A FEW DAYS LATER, WE WERE ALL DRIVING UP THE COAST WHEN WE passed a small sign that read OHAU STREAM WALK. If I had been the one driving, I doubt I would even have noticed it. The sign was plain and simple, no competition for the gorgeous South Pacific Ocean just off to our right. In fact, in an area famous for epic snowcapped mountain treks and deepwater dolphin encounters, killer whale tours and humpback breeching shows, a common stream walk might have seemed to me like the most minor of minor attractions. But like a banner reading BIG HOLE AHEAD at the entrance to the Grand Canyon, the understated OHAU STREAM WALK sign gave us no clue what to expect when we got out of the car in the parking lot.
It was Liane’s idea. As part of our daily WWOOFing chores, she’d packed us all in her car along with Jimmy, hitched up a trailer, and tossed in some shovels, pitchforks, buckets, and ratty gloves for what promised to be a spirited game of “Gather the Stinking, Fly-Covered Sea Rot,” otherwise known as collecting seaweed to be used as fertilizer in the Rumbles’ garden. But before we ever reached the beach, the stream walk sign caught her eye and Liane made a quick detour. Such is the way with fate.
A few feet up the wholly unspectacular path, we found a fur seal sitting in shallow water. Signs all over town warned people to keep twenty meters (roughly sixty feet) from all wild seals. Seal teeth are like ice picks, and a bite can give a nasty infection—though clearly the little seal we found had not read the warnings. It was just ten feet away and quite interested in us, watching our every move. “Let’s keep back, you guys,” I said parentally, but the seal wasn’t listening. He climbed the bank without much trouble and waddled right up to our feet.
I’ve seen plenty of seals in my day, in zoos and on TV and occasionally popping up like stray dogs along the coast of Maine, but I’d never been so close to one in the wild. This seal was a young one, not afraid at all, just taking us in with his large black eyes. And as I watched my own reflection in his dark alien orbs, they reminded me of something I had seen in a movie.
The Lord of the Rings gets a lot of attention in New Zealand; all the epic exteriors were filmed in various parts of the country, and you can still visit many of the sets. (At Sharda, we were a mere one hour north of the Shire!) As big LOTR fans, Logan and I couldn’t resist posing for nerdy pictures whenever the backdrops inspired us, and we probably talked about the story more than Jackson or Traca or any non-nerd wanted us to. Anyway, if you have seen the films, you might remember that the bad wizard Saruman had a black crystal ball called a palantír. The palantír was like onyx, only a bit smoky, alive with some dark power. At the risk of sounding like a super LOTR geek, seal eyes have roughly that same quality. No whites, no pupils, just unreadable palantíri looking back without emotion at the world around them.
We hung out with this little guy for a while, tried to keep Jimmy from riding off on his back, and considered ourselves lucky to have stumbled upon him. Then, after five minutes or so, we continued up the stream path and into what might best be described as a seal convention.
Turns out the first seal was just a teaser, like finding a penny outside an open bank vault. With every step we took, we saw more and more of these flippered little fur balls. At first, they seemed confined to the stream. There were six, then ten, then maybe twenty young seals hopping from rock to rock, playing in the deeper pools. But after Jackson spotted one seal waddling through the trees … and then another … we started finding seals everywhere.
It was a little like finding goats on the ocean floor when you’re out snorkeling—which is a weird way of saying that seals aren’t the animal you expect to find in the woods, especially in New Zealand. Unlike Costa Rica, the New Zealand landscape is home to very few land animals. In fact, other than bats, New Zealand has no native mammal species whatsoever. (No snakes, either, Jackson was happy to learn.) Before humans arrived a mere nine hundred years ago, making New Zealand the last large landmass on earth to be inhabited by Homo sapiens, the island was mostly crawling with flightless birds; without predators to chase them into the air, even the bats spent most of their time on the ground. Naturally, human inhabitants soon sought to improve on this delicate ecosystem, introducing opossums, stoats, ferrets, deer, dogs, and other animals, quickly driving many native species to extinction. After years of conservation and an intense opossum/ferret/stoat eradication program, the landscape once again feels pretty empty. Traipse through the bush and you will find only birds. Cool birds, friendly birds, but just birds. Not a single furry, chattering, scampering thing. Even back in Costa Rica, where animals were plentiful, you never got the sense that the forest was crowded with wildlife. But the farther we went up the Ohau Stream Walk, the more crowded it got—bustling, rush hour, Times Square, three-ring-circus crowded. And we were right in the middle of it.
I’m talking hundreds, maybe thousands, of seals, everywhere: sleeping under branches, curled up under bushes, piled up like cordwood in the path, waddling through the ponga trees, clogging the waterways, barking and burping their deep guttural grunts as if to say, Hey, guys. Welcome to the picnic. Did you bring the fish?
Liane said this seal extravaganza occurs only a couple of times a year. She had no idea it was happening when we stopped; we just got lucky. For some reason that no one knows, the young seals leave the ocean and—accompanied by a group of graying adult seal chaperones—hit the bush for a raucous daylong playdate. Like a sold-out rave, every inch of the quarter-mile path was packed with revelers. But the real hub of the party, like a hot seal nightclub, was the gorgeous waterfall we found at the end of the trail.
Emerging from somewhere high above us (a distant source one hundred feet up that was no doubt crawling with seals as well), the waterfall cascaded into a dark pond that was alive with acrobatics. Seals jumped and flipped, barked and rolled, swam in teams that charged this way and that way, obviously having fun, happy to let us watch. Jackson couldn’t resist and touched a curious pup on the nose while Logan posed beside the crowded pool as a dozen seals poked up to say “Cheese.”
As I watched all of this, it made me realize: If we had stayed in Maine, I would have been at the office at that moment, probably sitting at my desk, on the computer, checking email, completely unaware that the semiannual seal party was going on without us.
But then, like Liane’s decision to stop at the Ohau Stream Walk in the first place, sometimes one good impulsive decision can make all the difference.