The Shaky Isles, Part 3: In Praise of Useless Beauty

[Layer upon layer of beauty - Doubtful Sound, Fiordland, New Zealand.]

Elvis Costello possibly had the female of the species in mind when he penned the song All This Useless Beauty. However the phrase came to mind in a different context while I was in New Zealand’s Doubtful Sound.

The back-story begins in the Fiordland town of Manapouri. Decades ago Manapouri was a place of controversy. The lake that drains some of the extravagantly wet and lofty peaks of Fiordland, was due to be raised and joined with Lake Te Anau for hydro-electric power generation. Conservationists saw it as an afront to a beautiful place, as well as a foot-in-the-door for further incursions into the wild south-west of the South Island.

In the end a compromise saw the lake level remain more or less where it was, with some elaborate tunnelling now linking it and Lake Te Anau to an underground power station near Deep Cove in Doubtful Sound.

Our trip to that fjord began with a boat journey across Lake Manapouri to West Cove. From there a bus took us up and over Wilmott Pass on a road accessible only by water, through forest that could conjugate green many times over, were it a verb. And to Deep Cove, whose 5 metres of rain per annum explain the area’s eloquence in green.

There we boarded the Tuteko II,  just four of us, plus a crew of two, and sailed into a world of useless beauty. Because beyond Deep Cove there is nothing but frighteningly deep water, neck-achingly steep mountains, and heart-achingly beautiful scenery. It is a place that is patently not there for the service of humanity. Its water, wind, weather and wildness just are. Created by glacial action over several ice ages, it is a true fjord, a landscape open to the sea that has been cleft and scoured into a three dimensional puzzle of such depth that it laughs at map makers.

Well might Douglas Adams’ comic planet designer, Slartibartfast, have taken pride in his invention of fjords. And well might the Romantic poets have sought out the numinous thrill and chill of such landscapes, and coined the word sublime to describe them.

Even in a visit of just two days, I begin to feel myself taken prisoner by beauty. Words fail and expressions of awe begin to hang limp and useless. Even in the dark of night a humid nor’wester thumps into a swift and icy sou’wester, thrusting moist air high into the night sky. It rains wetly. Brilliant sheets of lightning illuminate the bellying cloud. Rolling rumbles of thunder ricochet off the steep canyon walls. And then all is deafeningly quiet.

In the clear morning we wake to the tinkling of tuis. The waterfall by which we’d anchored has found full voice too after the evening’s deluge. The surrounding tops are freshly garmented in snow. I stretch, gape, and finally form my impossible question. What do you do with such terrible beauty?

[A terrible beauty! Water plunges from the steep sides of Doubtful Sound, NZ]

My father was fond of the Stoic philosophers, fashioning for himself a set of more or less practical beliefs. They included the notion that aloofness from that which could hurt you,  let you down, or be lost to you, would shelter you from grief and bring some form of contentment. As sons will do, I rebelled against that philosophy of detachment, especially when I came to see that it did not keep him from even trivial grief. (His tears during the B-grade “weepie” “Lassie Come Home” are part of family legend!)

For me beauty is to be celebrated; and love to be lived. Out in Doubtful Sound I just want to give in, to be gulped down by the beauty. I suppose that puts me in peril, but I choose to remain open to beauty.

Perhaps that puts me in the same boat as the flightless kakapo. That marvellous parrot once ranged throughout all the useless beauty of Fiordland. Today barely 100 individual birds remain, thanks to introduced predators. Most of those birds are on predator-proof islands, a kind of avian gated community that’s virtually guarded by humans.

The same Douglas Adams met the bird and described it thus.

The kakapo is a bird out of time. If you look one in its large, round, greeny- brown face, it has a look of serenely innocent incomprehension that makes you want to hug it and tell it that everything will be all right, though you know that it probably will not be.

Might he not conclude the same about Fiordland, or indeed about any one of us? Which place or person is not imperiled by climate, comet, cataclysm or love? Even so, I choose attachment. In my incomprehension, I choose to look into that greeny-brown face. And I hope to do so for the rest of my life.

