He had a vision. It first came to him when he launched forwards off the cliff above Pukerua Bay, his wing soaring on the updrafts, turning as he shifted his weight and pulled on the risers. He was high above the Tasman Sea when he saw the empty hill, barren except for the harakeke and muehlenbeckia that sprawled from the edges right down to the sea. We would, one day, plant our babies – then too small to even crawl – in those bushes, which, like the house on the hill would one day be for us, were a cradle.
To get to the top of the hill where the vision first took hold, to see what he saw without flying over it, you took the winding gravel driveway at the end of Rawhiti Rd and bush-whacked until you got to the top. Any breath you had left would be sucked out of you when you saw that view.
The tides that surged between Kapiti Island and Cook Strait would suck you out, too. The Ngāti Toa chief Te Rauparaha would sail that current from Kapiti to Te Waipounamu on a waka. We could see that stretch of water, broken and raging or benign, and its changing light, from the top of the hill. Two poets lived on the easternmost point of the ridge and one of them would see the chief in his dreams.
Rāwhiti means east, though technically the road ran southeast. But it didn’t matter what direction the wind was coming from if you were walking: it would find you and beat you up. Lipstick and long hair became enemies, their virtues weaponised. Put down the umbrella. You had to pick your battles and the last battle you would want in the full force of the prevailing wind, a nor’wester, was an inverted umbrella with hostile spikes free from their feeble nylon casements.
Embedded in nature
You could take shelter along the long, wild driveway at Rawhiti Rd. Shrouded in trees that formed an arch, it was a dark mystery, an invitation to explore. Where were the houses and who lived in them? Their driveways would peel off like tributaries. You couldn’t walk up without announcing yourself, or by giving prior notice. Their inhabitants were embedded in nature, too, in houses sprung from visions that came decades earlier. Each had its own origin story starting in the late 1940s until 2000, when we arrived ecstatic and certain.
The first house at the end of the drive was a white Lockwood, and the daughter of the poets lived there. To the left lived a solitary man and his mad, mottled dog with its futile bark made hoarse from years of protesting at the wind and random visitors. Further down, the mid-century bunker and the elderly bookish couple. They had an eye for built-in cabinetry and nurtured a garden of poppies that survived the wind but not the seasonal raids by intrepid imposters with a nose for a supply and a craving for the milky sap pods inside the pretty heads.
Follow the sound of barking dogs to Alistair and Meg’s – the poets. Onwards, the white plastered adobe-style house with blue shutters where an Australian film producer lived when she wasn’t working at international locations. Another gravel tributary led to a place where no one emerged in the five years we lived there. All these houses sprang from disparate visions, dug into the earth, anchored by optimism against the unceasing elements.
Who were we – that young couple? It’s hard to say reliably what characteristics defined us. But from a distance, using a metric of years and experience, we were looking outwards, to the future. Still in love, or the idea of it. He: pathologically energetic, determined. She: hopeful, impatient, holding on. Their dog Ella, loyal and loud, would eventually succumb to the forces of nature, too – old age, specifically – and be buried up there.
Our visions merged. We would build a house that travelled down the slope of the hill rather than fighting for prime position on top of it. It sprawled, three levels of concrete, steel, timber and glass. But to build the vision, first build a path to the top. More than 100 railway sleepers packed into the hill. We planted rengarenga, hebe, ferns, mānuka and a lancewood. I climbed those steps every day. About a month before I gave birth to our twins, we installed a cable car. Later, some visitors would take one look at it and choose the steps.
Up on the hill, the vision slowly materialised. It was a folly, they said, countless times at parties or just in passing. “You’re fucking mad.” But we would return, always, to the top and look out at the vast, complex layers of blue. Not going anywhere.
Nature always had the last word and the word often came in the form of an insult on the “fall wind”. We’d built a fireplace with a cantilevered concrete hearth. The fall wind would send the smoke right back down the chimney and puff it into the room, like a dragon. Living there, we learnt what would grow, what would work and what would succumb. Our house would become solid, spectacular even. But the vision, buffeted and shaped by circumstance and internal, personal tides, was about to change.
Moving north
The babies were just over a year old when we left. He was in one car, me and the babies following in another. I cried all the way to Waiouru and we stayed in a motel on the Desert Rd. Early the next morning, I took the babies for a walk around the grey streets, trying to find the home where I was born, texting my sisters, “What number were we?”
Two days later, from 10 Rawhiti Rd we were moving into No 41: a house in Auckland. Four years later, I would move again, 20 houses down the road. I told my growing children stories about the place on the cliff. They seemed entranced but unconvinced ‒ a cognitive dissonance between the past and their reality now. They were looking out, out to the future.
But to get to the future, first you sometimes must go back. When they turned 18 and were preparing themselves for new lives in new cities, I drove them south so they could start by standing on the ground where the seed of the vision had been planted. Where they’d travelled, like clueless baby astronauts, in the cable car at five days old to the bouncy muehlenbeckia where they had been planted like tree fairies. Where their whenua was buried under a tī kōuka tree. Not going anywhere.
We took the cable car to meet the now-elderly but vital couple who had fallen in love with the house. Falling in love with a house is not so different from falling for a person. You see yourself there in that place and you want to stay. You so want to stay. To build it. To make it safe. The chemistry, the alluring view. You don’t know, or want to know, the cracks or flaws. You have a vision and you start to shape it before you’ve even done due diligence.
Up there, on clear winter mornings, you could see the maunga Taranaki, Kapiti and Ruapehu all in a line.
Glenda and Mike, who bought the house from us all those years ago, were still there. She taught the piano and he was a geophysicist. They described it as one in a million. They’d been happy there.
Like us, they’d become close to the poets, Alistair Te Ariki Campbell and Meg Campbell, and their dogs, which were always by their side. When Alistair died, Mozart the spaniel came up to the house for about a year looking for him, Glenda said. Scraping at the door.
The light fittings I bought for $20 from an op shop in Paraparaumu were still there, and the sari curtains, in the palest shades of gold, cream, and pink, still hung in the bedroom. Nature had prevailed but so, too, had Glenda and Mike, planting and nurturing, creating a sanctuary from the tyranny of the wind. Native trees and shrubs had triumphed so spectacularly that the path up to the house, once wide and daunting, was now almost hidden, a secret enticing us to keep walking up, up, up.
Up there, on clear winter mornings and at dusk, you could see Kapiti Island, Mt Taranaki and Mt Ruapehu all in a line. The curvature of the Earth was palpable in a way I’ve not seen before, or since, unless on Google Earth.
We could not find the tī kōuka, or the tree where Ella was buried. But as we stood at the edge of the cliff, falling into the wind, the end became not an end but part of a continuum.
The vision first seen from the air, now shared and bigger somehow, remained – for those who lived there and those who sprang from it and were looking out into the shifting light and patterns of the future, ecstatic and certain.
Sarah Daniell is a freelance writer.
