Sleep is the mind’s way of shitting. Dreams are just thoughts you have no use for, thoughts that will poison you if you don’t let them out. They say a lack of sleep will drive you crazy soon enough. None of us had slept much the night in the barn, three or four hours at most. The next night at Cone was even worse.
It’s a small hut, no more than three metres by four. The sleeping space is a platform raised above the dirt floor, where six people could lie comfortably, if there were mattresses. There weren’t, unless you count one decaying lump of foam that smelt of dampness and grime and things you wouldn’t want to imagine. We settled down early, straight after the radio sked. The weather report was for wind rising later the next day, and maybe some rain on the tops. We heard the other groups report in. All three of them were up at Alpha, so something must have delayed the fast group. When the operator asked them if they had any messages they replied ‘no thanks’, as if we weren’t even in the hills with them. That suited us fine. We didn’t give any messages either. We wouldn’t have to see them again until the end of the trip.
Lying down on the bare boards I could tell sleep was going to be difficult. I had that half-sick camp feeling you get—too much dried food, too much breathing in smoke from the open fire, and a long drop not designed for relaxation. My stomach was tight, my throat was dry, and my mind was restless. I propped myself up on one elbow and looked around to see whether anyone else was feeling the same. Lisa was already sitting up. We both tried our best to get a conversation going, like we had in the barn, but it was pointless. That mood had passed. We circled awkwardly for a while: school, family, childhood pets, before Jonathon put us out of our misery.
‘Fuck up will you both? I’m trying to get some sleep here.’
I lay back down and dug my head into a pillow of track pants and polar fleece and waited for sleep to rescue me from the feeling of disappointment. The rats came first.
I was on the end, up against the wall. A thin ledge ran above our heads, where you could squeeze another two people if you were desperate. I heard rustling there but I was determined to ignore it. Probably just birds. So what? I was too tired to care. Then they scampered from one side to the other. It was impossible not to listen.
‘Fucken rats.’ Jonathon’s water bottle bounced off the boards overhead and I heard the little feet scurrying away. A minute later, just long enough to start to relax, and they were back. Down below our feet this time, where we’d left our packs. I could hear their sharp teeth making short work of our plastic bags. I imagined the diseases dripping off their little tongues and how their tails would feel if they ran over me. I tried to remember whether I’d left anything open. The others definitely had. I’d seen Lisa throwing stuff everywhere, looking for her torch. I waited for someone else to do something. So did the others. Meanwhile the rats got on with their work and the sound of it filled the darkness. I tried to push it aside and lose myself in sleep but every time my thoughts began to break up the sound would start again; another rip, another tear.
A torch came on and I heard the rats disappearing through the cracks and holes. It was Ms Jenkins, sitting up in her sleeping bag, shining the light onto our gear.
‘You’ll have to check your packs,’ she told us. ‘If you don’t put that food away they’ll come back.’
Reluctantly we wriggled free from our bags, apart from Rebecca who didn’t move.
‘All fucken useless,’ I heard her mumble. Her pack was just as she’d left it, closed up tight and standing against the wall.
‘So who left the bread out?’ Jonathon held up the remains of a loaf. In the light of his torch we could see the plastic had been shredded and large chunks of bread were gone. ‘Hungry little suckers aren’t they? It was your job to pack this away wasn’t it Turner?’
‘I didn’t know you’d taken it out,’ I snapped.
‘Should have checked.’
‘Anyway, Lisa was carrying it.’
‘No, I took the pot, remember, after lunch.’
‘We stayed here after lunch.’
‘For God’s sake!’ Rebecca sat up, sounding like a babysitter who’d had her favourite movie interrupted. ‘One of you just put it away. We’ll be dumping it in the morning anyway. Hurry up. I want to sleep.’
‘Don’t see you helping,’ Jonathon said.
‘I didn’t leave food out, did I?’
‘That’s right, I forgot. You’re perfect.’
‘Just less useless than you. There’s a big difference.’
‘It must be so hard for you.’
‘Leave her alone.’
‘You fuck up.’
‘All of you fuck up and do something with that bread.’
It was just like old times. We packed everything away, exchanged a few more insults and went back to our sleeping bags. The wooden boards felt even harder second time around but again I made it halfway to dreaming before the rats came back. I heard one running along the board that angled down the wall only centimetres above my head. Then it stopped and there was silence, the silence of five people listening for the same sound. Then a second rat making its way down the same board, so close I could smell it, that old piss scent rats have. I pulled my head down into my sleeping bag but it was too hot to breathe.
