Solo mission to Mahia

Last week was a big week.  My daughter turned 18, so it felt like the right moment to go on a solo surf trip.  I haven't really done that in years, since she was a very small toddler.  I've taken my family and forced them to watch me surf, but I haven't taken off solo and allowed myself the luxury of surfing every possible moment and consigning washing to a distant memory.  I've been eyeing a spring trip to the east coast for years:  The westerlies that devil this coast blow hot and offshore there, and spring storms in the antarctic send a succession of southerly swells.  It would be a chance too, I thought, to catch up on my Nanowrimo, or more accurately, keep the momentum going, because at the time of departure I was, amazingly, ahead of the game.

I'd planned on allowing parts of two days to get over there, but I hadn't factored in getting out of work early or the difference in speed I got from a) taking a different route over than I have in the past and b) not lugging a family of four and all their crap.  I still took part of two days, because I wanted to camp at Tutira and see if I could snaffle myself a trout for supper.  I couldn't, but it's still one of my favourite spots to camp.  A southerly front had passed up the country a couple of days before and there was still snow lying on much of the high ground.  The evening was crisp, cold as soon as the sun went down, but undeniably beautiful..

Tutira

It's only a couple of hours from Tutira to the Mahia peninsula, and it wasn't until long after I got there that I realised I'd miscalculated, a little.  Firstly, I was banking on finding something, a village store or something where I could buy milk and a couple of supplies, but there's nothing, nada, zip.  And secondly, the spots that were catching the southerly swell were big, spooky, and I would be flying solo.  My radar must be pretty good, because I was chatting to a local a couple of days later and I was told that the spot I was eying up had recently taken possession of a resident 5 metre white pointer.

Blacks, bigger and spookier than it looks.

The southerly swell was due to back off, and an easterly to kick in.  I figured I'd head north to Gisborne for a day or two, pick up some supplies, and hit the surf there.  It's an easy hour's drive, and there's good places to stay.  Lovely places to stay.

Beachfront, Tatapouri

Surf was OK, nothing special.  Headhigh and semi-organised, good enough to spend a couple of days surfing twice a day and feeling some kind of surf-fitness coming back to me.  I got a few fun kegs but nothing fabulous.  Surfing twice a day calmed the voices in my head enough for me to crank out a fair few pages of my Nanowrimo.  It's starting to acquire life and momentum, which is great.  It's easy to keep writing something that wants to keep being written.  It's like being wanted.

Typical Gizzy surf that I got, fun but nothing more.

Out of season Giz is a relaxing place to hang out.  It feels remote enough now, back in the day this place must have felt like the end of the world to those who lived here and the travellers that made it this far.  There's a beauty all its own to this part of the coast, gentle and unkempt at the same time - very different from the rainforests in my part of the country.

East Coast hillside, dawn.

After a couple of days I was ready to head south again.  I checked the surf forecast and saw that the east swell would hold for another day, the next dawn looking like it'd be it for a few days.  So I determined to head for home after a night on the peninsula.  I found a deserted freedom campsite, which really...doesn't get a lot better.  I cast out a line and watched the sunset, once again acting as a one-man fish exclusion zone. 

Spot for the night, Mahia peninsula

Yeah, that'll do.

The surf the next morning was just...magic.  Blue, sand bottomed lefts and a conveyor belt rip, a golden sunrise and ahhhh!  Surfer heaven.  A thousand miles made worthwhile in two wonderful hours before the first breaths of the sea breeze stirred. 

I headed towards home.  I'd passed the Ruahines on the way East and thought they looked like there'd be a cool spot to pass a night.  I puled into a campsite at three, which was deserted, miserable, and felt like nothing so much as the kind of place you go to get axe-murdered by bogans. 

Ruahines, beautiful but spooky.

I had an uneasy couple of hours nap, then, sort of refreshed, I looked at the map and figured I was about three and a half hours from home.  I pushed on through dusk and reminded myself again, that this year, at last, I really must get the bus's headlights resilvered.  It was a magic few days away, I fell in love with the bus and surfing all over again, and it'll be a small price to pay.  However, that's for winter.  I'd like to keep her busy this summer....

Pushing through the night with epic, epic headlights.

Jobs for Winter, part one of...

