7

NEW ZEALAND

After Queensland, we knew we wanted to visit friends in Melbourne and Sydney, and also make a little jaunt to New Zealand—but the holidays mean outrageous holiday airfare. When frugality is one of your chief traveling considerations, you sometimes have to leave the country, then come back again.

From Cairns, we fly seventeen hundred miles south to Melbourne for a long weekend with friends. This is the first time on our travels that we connect with people we already know, and it is a melding of two worlds—our previous, “normal” life with our current itinerant one. We know Darren and Vanessa because we share fields of work; in fact, Darren is the one who brought me out to Australia on my previous work trips. They are native Melburnians, and their city is so much like our Portland—moody weather but brilliant when it’s behaving, indie coffee shops on every corner, bearded hipsters everywhere—that it feels like home. I adore it. We are here only for a weekend, but in every hour I inhale familiarity.

Our friends take us to their kids’ favorite playgrounds and to their favorite winery, we crack open a bottle in their backyard while the six children jump on a trampoline, and we join their company holiday party at a city park, where we meet their employees and share a potluck lunch. It would be the equivalent of the Fourth of July in America were it not for the impromptu pickup game of cricket, the Christmas music on the speakers, and the pavlova served on the picnic table (a fruit and meringue-based dessert controversial in these parts, based on the argument concerning whether it hails from Oz or the nearby Kiwis).

We are with people we already know, and right now I’m unaware that we are reaping the benefit from the simple act of befriending people regardless of where they live. Continual good-byes have been a staple in our family. Kyle and I met in Kosovo, and we are used to the risk of hurt. The curse from this is a growing hole in our hearts because friends are always continents away, no matter our geography. The blessing is, well, friends. Wherever we are.

We watch our children play at the park, and Vanessa asks, “So you love being around your kids all the time, then?”

I laugh. “Good gosh, no. Why? Does it seem like it?”

“Well, I would assume you’d have to, to take on a trip like this. Plus, you homeschool. I could never do either of those things.”

“This is the hardest part of the trip so far, honest to God,” I admit. “I love my kids. But I have been around them for three months solid with no break. I’ve even been around Kyle that whole time.”

Vanessa laughs. “That’s veritable sainthood right there.”

We fly to New Zealand.

It is nearly midnight when we land, and for the first time on the trip, I pull out my socks. It is biting cold compared to the tropics, where we’ve mostly been thus far. This is the first time on our trip that the temperature has dipped below eighty degrees, and it’s the first time in our lives we dip below the 45th parallel south, halfway between the equator and the South Pole. This week will be the southernmost point on our journey.

We walk out of the airport, and the wind and drizzling rain shock the breath out of me. My teeth chatter. The driver tosses our backpacks into the shuttle van, looks at our paper-thin windbreakers and says, “I hope you’ve got more than that in your backpacks, mates! We’re expecting a cold front this week.”

Tonight, we wash our socks and underwear, then dry them overnight in the heat billowing from our guesthouse radiators. It is one week until the summer solstice.

Our plan is to drive southward from Christchurch, the south island’s capital, and meander down to Queenstown. We will avoid highways at all costs, and we will stop for wildflowers, well-painted street signs, and hobbit sightings. The drive is three hundred miles, which means we calculate about five hours till our arrival at the next guesthouse. The south island’s population is only one million people, yet it’s roughly the size of Illinois, which has a population of thirteen million. Surely the traffic here is nil.

This is what’s important about New Zealand: its residents, known as Kiwis, are friendly to strangers, the cost of living is startlingly expensive, and the country selfishly holds captive the most staggering creation God has yet brainstormed. We drive away from Christchurch, and everything outside quiets. There is a chill in the air, but I crack down my window to hear the birds. The late morning sun rises above thigh-high golden grass, and our two-lane highway slices through the field. We follow its dotted lines, watch them chase each other beneath our car. They meander to the right and so do we, tucking into a valley and fields of purple lupine.

