“Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt.” – John Muir
Loud Australians shouting about teacher salaries hour upon hour. Flatulent scout leaders from Dunedin. A hut with 22 bunk spaces and 26 bodies.
But still, the Belgian man who gave up his bunk for me to sleep in. The couple from Cromwell, Sam and Dave, who live in a tricked-out van and cook for lodge guests at the privately owned Hollyford Track, who gave me trail advice and tips for hitchhiking.
“In the South Island, all you need to do is hold out a few beers or a meat pie instead of your thumb,” Dave says. “The last hitchhiker I saw was Asian. His sign said ‘I don’t eat dogs.'”
I didn’t realize hitchhikers needed incentives and marketing campaigns but such are the times in which we live.
DAY FOUR: GREENSTONE HUT TO MCKELLAR HUT
I am glad to get back on the solitary trail. “It gets much easier to follow now,” Sam says.
It’s only four hours to the next hut so I meander. I sit in a field and meditate. I walk another hour and then have a second breakfast. (Tolkien land, after all.) The trail is easy to follow. Every shade of green abounds. Even the dawdlers from the hut have by now passed me. I want to experience every moment of this day, with nothing to think about but the sky and the hillsides, the beech trees and fuzzy moss.
I lie down in a field to watch the clouds. I don’t know how much time has passed when I wake up to a swarthy New Zealand face peering at me with some concern. “Sorry; are you ok?” she asks.
I tell her, yes; I’m just enjoying the day.
“I wish I had time to do that,” she says. “I have to get to the Greenstone Hut before dark.”
As far as I can tell, it’s early afternoon and she has only a couple of hours to go. I woozily stand, strap on my pack, and follow her. I go into a daze planning this blog, actually, so that my aunt and three friends who have time to read can participate vicariously in my travels. I walk for over and hour before I notice a boulder smothered with a menagerie of scruffy moss and brilliant tentacled plant life. I’d taken a photo of it that morning.
Crap. I didn’t know how long I’d slept in the field. (Which, by the way, was totally worth it. Softly green fields are so seductive but they are usually bristly or bug-filled. This New Zealand field was the most perfect napping field of all time.)
I decide in an instant to turn around toward my original destination, McKellar Hut. It’s the same reason I do incredibly complicated Tibetan meditation practices, or fly to New Zealand after three days of considering the possibility. I’m familiar with doing the same old things. I want to know what will happen if I jump off the cliff and build my wings on the way down.
“All kinds of unforseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you’re alive.” – JK
This time, I walk like the sturdy New Zealand woman, purposefully. I walk through the forest. I walk through the forest. I see what happens when I’m not lost in thought. One foot after the other, the tension and flexion of muscles. Setting foot down, the feel of uneven earth, the sound of breath. Next foot down, the ringing song of a bellbird. I walk through the forest. The evening insects start their dreamlike whirring. Am I dreaming? I pinch my left wrist and feel it.
The sun is low. The earth gathers herself for the day’s last light. The trees thicken. I think about being alone in the trees at night. The thought links me to generations that have come before. Before we lit up our lives artificially and left no room for darkness to shroud our frail bodies with its mystery. For the weather to enter us, not as an entity acting upon us, but as us.
Just as it’s becoming to dark to see, I come to a swing bridge across a stream. There is McKellar hut. My new friends from the night before cheer. Sam hands me a leather bound flask of honey-flavored mead, and we pass around cookies and apply ointment to sand fly bites and laugh before falling into sleeping bags and nodding off between the eruptions of the flatulent Scout leaders and the 5 am iphone alarm that sounds like a rooster.
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