Thoughts on the Rakiura Trail, and the rest of the week, on Stewart Island.

Rakiura was goor-jus.
Lots of trees, including tree-ferns; the combination of tree-ferns and silver-trunked trees like aspen (though of course they weren't aspen, but something else exotic like rimu) anyway, it felt a little like stumbling onto the overgrown nursery of every prehistoric movie ever made -- Jurassic and Mohican and Stone-Age and Pioneer all growing together.

Made me think, this feels like a place that has fallen out of time.
Then I corrected myself: not fallen out of time, but operating by a different time, cyclical, like tides and growth, rather than linear. My mind wandered over this ground for a while, as I tramped along the trail. (Rhythmic activities, like tramping or bicycling, tend to let my thoughts run over the same ground contentedly again and again.)

And then, as it was a lovely excuse for a break, rather than simply giving in to tired legs and back, I sat down and began taking notes in my pocket-brain.

Here's what I wrote (a little more legibly presented):

Tramping through the forest of Rakiura, New Zealand. Surrounded by more ferns, and more kinds of fern, than have been seen in other place on earth since the Jurassic. Whistles, chirps, insect-buzzing, sudden rushes of wings, and the distant shussshh of the sea.
Like something fallen out of time: beeches, bees, chickenwire, ancient tropical fern-forests, roots that twine together and become trunks with no regard for propriety.
Rather, time is different here. [On the trail, my watch is most useful for trying to work out the tides. The tides determine which trail I will take: across the desolate beaches, or up through cascades of roots and mud along the banks above.]
Here, time is not the inexorable march of relentless change, not a progression through history toward an eventual apocalypse. (Although that time does seep in here, like a pestilence carried by the furtive rats who destroy birds, eggs, and trees, diminishing the forest and pushing it toward a collapse from which something entirely different may grow).
[Birds here have never needed to fly quietly; many of them whump like pigeons, thukathukathuka, an ostentatious swagger through the air. Some of them seem on the verge or falling from the sky at any moment. And many species, of course, have forgotten how to fly altogether. Rats, rabbits, possums, stoats, deer, in fact every mammal that runs on four feet, is an invader here, devouring the landscape and pressing these fat birds to change or die. Ironically, the only mammals that are native here are two species of bat: on this land, in ancient times, mammals were little flying things, and birds were everything else, some ground-walking and some flying.]

The time that seems to matter more here is ebb-and-flow time. My recognition of it echoes a past before history, a mythical world in which time is cyclical. The tides swell to send us scrambling around the bays over muddy rocks, or recede to offer us vast stretches of glittering sand. The slow burn of food in the belly; the roar of the campstove burning away the fear of disease. The surge of sugars in the blood, receding to hollow hunger; another handful of trail mix, repeat. The exhalation of carbons and exhaustion with each breath. Fatigue, rest, renewal, work. The rise and fall of countless stairs, the repetitive patterns of countless steps. The surge of sap through the trees in spring, sun and showers, wind and stillness, dry and wet.

If I return here, I will not notice where one tree has fallen and another has sprung up. Or which heads of moss are new and green, and which fading into gold, soon to become part of the buried brown litter in which their offspring grow. In a place like this, individual identity can fade; what matters is not the organism, but generation.

What is here, renews itself. Constantly devours itself, like ouroboros, to bloom again.

There is a place for people in this world, catching a "daily bread" of paua(abalone) and crayfish, cooking our small meals, leaving our trails of pressed earth and stone. The crossing of beaches and beaching of boats with the tides, the visitors carrying away their fish or glittering shells, has become part of the island.

The kind of change that makes history is not this ebb and flow, but permanence. And the most permanent kind of permanence is the permanence of loss: where something that once grew will never grow again. Another kind is deliberate longevity: durable, lasting objects either for use or for memory.
The fencing off of beaches for private use; the filling of harbors with plastic or poison, the swelling populations of voracious mammals steadily depleting the now-rare native birds. Packages of plastic instead of kelp and flax [the first humans here had a remarkable vacuum-sealing system for preserving cooked shorebirds, using fat, salt, kelp bladders, bark, and woven flax baskets...said to keep the meat nicely for a year or more.]
Bright signboards and historic markers; rusting remnants of steel and aluminum; fences; monuments; extinctions; these are the detritus of history.

My thoughts spin more grandiose, more judgemental. Even at the time, I suspect I am being carried away by the topic; I am, after all, keying these anti-historical thoughts into an extremely up-to-date piece of technology that has never existed before this decade. But sometimes, getting carried away is entertaining. I will have to play devils-advocate for balance later, if no one else volunteers.

I think,
One might call history a defiance of our own inevitable death; a search for individual permanence striking out against this constant erosion and replacement of identitiy that is cyclical time. In denying death, we also deny the possibility of rebirth; defy God to replace us with something else equally wonderful or worthwhile.
Each mark, each memento [like the shell I carry in my already too-heavy pack] aspires to give permanence to the fleeting, temporary moment.
Linear time gives a name to each moment, each instant; the nature of time is altered, perhaps diminished, thereby, but its existence cannot be forgotten.
The instant of my writing this in New Zealand time is 19-11-2004, 09:27:12. The content of this moment is altered by so naming it; the whole moment is taken up with working out its numerical designation. When I am not noticing the time or date, I sometimes forget whole days, confusing yesterday with last week, and don't care overmuch. But the sequence of monday-tuesday-wednesday, 13th-14th-15th, pins down the days and designates the gaps where the time I have forgotten must have been. The numbers in sequence carve out a place for our memory to fill with details, rightly or wrongly remembered.

Other thoughts on trail were much less abstract; they worked out something like:
Step step Step step Step Step Stepstepstep (not even Right Left; a more kinetic awareness of alternation).
I Like Roots.
Mud is Wet.
Mud is Soft on my Knees.
Brightness (sun has come out)
Coolness (cloud-shadow passes)
White (I am on a hilltop among bare-trunked, sunlit trees)
Green (I have returned to a ferny valley)
Red! (a fallen, perfectly symmetrical leaf on the ground)
Black (moist, fertile ground that begins with insects on the trees' bark before it even falls)
Whumwhumpwhump (a bird passing)
Who is that? (a red-headed green parrakeet)
That Tree with a few red leaves among green Looks Exactly Like That Bird! (the red-headed green ones that I had only previously seen in pet-stores). (Ah-ha, that explains it! But do the birds colors benefit them by helping them hide in the trees, or does changing their leaves a few at a time in a way that perfectly hides the birds benefit the trees somehow?)
Glint (water; approaching another bay or inlet, visible as green or blue through trees)

If the Sign Says the hut I came from is 1.5 hours beahind me along the trail, and the one I am aiming for is 3.5 hours ahead, and I have been waling for 2 hours, how long is it likely to take me at this pace, and what time is it now? ... do I need to walk faster to get there before dark, or do I have time to continue taking pictures or breaks, or would I prefer to go straight there at all speed I can manage, to see if I can save time to draw before the light goes?

Not far now ...
Here It Is!!!!! (the hut)

And then, the end-of-the-day pleasure of taking off the too-heavy pack. Running lightly along the stones of a tideswept beach, almost floating off-balance with release from strain, and stretching tight muscles with play.
The contented waiting for water to boil, promising food, clean water for tomorrow. Companionship; top bunks (where it is warm as anything, even in an unheated hut, with everyone else's warmth rising to keep me toasty). Making instant cheesecake from the ordinary, conveniently dehydrated mix, and making instant friends with cheesecake.