Transcendent—beyond or above merely human experience. It is a bit of a cliché to describe experiences in nature as transcendent, but occasionally there is no other way to capture the feeling of awe and connection we feel when being immersed in something massive, beautiful, and sublime. A few weeks ago, while the girls were on fall break, we drove across the island to the Southern Alps, Fiordland, and the West Coast where we spent five days. My most vivid memory comes from three minutes on a catamaran on the Crooked Arm of Doubtful Sound. Our family stood on the bow of the ship while the crew turned off the engines and motors, the passengers stopped moving around, and we floated in silence at the bottom of water-filled glacial canyon. But it wasn’t silent at all. We could hear wind, tuis and bellbirds in the unbroken beech forests, and our own breathing. The water was still and mirrored the steep, forest covered canyon walls. All around were small and large waterfalls that cascaded from the summits. In all of our adventuring in this magnificent country, it’s those few minutes that, to me, distilled the potential for wilderness to transform and transcend. Sharing it with my family made it sweet. I just read a passage that Oliver Sacks wrote as he contemplated his diagnosis with terminal cancer. It captures my emotions on Doubtful Sound:
“… [M]y predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world . . . Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”
The trip itself brought us new experiences and introduced us to new things. We ferried across Lake Manapouri, the proving grounds of New Zealand’s nascent environmental movement in the 1970s, to the site of an enormous hydroplant where the lake drains into a giant tunnel system that is bored over 10-km to outlet into Doubtful Sound. We rode a bus over a dirt road that is one of the few passages to the West Coast. While on Doubtful Sound, we were visited by bottlenose dolphins, albatross, and saw a fur seal colony lounging on ocean rocks.
We drove from Te Anau, in the heart of Fiordland, north through Queenstown and Wanaka, to Haast. Haast is one of the most remote places in New Zealand, and therefore in the world. It’s only been since the mid-1960s that there was a road over the Alps to Haast. Before then, residents of Haast would have to take the slow, windy road up the coast (a road subject to being washed out by glacial rivers and ocean inundation) to Arthur’s Pass. To find a town larger than a few hundred people would require a drive of 10 or 12 hours. We stayed in a little bach (holiday home) on the West Coast. When it was clear, we could see from coast to the summits of the Southern Alps. We visited the Fox Glacier, one that nearly spans from the summit of Mt. Cook to the Tasman Sea. It’s now a significant hike to the overlook where you can see the toe of the glacier. It has receded miles since first European arrival in New Zealand and is rapidly melting up canyon. We saw waterfalls, beautiful forests, and a glacial landscape that was varied and spectacular. In spite of weather forecasts of showers, we saw blue skies and we saw a vista or two that included Mt. Cook/Aoraki, the tallest mountain in New Zealand. Of course the showers came later, since average annual rainfall on the west coast ranges from 3-meters in Haast to over 7-meters in Hokitika.
One experience that was novel and was constantly brought to our memory for over a week after the trip included sandflies. While this country is Edenic, the snake in the garden is clearly this small fly. New Zealand has no poisonous reptiles, no native predators, few spiny plants. It is the most benign place (other than the weather) that I’ve ever visited. Instead, the only thing that keeps the West Coast from being overrun by people is this small, blood-sucking fly that will arrive in the 10’s of thousands if you stop moving. We got out at a lovely beach that was bordered by kohikitea trees 70-80-meters tall. While I flew my drone, I realized that my tan pants had nearly turned black by these small flies. They flew everywhere and tried to access flesh at shirt openings, ears, eyes, mouths, ankles, and even through hair. The most nefarious element of sandflies is that their bites are painless and go unnoticed for a day or two. They then itch much worse than mosquito bites. The kids kept count on their misery, reporting the number of bites on particular body parts (“10 on my right foot, 14 on my calf, …”).
Marshaling a trip like this takes some level of logistical mastery. Frequently in the past the joy has been diminished somewhat by the crush of having to know what and when we will eat next. This trip was relaxing and incredible in part because Martha, as part of a YW Personal Progress project, planned all of the food, organized the shopping, and led out on cooking for the week. She may ultimately be an engineer with her quantitative and logical skills but for the coming years she can be our family food and party planner. Her future family will be very lucky.
A special thanks to Coulter, again, for his work editing our family videos.
Part of my efforts included capturing imagery that will allow me to build computer models of forest and grassland canopies. One evening I visited a coastal wetland to take some teaching photos and videos and as I flew my drone I captured this image. It’s my new favorite NZ photo.