The last race of the season is tomorrow, and there's a storm raging outside.  This means two things - firstly, that I'll soon be having a few weeks with a bit more time, and secondly, having dropped my daughter off to a friend's house, I've been given a timely reminder of two of the jobs I've been promising the bus this winter - one is to clean as many of the electrical contacts up as I can, in an effort to improve the frankly abysmal performance of the wipers whenever anything else is on - like headlights, for example - and the second is to install a new heater cable. 

Grown men cry at the prospect of installing a new heater cable on these things, specifically because of just how much fun it can be removing the old one.  I'm going to have to think of something cleverer than the next sentence to accomplish this:  I've had a good tug (well, the nights were long and there was nothing on the telly) with a pair of pliers (ouch) and vice grips (double ouch) bracing my feet on the wheels and heaving for all I was worth (mustn't boast, and all that) and nothing showed even the slightest sign of coming.

If this storm produces a bit of snow, I might even manage to put it off until next year.

Speaking too soon again...

There I was congratulating myself on having a thoroughly reliable bus: result?  Oil all over the garage floor, skinned knuckles (my hands actually start leaking blood as soon as I touch a spanner), and just a little swearing.  It's nothing too serious, but fixing this leak still requires the removal of the exhaust which is, on these vehicles, an utter pain in the arse.  But I suppose it's good for me to keep my mechanical eye in, as it were, and on the way I'll get the chance to do a few bits of preventative maintenance that should keep her purring happily for a few more years' yet.

And there I was too, saying I was putting down my second draft and moving onto something else.  Well, I suppose that was half-right - I did put down my second draft.  I moved instead, straight to the third, without pausing to finish.  There was, as I've said previously, a spark missing, and I was never going to find a spark by mechanically flogging a dead horse.  Far better to cut the losses and proceed straight to the major surgery - a rewrite, changes of viewpoint and tense, deepening and turning of the plot.

If any one element does such a thing, then plot keeps readers turning pages: so I'm devoting more and more time to making sure I understand what's going on.  I'm not in the business of drawing up a rigid scaffold and sticking to it ruthlessly, that's an approach I've tried before and that yields the stiff, joyless results you might expect from a process that removes, at a single stroke, much of the impetus behind discovering new and interesting turns in the story - namely, language.

I'm a firm believer that language on its own can be a powerful agent of creativity.  Words suggest others, changes in tone and viewpoint suggest other words that lead, in turn, to other places and different stories.  Cutting myself off from that removes much of the fun of the creative journeying my writing takes me on. That's not to say I don't have to exercise restraint or discipline - of course I do, otherwise I'd never get anywhere.

Which, to complete the bus/writing allegory, applies to fixing oil leaks too.  Because at times like these it's restraint and discipline that keep me from smashing the thing with a sledgehammer, or worse - taking it to a mechanic.

Sunny days and creative delays

Since the house has been on the market bus trips have become more frequent: the sense of impending departure, even in the absence of any kind of done deal, has given us the impetus to try and get out into Otago more.  And it's beautiful, although I knew that already.  Wildlife, crazy beautiful beaches...

Hooker's sea lion in the dunes, Sandfly Bay.

Further up the road than I've been before...

Sandfly Bay, Otago Peninsula

The bus has been running better than it ever has in my ownership.  I'm trying to figure out exactly what I've done differently, but I can't actually see anything.  It's another example, if I needed one, of the organic contrariness of these things.  I'm convinced it's running better because I've finally convinced it I have some clue what I'm doing with a spanner in my hand (something, I admit, that has not always been the case.)  And I finally arrived at that happy point, where I looked at the service schedule in the Bentley manual (the knowledge), and found that there was not. one. single. thing. that was left wanting or of which I was uncertain. 

The writing, on the other hand, could be viewed in another way.  I've decided to put my completed first draft to one side - the second visit seemed too soon, too mechanical, too joyless - and am spending my writing time revisiting an idea that's been brewing, in one shape or another - my file history tells me - for nearly five years.  I'm putting no guns to heads, having no expectations: because the genesis of this story has been so long I'm reluctant to call it over.  The process is different too - I have no plan, I'm letting the language lead the way.  So far, I've always had something to write...so far.

Curing itchy feet...

My feet have been getting itchy.  Really itchy.

