A Piece of Heaven: Memoir

Cobb Valley, New Zealand. My inspiration, my heaven on earth, the safe place of my soul. Every child should have such a place.

We were hugely blessed to have this retreat available on a year by year basis. My father carried out his paleontological fieldwork there, so while he fossicked for fossils the rest of us had a holiday for a month or so, usually in the summer, once or twice in winter. A haven, undiscovered by the public and made remote by an unsealed, narrow, treacherous road that wound along the side of a steep gorge and over a mountain range into the hidden valley with the large lake and thickly forested slopes. Our only visitor - besides the wildlife, much of which was unique to New Zealand - was the forest ranger, who lived there all year round and brought us a wild duck for dinner from time to time. Nowadays I hear it is quite different, frequented by picnicking tourists; even the road has been sealed and the rocky slips above the road stabilised. But it wasn’t until we took visitors there that I realised others may not view the Valley in quite the same way I did. Instead, they would see the lack of electricity, the sparse living conditions in the wooden huts with rusting corrugated roofs, the spooky night-time walk along the bush path to the ‘longdrop’ outhouse which reputedly had resident rats and mice, though I never saw a single one. In Magnesite Hut, our ‘own’ hut, used by magnesite quartz miners occasionally but hired by my father every summer (now no longer in existence, sadly), cooking took place on an old enamel wood range. Showers were uncomfortably frigid until the fire had sufficiently heated up the stream water in the pipes which ran up through the chimney into water tanks behind the hut. The stream was at the end of a short bush walk behind the hut and had a surprisingly noisy waterfall which cascaded into a deep pool before flowing around a hefty flat rock, upon which may brother and I spent many a happy summer playing. We hooked up a rubber hose from the stream to the water tanks to fill them up and keep them fresh; the water was icy cold mountain water, and when it rained I was too scared to go and look at the stream because I could hear the thunderous roar of the waterfall which had turned into a cataract overnight. Sometimes I feared it would overflow all the way to the hut and wash us all away.

We had long tramps, or hikes as they call them elsewhere, and the feeling of wet clothes clinging to me, dangling from under the bottom of my parker, and aching legs, and tiredness so profound that it seemed we had been walking for weeks on end, became as familiar and comforting to me as that of reaching the end of the long day and making a fire and boiling tea or hot chocolate in the hut where we were spending the night. Endless miles of tussock, sliding slate mountainsides, shadowy and mysterious forest or 'bush', clearings with tiny butterflies and swampy marshland, rushing creeks and broad rivers, billowing dark clouds and driving rain, dramatic bursts of sunlight and steaming meadows – my writing, my imagination, my inspiration, was fed and nurtured and sustained by this magical kingdom. Oh, there were things I didn’t like – namely, wetas (you can Google these but believe me, they are much scarier in real life), spiders, thundering rivers, the dam when the spillgates were opened after the horn had sounded; but my fears somehow heightened my pleasures, percolated through my being and became indistinguishable from each other.

I am not nostalgic about my childhood on the whole, but I am totally and over-the-top-unashamedly nostalgic about Cobb Valley.  Everyone should have something they are totally over-the-top nostalgic about.   

The sky is taking on light,

though the moon still hangs pale over the water.

Such beauty that for a minute

death and ambition, even love,

doesn’t enter into this.

Happiness. It comes on

unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it.


(From ‘Happiness’ by Raymond Carver)