Palmy

I dreamed last night that Mom needed to repaint her house and had been sold on a new kind of product she asked me to apply for her. The first layer was color. Then I had to get a sprayer and coat all the surfaces—ceilings, walls and even the carpets—with a special adhesive liquid containing uncooked rice and popcorn seeds. Afterwards we had to turn the furnace up. It had seemed like such a good idea at the time. The house filled with sticky cooked rice and popped corn, and all you had to do was scoop some up with your hand and you had dinner and a snack. But it was impossible to clean up, and the more I scraped, the more cooked rice and popcorn continued to sprout in that spot. Then people walked on it and ground it into the rugs, rendering the food uneatable and the house unlivable.

. . .

Two weeks ago today it was pouring rain with gale-force winds as we crossed the water toward the South Island. Today as we boarded the ferry back, I was blinded by the sun. Hooray! Here, we’ve left the Queen Charlotte Sound and Tory Channel and are entering the Cook Strait.

Aboard the ship we ended up sitting next to a friendly woman, Helen, just returned from being among “the gypsies” of Bulgaria and Azerbaijan for the purpose of “spreading the word that we are all unconditionally loved by Our Father.” She talked about the dark place she’d been in until The Lord spoke to her. I said I understood about dark places but not The Lord. She seemed to see a window of opportunity for conversion. I respectfully slammed it shut. Sitting next to her as I began to read The Drama of the Gifted Child, I wondered what she would think of this quotation, which I’m taking out of context: “Is it possible, then, to free ourselves altogether from illusions? History demonstrates that they sneak in everywhere, that every life is full of them—perhaps because the truth often seems unbearable to us.” Oh well. Whatever works, as long as it doesn’t hurt someone else. But then there’s the problem of how you define “hurt.”

“I am a butterfly,” Helen told me. “For forty years I walked around my branch and ate leaves, as I was told. Then I became a chrysalis, wrapped up with no light. And now I am free.” She has recently left a loveless marriage. She wants to open a retreat where a newly divorced woman can go to heal. She plans to accept just one woman at a time and take no money for the week of care. “I just want to give her love.”

Frequently people hear my accent and ask where I’m from. Some guess the U.S. but more commonly they venture it’s Canada. “Why?” I asked one such person today. “Because when you say the U.S. and you’re wrong, some people are insulted.” (I am hardly surprised at our international reputation, going around killing the crap out of selected peoples as we do, and being so profoundly insular. A Kiwi told me that school kids here have to learn all our 50 states. I don’t recall much attention paid during my secondary education to anywhere beyond our borders, except for places with which we were militarily engaged—and even then it was only to learn about how they were wrong.) Now and then locals place me in Scotland or England or Ireland. I think a trace of my old Northeastern neo-Brit accent is still with me.

Tonight’s stop is Palmerston North, known as “Palmy” by locals and called “the suicide capital of New Zealand” by John Cleese in 2005. “If you want to kill yourself but lack the courage, I think a visit to Palmerston North will do the trick.” A year-and-a-half later the town got its revenge by dubbing the nearby Awapuni landfill the “John Cleese Memorial Tip” and erecting a sign: “Mt Cleese.” In fact, the only reason we’re stopping here is its relative proximity to our next night’s destination, Lake Taupo. I’ll let you know if Cleese was right—if I don’t off myself first. I asked Syd, who was navigating, to try to find the landfill on our good, detailed map, but we had no luck.

. . .

I just overheard a little Kiwi boy say to his mother, “Is it true Americans drive on the wrong side of the road?”

Back on land after three hours of smooth waters, we had no trouble finding our way out of Wellington and to Palmy, where we are now. Now, I love John Cleese but I don’t want him to unduly influence my opinion of this place. I’ll come to my own conclusions.

He’s right. There is no there here. A McDonald’s, K-Mart and Burger King welcome one to the outskirts of town. A block away, dozens of shabby mall stores advertising big sales surround the central town square. At the Pac-n-Save, gloomy customers schlump barefoot down the aisles. The young man in the parking lot who rounded up carts appeared to be drunk, or very clumsy; he’d grab a cart and shove it vigorously toward its mates, and miss, crash!, into a nearby light pole. Then there was our dinner. The curry tasted like old fish, while the piped-in Muzak made me borderline homicidal.

For some reason the word apogee just popped into my head and I want to use it, but this seems to be an apogee-free zone so I can’t work it in. Perhaps the apogee of this town’s architecture is our 1970s motel, where a wee sign reassures us that the mattresses are regularly sprayed for bugs. I’ll be more generous than grumpy old Cleese, and I’ll say that the town has many charms. It’s just that they’re all imperceptible to visiting humans. Maybe the bedbugs feel welcome. I am grateful for Mitex Mattress Hygienics: “Have a good night’s sleep.”