I went in search of a tree the other day.
Not just any tree – this one I saw for the first time on my way home to Te Awamutu, driving along State Highway 3 and heading away from Hamilton. As always, the Ohaupo Ridge, south of the little village, offered another of those endlessly superb views that are always available from there: lush farms, picturebook trees splurging their autumn colours, neatly trimmed hedges, mobs of contented animals, and long horizons lumpy with high hills and low mountains.
The several little raupo-skirted lakes to the east of the highway were full-colour mirrors of the landscapes around them, and in the still, late afternoon air the reflections from them were almost perfect.
The tree I went hunting was a tall, spare eucalypt, white against the faded sky and shining out starkly in the soft light of an early wintering sun which was heading determinedly for the western horizon. The gum stood out mainly because of its most unusual appearance, and I’m astounded that I haven’t seen it before. I’ve travelled along that road regularly, sometimes daily, for the past half century, and yet suddenly there was the tree, standing tall and obvious. It looked exactly like one of those ancient umbrella acacias so commonly seen in movies and documentaries on the Serengeti Plains of Africa, with perhaps several giraffes or a pride of lions sheltering languidly beneath it.
It was what the Aussie neatly call a ghost gum, and in the outback they are encountered usually growing in sprawling, winding lanes along the dry creekbeds that carve their way through gullies cut into the red-sand desert by flash floods over the millennia.
To get a closer look at the tree I turned off the highway into a side-road I’d never ventured down before. And that too provided an unexpected delight of remarkable country not visible from the main road. After driving through a brief grove of flounce-frocked colourful pinoaks, the side-road curved round a small hill and dropped down on to the edge of a vast flat plain of broad green paddocks. The land ran level for miles, frequently dotted with trees and hedges, and criss-crossed with weed-lined drains and the battenless wire fences common on dairy farms. Lush after the recent rains, close-cropped by hungry animals after the withering drought of February and March, the paddocks looked just what they were – high-quality cow country right at the heart of the best dairying land in the world.
From far off, the tree I was quietly stalking appeared to stand aloof and alone on what seemed to be a long isthmus of green land, raised somewhat above and jabbing out into the surrounding plain. Everything was in brilliant relief because of the extraordinary light of the silent, still, late afternoon. The peninsula where the tree stood shimmered in its almost garish greenness, and the tree itself shone with a sort of luminous light on the clean silver-white bark of its long bare trunk. It was obviously an old tree, perhaps 50 or even 75 years old, which for a gum growing in that soft-footed peat country is a very respectable age. Often they get bowled over by strong winds way out on such flat country where they have little or nothing to shelter them from the hard-pushing gusts.
But this tree, with its high, wide, curving crown of narrow, dark leaves, and a couple of small, gnarly branches halfway up the trunk, obviously had a good grasp on what was probably a section of ground a little more solid than the deep peat surrounding it on the flat country.
Houses, some of them late-model and palatial, others weatherbeaten, peeling and obviously of long-standing, dotted higher points of ground, affording current and long-gone residents good views out over the flatter land, and also, no doubt, some assurance in the early days that they were above flood and mud levels of soggy winters. Around them were sprinkled the inevitable farm sheds and out-buildings, again both ancient and modern, that are part of the business of farming and land use generally. Some were crammed with machinery, others with hay, and yet others stood forlorn, rejected, dilapidated and quietly crumbling in that haughtily humiliated manner to which only long disused farm buildings can aspire.
But ‘my’ tree lured me on. And the closer I got to it, the less alluring it became.
I was never able to get closer than 250 metres, driving down first one road and then another, past houses and sheds and herds, and taking any turn I found that may have brought me nearer. The tree continued to look quite extraordinary in its somewhat mythical, magical shape, but the apparent proximity of a house and bunch of sheds somehow reduced it.
At one stage I stopped, while quite some distance away, to take a photograph, in the hope that I could capture the remote mysteriousness of it, but my pocket point-and-squeeze everyman’s camera was pathetically inadequate. A pair of snotty little spur-winged plovers – birds I thoroughly detest, as does every hunter in the country – strutted self-importantly in a paddock opposite my car and chirled derisively in their rusty-doored voices at my useless efforts. A companion magpie didn’t deign to offer comment, and I drove on.
Eventually, after several twists and turns, I got as close as I could get, and managed a photo or two, but cursed silently at the presence of buildings and other acolyte growth around my tree. Still, it was an interesting diversion away from the main road into a piece of previously unexplored country, right here in the middle of the Waipa district.
I went on further – and found myself deep in the heart of blueberry country, hectares of it, rows and rows and rows of the now red-leafed bushes running away for hundreds of metres on either side of the road. And not long before the tar-seal ran out there was maybe half an acre of blueberry processing shed, huge and built out of corrugated iron and stuck way out in the middle of everywhere. Except for maybe 100 people, probably nobody else in the world knows it’s there. And I really like blueberries, specially dried blueberries in home-brewed back-country tramping mixes with nuts and jaffas and raisins. Maybe that’s where most of the world’s blueberries come from – there’s certainly a lot of plants and big machinery and massive packhouses working away quietly out there on behalf of the nation’s health and welfare.
The blueberry rows had broad sweeping headlands fore and aft, presumably where large machines turned as they harvested the crops. It was in these headlands that dense flocks of goldfinches were feeding, bouncing up and flitting away in swooping flights and then turning back on themselves as I gained the lead on them.
I drove on further, and ran out of tarseal. It wasn’t a problem – the Otewa Road where I grew up at the back of Otorohanga spent a long time being metal, which was ideal for us kids who were keen to perfect our skills with shanghais.
Out past the million-plant blueberry farm the dusty road turned south at a right-angle, and the land gave up red-leafed bushes and became dairy country again, flat except for the almost imperceptible wide corrugations in the ground to help water run-off into the long, straight drains that gouged deep scores across the farms. The grass was rich and dense, and at the safe distance of 50 metres a lone blue heron pumped long, gentle wing-beats to keep pace with me, then settled with remarkable skill on the rim of a concrete water-trough, perhaps intent on canapés of water boatmen before a fresh frog dinner.
My tree had now somehow regained its far-off, almost supernatural solitary status, clear-cut against the intense grey-blue of a one-dimensional Mt Pirongia whose jagged image was itself stark and hard and razor-sharp against the orange-tinted sunset sky.
I keep saying it with monotonous regularity, but it’s true – we are surrounded by astounding beauty, every day. Me? I just love it!
Kingsley Field is a columnist with the Waikato Times in Hamilton. His Outdoor columns appear fortnightly, and he has recently published his second illustrated volume of the columns. He can be contacted at kingsley(at)accuwrite.co.nz
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