KEY POINTS:
There were maybe eight of us, a couple of giant teenage nephews, just about Sir Ed-sized now, my own children, their grandmothers, a sister - all armed with bad umbrellas that pulled inside out like anorexic cancan dancers when the wind came up later.
It felt like we were going to a concert, as ribbons of people converged at the top of the Domain and sat down in front of a view that nobody noticed that day.
I was doing what every mother hopes to have at her fingertips just a couple of times in their lives, injecting my kids with a morning's memory they won't recognise as a small piece of history until they're explaining it to their own children someday.
Like once watching the Dalai Llama laugh at his own jokes on a distant stage, or joining the 35,000 that protested through the streets of Portland, Oregon, chanting that a war in Iraq wasn't the answer. I was just doing my job, catching karmic parenting points to offset fast-food dinners after gymnastics shuttling.
My eyes wandered away from the giant screen to the sunburnt neck of the man ahead of us who must have come from Central Casting. He sat with his gumboots splayed apart like two upturned tick marks, a wilted bucket hat perched like a deflated Pav on top.
When the rains came we shrouded ourselves in a tarp like a human burrito. He didn't even flinch. No reason to.
I distractedly watched photographers move through the crowd like bees circling Hillary's last hive, surreptitiously taking pictures of the wilted prayer flags knotted to the top of our umbrella. This wasn't my history; it was someone else's. A Sherpa leader once wrote when asking for Hillary's help to open a school: "Our children have eyes and yet they are blind." I thought I was just restless.
I got up and walked back through the crowd to the steps of the War Memorial, crouched down on my haunches with a piece of chalk in my fist, and wrote on the pavement below me, "Farewell Good Sir."
That much I knew. It was a graffiti prayer to the Gods that must have watched his every step for 88 years.
Before wending my way back through the crowd, I looked up and saw what I finally needed to see - thousands and thousands of New Zealanders sat at the top of an old volcano to honour the best of who they are.
I have been in this country for over three years now and this was the first time I felt myself becoming a New Zealand citizen. I never filled out any application forms, or even made a conscious choice; I simply sat in the sun, then pouring rain, and began to understand.
I heard when an interviewer commented to Sir Ed on his modesty that his reply was: "I have a great deal to be modest about." I heard Peter Hillary describe sitting around their kitchen table through three cups of tea before Sir Ed broke the companionable silence with: "Would you like to go to the North Pole?"
An honour guard had ice axes, not guns. Nervous children did a haka they will never forget.
Ed Hillary sat in his chair and watched the All Blacks on television and made plans that the rest of us would call dreams.
I saw what I always thought were twin strands of the American and New Zealand sensibility - independence and striving for individual achievement against all odds - go separate ways.
It's not that Kiwis don't respect the achievement of the tall poppy in the field, New Zealanders just don't need to show off the audacity of its bloom.
Kiwis understand that the importance of Sir Ed's life would have been a singular stem had he not spent the rest of his lifetime after that one achievement sowing the seeds of an entire field full of others' "extraordinary possibilities".
In all the coverage that's been written about Sir Ed as a Kiwi hero, you have typically forgotten to say one thing: he was the quintessential Kiwi man, a portrait of yourselves as a nation. You love your spouse, your children, but don't need to tell anybody about it. You value independence like it was stamped on your birth certificate.
Respect is assumed, until proven otherwise. What is left unsaid about personal successes is not called modesty, it just is what it is.
By the time the heavens opened and we collectively moved to line the streets to watch him pass, I was humbled not so much by greatness but by the goodness of the people standing all around me.
My chalk homage had washed away long before the black car passed. I think he would have liked that.
www.traceybarnett.co.nz
