Stephanie Johnson on the appeal escaping to rural idylls.
All around the world, millions of those who can afford it contemplate moving to less crowded places where the likelihood of attracting violence and viruses is diminished. Technology makes retreat more possible – we can take our jobs with us. The rural idyll, pastoral bliss, peace and quiet – how lovely it sounds. We want it even if we are entirely unsuited to it. There was a media story a few years back that featured a vet. He recounted how he had been called more than once to lifestyle blocks to find out why the sheep had died. The sheep had died because the citified owners had neglected to supply them with water. This omission seems to exemplify the general hopelessness of how city people may adapt to country life. Another story appearing now and again concerns tree-changers complaining about smell or noise. One featured the proud owners of a country home that was unfortunately very close to a stinky mushroom farm. Another featured people who disliked listening to bobby calves bellowing for their mothers while they waited at the farm gate for certain annihilation. Yet another detailed the newbies' dislike of roaring machinery. In every case it seems a kind of child-like amnesia had taken hold. The grown-ups had forgotten that the countryside is tooth and claw. It is s*** and blood. It is, only if you're lucky, sweet solitude.
I am not the first New Zealand writer to explore the idea of retreat. Poet Denis Glover may well have been one of the first, although his Tom and Elizabeth were more pioneers than retreaters, listening to quardle oodle ardle wardle while they made their bed and tried and failed to get ahead. The retirees in Sir Roger Hall's 2004 play, Spreading Out, take themselves out of the city to live on their 10-acre block, where they are besieged by annoying relatives and unwanted visitors. More recently in the novel Baby, Annaleese Jochems' characters retreat disastrously to a small boat and deserted island; just as in Ruby Porter's novel Attraction, young women leave Auckland for a protracted road-trip to Levin via Gisborne. In each of these works not much goes according to plan and if it did, it would not be entertaining. Retreat in fiction is rarely smoothly or easily done. Put your characters up a tree and chuck stones at them, went the old creative writing adage, but the high road to change may function as well as a peppered high spot on a bough. Conflict is drama. It can also be highly amusing.
At its root, the desire for retreat is a desire for change. Those of us who want to leave the rat race are, mostly, under analysis, craving upheaval. We are tired of waking up inside the same four walls, of dealing with the same congested traffic, of listening to the same bleating at the office or factory or building site. We want to test ourselves, to see if we have the mettle start again. Our nineteenth-century Pākehā ancestors knew "starting again". It was what drove them to board sailing ships and make the dangerous voyage to the other side of the planet. They were in retreat from Europe, mostly from Britain, where life in huge, grinding, populous, smoky cities, a hundred years into the industrial revolution, was difficult and impoverished for the majority. Like most humans, before and since, they gave little thought to those whose lives would be compromised and damaged by their arrival, by their nominal ownership of "new" land.
There is a theory that the three most traumatic events we may endure are bereavement, divorce and shifting house. No one would argue with the first two but the third is surely dependent on character, curiosity and resilience. It may be a positive change, a process of discovery not only of new facets of self but place. The lockdowns have demonstrated that staying home is hard, despite exhortations from tougher individuals that the lockdown is not the Blitz, it is not Rwandan genocide or starvation in the Yemen. All we Kiwis have to do is sit on the couch, get fat, watch Netflix and worry about how to pay the bills. After a winter of lockdowns, in the absence of international tourists, many New Zealanders broke wildly out of captivity. They spent their summer holidays travelling the country, joining the Grey Nomads at caravan parks.