Finding Whirinaki

[written following a visit to the central North Island of New Zealand, September 2009]

Place names can ring like a bell, although the reasons for this may vary. I once lived near towns whose names I delighted in reciting: Cookamidgera, Mandagery, Mugincoble. The last, pronounced “Muh-JINK-a-bull”, was also a railway town, giving its nomenclature an onomatopoeic perfection.

For passing generations, Passchendaele and Pearl Harbour evoked the opposite of delight, and for some of my generation Lake Pedder still carries a plangent, melancholy note. Across the Tasman Sea Lake Manapouri and Whirinaki Forest sound all the sweeter for what might have happened there.

Whirinaki (the “Wh” is pronounced as a “F”) has long fascinated me. But it is early spring 2009 before I am finally going there. 25 years have passed since the logging ceased. It’s a clear and sun-filled day, and I’m in the company of Joe Doherty, a respected elder of the local Ngai Tuhoe Maori tribe. He and his family run Te Urewera Treks here in the eastern Bay of Plenty area, in the central North Island of New Zealand. Today I have Joe one-on-one.

On the drive up he is as happy speaking about his Irish ancestry as his long and local Maori heritage. But when we reach Whirinaki, the first thing he does is stop and pray in Maori. Or at least that’s my take on the Maori invocation or karakia. He pauses at the forest portal, explaining that he will acknowledge the creator and the spirit of the forest, and ask them to welcome us to this place. His voice is deep and his tone reverent, but the words scarcely penetrate the forest, seeming to be absorbed by the foliage.

We step into the ancient podocarp forest, once dubbed a dinosaur forest by David Bellamy because its ancestor trees were around in the Jurassic. If Joe’s prayer hadn’t already done it, the still, quiet and darkly green place would have quickly awed me. Great vaulting trunks of rata and rimu; matai and miro; totara and kahikatea burst from dense and deeply green fern glades. The sometimes fissured trunks are covered with delicate-leafed creepers and climbing ferns; the upper branches festooned with hitch-hiking epiphytes.

When Charles Darwin first stepped into a Brazilian rainforest, his breath was similarly taken away. “Sublime devotion (was) the prevalent feeling”, he reported, describing:

Twiners entwining twiners — tresses like hair — beautiful lepidoptera — Silence — hosannah.

For us there are no butterflies, but the hosannahs of kaka cascade down from the tree tops, part parrot-scratch, part song-bird melody. All else is muffled – our footsteps, our conversation – as though in a cathedral. As Joe quietly explains his karakia, it confirms my sense of its closeness to prayer. Surely part of prayer is a humbling and grateful recognition of powers far greater than the human.

I pause to wonder why I, as a Christian, do not stop to make this sort of acknowledgement in similar places. Walking through this botanical wonder, I also ponder how Christian notions of sin might apply to the destruction of the great majority of New Zealand’s podocarp forests. In 1947 the New Zealand Forest Service saw it in different terms, summing up with chilling pragmatism that "dairy farming demands such land (and timber) in the national interest and kahikatea forests are therefore impossible."

Against such a backdrop Whirinaki is a miraculous survivor; a virtual tree museum in national terms; a small arboreal throw-back. Today it is surrounded by a vast acreage of pine and eucalypt plantation, tree farms that deaden mile after mile of the drive down SH1 from Auckland to Wellington.

I first drove that road in the early 1970s, a wide-eyed and gormless Australian student on a fleeting visit. But even then I had a sense that the heart was missing from this countryside. Here in Whirinaki, 35 years later, might I have found its still-beating pulse? Here at least, the wonder of water and soil are still in the service of what has grown and flown here since the dinosaurs. As Joe tells me about the long human connections here, the picture widens. I gain a glimpse of a living system of plants and animals; humans and landforms, that indicate it’s even more than just the botanical heart of New Zealand’s North Island. We can have a place in the forests too. Darwin’s hosannah fits Whirinaki.