Back from the South

Drank the last of the Obama wine (thanks Mom!), bought another retro suit for $45 (a new record for sartorial expenditure), skipped the perfectly flat stones around Lake Wakatipu, hiked around Queenstown, biked the Dunedin peninsula, inspired by Mala Decisión Dinosaurio to eat a bunch of fried food from Night and Day convenience stores, got on a bus, thought about getting on a century-old steamship, got on a plane, came home to our little flat.

A relaxing experience. I'd begun to take everything so seriously - every deadline, every departure or arrival or decision. Minutes and hours had become laden with pressure. Pressure paralyzes, just as absolute freedom does. But it does so by preventing you from letting a minute pass in contemplation or boredom, rather allowing you to push action off into the ever-distant future.

Anne found the trip wholly remarkable - so many things she had never seen, or expected to see. My unusual childhood inoculated me against the same level of wonder. Where it swept rapturously in for her, it trickled by for me.

But I suppose it allowed me to find the wonderful tiny things, to look for the sublime in the microcosm rather than the whole landscape. When we went to Milford Sound, I was captivated by the rock-faces, the deepness of the glacier-carved harbor, the rainbow formed at the bottom of Fairy Falls (saw the end - no pot of gold!). But then, I suppose that she really liked the seals basking on a few rocks, and they were tiny compared with the scene as a whole.

The phrase that got me from the sleepy start was "tree avalanches". The road into Milford was in the bottom of a steep glacial valley - and of course snow and rocks occasionally avalanched down the sides. The valley-sides were also covered with trees, clinging onto a thin layer of topsoil painstakingly accumulated over centuries. Below was rock too hard to put roots into. And so the trees weave roots together, forming a carpet of vegetable matter.

When a tree dies, or is hit by a falling rock, or is blown over - a thousand different things could go wrong, really - it falls, and rips its companions from the rocks as well. Trees cascade down, cutting a narrow scar through the slope's tree surface forest. What's left is bare rock.

Thanks to the steepness of the fiord's sides, boats can pass within yards of its edge. Our cruise took us up next to the paths of previous tree avalanches. I tried to imagine the sight - trees crashing down the almost-vertical hillside, rushing towards the deep water and floating off or disappearing below the tide. It takes over 75 years for such a wound to be healed - decades pass before enough soil, seeds, and moss accumulate on the naked cliff to mask it in green. Then larger plants slowly recolonize the space.

In wonder at that sort of patience. We build houses that are old after a few decades, design cellphones and computers to last a few years, write business plans for the next 90 days or a year, buy plastic bags and packaging that expires after one use - two at most, flick around memes with a shelf-life of hours. Planned obsolescence is our way of life; it's a big game of hot-potato with global ecological consequences. We live on the edge of a fiord - steep climb above, deep water below, thin film of dirt and our neighbors' roots holding us in place. Would an avalanche discourage us in a way that it doesn't seem to discourage the trees?