Something brushed my hair and I froze. Just Rebecca’s hand, I told myself. Then Lisa screamed, a sound so sudden and so loud it stayed ringing in my ears, like I was hearing it bouncing its way down the valley.
‘My hair! It was in my hair!’ She sat up and rubbed frantically at her scalp. ‘The little mother was in my hair!’
‘Probably got fleas,’ Jonathon offered.
She hit him hard across the back of his head as he sat up.
‘Ow. Just saying.’
‘I think one touched my ear,’ I told them.
‘It’s still there!’ Lisa screeched. ‘Look.’
We followed her torchlight along our sleeping bags. It was perched at the end. I could have reached out and touched it. Its dark eyes regarded us complacently, like it had us worked out. Jonathon snatched Lisa’s torch and hurled it at the little beast. There was a loud crash against the wall, then darkness.
‘Now you’ve smashed the bulb.’
‘So you want them to keep coming back do you?’
‘They will, now they know what a crap shot you are.’
‘Well I can’t sleep now,’ Lisa announced. ‘There’s no way I’m even going to try.’
‘Lisa.’ Rebecca spoke slowly, like she was trying hard not to lose it. ‘Did it bite you? Did it hurt you in any way?’
‘No.’
‘So ignore it.’
‘I can’t.’
Ms Jenkins muttered something I couldn’t hear, climbed out of her sleeping bag and walked over to her pack.
‘Here, I’ll light a candle. They won’t come back if there’s light.’ Maybe that was true. Maybe it was Jonathon’s torch hurling that had scared them off, or maybe they did return and ran all over my face. I don’t know. I was asleep.
When I woke my throat was drier, my head hurt more and I felt like throwing up. Lisa and Jonathon were both making noises that would have terrified me in the dark. Rebecca, however, was already up, munching her way through a bowl of cereal. We’d gone two nights without decent sleep, we were a day behind schedule, rats had been into our food and the biggest climb lay ahead of us. I got the feeling that in years to come Mr Camden would be using us as his example of how not to do Coast to Coast.
The tramp started with a river crossing which wasn’t too bad. It hadn’t rained for a while and the water ran clear. From there we dragged our soggy feet up Bull Mound, a two and a half hour slog along a ridge where my moods came and went without warning. We stopped more often than we should have, breaking any rhythm we might have found, to drink, blame, and complain. We weren’t too unfit as a group. Only Lisa seemed to be strug-gling and that was just in bursts. Our weakness was more social.
My opinion of Ms Jenkins was changing. She didn’t seem to have tired at all, even though she’d had as little sleep as the rest of us. She stayed totally even-tempered, the same calm mood the whole way. It was like she was quietly letting us know we could rely on her if we had to. And she was the fittest of any of us, too. When she walked out front I could see her calves knotting with every step and she never seemed to slip or drop her pace.
The climb was through bush the whole way, beech forest with light undergrowth and the moss getting thicker near the top. The trees thinned out as the ridge flattened to a long spur and we made our way through a new landscape of low scrub and rock. That’s when we first heard the wind, roaring across the tops above us. I didn’t think much of it, I was too busy trying not to think of sore shoulders or the hours still ahead, or the way I’d walked in on Jonathon and Rebecca talking that morning, and how they’d both stopped as soon as they saw me.
The wind in the Tararuas can only be ignored for so long. As soon as we came out onto the top of Bull Mound it was obvious this wasn’t a place used to calm. There were no trees up there. The small patches of scrub grew short and prickly, clinging hard to the rocky ground. It was a grey landscape of stone, broken only by vivid green patches of moss. In the background clouds rushed over the tops of the overlooking mountains and then were blown apart, looking like a half-formed waterfall.
We were Wellington kids. We were meant to be used to wind. Down in the city gales funnelled through narrow streets and children grabbed at parking meters to stop themselves blowing away. This wind was different. This wind was frightening. The noise of it filled my ears as it swept around me, attacking me from three different directions. It inflated my nostrils and twisted my eyelids. It threatened my hold on the ground, 1300 metres up with no place to shelter. Stone cairns pointed the way forward, south along the flat top. At least we would be away from any steep dropoffs.
Instinctively we linked arms. Jonathon paired up with Rebecca while Ms Jenkins and me stood either side of Lisa. We stumbled forward, leaning heavily on one another and crouching to the ground during the strongest gusts. Jonathon was the first to go. They were up ahead of us and I saw him stumble on a rock and lose hold of Rebecca’s arm. It was terrifying how quickly the wind took him, lifting his full weight, pack and all, as if he had deliberately leapt into the air. He landed a couple of metres to the left of his take-off point, flat on his pack, arms and legs flailing about like a turtle tipped in the surf.
