Day 29 Queenstown to Mossburn via Walter Peak Station

Day 29 Queenstown to Mossburn via Walter Peak Station

Up before dawn and biked to 1 Mile Reserve to catch the landing craft/ferry to Walter Peak Station. There were 6 of us and Joel the skipper who entertained us about catching a salmon in the lake and smoking it, glacial features in the surrounding hills and the risk of tsunamis in the area because of earthquakes or landslides. The lake 'breathes' rising and falling with different air pressure.

We stormed off the landing craft and 'Darth Vader' (codename) took off on his electric bike. I was behind him getting further back. About 6 kms in I went down and out of a small stream bed and rose back onto the flat. There were cultivated fields of a winter crop of brassicas planted on both sides and a huge, old stag, cast on his back trying to turn himself over. He was snorting and bugling fiercely and I could hear the breathe rushing out of his nostrils.

His hooves were clattering and thumping on the stones as he flailed around trying to turn over. He eventually did then made another furious effort to stand up but it was no good... one of his back legs appeared to be broken and he couldn't stand. The others arrived and were concerned for him and themselves. If he did get up he was potentially dangerous. I called my trusty operations manager, explained the location and situation and she got busy ringing Walter Peak. The others went cautiously past. I stayed around and he calmed down and we looked at each other. I could imagine someone at the Station getting the keys and opening the gun cabinet, getting the bolt and a couple of rounds from another locked place and organizing a vehicle with a winch.

Coffin's poem came to mind again. I looked up the whole poem's lines later.

Once or twice this side of death
Things can make one hold his breath.
From my boyhood I remember
A crystal moment of September.
A wooded island rang with sounds
Of church bells in the throats of hounds.
A buck leaped out and took the tide
With jewels flowing past each side.
With his head high like a tree
He swam within a yard of me.
I saw the golden drop of light
In his eyes turned dark with fright.
I saw the forest's holiness
On him like a fierce caress.
Fear made him lovely past belief,
My heart was trembling like a leaf.
He leans towards the land and life
With need above him like a knife.
In his wake the hot hounds churned
They stretched their muzzles out and yearned.
They bayed no more, but swam and throbbed
Hunger drove them till they sobbed.
Pursued, pursuers reached the shore
And vanished. I saw nothing more.
So they passed, a pageant such
As only gods could witness much,
Life and death upon one tether
And running beautiful together.

I stayed a while and he calmed down. He was old and had gnarly, uneven antlers, one or two broken off. He had 15 or so points. We both knew the race was over and I rode off listening for the crack of the rifle and the echo but it must have come later. Riders on an afternoon boat told me they saw his carcass on the back of a vehicle.

I'm not trying to be pretentious using poetry. Coleridge wrote that poetry was simply 'The best words in the best order.' We learned poetry at school and lines stayed with. Steve Barnett, an old school buddy, rattled off Hopkins 'Spring' last time I saw him.

I carried on up the valley and stopped to put on my coat in the next valley. The stags were roaring at each other in the scattered bush on the other side.

I stopped for a photo of this stone cottage and just down the road ran across Val and Brent who were remarkably calm considering they had two ruined tyres and were miles from anywhere. I offered them a couple of CO2 cans but the tyres were beyond repair. Val had biked to the station and organized for the wheels to be picked up and fixed in Queenstown. They slept in the van and offered me a coffee and something to eat!

Brent explained the stone building was the cookhouse and the original station house was in a copse of trees nearby. At the top of the Von Hill the first and only rider I saw all day passed me at 710 metres elevation. I had a two hour head start but he reeled me in after 332 kms in two- travelling twice as fast as me. O to be young again but slow and steady works for me.

The road became easy and I cracked along at 20+kmh for sometime on a smooth surface. Today was 103 kms of gravel road and tracks. After a bite to eat in the shade of a hut I hit the rough. The road became corrugated. There were basically four tracks of deep gravel and three lanes of less stone but deep corrugations. The traffic use the centre lane for the driver's side wheels and either the other track depending on which way you were going. It was hot and dusty. For four hours there had been no vehicles and now vehicles carrying boats or trailers or caravans were roaring past regularly creating huge clouds of dust which obscured them the moment they passed and choked you for kilometers. I tried counting poles but gave up because it was too depressing. The straights were long: 20 + poles.

