Tales from the twilight zone (This dirty town is burning down in my dreams)

To pay for my expensive yoga addiction, I cash in on my “man-credits” and go to the studio owner’s house to labour with her husband. They have quite an extensive piece of land, and we’ve been clearing out shrubs and trees like crazy to make what Bill keeps referring to as a “defensible area”. He wants to have a space either side of the drive way that is impervious to forest fire to allow a fire engine to get up the drive, and then fight-fire with ease. While this seemed like it would be handy, it also seemed a tad paranoid to me. I ran it by Lauren, who informed me that this was standard issue in these parts. And since then I have noticed several signs around the area inquiring whether your house had one of these “defensible areas”. It sounds like a military strategy. But forest fires are a pretty eminent danger here – and with last October’s rager destroying parts of Southern California, it’s a pretty touchy issue.

Fire season, is thought of to be September and October. When summer has dried the land, and winter has yet to replenish it with the loving hand of hydration – it’s a pretty vulnerable area. Weather up here works in black and white fashion, it hardly rains a drop in the summer and is deathly hot – but winter brings plentiful amounts of rain and snow to offset the summer. With the climate changing, the ground is unusually dry, and now we have a situation. On Saturday, when the lightning came, the sky went a near apocalyptic shade of black, and it seemed as if any second the heavens would open. But with the atmosphere too heated, much of the rain evaporated before it hit the ground, and the lightning was like a match striking an extremely dry earth. Fire this early in the summer is not good news and can only point to more worrying things to come later in the season.

This all makes Bill a pretty wise-guy, and also seems to be quite worrying to locals. Waking up this morning, it at first appeared as if we had stuck a rare Californian mid-summer cloudy day. Lying in bed thinking about how I might not sweat so much today, I remembered waking in the middle of the night to the smell of burnt wood in the room (never innocently say to a sleeping person “can you smell that burning?” They can get startled…) and on closer inspection the sky was a creepy ashtray shade of grey. The smell of burnt hung in the air, and long range visibility was poor. The sun shone through the smoky-murk with an eery-orange sheen. Divorced from the traditional blue-sky, the sun looked strangely out of place in a bed of greys. Light hit the ground with a creepy twilight bluntness. It all just seemed slightly strange and bizarre.

The smell of burnt wood got slightly annoying after a bit, and in-doors it was still unavoidable. So I did what any man would do with a lot of time on his hand. I went to the movies. (Get Smart. 6 out of 10.)

It’s like standing in warm fog upwind from a campfire here. Everywhere.

*****

The other night I watched Eagle versus Shark, finally getting my wish of renting this movie. I think Lauren is a bit skeptical of New Zealand cinema after I made her sit through Stickmen. But I thought it was a lovely movie, I can’t really remember laughing that hard ever (genuinely) in a New Zealand movie. Well, there was Sione’s Wedding. Those trouble-making Samoans!

I was delighted to see that many scenes were filmed in Cuba Mall, but I was caught out when I was forced to reveal exactly how I knew for sure that that was the inside of Cuba Mall’s KFC. I freeze framed when the main girl walked past Jay-Jays (the former site of planetjack.com, my old workplace) and probably squealed while doing so. Starmart logos! Aaah! The New Zealand five-dollar note! So red.

Anyway, I’m starting to get pretty soft on New Zealand, geeing myself up for my coming return. We’ve a burn of the new Elemeno P album in the car (I hear from the horse’s mouth it got a one-star Simon Sweetman review), and Lauren likes a song a two, so we listen. Ah. The sweet sounds of my countrymen.

Lauren plans to descend on us in September, so I’ve been talking her through our countries quirks. But it probably serves more of a purpose for me. I’m feeling almost romantic about our dorky pair of islands.

On Sunday we went out to a pot-luck lunch (I made an awesome “this potato salad tastes like Coldplay” joke that, well, I’m still chuckling about) at a local organic farm. I got chatting with a man who’d spent a good amount of time studying bats on Stewart Island, and studying in Hamilton. It was one of the few times in my life I have ever really been enthralled by the mention of Hamilton in a topic of a conversation. He made a Hamilton equals Sacramento remark (both bland, flat and characterless cities near more preferred major centres) and I told him about the time in Hamilton I drove into a parked motorcycle after accidentally driving the wrong way up a one-way street.

It was magic. My heart could’ve burst.