A winter's tale

Turner: "It's brisk, bristly and bright in the morning as I write this. There are no clouds anywhere over Rough Ridge to the east or Blackstone Hill to the west. I imagine diamonds are glinting in the snow on my back lawn."

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THE RUSSIAN poet Osip Mandelstam wrote of stars in the sky like frost on the blade of an axe. That image resounds, strikes me as entirely apt if you live in my part of the world, the inland spaces of southern New Zealand, energy milch cow to the rest of New Zealand.

It's brisk, bristly and bright in the morning as I write this. There are no clouds anywhere over Rough Ridge to the east or Blackstone Hill to the west. I imagine diamonds are glinting in the snow on my back lawn. I'm sitting here in my possum socks. On my head I have one of my several woollen beanies. My stringy frame hosts a singlet, a very thick lined "bush" shirt, and over that two woollen jerseys. For the time being I've lost my fingerless woollen mittens. In my "main" room is a small woodburner that, years ago, I put in what was previously an utterly useless, ineffectual fireplace.

For three months of the year I keep my fire burning slowly all night and most of the day. I spend about two weeks a year cutting and splitting and stacking wood in preparation for winter. The wood a mix of willow, pine and anything else I can find I stack under trees down the back and in old metal water tanks lying on their sides behind the garage. I have a small garden shed four paces from the back door that I keep half full of wood, and a bin in my tiny back porch which holds about two days' worth of fuel.

Gathering, sawing and splitting wood is satisfying. I like the smell of sap, of bark and sawdust, like the colours and the rings and grain of the wood. There's an art in working out where and how to hit wood in order to split it cleanly. Then I let it lie for days in the sun and wind before stacking it and basking for a moment or two when reflecting on the warmth it will provide in the depths of winter.

I live in a tiny house, a shoebox, have the unenviable distinction of hunkering in a very small town, Oturehua population 30-40 near the head of the Ida Valley in the Maniototo region of Central Otago. A few kilometres up the road are the snow-draped and pleated slopes of my beloved Hawkdun range, and a bit further off, in the northwest, is that wonderful mammoth, Mt St Bathans. In every direction are high hills and mountains, their shapes and hues often replicated by the most wonderful and startling skyscapes I have seen anywhere.

Locals tell me that, contrary to lore, it is not Ophir, in the next valley west, but Oturehua that is regularly the coldest in the district, and possibly the coldest of all New Zealand towns. Some people tell me they "envy" me living in Central Otago but then, when they find out where, they are likely to say, "only a fool would live there". When I asked Peter Kirk, a former neighbour, how to "survive winter here", he laughed and said, "leave".

Others have said bluntly that I must be mad living here, which reminds me of Yeats reflecting on who might be Mad as the mist and snow. Well, half those I know everywhere strike me as a bit mad, and I'm sure I'm no different. It's the so-called sane I fear most, those afflicted with rational-itis laved with vanity and self-delusion. They're much in evidence among the "we will do betters" who seldom do, and who yap more loudly in lead-up to election times.

LAST WINTER was pretty brutal for me. I'd had yet another serious operation and it was months before I recovered. The convalescent period coincided with one of the hardest winters for many years. For several weeks I was getting up two and three times a night to run the taps in an effort to stop water freezing in the pipes. My small header tank froze up a few times despite the Batts I'd stuffed in the space between the ceiling and the roof. Help came: Barry and Murray Becker arrived one day and piled a few bales of hay against the walls outside my kitchen and bathroom this to "keep the heat in". Then a few weeks ago, one of John Breen's carpenters, Neil McArthur, turned up and lifted a few sheets of iron off the roof and found a cold water pipe sneaking along under the eaves. It wasn't lagged properly so he fixed that and shoved some more Batts in here and there. So far, so good. Touch wood.

Thankfully, apart from a period last year, recently winters haven't been as bad as those now legendary times 18-20 years ago. For instance, for a month from June 26, 1991, it was hell in the Ida valley. In Oturehua it was -18C on June 27, -19C on July 1, -16C to -19C from July 13-16, and so on. Down at Auripo, 10km away, it was -16C June 26, -23C on July 1, and -22C on the 16th of the month. Between June 26 and July 20 the lightest frost was -13C. Snow and ice locked up the valley. Rings of wool were all over the place. When the stronger sheep got off the ground in the mornings, wool was torn from their fleeces.

