Karekare is a wild, beautiful area of the Waitakeres, west of Auckland. It’s the place I dreamed about when I lived in London, the landscape I yearned to return to. It was the location of my most intense experiences as a child: fear, euphoria, exhilaration, joy.
Our parents’ bach was built on a hillside with a view down the valley, surrounded by dense bush in all directions. There was always the risk that if we went too far off a track, even close to the house, we’d quickly get disorientated and lost. The bush was so thick you couldn’t get a clear view out of it, and the only way to escape was by standing still and shouting.
At the bottom of Lone Kauri Road was Karekare Beach (the beach in the movie The Piano), a glittering expanse of black sand and dunes ending in lines of rolling surf that roared ceaselessly, the sound echoing against the cliffs.
On hot afternoons the air rippled with heatwaves that made mirages appear like puddles of mercury shimmering over the black sand. I was exhilarated by the hard light, the sky and the big surf. One year after a summer storm, when the sea was wild and whipped into massive swells by the offshore wind, and it happened to be dead low tide, the point when the surf is rolling over shallow water and, near the shore, the waves are breaking on hard sand, a wave picked up my father and dashed him down on his head, fracturing a vertebra in his neck. He was rescued by lifeguards and helicoptered to hospital, lucky not to have been paralysed and drowned.
Karekare is a landscape always in wild motion: the boiling surf, the wind, the dancing glare off the dunes. The sand itself is a hazard in summer; its blackness absorbs heat, and if you get caught on a stretch of it without shoes you can suffer serious burns.
One holiday our parents allowed me, my brother and a family friend to tramp alone into the Pararaha Gorge. We entered a wilderness of dense bush, sign-posted as a day-long hike “for experienced trampers only”, with no proper track, which ended in a remote coastal walk around surf-lashed rocks that could only be safely negotiated at low tide. My brother was ten, I was seven, the friend was five.
Once we’d got a certain way in, the track disappeared, and we spent the next hours trying to find it, following false trails and sheep tracks that petered out halfway up cliffs. We realised we were lost, and that by now we couldn’t go back even if we wanted to, because the bluffs and waterfalls we’d climbed around were too hard, especially for a five-year-old, to scale.
We had to deal with the dangerous, fast-flowing white-water river, steep cliffs and tangled bush for the whole day until we were found. It was only after a long period of trying to find a track and following trails that led us to dangerous places and dead ends that we understood we should just follow the river itself. I remember intense fear and despair, the hours of terrified crying as we tried to find our way, and the objectively correct understanding that we could die. We got stuck on steep bluffs, we struggled with the five-year-old trying to climb around waterfalls, we had to swim, climb and fight our way through the stark, unforgiving landscape.
But I went on loving the wild, exhilaratingly beautiful place, and I’ve always returned to it, despite the terror of that day.
Charlotte Grimshaw is an Auckland novelist. Her latest book is a memoir, The Mirror Book
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