea. I spent my youth swimming in the warm, churning surf north of Brisbane, face all grinning beetroot red as I dragged my zinc-cream-smeared fingers through the sand to scour away the evidence of my mother’s painstaking graffiti. I used to imagine living in an old weatherboard bach, its paintwork stripped away by sandpaper days, a veranda slumped casually against the dunes, and a thick mat of stiff, bristle soldiers guarding the door against the invading Trojan sand clinging to the soles of shuffling summer feet. There’d be bonfires on the beach enticing ships to run aground on those silent pagan nights. Midnight swims to relieve those sleepless nights full of mosquitoes and sweat-heavy sheets. And all the windswept winter I’d collect buckets of sculptured fragments in wood and stone and shell carved by the prolific tide ...
Maybe it’s because I’ve loved the forest since it first embraced me with its cool indifference, keeping its secrets stashed in distant corners until I learnt the language of its silence. It teased me with sudden dark lightning bolts of movement high in its canopy and the furtive shifting of leaves in the undergrowth. Gone before jaded city eyes swirled into focus. Gone before street muffled ears sifted golden meaning from the cacophony of soundlessness. I sat by a whispering stream watching my moss-covered hut congeal in the depths of an icy pool. I dived in to retrieve it, feeling the electric shiver of contentment crawl over my nakedness to wash away the city’s numbness. This is what it felt like to be alive! Only here could I find peace ...
Maybe it’s because I once discovered paradise high in the mountains. In a velvet basin rimmed by whiteness I stared at the ragged circle of sky above, watching the clouds being shredded by a dark finger of stone, the ring of shadowy sentinels holding the outside world at bay. I tasted the snow. I tasted the air. This was paradise - a harsh, uncompromising paradise, dismissive of our frail efforts and miserly with its rewards ... but what rewards!
There would be many long lonely winters with only the murmur of the fire to keep me company, and only those stealthy nightcallers braving the climb to leave their scrawled messages in the snow. But on those bright, hollow mornings when every sound shared with the sunlight climbs towards chattering salvation high in the crystal sky, my blood would tremble through my body as I hugged another load of sappy firewood lovingly to my chest. Pausing a moment to sniff the silence, shiny eyes turning to drift casually along the veranda, I would see the familiar frozen-faced stranger reflected in the window, hear his sudden laughter rattling the icicles hanging from the eaves ...
But there are no forests here (except the cruel uniformity of the pine plantations marching unstoppably over the hillsides), only faded memories of mountains (at 1200 metres, Mt Benger is hardly more than a fold in the earth’s blanket), and the sea’s siren song is never heard here, though often I can almost catch its final notes on the cold breath of a southerly before it’s snatched cruelly away. In fact, Millers Flat is possibly the village furthest away from any sea, forest or mountain.
Maybe I’m held captive by the area’s beauty?
Technically this valley is part of Central Otago, but it’s not entirely comfortable with such allegiances - sometimes embracing Central’s stable, dry reign with oppressive fervour, sometimes succumbing to the damp advances of Otago proper, sometimes spurning them both in favour of tumultuous independence. It is a tenuous borderland. The first rocky outcrops of grey schist, wrapped in their lichen blankets, begin to poke their heads from the hillside, but it’s another 25 kilometres before they begin to dominate the landscape. The tussock still prickles the hilltops here, and threads of manuka and kowhai and cabbage tree and flax still weave their way along the steep crevasses where sheep and goats no longer go, surviving somehow despite annual burn-offs and the growling attentions of aerial sprayers.
It is a strangely muffled world which envelopes us. A pastel landscape, all muted greens and greys and browns - the wild thyme doesn’t adorn these hills with its lilac mist, and only the gorse wears its showy golden mantle with any confidence.
This is not (at least officially) a beautiful area. There are no tourist chalets or half-empty shopping malls, and nary a single half star in a guidebook. There are no postcard beauties here, no scenic lookouts or giant plastic fruit. Nothing which can be squeezed into a frame or carried away by window-weary eyes.
But there is beauty here.
It’s in the shadows and the light as they weave across the ancient hills; dewy rainbows suddenly unveiled by the parting curtains of cloud; autumn’s heavy breath melting slowly in the sun; and early morning fields shimmering with a million gossamer webs of ice. A beauty which is never static, changing with the moods of the wild, turbulent Clutha River which runs through it. A beauty measured in moments and years, not miles.
