New Zealand part 10 – Nothing, Nothing

It’s a damp, greying kind of day, all low clouds and drizzle. It’s a bickering over nothing, irritated at everything kinda day. It’s the kind of day, in truth, that I am always tempted to omit from travelogs and stories told. Filled not so much with painful sweeping truths as grimy little realities of life on the road.

The first hours of the morning are full of
Fine.
Sure.
Whatever you want.
Fine.

And then we’re on the road, driving north from little Franz Josef, not so much a town as a dot on the map serving one thing: helicopter tours of the Fox and Franz Josef glaciers. When we stopped there the night before not even the two restaurants in town were open. This morning the streets are empty, as an impending rain storm has shuttered any chance of a helicopter ride. The same storm has also forced us to cancel two additional backpacking trips because of the danger of flooding and becoming trapped in the backcountry; grinding our trip to a halt and leaving both of us frustrated.

But when you’re on the road things don’t stop, they only change direction. So we putter our tiny car into the oncoming rain and begin our drive up the coast. The forecast calls for near-biblical amounts of rain along the West Coast but the storm is late in its arrival and we drive through a landscape ever-changing. One minute windshield wipers flailing against the torrent the next minute the roads are nearly dry and one could be forgiven for describing the sky as just the littlest bit blue. A familiar refrain presses against my lips against the obvious unreality: “what a beautiful day.” But it is, it is a remarkably beautiful day even with the mountains hidden by clouds, the sea blockaded by shrubby green-brown trees. Because bad days happen wherever you are and I’d rather be in a small car on the road than in my small apartment back in Seattle. The joy of being somewhere new, even on the bad days, so entirely eclipses the mundanity of the familiar that I cannot help but say it: “what a beautiful day.”

—
We shut off the car in the small town of Greymouth, a former mining town stuck somewhere in the middle of reinventing itself into a tourist town. Too bad there’s nothing to do here.

That night Keith and I lay in bed and watch as the lightning illuminates the sky, bright as a cosmic spotlight but without the accompanying thunder; the melodramatics without the danger. The storm is here but we are safe in our little rented bed for two. A nest of home within each other, not so much us against the world, more like us within the world, a center, a home from which the road doesn’t feel so chaotic.