Paula Green reports from flooded West Auckland
Monday night and the rain and thunder are loud and relentless. Uncharacteristically I am tweeting that I am scared. I never do personal tweets. I have never tweeted I am scared in a storm. Maybe it is the intense noise. We are watching tv, but the tv reception is on storm fade, and I am missing the final of Australian Master Chef after months of viewing. This is upsetting me as much as the storm.
My neighbour texts to say he has a couple of rivers running through his property and our road is blocked. We live on a ridge, inland from Te Henga Bethells Beach, and in no danger of floods, but I keep hoping the house won’t slip down the hill into the bush. Morning comes and the local roads are awash with water, rock debris, slips, many impassable. I have barely slept. Bethells Beach is cut off because the road is slipping into the estuary, and I am worrying how the families will cope with this double lockdown.
In the first lockdown I wrote a poem every week for the Herald, opened up my poetry blogs for adults and children, got sent hundreds of emails, drifted through the house picking up novels and poetry books, unable to settle on sentences let alone paragraphs. I was making sourdough bread, because I always make sourdough bread, but I also learned to make yoghurt and almond milk, to get better at sprouts and microgreens. I germinated a million seeds. Yet I couldn’t get out of drift and daze. Every day I received masses of emails from strangers wanting to make some kind of poetry connection. I have no idea if answered them all. I meant to.
Back in Level 4 again, I’ve returned to a state of drift and daze, but it feels different. With my partner artist Michael Hight and our adult daughter, I live a hermit life. I always live a hermit life. I love living a hermit life. But the border between our rural haven and the outside world is more acute now. I am high risk health wise, double vaccinated yes but, unlike last time, unwilling to dare moving beyond the top of our driveway. Instead I book precious click-and-collect spots, with the Delta strain scarier and so many West Auckland supermarkets on the places-of-interest list. An essential worker assembles my order, and it’s like a Master Chef mystery box with items missing and weird substitutions, and yet I feel extremely grateful, even though the butter is unsalted, there’s way too much milk, and no toilet paper. It is like a miniature miracle putting fresh vegetables in the fridge and planning a spicy fish curry.
We have acres of bush, bush tracks, a little stream, expansive sky views, infinite quiet, endless beauty vistas. It is the perfect place to live as hermits, a poet and an artist, but in lockdown, as much as I delight in the beauty of my home surroundings, I crave an elsewhere, because I crave diversions. I am more inclined to read books, listen to music, watch tv than to fixate on the view outside. My writing is the same, nothing to do with Covid, secret projects that lead me elsewhere. Diversion tactics.
Everything slows down at Level 4. It takes me ages to read a novel. I read Rebecca K Reilley’s Greta and Valdin at a snail’s pace. The sweetly crafted dialogue implants me so firmly in the scene, pandemics are banished momentarily. I don’t want to leave. Then again, I devour Eileen Merriman’s Double Helix in two sittings. Her ability to build characters and complex issues cuts deep and sticks. Sometimes I go for children’s picture books. Julia Liu and Bei Lynn’s The Library Bus is a winner. Still at glacial pace. It takes me an eternity to read a poetry book let alone review it for my blog, Poetry Shelf. But here I am reading poetry every day. Hungry for books. I’m currently drawn to writing that lifts me out of the Covid shadows, such as Dinah Hawken’s luminous Sea-Light. Individual poems blaze in my head, no matter what else I am doing. I spent all Saturday on a summer cruise in David Eggleton’s sublime chapbook Throw Net | Upena Ho’olei. Just nine pleasure-craft poems and Tonu Shane Eggleton’s artwork. Bliss.
Lockdown certainly makes me choose music and books carefully. I like edge and I like balm, but the key hook is diversion. Maybe I’m after a trance-like state where all the bad thoughts about the future of the world, let alone the present state of the world, are on hold. Lockdown makes me choose social media even more carefully. I am avoiding toxic threads on Twitter and Facebook: anything racist, sexist, scoring petty political points, slamming accents, circulating conspiracy theories, misinformation, disinformation, anything that that adds up to downright ignorance. I wake in the night worrying about how we can ever move on from this. It is my tipping point at Level 4. Hearing the reaction to Pasifica Covid cases makes me want to explode on the lounge carpet.
It’s Level 4 in Tāmakai Makaurau and, when I’m not careful, the battered world gets to me. The situation in Afganistan. The people with neither food nor shelter. Sexual abuse. Family abuse. Workplace bullies. The extraordinary pressure placed upon hospitals and medical workers in every single country on the globe. The crude side swipes at Jacinda Ardern, at home and abroad, when I am so thankful I live in Aotearoa, where human lives matter.
I tune into the 1 pm update and feel relief at the graph trending downwards, and then my heart trends upwards when there is so much to get right, and the possibilities for human error are visible. It’s too much and I’m switching off the news and the updates, wondering how our leaders can ever sleep at night, with such responsibilities, and a clear inclination to listen and do better. Yet here I am today, switching on the news and the daily update again, making sourdough, writing a secret poem, selecting a new novel, out walking.
I am walking up our long steep drive to check for rural deliveries, breathing in mānuka, stalling on the switch-back dance of the pīwakawaka, but Bethells Beach is still cut off. The beach community, as communities have done in Kumeū and Taupaki, is pitching in together, making sure neighbours are fed, rescued, cared for. And this is it, my resistance to being completely overwhelmed is to focus on the present tense. To live and love the moment. When I took a day-long sojourn in David Eggleton’s poems, I got to sail and dream. A poetry care package.
This week's lockdown series around New Zealand has looked at settlements in the Bay of Islands, the West Coast and South Auckland. The series ends tomorrow with a lockdown death in Otago.