If the Clutha didn’t run free here, I would never have contemplated staying. Most of the river has long been subdued by civilisation’s unquenchable thirst for electricity, but here it still laughs and whoops with delight as it leaves the last of the dams behind and races towards the sea. Here it’s still the colour of the liquid in those tampon commercials, not yet stained by the dark waters of the Tuapeka. Further upstream it’s little more than a narrow belt of silent turquoise lakes, but here it’s still boisterous and untamed. Another thirty kilometres and it will lose its urgency, becoming sombre as it senses the end of its journey drawing nearer, with only Balclutha and dissipation into the Pacific remaining unspoken.
(Wild rivers have gone out of fashion. People have forgotten the past and grown envious of the river’s freedom, its power. They no longer understand its moods, mistaking ecstasy for menace. It’s dangerous, they say. It’s unpredictable, they argue. It must be put in its place, they shout. But it’s the gold they really crave - not the hard-won gold of their ancestors, but the gleaming golden promises of jobs and dollars and megawatts.)
But it’s not the river that keeps me here.
Nor is it the people.
Millers Flat is a small, largely undistinguished colony nesting, almost unnoticed, on the Clutha’s northern banks.
The colony’s main inhabitants are the common or garden variety of ruralfolkus simplex - a retiring creature which refrains from showy displays of any kind (except under the influence of various fermented concoctions, for which it has a particular fondness), it congregates around the colony’s main food centre (though this highly mobile species has been known to travel great distances in search of the elusive bargains which are its primary source of sustenance), and is extremely industrious, spending most of its spare time maintaining or adorning its sturdily unprepossessing nest. This species is not dangerous, but it is easily unsettled, so it is difficult to get close enough for any intensive study to be undertaken. It prefers the company of its own kind, and when approached, its familiar call of goodasgold - goodasgold - goodasgold and the accompanying head twitching, will continue until all danger is passed.
There are also small enclaves of redneckus officinalis ­(though numbers are, thankfully, much smaller than in many similar colonies) - a great, lumbering species distinguished by its bright red head and loud, booming call. Although relatively harmless, because of its innate myopia and narrow-mindedness it may quickly become irrational or even aggressive when confronted by unfamiliar species, especially those species perceived to threaten its own fragile sense of identity - eg. homosexualis flagrante, politicala radicalis var. socialistis, horticulturista organicalis, nohopa dolebludgeris, bigsmokis intellectualis, hairylegis feministis and migranta orientalis.
Finally, aggressive specimens of hoonis vulgaris occasionally halt here on their eternal migration in search of better conditions and breeding partners. Arriving mainly in pairs, they soon establish complex social structures and pecking orders based largely on their relative penis sizes and their ability to endure physical self-abuse. This is an extremely dangerous species, particularly during social interplay, so their watering holes should be studiously avoided. There is no precise method of physical identification (due to the dangers of extensive field research), but this species can normally be accurately identified by its screeching bellow - FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!.
Despite such intrusions, the colony has remained relatively constant and untroubled, mainly due to its adaptation of a survival technique used by such species as the paradise duck to avoid predation. In the duck’s case, the male will feign injury and flutter helplessly along the ground to divert an intruder’s attention while the female and her chicks seek shelter elsewhere. The male continues its charade until convinced its family is safe, then miraculously recovers just in time to elude the confused predator’s desperate lunge. Millers Flat has adapted a similar technique to enable it to remain virtually unnoticed by passers-by.
Anonymity is rare in a world where wide-eyed tourists sift through tomes of guide-book rubble searching for the flicker of gold in every insignificant map speck. Millers Flat is on the map, whether it likes it or not. So there must be an official sign verifying its existence and providing a reference point for highway navigators. And signs encourage unwanted intrusion.
By the cunning use of decoys, the village has retained an unobtrusiveness bordering on invisibility. What amounts to a virtual “mock village” has been constructed along the opposite bank - a tavern, a petrol-less garage, a string of ramshackle baches and an occasional proper house to give an air of authenticity - sandwiched between two nondescript signs assuring passers-by that they have indeed reached Millers Flat, and yes, this is all there is, not even a shop or a picnic spot, so it’s hardly worth stopping, is it? Of course they glimpse the bridge as they speed onwards, and the crooked AA fingers clenched around the lamp-post suggesting more, but at 100 km/hour, Millers Flat Township may as well read Mullet Flax Toothbrush.