“Oh my God,” I utter. I am not swearing.

Kyle lifts the pressure off the gas pedal and we stare at alien pastures of chiaroscuro shadows, light-carved hills on a flat plain. Clouds dawdle above, their silhouettes below dancing with wildflowers. The scene before us ranks with Tuscany and the Pacific Northwest. I respond the only way I know how—I laugh helplessly.

Kyle whispers, “What in the world?”

The kids exclaim, “Whoa!” and return to their books.

We pull over for roadside lupine again and again, the sun crawling across the sky morphing their colors hourly from iris, lavender, amethyst, lilac, violet, sangria, wine. Cerulean streams and clusters of agapanthus stow away in leggy grass. It smells like sweet spring, tender and hopeful. I take an hour to photograph a stone chapel overlooking the milky green Tekapo Lake, angling to avoid the throngs of Japanese tourists shooting peace signs in the background. The kids impatiently wait in the car. As the sun fades, I force Kyle to pull over so I can capture a local post office’s red clock swinging above its front door.

We arrive on our next front porch ten hours after leaving Christchurch this morning.

“Finally!” Tate announces as she heaves her pack through the front door. It is starless outside, pitch-black beyond the cottage’s windows. Tomorrow morning, we will see our surroundings. I swing open our bedroom windows and they entangle with vines outside. The earthy smell of garden barrels through our nostrils—soil, dew, musty compost, wet grass—weaving with stealth through the air and hitting the back of my throat. We brush our teeth, change clothes, stock the fridge with our groceries, collapse into bed.

The gold of morning rouses us, and I look out our window from bed.

“Oh my God,” I utter. I am not swearing again.

We are carved into a rose garden.

I climb out of bed while Kyle still snores, open the double doors in the living room. I am ensconced by thickets of pinks, yellows, whites; I am standing on a patio thrust into the flowers with a table, chairs, chaise longues. Virescent mountains praise the sky behind the neighbor’s house across the street. I head inside to the kitchen and start the coffee; I find my bag and dig out my current book (At Home, Bill Bryson). The family sleeps; the coffeemaker murmurs awake.

I have found my elysian fields. I don’t plan to leave.

We are technically in Arrowtown, a tiny bedroom community of several thousand residents outside Queenstown. After breakfast on the patio, we walk to the town’s main street, a conglomeration of Old West–style storefronts now holding trendy clothing and bespoke home goods. We stop at the post office (its wooden sign: Post and Telegraph) and mail postcards to grandparents. It is a stockpile of stationery and stamps, books by local authors on local places. The standard red mailbox is out front, but inside is a temporary mailbox for letters to Santa. I ask the two women at the desk who in town handles the letters.

“What do you mean?” one says with a wink. “Santa does.”

Next door, people dine alfresco at Postmasters, a cottage-turned-café named for its original nineteenth-century inhabitant. On the other side, a man sells ice cream from a stand. I exchange the jacket I was wearing for an apple from my backpack. The weather is warming—not exactly summer to me, but it smacks of spring. I think that airport shuttle driver was wrong.

We walk to the end of the main street, then to the nearby banks of Bush Creek, a tributary of the Arrow River and home of the derelict Arrowtown Chinese Settlement. Stone huts from the 1860s dot the land, a reminder that the town began during the Otago Gold Rush and swelled to a thriving place of residence. Chinese immigrants made their way here, along with Europeans and Californians, then were dutifully persecuted and heavily taxed until the 1940s (New Zealand formally apologized in 2002). Our kids run in and out of the huts, and we imagine frontier life raising a family with fingers crossed in hopes of striking it rich. I am aware of what little Kiwi history I know.

Nearby, an original police camp building stands as a graying wood cabin, parked authoritatively along the river in overstated protection from the original foreigners. Cottonwood trees sway in the breeze, towering above the shanty. They shower puffs of cotton with drops of seedpod on the ground, and the grass is blanketed with tufts of spring snow. The kids sing “Jingle Bells” and toss the snow in the air.