We got to him as quickly as we could. The wind meant any sound he made was snatched away before it reached us and it wasn’t until I was standing over him that I realised he was laughing. Big whooping laughter, so he had to keep stopping to catch his breath. He grabbed at the arms offered him and pulled himself up.
‘Come on Marko!’ he shouted in my ear. ‘Let’s run. That was the coolest thing.’
So we did. The first time the wind took me I freaked, sure I’d land badly, twist a knee or crash head first into a rock. Jonathon was right though, there was fun to be had once I got the hang of it, a bit like moon-walking must feel, only more erratic, taking off in huge wind-assisted bounds, following a crazy path like some Friday night drunk, twisting every time I fell, relying on my pack to cushion me. Then straight back up and racing to catch the others, our shrieks of laughter ripped away from us, to snag on rocks and branches somewhere down in the valleys. It was a wonderful feeling: to be so totally at the mercy of such an awesome force and yet somehow invincible.
At the southern end of Bull Mound a boggy track took us right, down into the shelter of trees. We stopped, the memory of wind still filling our heads, and turned the game into stories. Fifteen minutes on the top had given us enough energy to keep going all the way to Alpha. I remember thinking how once again Jonathon had been the one to pull us together.
The last part of the tramp took us up through the Goblin Forest, where the air is damp all year round and the sky is the only thing not covered by the thick moss. It’s a landscape of dripping green, like walking through the set of a movie made for children. We walked in silence, enjoying the tramp now, but ready for the hut too.
It was a huge improvement on Cone, relatively new and built with trampers in mind. A bunkroom overlooked a large open-plan kitchen, windows all around let in the light, there was a mattress for every bed and as far as I could tell no holes to let the rats in. Lisa walked over to the map on the wall.
‘Look. We did all this today.’ She traced the track with her fingers. ‘Almost all the climbing done too.’
We crowded round and saw she was right. Alpha Hut was at 1300 metres, not far short of the highest peak of the crossing. We dumped our gear and crashed on the mattresses. There was a sense of relief that we’d beaten the day’s challenges. The sort of relief fate lies waiting for.
Dinner was good. It was Rebecca’s turn to cook and she produced a huge billy full of curried rice with fresh vegetables and cashews all mixed in. She looked pleased with herself when Jonathon and me raced each other for seconds. Then we had the predictable washing up argument which I lost, the way I always lose arguments—I run out of volume. After that we did the radio. There was still no contact from the others who had made it across to Kime before the wind got up. I expected we’d just settle in for a much needed sleep but Ms Jenkins had other ideas.
‘Who’s for a walk up to the tops?’ she asked us. ‘Just fifteen minutes.’
‘Walking? Yeah, I knew there was something my day had been missing,’ Jonathon replied.
‘We’ll be seeing it tomorrow anyway won’t we?’ Lisa asked.
‘Not at night we won’t. The wind’s died right down. It’s gorgeous out there.’ She rubbed a patch in the steamed up window and the stars shone through. ‘You’ll be able to see right down into the city.’
‘I’m in,’ Rebecca announced, sitting up on her bed. She meant it as a challenge and we rose to it. Even Lisa went through the hell of putting warm feet back into wet socks for the sake of group unity.
The track followed a path waterways had cut through the clay. Soon we were above the trees again and walking through dew-wet clumps of mountain grass. The air was cold and clean-tasting. Except for Lisa we all carried torches but Ms Jenkins made us turn them off, so our eyes could adjust to the light of the low hanging half-moon. She’d been right to drag us out. It was like walking through another world, one where day and night hardly mattered, where none of the things we’d left behind—homework, TV, dodging skateboarders on the pavements—seemed real.
‘Now that’s a real sky,’ Ms Jenkins said, stopping without warning so we all bumped into the person in front. I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. The sky was so filled with stars it was more white than black. Their light shimmered, confusing my eyes. I stood there with my head back and my mouth open. It was the sort of night you could drink.
‘Fuck that’s beautiful,’ Lisa whispered to herself, but her voice carried in the clear air and we all murmured our agreement.
From the top we could see the lights of Wellington, down to the south, sparkling around the harbour as if they’d been arranged there especially for our benefit. We found a cavity just off the rim, protected from the breeze, and squeezed in close to one another, for warmth and because we could. Ms Jenkins started the talking. She was beginning to relax with us, now that we were away from the others, away from everything.