Millers Flat has never been ‘great’, in any way, at any time. It’s not a village which inspires pride, nor excitement, nor even well-being. It’s just a village. Perhaps it’s some indication of the general narrowness of this valley (or perhaps the wry humour of those early pioneers) that every space wide enough to squeeze two donkeys past each other is called a “Flat”. There are enough Flats in this valley to build a city tenement - Moa Flat, Hercules Flat, Craig Flat, Evans Flat... the list goes on. Maybe it’s not totally inappropriate, because ‘flat’ seems as useful a word to describe the general mood in the area as any other.
Millers Flat was named after Walter Miller, a man of impressive stature and an infamous disregard for apostrophes. (Though perhaps, being a rather portly gentleman, he felt Miller’s Flat may have been irresistible to local wags?) Looking more like a silent-movie villain, in his bowler hat and shoulder-length beard, than a sheep farmer, he crossed the Lammerlaws in 1857 and was so taken by this minor wobble in the valley’s undulations, that he not only named it after himself, but decided to settle.
Then came the gold, and for a few years Millers Flat had it’s moment of golden glory. But the gold soon disappeared and so did most of the population. Although the dredges dragged their buckets a while longer, Millers Flat’s supporting role in the goldrush was effectively over before it had reached any great heights - the local gold-diggers’ exploits consigned to brief footnotes in the region’s history.
This cloud of “not quite” seems to hang over the village still. A sense of unattained hopes, fore-closed dreams and ‘just making do’ hovers here. Of course there are still sheep to be tended, but local farmers envy the easy prosperity of their compatriots over the hills where water simply falls from the skies. And the few apple orchards which crept downstream from Ettrick and Roxburgh, have never really felt at ease here. But then, nobody is under the illusion that Life is supposed to be easy. The most you can expect is to ‘get by’.
Millers Flat has always gotten by, somehow or another. It’s never been an important village, or a progressive village, or a village where things happened. It’s never aspired to being any of these things. It’s generally content with its lot - middle-of-the-road, middle-of-nowhere, middle-of-everywhere.
Once, not long ago, it may have dreamt of more. When it was still on the edge of the city daytrippers’ realm, they used to come here in Sunday cars crammed with laughter and I Spy searching for a fresh fruit Eldorado, drifting homeward with stomach aches and tired cherry smiles in the cool, golden evening. When it was the first stop across the border in “stable, warm, summer weather” land, the holiday crowds filled the motor camp with splashing friendships and fishing tales sizzling on the barbecue.
But the world shrank almost overnight, and once people realised they could get to where they were going without stopping, they stopped stopping in Millers Flat. The highway began to fill with angry cars - no longer casual cruising townies slaloming between roadside stalls with friendly abandon, these were cars with a mission. Cars which shot like missiles from the city at the first peal of the Friday knock-off bell (after another bruising round in the contest of life), aiming for weekend destinations their parents once invested their lifesavings to reach. Grim, driven drivers and their grimly staring passengers speeding towards an encounter with ‘fun’.
They were much too intent on throwing themselves off bridges or racing their deafening machines past blurred landscapes in areas which had never known noise before or joining sliding conga lines on the side of manicured mounds of artificial snow or just comparing solarium tans and designer sunglasses with the hoards of city refugees seeking asylum amid the crowded solitude to even notice Millers Flat hiding on the opposite side of the river.
That’s perfectly understandable. Marion and I cycled past it without giving it a second glance ... but more of that later.
The elusive question - why am I here? - remains unanswered. Perhaps it was indecision wrapped in a sticky coat of compromise which enticed me to stay. Perhaps destiny. But perhaps it’ll forever remain a mystery. This area is littered with mysteries, so perhaps it’s as good a place as any to leave mine. Perhaps it’ll be discovered one day, washed up on the banks of the Clutha, and a kind stranger will take pity on it, will drag it up the hill at Horseshoe Bend and bury it on the knoll where Somebody’s Darling and William Rigney (“the man who buried somebody’s darling”) now lie, and by the flickering light of a kerosene lamp will carve its epitaph - “Somebody’s Mystery lies buried here.” A romantic story, to be sure, though highly unlikely since nobody uses kerosene lamps anymore ...
Although the “whys” may remain forever out of reach, the “hows” are slightly clearer. Perhaps ‘why’ and ‘how’ are simply interwoven threads of the same fabric - the wefting why deftly woven into the warping strands of our actions. There are a million ‘hows’, each with a beginning and an end, each piece separate, knotted together at the ends to form a continuous chain of events. We can snip them off and slowly tease them out of the fabric without compromising the fabric’s integrity. But the ‘whys’ consist of a single strand stretching through generations. So, perhaps it’s better that I don’t try to unravel them just yet.