How the land lies

Abstract

Our place is being battered by wind this morning. Severe nor' west gales shake the house on its foundations. Trees we have planted bend and dance then stand straight and tremble in aftershock between each gust. The forecasters predict the gales will ease later in the day, before returning from the south tomorrow. Possibly the Rimutaka road is closed. The Tararua range across the valley is silhouetted, arched by clouds, which have their own intense, wind sculpted and shifting landscape. Before coming to live here, Catherine and I cycled for months of 1990 through Italy, Switzerland, France, and then up the west coast of Ireland. We pedalled our way through some rough weather at times, but nothing was quite like the north Atlantic gale that hit us near the Cliffs of Moher in western Ireland. I got blown off my bike. Turning my parka into a sail, a gust of wind somersaulted me over the handlebars and I landed on my back in the middle of the road. There was nothing between us and the North Pole to soften that particular storm. Two hundred metres beneath the Cliffs the Atlantic beat against the rocky shore, huge breakers spraying hundreds of metres, smearing windows a mile from the beach with salt. The sense of that place, Moher, the beach at Doolin, in my mind has a wildness touched with a feeling of being at the edge of the world. Men and women crofting there, with stone cottages for shelter, must have been tough, with survival skills well suited to the task of emigration to the colonies of the 19th century world.