Dealing with nature - it's all about respect

BY ROSEMARY MCLEOD

OPINION: Tragedies like Haiti are too vast to comprehend. I focus on my hydrangeas, formerly the one triumph in the garden this summer, which were knocked out by last weekend's weather, and now lie in a collapsed heap of powder pink and blue.

It has been the vilest summer I can remember, and the previous entire year wasn't much better. Only fools would live in Wellington's climate, and to make matters worse, we perch on a mass of fault lines. We can see the evidence of the great 19th century upheaval that gave us the Hutt Road and half the commercial area of the capital, but carry on as if it could never happen again.

I'm a great respecter of nature and its many dirty tricks, which is why you won't find me out in it whistling. School-forced marches up winding, damp clay tracks through gorse gave me a healthy disrespect for discomfort, and the only time I ever went tramping I made someone else carry my pack. Imagine my consternation when the hut we'd hiked for hours to reach had no flush toilet or hot running water, still less a corner dairy. I've never repeated that mistake.

We are surrounded by so few people, and so much bush, river, mountain and beach, that it escapes our notice that all of these are potentially lethal. Every summer there's a catalogue of deaths as a result, since we expect to casually stroll about in it as if it's our own living room.

This week there was the tale of a man who saved his family from drowning after they decided to camp in the South Wairarapa, by a river mouth. The man's pregnant partner, two young sons and mother-in-law were trapped in a Landrover where they had slept, his young daughter and nieces had slept in another car with floodwaters now lapping against their window, and his elderly father-in-law, who needs a wheelchair, yelled for help from a washed-out tent as he woke. Somehow they all survived the first hours of their week's "holiday" before they retreated back to civilisation.

You'd wonder if they'd listened to weather forecasts, or really understood what rivers do when it rains. I'd hardly blame them if they hadn't: we assume that nature, which we adore, will be kind to us because we love dolphins and use energy-efficient light bulbs, whereas it is implacable and indifferent. It has drowned a million people before, and will do so again, and this family means about as much to it as my hydrangeas do to the Haitians.

Lisa Minns, the pregnant woman involved in the South Wairarapa incident, was annoyed that there were no warning signs about the hazards of their "freedom" camping site. Local mayor Adrienne Staples said signs were planned, and should have been put up before Christmas, and she was surprised they hadn't been. She also added, somewhat blithely, I thought, "I'm sorry but I just believe there has to be some personal responsibility."

Now, where would this family have acquired that, when all the publicity we feed ourselves and the world about this country is that it's one vast Lord of the Rings set, with goblins under every rock, and elves prattling in the scrub?

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True, Wellington was being lashed by twice its average monthly rainfall in just two days last weekend, with winds up to 95kmh, and we revelled in a pathetic 11 degrees of heat.

But apparently most of the country has seen sun, and is therefore delusional.

This story reminded me of a walk I took a few years ago, near Kaikoura.

There was a large, glassed-in map of this walk, which described it as easy. It was, of course, an obstacle course for the infuriatingly fit, and as usual took far longer than the suggested time, set by the husky types who do this for a living, doubtless yodelling and toting concrete lamp posts along just for the hell of it.

Suddenly, while walking along a thin track made by sheep - the only path - I realised there was at most a foot of earth on one side of me, with below it a steep, sharp drop to oblivion, and a steep hillside on the other. There was nothing to hold on to, waves dashed on to the rocks below, and I had a paralysing attack of vertigo.

I've never trusted tourist signage since. And as for freedom camping - international news tells me that's what desperate people do in the aftermath of a disaster. There can be no other excuse.

- © Fairfax NZ News