Cyclone Gabrielle: Steve Braunias - the good, the bad and the ugly of cyclone

OPINION

Poor, fragile, eroding, drenched, crushed, powerless, badly or barely led, once was staggeringly beautiful Auckland.

The lucky city, subtropical and bursting with health, one of the great seaports of the South Pacific, a littoral isthmus of harbour, beach, creek and lake - all that water, the blessing that is now a curse.

The tragedy at Muriwai. Piha, cut off and in the dark. Before the storm Auckland felt like the days of waiting for lockdown: there was that same instruction to stock up, that same obedience of the good old sheeple.

All over town there were Dads on ladders peering into gutters, Mums doing more important work by looking after the bloody kids. We saw out lockdown. We saw out the floods. And now we had to see out the cyclone, a thing of beauty on the 3D weather maps with its swirls and twirls, the eye of it spiralling like a koru fern.

But it was more ominous than lockdown, had a sharper taste.

So much of life is what we can control. We all remember the infantilised golden lesson of Covid behaviour: “Stay home and save lives”. And it was true. If you locked all the doors and windows, and only went outside in the ensemble of a masked ranger, you’d be fine. A microbe can be shunned.

But nothing is greater or more constant than weather. It will blow your house down, flood you out, do whatever its distemper wants. It can never be controlled; there’s no vaccine for it.

People watch waves crash at Matakatia Bay on Whangaparoa at high tide. Photo / Dean Purcell

And so the koru fern of Cyclone Gabrielle came and went, spiralling out of control. Poor old Auckland, but most of us are perfectly fine. You know the mood has picked up when there’s a pile-on, and Auckland Grammar obliged the Two Minutes Hate known as social media by remaining the only school to stay open on Monday. We get by these days by finding things to identify as enemies of the public good – media drongos, te reo speakers, the cheerfully rich – and Grammar served that function this week, took some of the psychic load off.

Auckland itself has long been viewed as a nation state and enemy of the public good but that started to change during the lockdown, when loathing turned to sympathy, and there is no one north or south of the Bombay divide whose heart doesn’t go out to what happened in Muriwai. Lockdown and Cyclone Gabrielle has made the rest of New Zealand see Auckland for what it is – just another province on the edge of things in this age of airborne disease and climate change.

A large tree fell across the road overnight in the Auckland Domain after heavy rain from Cyclone Gabrielle. Photo / Jason Oxenham

Just another province, except with someone in charge who no one outside of Auckland can understand how he got elected mayor. There are 180,000 voters who do understand and the rest of us must assume they are students of ancient history. The myth is that Caligula made the horse Incitatus a consul in the Roman senate, but actually the mad emperor (12-41AD) never got around to it. Those who elected Wayne Brown as Auckland mayor got a lot closer. They must be wondering if they’ve voted in a grumpy and braying jackass.

Good luck to Brown. He’s likely peering into a drain right now and the learnings could well serve the drowned city. But to watch his performances in the flood, and now in the storm, is to view a silly old fool in a rest home, his mouth hanging open while watching The Chase. He has become the vacuum to his deputy mayor’s power: the one person we have been able to look to for an example of leadership and strength is Desley Simpson. She’s fronted. She’s stood up. “I’m talking to you,” she told RNZ. “I’ll talk to you at any time. That’s my commitment to you and to Auckland.”

Someone else used to say that sort of thing all the time. What was her name…You know…Had a kid to some guy who caught lots of fish…Jacinda Ardern was so 2017-2022. That role, in Auckland, is now held by the only woman in public life called Desley. Good on her. She’s been calm and, above all, practical. She talked about “finalising curbside collections”. Now and then her language turns into that kind of robotese but what she meant was that she called in the army to take away flood-damaged junk outside houses. In a year that may look set to signal a change in government, from the liberal nags of the left to the money-grubbing sheikhs of the right, National as well as Auckland has found its example of leadership in Desley Simpson.

A flooded truck in Kumeu during Cyclone Gabrielle. Photo / George Heard

We look to leaders as symbols of qualities we admire – being responsible, having the right idea, setting things in motion. But we look to each other for a true sense of moral worth. Politics is something that happens while we’re busy getting on with life. As ever when the country is in some sort of jam and it seems a worthwhile exercise to look on the bright side, I think of that ringing endorsement of the national character that concludes Michael King’s 2003 masterpiece, The Penguin History of New Zealand: “Most New Zealanders, whatever their cultural background, are good-hearted, practical, commonsensical and tolerant…They are as sound a basis as any for optimism about the country’s future.”

And so there was an epitome of the good-hearted and practical Kiwi joker – to be precise, Auckland joker – during the storm this week, filmed by George Heard from the Herald. Has it gone viral? It should; it’s an interview at night with a guy called Cameron Vernon, a volunteer driving around in a tractor saving families from their flooded homes. I chucked it on the Twitter machine and a guy called Richard Ashton (“Social Service Non Profit CEO 15 yrs, now governance/advisory work”) responded, “classic. pragmatic, sensible with a relaxed sense of humour. Just the person you need in a storm.”

Totally. Let Brown bray his jackassery in whatever drain he wants; the people who really get you through are the Cameron Vernons. And another guy who featured on a social media clip. It was also filmed late Monday night, somewhere in Auckland; it showed the rain falling hard on a pavement, and then, walking into the picture, was a man out on a stroll, really engaging with the elements, taking it all in his stride, nakedly. Without clothes. As in like completely nude. Bravo, anonymous nudist of Cyclone Gabrielle! There is the weather doing its worst, belting Auckland senseless, the age of climate change and its chaos on our doorstep – but the human spirit perseveres, and so does the spirit of Auckland, as taught to us by an unknown naked man, a quiet hero of the storm, walking the earth of our beautiful isthmus.