It’s not an ideal sight to start my day – an emaciated possum staggering along the roadside. Dawn is breaking, just, but it seems unaware of its environment – a marsupial zombie – it has consumed a lethal dose of cholecalciferol and is dying ever so slowly.
The possum’s kin have been luckier. They dangle from roadside trees which shudder and lurch in the strong nor-wester – their heads in kill traps and necks broken. Instant death. But look closer and you’ll see joeys in doe’s pouches – their deceased mother provides no milk and no body heat, they are too young to leave her, so they too expire slowly.
Conservation. Taking a life to save another. Kill the imports and save the natives – the trees, frogs, birds and Powlanthia snails.
The possums’ prolonged deaths are not my handiwork. I understand the need to preserve our national treasures, but the reality of conservation work is sometimes hard to witness.
Onwards, the road a writhing serpent. S’s hard left and hard right, corners tighter than tight. Potholes, washouts, corrugations. Glimpses of sea and mountains, islands and far distant rows of marine farms. And all the while the trees continue to shudder and lurch.
Then farmland, destocked, flushing green with unchecked growth. Now the views are unimpeded, but they do not impress. Low cloud scuds hurriedly by, chased by the nor’ wester. D’Urville Island and French Pass look drab, dressed in grey and khaki. I know they can do better; I have seen them in all their glory.
I have hunted here in years gone by. Fished too. I’ve triumphantly pulled bright orange gurnard from aquamarine waters in the bays below. I’ve lugged black boars from gorse flowering bright yellow. I’ve seen heat haze shimmering on seas dead calm, the surface tension only broken by frolicking dolphins. The beauty can be breath taking. But not today.
Today it blows hard and cold.
Today the sea is so violent, the winds so strong, that a marine farm has self-destructed. Mussel buoys bob in Okuri Bay, slowly migrating towards the shore like black sheep straggling afore a drunken shepherd.
I am working on the hillsides above the bay. I tote a backpack, a phone, a planting spade – tools of my trade. The sea speaks a language I was born to. The dull crash of huge waves upon the shore – thump’n’slide, thump’n’slide – my sailor Dad would have scarpered before this gale hit, tucking his yacht into a lee, lashing everything down before facing the ferocity.
Not I. I must turn my back on it. My job requires me to contour, to circle, little high, little low. I run logger’s tape, dot pink paint, count tiny trees, enter details on my phone. Hour upon hour and all the while the gale worsens. I don’t stop for lunch. And I don’t dare stop to pee, that would be messy in more ways than one.
Morning progresses to afternoon. Mother Nature and I are in a clash of wills. I’m determined to finish my work. She is determined to see me off.
The wind’s raw power assaults all my senses. Salt, blown off the sea below, is crusted upon my exposed skin. My eyes are bloodshot and hurting. The constant buffeting and bullying take a toll on my will to continue.
My dog Nugget, he’s terrified. The worst gusts catch the corners of his mouth, inflating his cheek pouches and ballooning his face. He’s been repeatedly lifted off his feet and he cowers, paws wide, claws scrabbling, keeping his belly close to the ground.
As day draws to a close the worst is yet to come. I must complete the skyline section – the exposed ridge – it’s tough going up here. The gale shrieks and roars, hurling itself over the crest. I hold my spade tight as it threatens to fly away, weightless as a feather.
Nugget is crawling in my wake when a mighty and sustained blast slams us against a wire-netting sheep fence. Here we’re stuck, forced bodily against the unforgiving mesh like a whale and a dog fish, netted, and no longer able to fight the good fight.
Safety is so close. The embankment above the road will shelter us if only we can get there.
Metre by metre I pull myself forward, white knuckles grasping the wire, clothing vibrating like a sky diver’s suit, the dog buckled about my feet. Its sorta ridiculously funny and sorta ridiculously frightening. The things I do to make a dollar!
When the battle is won and the day is done, I unerringly find my way southwards, scooting through the multitude of French Pass Road’s S bends and ignoring the tailwind as it blows me from Marlborough Sounds to the snow-studded high-country hills of home.
Home. Where I can slide a familiar rifle stock from the gun safe in the pre-dawn dark of the following day. No orange gurnard here, no green-lipped mussels nor blue cod either. Where the only salt on my skin comes from within. Where I can complain that the weather predictions are ‘bollocks’ because the slight caress of a breeze on my cheek is from the south and not the west. Yup, the forecast wind direction is wrong, again.
A skylark lifts off the ground, climbing steeply towards the morning sun. He sings an ecstatic song proclaiming to all and sundry that this is his home too. His territory. Tiny wings beat at 600 beats per minute, but the songster’s rhapsody never falters.
The lark’s exuberance is contagious, mornings are for celebrating – “Any way the wind blows doesn’t really matter, to me”.
My limbs beat a slower tattoo. My hearty inhale and exhale preclude rhapsody, but I am climbing steeply too. For I have spied with my still-bloodshot-eyes venison and pork aplenty. West or south, gale or caress, anabatic or katabatic, the wind is beyond my control – it’s up to me to adapt – and adapt I most certainly can do!
