An island in time
Revisiting some Auckland memories (5 minute preview, 9 minute read)
Sometimes things just don’t go to plan. This article was supposed to be about Rangitoto, the island in the Hauraki Gulf near Auckland. It’s a place I’ve visited many times, but all my visits were before the age of digital cameras, and I’m not sure where my photos are. I had a spare day in Auckland, on my way to visit relatives in Australia. So, I decided to visit Rangitoto.
The trouble with islands, but also what makes them magical, is that they are inaccessible. Rangitoto is close to Auckland, but during the week only one ferry goes there a day, and I managed to miss it. My troubles began the day before, when I was getting the house clean and organised for my house and pet-sitter. All was going well until I came to clean the large fish tank in my lounge. I had to switch the filter pump off to clean it, and when I turned the pump back on, it made a gurgling sound then stopped. I fiddled around with it for a while, but it was clearly quite dead.
The fish in this tank need the filter pump. There was no way I could leave it. I panicked for a while, before remembering I had a spare pump in the cupboard. It wasn’t the right kind of pump, but I thought I could make it work.
I was right, but the whole episode took three hours. The bathroom, which had been clean, was now smeared with black gunge from the filter. There was a pile of damp towels on the floor, also smeared with black gunge. The house sitter was due to arrive and I hadn’t done half of what I needed to do. I hadn’t started to pack, and I had to leave the house in three hours.
The filter was only the first disaster. I was showing the house sitter around, trailed by Donna who couldn’t work out whether to be excited about a visitor or anxious because my suitcase was sitting empty on the bedroom floor. We were standing in the kitchen when I looked towards the hall and saw a spreading pool of water on the floor. There had been forty litres of water sitting in a tub ready to top up the tank. Somehow, a hose connected to that tub had been knocked and those forty litres of water were now on the floor.
The towels which hadn’t been used mopping up water from fixing the filter were used to mop up the flood.
I’m grateful for the fact my house sitter didn’t run screaming from this scene of chaos. We got the flood under control and I showed her the house’s various quirks. I showed her the dinner routine with the pets and began to pack. It was 5.30pm and I was leaving on the 7pm overnight bus to Auckland. I gave up on my plan to pare down my packing to one small suitcase and just started throwing things into my larger suitcase.
I made it onto the bus without further drama, and managed to get a reasonable amount of sleep. However, the bus stopped at every possible stop on the way, so it was a more disrupted and slower journey than usual, and then there was heavy traffic coming into Auckland. The bus arrived half an hour later than scheduled, and nearly an hour later than its usual arrival time.
But I still had plenty of time to get to the Rangitoto ferry. Or so I thought.
It was only when I arrived at my mother’s place in Auckland that I realised I had forgotten my passport. I could explain to my house sitter where to find it, but I still had to get it to Auckland. After some time googling and phoning courier companies, and paying the hefty bill, my passport was on its way. I thought that I still had time to make the Rangitoto ferry, but it turned out that I didn’t. I reached the terminal to see the only ferry for the day sailing away from the dock.
If I’d had more time to think, I could, perhaps, have pivoted to the article I planned to follow Rangitoto, which is about the island of Hawai’i (not the island group, but the largest island, which is sometimes called the Big Island although it’s more correctly known as Hawai’i). Like Rangitoto, it’s a volcano, but unlike Rangitoto it’s very much still active. I’ve got all my photos on my laptop, including the images of the Hawai’ian relative of pohutukawa growing on bare scoria, a scene which could have been photographed on Rangitoto.
But I hadn’t put enough thought into preparing, and I knew it wasn’t going to work. Instead, I thought of another island, a metaphorical one. It’s an island of green tucked in between Auckland City Hospital, the university, a wealthy inner-city suburb and New Zealand’s most complicated motorway interchange. I grew up calling it the Auckland Domain, but it’s built on an ancient volcano known as Pukekawa, and the original name is increasingly being used.
My childhood memories of Pukekawa are centred around the duck ponds. I loved anywhere there was water, although I remember even then that the water looked murky and foetid. When I was at university, I loved the Wintergardens, two giant glasshouses near the duckponds which are filled with exotic flowers and foliage. I had a dream to live in a house which was like one of those glasshouses – half home, half rainforest. There would be plants everywhere, a pond in the middle with fish, mezzanine floors with comfortable chairs among the lush leaves and walkways among the tops of the tallest plants. It was a wildly impractical dream – I don’t have enough hours in the day to maintain all the plants, my clothes would go mouldy and the humidity would destroy my laptop. But that wasn’t the point. During a dark time, imagining this impractical, wonderful house brought me some light.