Whether this is because I've barely set foot outside Dunedin in seven months - two brief weekend camping trips aside - or because the end of summer is in the air (was that it?), or because in this last crazy fortnight in NZ what's really important in life is standing proud in our minds, I'm not sure.  I know last weekend was really hard though - epic sessions going down in Taranaki with a crew of good friends out, while I drifted between so-so waves in a layer of fleece.

I got back from a trip out in the van, swept the sand and the ice-cream wrappers out, and parked it in the garage.  Next to the camping gear, and the shelf with the spares on it.  There's an oil filter sat there now, along with a four-litre can of Castrol.  I stood there and looked at my van and figured just what I'd have to do to fire it up and drive the thousand mile journey north:  oil change, valves, set the timing. Check the tyres.  Fetch the ipod and throw some baked beans in the headbanger.  Go - there's plenty of time along the way to deliver the motivational speeches that I know, deep down, keep her going.

It was hard enough not to run right on in and book the ferry then and there.

I moped around for a couple of days, wondering how I could shake myself out of it.

I surfed every day - quick blats to the beach in the car, so as not to cut up the day.  Didn't help, too much.  Now I had sore shoulders to go with the itchy feet.

Tried to write - that always makes me feel better.  Couldn't.

So I loaded up the bus - me and the dog, a surfboard, lunch, and a laptop.  I went and parked down at a nice beach, surfed some okay waves, walked the dog, and then sat down in the bus and ate.

It's a curious thing, as to why sitting in the back of the bus should be so healing.  Maybe it's the smell. (All buses smell good.  If you're an olfactory pervert who doesn't like getting their hands dirty - stay away.  You'll have to have one.)  Maybe it's some cosmic imprint left in the fabric of the thing by near-as-dammit forty years of good times going down in there.  Whatever.  But for the first time in a week the words came back, in a trickle at first, and with them some sense of - if not contentment, then a lessening of unease, for sure.

Buses is fucking great, and you knows it.

Getting ready for roadtripping...again

I had another OK day of writing today.  I'm still at a point where I'm going over what has gone before - no teasers yet - but where I'm laying foundations for what's happening next.  Seeing as how I really haven't mapped this bit out, it's exciting, although slow writing.  The plot as it stands so far is pretty detailed and intricate - there's a lot of historical references, which I hope both add interest and authority.  The need to appear authoritative isn't a vain thing in writing, it's essential - it establishes the trust the reader has in the author; and also, as Flaubert said, God is in the details.

I picked up some oil and bits today for servicing the kombi.  I'm planning a roadie on my own down to the Catlins sometime in the next couple of weeks, should the surf and weather co-operate.  The days are pretty short and the nights long, so it'll probably be a one or two night deal, I think.  I'll take the laptop and write while the battery lasts.  My writing career began travelling: I consciously started pursuing this writing dream when I worked out at sea as an observer on Spanish fishing boats on Newfoundland's Grand Banks.  Over four months I penned the bones of what is probably the world's worst novel.

I vividly remember taking this photograph after a morning's writing; on the morning of the first day of the new millennium, feeling the ache of missing my eighteen-month old daughter and wife. I finished that novel two years later, and it occupies a proud position on my bookshelf from where it never moves.  It sits there taunting me really - I am your work.  As a motivator it's quite powerful:  there's a strong sense that in this awful work is something I have to atone for. Yet I'm equally proud of it: it's the stamp that marks the beginnings of my apprenticeship.

The first sketches of that novel were done a couple of years before, on my own again in a plain pension on the small island of Graciosa, just off Lanzarote. In between picking urchin spines out of my feet and trying to stem the flow of blood from scalp wounds - all marks of honour from tackling a heaving left-hander five miles daily walk away - I started writing out characters.  I would never have thought then that Graciosa would be the birthplace of something that would stick with me and possess me like writing - trying to tell stories - has done ever since.  Funny and powerful things happen on the road.

So when I travel solo I always look for and make room to discover new things in my writing.  Hopefully it'll be the same going down to the Catlins.  I'm timing this because I think that I'll be running into blockages soon, and the trip might just head those off.    But before then, I need to change the oil, adjust the valves, fix a couple of leaking pushrod seals and change the dipstick boot, a task which promises to have me swearing in new and interesting ways.

Unsatisfying interior adventures

Yes, that title's just one of the many reasons I should never try writing erotica.  Went for a spin on Sunday looking for inspiration.  Drove through a beautiful landscape, so different from what's outside the door, only an hour from home.

