Once a Land of Birds by Magi Nams

Author:Magi Nams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Leaf Rain Books

Perhaps muted by yesterday’s storm, today is a quiet, ephemeral interlude brightened by pleasant sunshine and vividly coloured acrylic paintings that lie like decorations on our kitchen table. This morning, Dainis painted the view through the kitchen window – all luscious greens and bright blues, with a smear of pink representing azalea blossoms thrown down onto the lawn by yesterday’s storm; everything bordered in a frame of brilliant red. Jānis painted a house of magenta-rust bricks set against rounded brown hills, and then came up with the idea of painting fireworks onto black paper. I concocted a Port Hills-y work of cabbage trees set against dry hills and greenish-blue ocean.

When I mixed the blue, white, and green paints to create the desired hue for the ocean, a sudden swirl of white on blue had me envisioning the surf pounding onto the beach at Brooklands Spit two weeks ago, so I painted that, too. It was like play, and there was no right or wrong, not even any answer. The only caveat was not to go too far, not to add more brushstrokes than needed, for in art, as in life, I’ve found that less is often better than more.

October 14

A road sign’s blunt message: YOU’RE A LONG TIME DEAD, SO WHAT’S THE HURRY? bears down on us and then sweeps away, leaving only open highway. Intent on tramping in the foothills of the Southern Alps, we drive south through sheep and cattle pastures and past pine plantations marred by blow downs, perhaps the result of the recent storm. In the distance, the Southern Alps – Canterbury’s sharply protruding western bones – rear up against clear blue sky. Five days ago, those mountains captivated us. Today, we seek another sip from their bucket of exhilarating promise.

Forty kilometres east of Rakaia Gorge, the Rakaia River forms a vast expanse of interlacing stone and water more than two kilometres wide. We cross it on New Zealand’s longest bridge and pass the town of Rakaia before angling southwest toward Mount Somers, a low peak twenty-five kilometres south of Mount Hutt. The boys chuckle at a motley collection of a hundred or more shoes hanging on a pasture fence and giggle at a herd of curious beef cattle crowding the same fence farther down the road. We stop to inspect the cattle. They stare, so we stare back. They crowd even closer to the fence. Dainis and Jānis burst out laughing.

As we approach our destination of Woolshed Creek and the Coalminers Flat tracks near Mount Somers, it’s obvious that spring in the foothills lags behind that in Lincoln. Lambs are small, and pastures are muted shades of brownish green.

Image

Sheep near Coalminers Flat

Alongside a gravel road, stacks of beehives punctuate thick stands of Scotch broom. Gorse grows rampant over hillsides. One long slope of it is dead from herbicide spraying that left a thousand spiky grey skeletons and the spectre of ecological death in its wake. I stare at it in near-disbelief. Never before have I seen such full-scale poisoning of every living plant over such a large area.

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