OF ALL THE KIWI HOSTS WE MET ON OUR TRIP, LIANE AND RICK RUMBLE seemed to have the whole WWOOFing thing figured out. Unlike Sherab, who had lazy, half-cocked WWOOFers always descending on her kitchen, devouring every crumb in sight, the Rumbles had pretty much WWOOF-proofed their house and their lives. While they stayed in the main house, we were more or less confined to the Hangar. And though we occasionally ate with them, they just as often delivered food to us, a room service option that was both good and bad. Yes, it was nice to eat as a family for a change, but it did limit the amount of food we could eat at any one time. (Logan, the bottomless pit, was particularly concerned about this arrangement.) What it really meant was that if we ran out of milk or fruit or Weetabix for breakfast, we had to ask for more. Not that the Rumbles were stingy with the goods; they served us rock lobster and paua (abalone) for dinner one night, two delicacies that are more precious than gold in New Zealand. The difference was that the Rumbles were in control. There would be no invasion of the WWOOFing locusts at the Rumble House.
What’s more, they expected us to do some serious work. Five hours a day. We built massive lasagna-style compost piles, constructed a mansion of a chicken coop, hauled debris, and weeded our fingers to the bone. (“I hate weeding,” Jackson confessed on multiple occasions, making it abundantly clear that she would not be a professional weeder when she grew up—but also making her solid weeding efforts feel all the more deserving of a silent standing ovation in my mind.) We also tapped into our inner lumberjacks with a round of wood splitting that honed our ax skills while testing the limits of our lower back strength. Logan and I shared this manly task one afternoon from 1:30 to 6:00 P.M., which was roughly four hours longer than all his previous firewood chopping experience combined. He didn’t complain, though. Hour after hour, he just took his turn slamming his ax into log after log, helping amass a small forest of ready-for-the-stove segments. By the end of it, my body hurt, my hands were sore, and I wondered how Logan was holding up.
“You okay?” I asked, expecting some kind of complaint.
“I’m doing good,” he said. “But this log …” He shook his head ruefully and looked down at the next tree section on his chopping block, then glanced up at me for dramatic effect. “This log is doing real bad.” Then he reared back with his ax and split that poor log with a full-body swing and a life-affirming shout that cracked both me and the log up. Liane and Rick were thrilled with the effort.
Which brings us to Lesson Number Three in the unofficial WWOOFing handbook: If you (A) work hard and (B) resist the urge to eat, smoke, and hump everything in sight, there’s a good chance that (C) your hosts will go out of their way to make sure your stay is a pleasant and memorable one. At least that’s how we ended up, on our last full Kaikoura day, at the base of Mount Fyffe.
It was Liane’s idea. “Take the day off,” she suggested. “I’ll pack a lunch. You relax, spend some free time outdoors.” When we didn’t protest and demand more seaweed raking, she dropped us off early in the morning, gave us food and a cell phone, and agreed to pick us up when we called. All we had to do was climb the mountain.
Climbing Mount Fyffe is no walk in the park. Though the trail is essentially a crushed gravel road wide enough for a truck, it’s also long and relentless, with each switchback revealing another switchback, getting steeper and steeper all the time. Ten minutes after we started to climb we were leaning forward like ski jumpers, plodding like turtles. The hike is posted as eight hours to the top and back, but Jackson’s left ankle started to hurt around hour one. By the time we got to the midway hut for a lunch break, it had not improved. To make matters worse, we were completely socked in with fog, surrounded by a colorless world with no view whatsoever.
Views are something New Zealand in general and Kaikoura in particular rightly boast of. Whether you’re walking around the peninsula or walking to the outhouse, at any hour of the day, you are immersed in gorgeousness: the pink morning light on the mountains, the rising afternoon fog along the rugged coast, the sunset glow across the pasturelands. No matter where you point your camera, New Zealand is the supermodel of countries. It just doesn’t take a bad picture.
But on Mount Fyffe that day, there were no pictures to take, no real fun in the air, only low clouds that clung to us like a wet blanket. As we sat down to lunch, we didn’t talk much, just ripped into the food Liane had prepared for us: gourmet egg salad sandwiches, homemade scones, sweet apples, and dark chocolate, all totally delicious as usual.
Before becoming a mom and a self-sufficient homesteader, Liane had been a chef. Though she didn’t brag about it, she had been the personal chef for former Beatle George Harrison in 1999, at the time that George was stabbed by a deranged fan in London. Back then, she worked at the Harrison estate with her husband, Rick, who became head of estate security immediately following the stabbing.
When that long and winding road came to an end, the Rumbles traveled the world, working aboard multimillion-dollar yachts and managing swanky resorts before finally settling down in Kaikoura to surf, start a family, and host WWOOFers like us.
But as another great English rocker once sang: You can’t always get what you want. It ended up taking seven years to conceive their first child, and by the time Jimmy Rumble popped into the world, Liane was forty-two, Rick nearly forty. When we met him, Jimmy was a strong-willed chap who, even at three years old, used such expressions as “Don’t look at me!” and “You don’t talk!” and my personal favorite: “Don’t do what I told you when I said!” All these commands were delivered with utter disdain and incredible gusto for one so young and—though he was as sweet as he was sour—we could tell it wore on Liane. Not so much that she lost her touch with the egg salad, but still, it took a toll.
It was like our world trip, in a way. At considerable expense, with the best of intentions, Traca and I hoped to give our children an amazing gift, a treasure box of experiences to take with them into life. But the night before we climbed Mount Fyffe, Jackson was up late crying big tears on Traca’s shoulder, saying “I want to go home. I just want to go home!” She missed her friends, missed her life. She was tired of pulling weeds and sleeping in the same room with her parents. It didn’t matter what our hopes were for her or what adventures might be waiting for us down the road. Sometimes the fog is too thick to see more than what’s right in front of you.
After lunch, we continued up the mountain, dividing into alternating configurations of two, chatting away in the clouds. Gradually, just the smallest bits of white at a time, we began to find snow. Then, step by step, the snow got a little deeper. Higher still and the sun began to peek out from time to time, making our now snow-covered, evergreen-lined trail look like the entrance into Christmas Town. Until at last, the blue sky appeared as we stepped above the clouds.
For the final hour of our climb, the world below us was only clouds, a sea of cotton waves lit from above by a warm and brilliant sun. Jagged snowcapped peaks sharked up through the white for as far as we could see, etching a heartbeat onto an intense cobalt sky. It was like a dream, like heaven, as if we’d sneaked onto Mount Olympus and were looking off Zeus’ balcony.
Sometimes there is a gap between what you wish for and what you get. You hope for a bundle of joy and you get a petty tyrant for a while. Or you hope to offer your child the world on a silver platter and all they really want to do is go home and eat at Gorham House of Pizza. The top of the mountain seems like a good idea when you’re standing at the bottom. But then the weather changes, and your ankle hurts, and the fog rolls in, and the tears begin to fall.
As we stood on top of Mount Fyffe, taking pictures, feeling lucky, looking out at the cloud-covered world, our time in New Zealand was almost up. We had one more WWOOFing stop in Golden Bay, the little spit of land at the tippy top of the South Island, but after that I had nothing planned for our last Kiwi week. Like the sea of white that rippled out in all directions below us, it was all just a blank page that was waiting to be written. One minute it might be terrible; the next, it might be glorious. We couldn’t stop it. As Rahaman said, the best we could do was to go through all the changes with as much grace as possible. For everyone.
“All right. I’m cold,” Jackson said, changing again.
And just like that, we started down, stepping back into the clouds.