Gravel roads, beautiful hills, almost no traffic - it was old volkswagen heaven.

Except you can't go near any of it.  We drove for nearly a hundred miles through stunning scenery and saw not a fence, not a lay-by, not one foot-track - just mile after mile of barbed wire.  Finally got to a place called Middlemarch and found a footpath, but couldn't take the dog on it.  Maybe the Taeri council - if there is one - might like to put up a giant sign that says simply: Fuck Off.  It's in the subtext anyway.  If I had an ounce of her talent I'd be doing a kiwi version of Fay Godwin's Our Forbidden Land - someone needs to, before it's too late.


On a happier note, the book's been going very well.  I haven't felt any of the symptoms of running out of steam: I still know where I'm going tomorrow.  I'm annotating my first draft with comments in Word, highlighting all the little things I'm spotting as I'm going that I need to do better or find out:  do Royal Jordanian Airways, for example, serve Alcohol?  (I doubt it.)  Is all their in-flight food halal?  Have I shown my hero's back-story enough - shown that he's made of the right stuff?  (Not yet...) As it is, I'm currently confining my research to establishing the points without which I can't move the story on.  It feels like the right thing to do - to keep the flow going...

Jelly-shouldered and running out of steam

More waves today. I felt tired as soon as I woke up this morning: I think I must have - quite uncharacteristically - caught so many waves yesterday that my arms and shoulders did their week's quota of paddling in one hit. In situations like this I can usually expect the sympathy from the rest of the family to manifest itself as an evening of being called upon to change light-bulbs, fetch things off high shelves, or serve tea with my feet while doing a handstand - anything for the thrill of watching me cry, in fact. I'm not the world's fastest paddler - in fact it's safe to say that if you ever find yourself being out-paddled by me, you need to get your fat arse in a swimming pool, pronto. As for me, I'm not fat. Just insulated.

I don't feel as if I'm running out of steam with the novel, exactly - more that I'm hitting the technical bits which have got to be got right, inevitably making the going somewhat slower. So my word count for the day is pretty modest and I'm going to have to find some time this weekend to ensure that the momentum that I have is conserved. I'm not working to any hard and fast deadline for the first draft, but I want to have the luxuries of putting it away between drafts, of taking breaks when it gets a bit much. If I'm going to get to the final finish line of a finished article within the year, hitting walls is a luxury I can't afford.

I can afford to run the bus, though. For some reason, after having the rear suspension set, it's decided that not only does it enjoy keeping up with the other traffic really, but that it'll do so while doing 23 to the gallon. For an old VW bus, that's almost the height of parsimony. Of course, it's made up for this by springing another oil leak, but with a sheet of newspaper and a squint I can be in denial for months - not a strategy that works for premature ejaculation. Apparently...

On a lighter note, the main highway in and out of Dunedin is closed by the city's second bomb scare in 24 hours. I wonder if it's anything to do with the latitude - do Dunedinites have the same kind of pull that leads Swedes to kill themselves like lemmings, or Finns to drink more meths than water? Well, there'll be plenty of material for another book, anyway...

Not the day I expected...

There I was expecting a beautiful, sunny day - like yesterday. I had visions of hiding from the sun in the van after a nice, sunburney-face kind of a surf, willing myself to get something done before I reluctantly trudged home.

Instead it was grey and cold, and I had the heater running at full blast in the van, which is to say that I had a faint trickle of warmth on the downhills and a blast of the good stuff on the ups. I found a little right point down the coast with one guy there, getting out pretty much as soon as I arrived. The pictures are from later on once it got a bit of wind on it, and you can't really tell that it was nicely overhead. But when I arrived it was sheet glass perfection, zipping down the sandbar. My backhand's usually left on the beach, so it was a double pleasure to actually have it in the water with me today.



Then afterwards, I drove down towards Taeri and found a beautiful place to park up and write. I poured myself a cup of coffee and that was that - next thing I knew I'd knocked out a thousand good words and left it right where I knew I could pick it up. How's this for a view from the office?



I thought today was going to be a good day, but it was better. It was one of those that'll have an index card all of it's own in the surfing ledger, to be pulled out and enjoyed again and again. Suddenly, the homesickness for Taranaki and warmer waves I was feeling seems to have dimmed. How much are those electric suits again?