WWOOFING YOUR WAY FROM FARM TO FARM IS LIKE STARTING A NEW life every few days. Once you make your arrangements online and get to your next WWOOFing town, a new driver in a new car shows up and takes you to a new place, where a new set of people are waiting for you with new jobs to do and new things to see. On a practical level, it means waking up in a new room, on a new bed, with a new view out a new window. While it takes some getting used to and can leave you disoriented in the middle of the night, you certainly won’t be complaining anymore about the dull sameness of life.
Our next stop was the town of Kaikoura, and according to our guidebooks, we were in for a treat. Kaikoura sits on the rugged east coast of the South Island and is blessed with a unique coastal-alpine setting: majestic mountains encircling a pristine shoreline. World famous as a destination for ecotourists, marine wildlife watchers, and anyone who enjoys the drop-dead-gorgeous outdoors, the promise of Kaikoura made us all eager to climb aboard when Liane Rumble and her gray Jeep SUV rolled up to cart us away.
Liane lived twelve kilometers north of town in an off-the-grid house she’d built with her husband, Rick. Their home was surrounded by organic gardens, chickens, roosters, guinea fowl, a small dog named Rio, a wonky-eyed goat named L&P, and a three-year-old boy named Jimmy, the Rumbles’ only child. They also had a curved metal arc of a building out back, and this was where they put the WWOOFers. They called it the Hangar, and it featured two single beds on the first floor and one double bed up in a loft. To spoil us, it came equipped with a full-sized pool table and a woodstove. To keep us grounded, it also offered a lukewarm outdoor shower and a composting toilet. Out our new sliding door, the ocean was an easy ten-minute walk to the east and the Kaikoura Mountains—the northernmost extension of the New Zealand Southern Alps—were just across State Highway 1 to the west. We were surrounded by beauty.
We didn’t do much that first day. After settling in and getting the lay of the land, a little light garden work was all we had time for. But the day does stand out in my mind for two reasons: (1) It was Traca’s birthday, and (2) I nearly poached her to death.
A ritual bather back home, Traca had been missing her nightly soaks, and when I found a funky outdoor tub behind the Hangar, I decided to draw her a birthday bath she would not soon forget.
The tub sat in a clearing surrounded by gooseberry plants. It was made of white cast iron and was suspended over a blackened fire pit. You see these setups all over New Zealand, a bit of cowboy ingenuity to warm your tired WWOOFing bones. To operate, simply fill the tub about halfway with a garden hose, light a fire below, heat the contents to a near boil, then cool with more hose water until the desired temperature is reached.
By the time my fire had done its job, a beautiful nearly full moon had risen above the pines. With great excitement, Traca stripped down to her birthday suit, slipped into her birthday bath … and nearly parboiled her pale little birthday butt in the process.
“Whoa! That’s hot,” she said, clutching the rim of the tub with her fingers and toes in a pose that resembled an inverted cat trying not to fall in a bubbling soup pot. I tried not to laugh but I couldn’t help it. Even as I added more cold hose water, the tub was still roasting; I think I started with way too much heat. And when the water began to overflow, the hot coals below sent billows of smoke into the air. For the next ten minutes, Traca dipped her feet in, then pulled them out, bright red and tender, steaming in the cool night air. It was ridiculous.
“It’s nice to unwind, isn’t it?” I said.
“It’s so soothing,” Traca agreed, daring to dip her entire bum into the liquid lava and counting to ten before pulling it out, looking like a baboon.
Eventually, the steam cleared and the water cooled enough for her to settle in. I sat at the head of the tub, rubbing her shoulders and looking up at the huge New Zealand sky. For all its absurdity, the bath evolved into a beautiful, intimate moment.
“Did you ever think, on the day we got married, that we’d end up here almost twenty years later?” I asked.
“Not exactly,” Traca said, “but yeah, something like this.”
“That seems like a long time ago,” I said, remembering our wedding day.
“We’re certainly not the same people we were back then,” Traca said.
In the quiet that followed, I tried to picture our actual wedding ceremony, our vows, but the details had grown fuzzy over the years. Since we didn’t videotape the actual day, we couldn’t rewatch the event from time to time and refresh our memories. In fact, the only video we had was some grainy footage shot by one of my cousins on her bad VHS recorder. It’s no more than ten minutes long and the quality is terrible. It briefly shows Traca walking down the aisle with her father, skips the entire service, then picks up again in jumpy cuts at the reception. The only unbroken scene is our first dance.
We danced to a song that I’d written specifically for the occasion. I’m not a trained musician but I’m pretty good with melodies. And though my kids accuse me of recycling the same four chords in every song I write, I didn’t have those little critics back then. I just thought an original song would be more personal, so I wrote one.
I called the song “The Farthest Point,” the metaphor being that marriage is like a boat that carries two people toward the horizon, the farthest point away. There’s no rush because you’ll never get there. Love is not where you’re going, it’s where you are. It’s how you travel. So you ask someone to join you for the ride because it’s more fun to float across the sea of life with someone you love than to do it alone.
We were living in Los Angeles at the time, so I recorded a rough version of the song on a cassette tape player, played the piano and sang along, then shipped it to our wedding band back in Maine. After that, I pretty much forgot about it until we were called out onto the dance floor.
In the video, we look painfully young, just twenty-four years old, like kids playing dress-up. We walk out on the dance floor hand in hand, our faces shining with perspiration, joyously happy. Traca looks gorgeous in her white gown, a halo of flowers in her hair, a radiant smile on her face as she looks at me. And I look like a dorky leading man, so happy to be marrying this beautiful woman, so completely lacking in fashion sense.
My black tux was a terrible fit, and that was my fault. When I went for the rental fitting, it was a scorching hot summer day and I never actually tried it on. As a result, my pants were too big, requiring last-minute safety pins bunched in the back, and my vest was way too small, revealing a dorky band of white shirt above my droopy waistline. Most dorky of all, my hair was cut and styled in a perfect mullet, the likes of which I have never worn before or since. It was slicked like a rubber wig and hung long in the back, with a few carefully pulled strands arranged to appear casual on my shining forehead.
You can’t see any of these details in the video. The dance floor is dimly lit. The recording is handheld and shaky. All you can see are two young people in a familiar scene: their first dance as husband and wife, eyes locked on each other, with friends and family around them, waiting for the music to begin.
When the band started playing my song, I knew we were in trouble right away. From the very first beat, it was too slow, painfully slow. I’d written it as a midtempo number that wouldn’t leave us dancing all afternoon, but the band was playing it as the slowest ballad ever written, over six minutes of plodding originality! And when they launched back to repeat the final two verses, a musical idea that worked fine on the faster version, Traca and I started laughing. I remember it feeling like slow musical torture at the time, but as I’ve replayed the tape through the years, I’ve come to see it for what it really was: the start of our life together, awkward and improvised as all lives are. We kissed and we turned, slowly spinning, frozen in time with all the promise and hope of eternal love waiting beyond that circle, that song. Any perils that awaited us, any problems that we’d face, would all come later. For that moment, we were united and whole. Our story was unwritten. Our love was untested. Our song, unfinished.
“There’s no need to hurry,” you can hear the ocean say.
The farthest point is still the farthest point away.
Twenty years later, in an outdoor New Zealand tub, the night air was getting cooler and steam was rising from the bathwater, drifting away like memory. Above us, the tops of the surrounding pine trees swayed back and forth, caught in an ocean wind we could not feel. Only the moon was still. And a single star.
“Make a wish,” I said.
And Traca did, keeping it to herself.