Arrowtown charms, but my mind wanders to our guesthouse. I want to bake in the patio’s sun and imbibe the perfume of roses. My body and soul want to pause the sightseeing, to instead soak in glory. I need to stop and smell the roses. We all do.

I think of Vanessa’s comment in Melbourne, and I calculate that I have indeed spent more than two thousand hours nonstop with the kids, not counting sleep, spiritual direction sessions with Nora, a few hours at random coffee shops to scramble for work deadlines, and thirty minutes when I had LASIK surgery on my eyes in Chiang Mai. I study my kids’ hairlines, scrutinize the freckles dancing across their noses, and marvel that I played a role in creating their bodies. Their quotidian observations slay, make my brain stand on its head. I vie for their moral resolve.

Parenting is hard because of diapers and time-outs, the slog of sounding out vowels and the drama of mailboxes missing party invitations. But it is hardest because it is a mirror. It is life staring me down. It is the echoes of my inner childish voice reverberating from my children’s; it is the denial of me going first. It is my flesh and blood unleashed, encased around another personality, another will. It is the continual death of my basal impulses for the exchange of extraordinary. It is fighting traffic for gymnastics class, early-morning sandwich cutting, late-night math drills. It is perpetual togetherness while circumnavigating the globe.

At the guesthouse, Kyle grills and I make a salad. We eat on the patio, and the kids perform a play they’ve rehearsed in secret. We applaud wildly. Then baths, pajamas, my turn to read a story. The kids climb into bunk beds in the room with blackout shades, hours before the sun sets at ten. I retreat back outside to Kyle, and we open a bottle of wine. I wonder at the sky that resembles early afternoon. We talk about the kids, how they’re doing, marvel at their traveling prowess, comment on Tate’s confusion with fractions, Reed’s challenge with phonics. We laugh at something we read on the Internet. We watch a cat video. I think again about my kids and my mother-heart swells.

Then the two of us change into our pajamas, open our windows, climb into bed, and start Lord of the Rings on a laptop. The mines of Moria and the river through Rivendell are right outside Arrowtown.

Three days later, we leave town. It is the first time I sob about leaving a place. We vow to return one day.

To make our week in New Zealand financially doable, we must spend the next half in a campervan, crawling our way back up the south island. In Queenstown, I found a bargain deal that required schlepping a campervan back to Christchurch, and we could make the trek however we wanted. The only two real options were the east or west coast, which in New Zealand is akin to choosing emeralds or rubies. We opt for west because we are West Coasters, and west is best, as West Coasters are wont to say.

After we leave, I read the weather forecast: clear skies east, non-stop rain west. We duck through a rain forest, and a torrent of water pours for two days. The kids play with Lego bricks for forty-eight hours in the campervan, and we drive from campsite to campsite. We make meals of cheese and crackers from the kitchenette. Muddy footprints stomp up and down our minuscule hallway. I paid extra for an Internet router in the van, but it can’t endure the weather, so I’m unable to work. Kyle steers our mammoth ride around windy wooded corners through peals of water, and through the downpour and windshield patter we shout our thoughts about life post-travel, ideas about where we might relocate, what our work will look like a year from now. We bellow our dreams.

The native Maori tribes of New Zealand christened the islands with the name Aotearoa, which means “Land of the Long White Cloud.” No one knows the official origin of this name, but it is birthed from beauty, from gazing at its landscape. New Zealand is one of the least densely populated countries on earth. Here, flowers and sheep and cattle crowd out humankind. Creation reigns. A smattering of men, women, and children are graced with the privilege to walk on it.

This week, we have cheated on Italy and France, on Thailand. Our hearts splinter over a new lover. We board our plane back to Australia with a sigh in our hearts and a promise to rendezvous with her again. Kiwi dirt banked along clouded cerulean water has caked into the tread of my shoes. I choose not to remove it, a souvenir from God’s oeuvre. I will let it depart on its own, where it may.