She was pointing out the patterns of the stars, explaining how to use the Southern Cross to get our bearings, when the first wave hit. I’d been in other earthquakes and at first this one wasn’t any different. There’s that initial confusion, before you work out for sure what’s going on. Maybe it’s just some trick of the night, or something wrong with your balance, so you look at the others and see them looking back at you, for just the same reason. Then your senses settle and your brain works out the rest. There’s only one thing that can be happening. The ground is pitching and rolling like a ship on an ocean swell. You start thinking about the dangers, all the things that might go wrong. Maybe someone screams or yells out ‘cool’ and you use it as an excuse to sit even closer. And you wait for it to pass, because it always passes. You ride it out until the ground becomes ground again, a thick crust stretched tight over a liquid earth. Not this time though. This time it didn’t stop.
It wound itself up. The rumbling turned to shaking and the shaking turned to waves. It was as if the earth had tired of us and was trying to shake us free. There was noise too, sounds of ground breaking apart and hillsides slipping away, new rips in the earth’s fabric. And screaming, my screaming mixed in with theirs, all of us holding tight to each other, like our bodies were the only solid things left. We knew how bad it was without having to say it. At any moment the ground we were perched upon could give way and that would be the end. We would live or we would die and it would all be down to blind fate, nothing else. My mind went numb as I waited, I felt as if I was watching from the outside. The whole world was breaking free from its rules—even time paused to let the moments fill us, so if you asked how long it lasted, I would have to say forever.
Then it was over, or at least the main shock was, and suddenly only our bodies were shaking. We were all making sounds, strange little noises of fear and relief you won’t find in any dictionary.
‘The city’s gone,’ someone finally said. I remember looking to the harbour and seeing only blackness, like the earth had rolled over and turned out the light. There was silence, as we all thought our own thoughts, thoughts of destruction and almost-death. Then the explosions came in two distinct flashes, each turning to a gigantic fireball rising in the sky, like a fireworks display gone wrong.
‘Should we go to the hut?’ Rebecca asked, and her uncertainty made it sound like she’d borrowed someone else’s voice.
‘Not yet,’ Ms Jenkins told her. ‘There’ll be aftershocks. Staying put is the safest thing for now.’
There were three separate waves over the next half hour. The second was the worst, like it was responding to the earlier challenge. It wasn’t until we’d had twenty minutes of stillness that Ms Jenkins gave the all clear. No one questioned her authority, or tried to make a joke about this being ‘our trip’. We were frightened and we needed her.
She led off slowly, one small step at a time. We had our torches on and walked so close I could feel Lisa’s breath on my neck. My legs were unsteady, tight with tramping and fear, and too long sitting in the cold.
‘Keep your eyes wide open,’ Ms Jenkins instructed. ‘Anywhere could be a slip, or a slip about to happen.’
It was too dark to tell how much had changed around us but my imagination filled in the gaps. At one stage the track seemed to finish and we were walking in loose dirt and stones. Then we were squeezing between boulders, surely too big to have moved, but they hadn’t been there on the way up.
‘Are you sure this is the right way?’ Lisa asked from behind me.
‘Yeah. Careful up here, it feels quite unsteady. No, come on, it’ll be all right.’ Ms Jenkins had climbed up over a waist-high boulder. Jonathon followed, then Rebecca. When she reached the top she turned to offer me her hand. Just as I took it the rock moved and she fell forward with a shriek, her weight taking me backwards onto the ground.
‘You were supposed to catch me,’ she joked, but I could feel she was shaking as much as I was. Below us I heard the huge rock rumbling down the hill before crashing into the scrub.
‘Shit.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘What happened?’
Torches flashed around in the dark. I replied with a weak smile, all I could manage.
It was a relief to see the hut still standing. As far as we could tell the land around it was as we’d left it. Ms Jenkins made us wait outside while she completed three slow circuits with her torch, peering at foundations, kicking at walls and leaning against the water tank. I believed in her, the way you believe in your parents when you’re little, because not believing is way too frightening.
When we got inside we just milled around, as if there was something that needed doing but none of us could remember what. I was standing at the bench next to Lisa. She turned and put her arms around me and buried her head in my chest. Someone lit a candle and the silence was broken by the static of the mountain radio.
‘This is JG67.’ Ms Jenkins was at the table, hunched over the transceiver, talking quietly, no hint of panic in her voice. She was much tougher than I would have guessed. ‘This is JG67. Do you read me? Over.’
We crowded around her and waited for the static to give way to a reply. Nothing. She tried again, and again. Thirty measured minutes of the same message, like each time she was sure the next one would bring a reply. It never came.
Then we crawled off to our beds, all five of us close together on the bottom level. As soon as my eyes closed my head filled with movement. I fell asleep feeling like a baby again, rocking into unconsciousness.