Joe Bennett: This is the wild wonderful coast

The West Coast wilderness of Hokitika Beach.

OPINION

Much of this country is coast. But when we speak of the Coast, we don’t mean much of this country. We mean about half of the sparsely populated West Coast of the South Island.

As you drive over Arthur’s Pass then down through Otira Gorge and Jacksons and approach the little settlement of Kumara, with its improbably large racecourse and its little wooden houses and its sense of perpetual afternoon, the signature note is gorse.

This time of the year, the stuff flames butter-yellow everywhere. Cattle and sheep graze amongst it. It sprouts on flats and hillsides and in riverbeds. It comes with rickety fences, and rusted rooves, and a sense of impermanence, of vulnerability, of clinging to the skin of the earth and not much more.

South and north from Kumara Junction, the Coast is just a narrow strip of habitable land, of cleared land, pinched between the mountains and the sea and dwarfed by both.

There’s only the one road all the way down to Haast, forever threatened by slips and washouts and encroaching bush. North of Westport the road becomes frailer still, a mere ribbon of passage carved through rock and wilderness, winding over bluffs, flirting with the sea’s edge. Then it reaches Karamea and just stops. Karamea’s the end of a world.

Every bridge on the Coast is liable to be swept away, and there are lots of bridges, some spindly and wooden, spanning valleys widened by sudden unstoppable volumes of rain.

I forget who said that the earth will eventually shake off human beings as if shaking off fleas, but on the Coast, you feel the truth of it. Book of Revelation threats abound. Floods are common, and the great fault line that formed the Southern Alps is part of everyone’s backyard. It’s stretched like a rubber band. It has to go somewhere. And we are powerless to predict it or control it.

Even the air is fierce. The wind off the sea not only brings torrential rain, but in itself is a belabouring force. It combs the low bush flat like an Elvis quiff. And when a single pine tree stands between the highway and the sea, its limbs stretch out to lee like a girl’s blown hair.

The wind is inimical, the bush inimical, the mountains inimical, the sandflies inimical, the rain inimical and the sea, well, it’s not the Pacific. The Pacific is far away on the other side of the country and aptly named. This sea, though dubbed the Tasman, is beyond being tamed by a name. It is simply the element that covers seven-tenths of the globe, and it is ungovernable.

It thumps at the land, eats at it, beats at it day and night. All along the coast it rips trees out by the roots, strips them of leaves and bark, salts and silvers their flesh, churns and smooths them, then flings them back denuded on the shore.

The tallest building in Hokitika is St Mary’s Catholic church, a grand, four-square Romanesque beast sat stoutly on a large section, built to proclaim the permanence and glory of the one true god. Steps lead up to the big front doors, and at the foot of those steps there’s a curve of spacious private driveway, so shy brides and fat bishops can arrive at the steps in style.

But the driveway is chained off and moss is reclaiming the tarmac. The church has been closed for a decade because the coming earthquake will fell it. And the money isn’t there to strengthen it. A notice says that masses are still held in rooms ‘round the back, but it feels like a defeat.

From the site of the derelict church, cross Tancred Street and Revell Street, climb the dune beyond and you feel the sea before you see it. It crashes against the steep beach, recedes and crashes again. Incessant, utterly unswimmable, relentless. Vast quantities of boulders have been bulldozed into place to protect Hokitika.

Climb back down the dune to the motels and the bars and the jade shops for the tourists, and the sea still beats through your feet, through the land, through the whole town, like a heart heard through a stethoscope.

It is a constant reminder of the earth’s massive forces, of our flea-like impermanence. Why bother to grub gorse, to straighten fences, to clear bush, to build in what we laughably refer to as permanent materials? Why bother at all? This is the Coast.