OPINION
Hot pools are central to the New Zealand way of idleness - we too often think of New Zealand as something wild and bracing and adventurous, full of fools on skis and surfboards, but hot pools are a constant reminder that in fact we live on a Pacific island designed for laziness, for sloth, for sitting around to do nothing more than stew in a weird and steaming outdoor hotpot. I texted Shayne the other day and said, "Let's go to the hot pools," and he said, "Great idea," he'd drive right over.
Hot pools are for young and old, mad and reasonable, friends and lovers – everyone knows the love story of Hinemoa and Tūtānekai, and its setting of Mokoia Island in Lake Rotorua, where Hinemoa hid in the island's hot spring to wait for her lover. When Tūtānekai arrived to meet her, "She rose up from the water," in Sir George Grey's 1855 version, "as beautiful as the wild white hawk." Shayne learned to drive a few years ago and then gave me lessons, which were fun but I never took it any further and his own knowledge of cars has remained pretty limited, close to non-existent.
Hot pools form a kind of river running beneath New Zealand, or a "quasi-subterranean stream", as John Cheever described the 15 neighbourhood swimming pools his character Neddy Merrill plans to navigate in Cheever's classic short story, "The Swimmer" – he writes of poor, doomed Neddy, "He seemed to see, with a cartographer's eye, that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the county." Shayne walked up my front path and said, "Bad news. We're going nowhere."
Hot pools are an enduring interest for Sally Jackson, author of "Hot Springs of New Zealand" – she has published five editions since 2001, constantly updating its list of thermal pools, including such obscurities as the Amethyst hot springs dug into a river near Harihari, private kauri-lined tubs at Te Maire, and New Zealand's most isolated hot springs (she hiked for four days over the Southern Alps) somewhere or other on the Mungo River. Shayne had mounted the curb outside my house and got a flat tyre and neither of us had any idea how to fix it, and we stood by the car deep in thought.