It's easier to count the metal anti-possum bands on them, but there were so many they just blurred into the distance. 20+ poles at 80 metres apart was 1.6 kms. There would be the long straight then a slight bend then another straight. The corrugations were rattling my saddle which bounced off a couple of times. My wrists were numb, my bum felt it was getting a steady going over with a cheese grater on some block of parmesan. It was dangerous trying to swap lanes because the tracks were so full of stone every time I looked futilely for a better line or smoother piece the bike would lurch, or slow, buried in the kitty litter trying to slide the front wheel out. My neck which had been fine for a couple of days began pounding again. (A couple of my fingers are still numb on Tuesday after finishing yesterday.)

I looked for excuses to dismount: fiddle with straps, look at the map, drain the last drops from the water bottles but it was all useless. Winston Churchill had said never, never, never give up but the reality is different. I swear if the devil himself had come past in a golf cart or flaming chariot I would have jumped on without a glance at the fine print on the contract I would have to sign.

Eventually the surface got better but then there were more hills sweeping way into the distance. I eventually reached Mossburn and checked into the Railway Hotel. It was charming. The laundry was free and they provided a free help yourself breakfast of toast and cereals with fresh milk and my wodge of Vegemite.

I took a photo in the bar of the locals to let the family I was safe and rehydrating then realized they weren't locals but the other cyclists who had been on the barge and looked totally different showered and changed and relaxed. I felt and looked liked something the cat dragged in. Four of us had dinner together and laughed and laughed sharing stories about the ride and holes on a cliff I thought were where mad rabbit holes dug down and out through the cliff. They enter Martin nests. Alistair and Andy, neighbors in Paramatta talked about a stoat they had seen on a ride carrying a young stoat in it's fangs and Jojo mama got cramp and wobbled up and shuffled around.

They told me we could officially make the 30 day cut off by finishing before 9 am the day after next and I resolved to do that because it was still 135.89 kms to Bluff. Lovely wife Sam was coming to care for me and we had arranged for her to meet at Winton pick up my bags. I would cycle to Invercargill then rise early and finish the next day before 9 am.

Dad never talked about the war much except for the pleasant aspects: climbing the pyramids, the wail of the calls to prayer, the filthy flies on meat and dusty markets. He loved the brass work and brought home a howitzer round with a handle and map and statistics on the NZ battles, which he polished now and then. He mentioned driving an officer around in Florence or Milan and going to the opera, getting thrown cartons of cigarettes by Field Marshal Montgomery somewhere in Italy while they were digging out a truck mired in the mud, the aerial bombardment of the Abbey at Monte Casino, a soldier getting killed when peace was declared in Tripoli, hit by someone firing their weapon in celebration, stukas screaming down attacking them, floating in the Dead Sea, an American GI getting his hand blown off as dad poured him some vino while they sheltered under a truck in a mortar attack. The shrapnel had whistled past his ear. His disgust at some NZ soldiers hanging their prisoners on the telegraph poles. I guess every day on earth was a blessing after that. 

When I came home from HK with Sam to be married I said Sandy and I had changed trains in Foggia and he casually mentioned they spent a bitter winter there in the rain and mud. He loved sleeping under the olive trees and Fay's first name is Olive. He bought an old coffee percolator with a glass top which bubbled and hissed like a geyser. I don't know if he actually ground the coffee beans, they seemed to stew for hours. He loved eating dates. He always hated sea travel and had been seasick both to and from the war. 

Mum had told us about the terrible conditions they endured, not enough to eat or keep properly warm, and attributed his arthritis in the hip partially to those conditions, but never mentioned the tank being blown up until after he was gone.

Most of the souvenirs he had got went down on a ship which was torpedoed but Mum had a tin box of all his letters home to her, which I Ionged to read, but never did because they disappeared when he died. When I came home to get married he was retired, still strong and lively but slowing down. He used to skite about a party trick of picking up a matchbox doing press ups with one arm, either arm, but had now given up gardening.

He still pottered around in his daggy old army trousers with the belt thrown carelessly around the middle but never laced property. My sisters were mortified when he turned up in them, skinny legs sticking out the bottom, to take Sam and the family for a ride to the beach at Rarangi but he didn't care.

On my first leave after three years he had slowed more. He moved slowly and couldn't walk far. We spent a pleasant time in NZ then went back to HK for another three years and Mum and Dad promised to visit.