Troubling dreams stalked me through a night of fitful sleep. I was having to move again, pack up, the situation was all wrong, people I didn’t know were crowding into my rooms, I was running low on money, and then I was traveling with a caravan of lost souls in a futuristic world where populations had been depredated by great mortalities, food was scarce, warmth and shelter fleeting. Now and then I jolted awake, but peering out, I saw only blackness and a starless sky. “No Service” still showed on the banner at the top of my iPhone. The feeling of being cut off from the world weighed down on me, and it felt like there was no escaping my predicament.
Finally, mercifully, morning crept in through the windows with a timid light. The wind, still gusting, had calmed. The cacophony of the storm was absent. Max was meowing for food, so it seemed we had endured the worst of it and things had normalized.
I heard a strange noise: a rhythmical slapping against the camper van. Opening the side door, I saw to my horror that the tide had come in and the ocean had risen three feet, nearly to the level of the camper van’s floor. Fuck, I muttered to myself. Fuck!
“Come on, Max man, we’ve got to get out of here before we’re swept out to sea.” I pulled on the knee-high Red Band Wellingtons that had come with the camper van, gathered Max up and secured him in his carrier, packed my carry-on bag with all the essentials it would carry, and, with my electronics bag slung over my shoulder and Max firmly in one hand, climbed out the driver’s-side door, where there was still a stepladder remaining. Thank God I remembered the Red Band boots, because I landed in water halfway up my calves.
I heard a splash and lowered my eyes. Lying face down in the water was a copy of A Year of Pure Feeling that had fallen out of my unzipped carry-on. As I reached down to retrieve it, a sudden surge of ocean water lifted it up, then, on its ebb flow, carried it out to sea, Kon-Tiki in miniature heading on an El Niño current to North America, where, I laughed to myself, it might find a US publisher, a message in a bottle. Careful not to drop Max and the rest of my only belongings, I trudged nearly a hundred paces through seawater and muck to dry land. Barking fur seals were scattered on the sand and rocks as I approached the shore. They paid me no mind.
On dry land, I set down my belongings and looked back into the sun with tented forehead. The Pacific Horizon camper van was rocking back and forth in the tiny waves that broke at its wheels, clearly not the promotional social media post the company who had sponsored me was hoping for. How I had come to park it so close to the ocean I could only chalk up to my poor eyesight and discombobulated state of mind, the fact it was night and I had not factored in the tide tables. Why a surfer boy like me from Southern California hadn’t foreseen the radical tides was confounding. The Beast looked whipped and beaten. Its mirrors had both been clipped off, and it looked like an earless woolly mammoth. The side that presented itself to me was tree and shrub abraded from too many brushes with the edges of the narrow roads I had dangerously navigated. Floating in the rising ocean, it appeared forlorn, an abandoned military vehicle in the aftermath of a battlefield where no side had won, soon to be set adrift and sunk for future marine archaeologists to discover and wonder about. Or not.
Then something miraculous happened. When I got to Cape Palliser Road, I stopped to catch my breath. A numinous force had pulled the clouds apart with enormous cosmic hands and revealed an azure-blue sky. Within moments a resplendently iridescent rainbow emerged and colored the empyrean. From the far reaches of the Pacific to the hills of Cape Palliser and Ngawi, the miracle rainbow arced, growing brighter and more vibrant with every passing second. I don’t believe in spiritual anything, I don’t even like the word spiritual, but there it was, magnificent, a gift (a sign?) from Nature, a breath of blue sky and a colossal rainbow that seemed to be pointing the way to salvation. And I desperately needed a ray of hope for salvation, because all that was left of me was a few items of clothes, my laptop, and Max.
Across Cape Palliser Road a tiny community of trailers came into focus, and I trekked in that direction. At one point I walked past what appeared to be a graveyard of tractor trailers parked on the sand. But on closer inspection it appeared some of them had fishing boats in tow.
A hundred yards inland, on slightly higher ground, I stumbled upon a general store called Sea Trader. Inside, I explained my plight to a middle-aged Kiwi woman with a sea-weathered face and a circumspect mien minding the store. My story sounded cockamamie, even to her, and at this far-flung outpost, one had to imagine she’d heard her share.
“Cape Palliser’s closed, love. Caved in yesterday about twenty kilometers from here.”