There was 23cm of ice on the Ida dam and the locals curled or skated most days, there was bugger all else they could do. Diesel froze in trucks and tractors; tractor tyres burst, hinges froze on gates, door handles snapped off cars, and track crews working on the Central railway found lines broke while they were lifting them. Women couldn't walk across the road from the pub after a card evening so they crawled. People skated up and down the main road. On July 14, the pipes to long-term resident Herb Gilchrist's house froze up, for the first time in 35 years. The pipes were well lagged and buried 60cm in the ground.

Pete Kirk says "we were going mad, all you could do was curl, play cards and drink at the pub, and then work out how the hell to get home".

I came here to live in late 1999. Many's the time since that I have woken to ice on the insides of some of my windows. I sleep under a double duck down duvet and often warm the bed up a bit with an electric blanket before I get in. If sitting up reading I usually have a wool hat and shirt on.

I do the odd bit of washing of clothes, not often. The shirt I'm wearing over a T-shirt hasn't been washed for six weeks. On pellucid days, I hang washing out on a line between 11am and 3pm and then bring it in, stuff it around the hot water cylinder or in front of the firebox.

When I go for a ride on my bike I often wear a balaclava under my helmet, woollen mittens, tights, a polypropylene singlet, T-shirt, cycling jersey and a close-fitting windbreaker. And I shove two sheets of newspaper up the front between my singlet and the jersey. Yesterday, when out fantasising I was leading on the climb up Alpe D'Huez in le Tour de France, the air was sharp and tingling, the sun like a great spraggy asterisk above the Dunstan Mountains. Wonderful.

One feels of and in this land, challenged by it often, and a certain distaste for pretension or affectation. In my case there's a disinclination, too, to listen to too much whingeing about rights and entitlements driven by unreasonable or unsustainable expectations. Living here helps emphasise the difference between needs and wants, forces me to learn how to get by and make do.

I watch the hawks and magpies and other birds in their struggles to survive and wonder what they would think, if sentient, of the clamouring from those ever complaining about our lack of this or that relative to what can be extracted in Australia. New Zealand is full of noisy hard-done-bys who sometimes make it hard to distinguish the genuine articles.

Twice a day I feed an eager collection of birds on the path outside my front porch. They come within seconds of my opening the door and calling out. They attack bread and scraps and cut up apples that I gathered from a wild tree alongside the rail trail by Auripo Rd a few weeks ago. The waxies like dripping and sugared water as well. The other day they all turned up in these lines from a poem I wrote:

Look out the window

now, at the sparkling light in the clear sky,

the frost's stern whiteness on the ground,

crystals on stalks and walls, and at waxies,

their beaks jabbing the sugared water you provide.

Look at the flock of sparrows whose name

could be urgents, at the sole bedraggled starling,

the meek and dithery thrush with its speckled pinny

and the coppery-breasted female blackbirds

springing back and forth as if they're uncertain

which way to go, as if vigilance is a programme

that never fails. Look at all that, and cherish

the tendency to wonder, to dream, which sets us apart.

Often, I'm reminded of Thoreau who, for a time, learned from nature, set out "to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life". He wasn't, of course, expressing a preference for hair shirts over silk pyjamas, but he was looking for ways to apprehend the essence of what is less grasping, and hoped to become more appreciative of simpler, respectful pleasures.

Thoreau is one of several who convinced me that humility sans obsequy and slavish obeisance to gross material desire is badly needed if we are to become more at ease and less rapacious here, less concerned with demanding others assure us we are on the world map, and join us in congratulating ourselves for being "100% pure". What a fallacy that is.

In this regard I sometimes recall Edward Thomas's lines, "When gods were young / This wind was old." They curb any tendency to whinge, remind me to get on with it. Then I look forward to the day when I can say, as in my poem "Duende",

There's a warm breeze blowing down

off the mountains

now that most of the snow has gone.

- © Fairfax NZ News