“I heard. What do I do? I . . . I parked too close to the ocean and my camper van is now stuck in the ocean.” I pointed out the window to the vast, glittering Pacific in the distance, and her eyes traveled with my finger until they reached the nothingness of an image because Max and I had trekked too far to see it anymore.
She looked at me pitilessly. “There’re no motels here. You can try knocking on doors and see if anyone’ll put you up until the road is reopened. But that could take days.”
I bought a coffee from her and sat down at a planked table. I powered on my phone. My heart skipped a beat with excitement when I noticed it was showing one bar! There was only one person in the world to call.
“Hello?” Hana said, picking up seconds before I ended the call.
“Hana, it’s Miles.”
A silence greeted me.
“Hi, Miles,” she finally said. “Where are you?”
I explained my situation in as calm a voice as I could manage.
“My God,” she said. “Ngawi. Cape Palliser. What possessed you?”
“I needed to get away from the tour. Anyway, the road’s closed. Capsized into the sea. I thought I was hallucinating. What do I do?”
After a moment when I assumed she was googling, Hana spoke up. “Sea Trader? Ngawi?”
“Yes.”
“Stay put.”
“Where am I going to go?”
The phone went dead in my hand. I looked around. It was only me and Max and the proprietor behind the counter. My pant legs were sopping wet, but otherwise I was warm and dry. I didn’t know what Hana had in mind. Was there another way into Ngawi? I considered calling her back, but she sounded definitive about a solution when she had hung up.
“Is that your camper in the ocean,” a crusty fisherman said to me as he banged into the Sea Trader.
“Yes, it is.”
“Do you need a tow? I can get one of the tractor trailers to pull it out.” My look of utter consternation must have prompted additional explanation, as he went on to say that because there was no pier or marina at Ngawi, this was how they launched and retrieved their boats, the packed black sand of the beach acting as a natural boat ramp.
“I’m in touch with people in Wellington,” I said. “I’ll let you know. But thanks.”
“It’s all good,” he said, then trudged his way to the counter to place an order.
Morning eased into afternoon, the minutes slow as earthworms on hot asphalt. The sun now burned a bright hole in the sky, dispersing the last remnants of storm clouds. The rainbow had evanesced. I texted Hana several times and all she texted back was, “Stay put.”
The sun finally went over the hills, touching off fires on the other side of the planet, and I started to worry where I was going to stay for the night. Locals who had come in and out of the Sea Trader offered advice, most of it unhelpful or tinged with apocalyptic mordancy. Then this stunningly beautiful, wraithlike figure with long, dark, curly hair trudged up the pathway and approached the Sea Trader. I could see her through the windows, and my heart leaped with joy. Hana!
She trooped inside, spotted me at the table with Max and my laptop. “I’m glad you’re okay,” she said, rushing over.
“Yeah. It was quite a night.”
“I’ll bet. These all your belongings?” She pointed to my carry-on and electronics bag.
“Yep. All that’s left of Miles Raymond.”
She gathered up both, then said, “Get Max, let’s go, follow me.”
We trudged together down an unsealed road to Cape Palliser Road, crossed the closed highway, then met a red-and-white-colored rescue boat that had been piloted up onto the black sand. Outfitted with foam pontoons, it had amphibious capabilities. Two New Zealand Coastguard personnel, a stoic-faced young woman and a smiling middle-aged man, helped Hana, Max, and me into the raft-like boat. They motioned for us to get inside the cabin. With their powerful twin engines, they rotated the craft a hundred eighty degrees on a dime and steered back out into the white-capped Pacific.
“Miles Raymond, rescued by the N Zed Coast Guard after failed book tour,” I joked to Hana. “One-of-a-kind publicity.”
She smiled a weary smile.
“Thank you for rescuing me.”
“It’s what we do. You’re in New Zealand, Miles. We take care of people.”
“Tell that to Hughie.”
The Coast Guard crew piloted the boat out into open waters. The seas had calmed from the night before, but it was still a bumpy ride back into Wellington’s harbor.
As we neared the marina, Hana, who hadn’t spoken much during the boat journey, turned to me:
“When’s your flight back to California? Have you booked it?”
“Day after tomorrow. Red-eye.”
“How’re you going to get there?”
I shrugged. “I’m at a loss without my publicist.”
“I’m driving to Napier to visit my parents. You can hitch a ride with me, then catch a flight to Auckland from there.”