Coastal Change

Happy New Year! Here's a tale of a long, long ago summer which might chime with some of your own recollections of family holidays when school/work was still unimaginable weeks away...

I was always a late developer, never more obviously so than in my early teens. At that crucial age my already diaphanous self-confidence was shredded by two things: The first of these was the fact that I went to a single-sex college and had little-to-no concept of how to interact with girls – if I could even find any.  And secondly: an oddly-shaped bite saw my nervous smile scaffolded with glittering orthodontic braces for a very long, and socially critical, two years.

Kids seem so much more confident these days, some even see similar corrective treatment as a statement, but for me it was an unsightly muzzle and I felt as if I was trying to interact with an increasingly scary world with a paper bag over my head.  Indeed, some days that would have felt like a blessing. It’s been said that one reason the Frankenstein monster is so popular in youth culture is that the clumping, out-sized, misunderstood creature chimes with how an adolescent male can feel: trapped in an uncoordinated, complexion-ravaged and oddly-proportioned  body, struggling to be accepted before rebelling against an uncaring world. I certainly wasn’t late in developing my teenage angst.

Already shy, stuttering and gawky, what passed for a social life was spent with a few classmates who have remained loyal and cherished friends to this day.  None of us were sporting legends or endowed with full social calendars, but our somewhat book-ish camaraderie enabled us to happily suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous early adolescence together. If the unimaginably remote subject of girlfriends ever arose, the awkward, foot-shuffling silence could always be covered up with the kind of braying, teenage bravado which even we weren’t immune to (while we secretly hoped that maybe the combined colleges formal dance, still years way, might be our deliverance).
Then one summer it all seemed to change in a matter of weeks - a long-overdue quantum leap.
I think I can say exactly how it began. My usual summer holiday routine of spending almost all my time with a visiting friend, whom I only saw once a year, was interrupted.  The reason is lost in the mists of time, but I suspect the very thing lacking in my life, co-ed socialising, might have been a factor for him.

I faced an immediate future which lacked its usual structure, and like many social inepts, this vexed me.  My regular friends were away on long family holidays, or working summer jobs.  So I wandered down to the town swimming pool, the only place to be, (but not necessarily by yourself). And while convincing myself that I was having a great time all on my own, I received some abuse.  The friendly, good-natured abuse which boys at this age (actually, any age) greet each other with.  It was an acquaintance from school, he was calling me over to meet his friends, and some of them were girls.

At 15, I quickly discovered that I had a horrible tendency to go all ‘Rex Harrison’, in female company. Stilted vocabulary, exaggerated courtesy, I could hope at best to be called ‘polite’, but most likely, simply a dick.  But fortunately, they were all nice people, we had fun, I relaxed, and gradually realised that the same things I could make my usual male friends laugh with made girls laugh too. I could be funny, and not just unintentionally. Somehow, I was quickly accepted into this new fold, and we went on excursions to rivers, beaches and even out at night. But mostly, long December afternoons were spent punctuated by the reverberating twang of diving boards and the myriad splashes and shouts which make up the ambient babble of an outdoor swimming complex. Water would pool on the rough concrete we lay on, while the sun warmed and dried our backs and, impossibly, I talked to girls. To them I was new and I was different, sometimes even in an interesting way (being bookish can have its advantages sometimes). I was happy… and suddenly I was also gone, due to the sudden arrival of my first summer holiday job.

I wasn’t looking, it was found for me, but in the spirit of happily accepting all the exciting new things suddenly coming my way, I threw myself into hard, vineyard labouring. It almost killed me, but there were girls there too, who also found me funny – mostly because of my total naivety forged from years of ignorance of the opposite sex.  But at least I had new stories to tell my new friends when I saw them at the Town Pool in the weekends.
I hardly recognised my life anymore, I had new friends, a tan, I was even making money – and then I was transplanted for the second time.

My own family holiday had arrived, two weeks away from this recently-born, thrillingly ‘adult’ new existence to a place which might be politely described as infamously quiet and remote.  In a tent.  With my family.

Kaikoura has considerably more glamour and appeal these days, but back then my sister and I refused to believe we were actually staying here until Dad pulled off the highway into the dusty Motor Camp.  But even here, the unstoppable spirit of change which this summer had unleashed sought me out and continued to re-order my life.

It would have made this summer a perfect cliché to talk about a holiday romance at this point.  I did meet a girl (being a relative of our camping friends and staying in a tent right next to ours, even someone with my feeble hit rate couldn’t fail to) and we spent a lot of time together.  We walked along the beach, and talked, and talked, and talked – way past my usual bedtime.  Although my arrested emotional development couldn’t fail to turn this overwhelming new experience into something resembling infatuation, it was entirely one-sided and completely platonic. The closest it came to ever becoming in any way physical was her grabbing me in fright when a startled cow loomed out of the darkness as we crossed a field from the beach one night.  But what these many hours sharing stories and experiences with a slightly ‘older woman’ did for me was give my tremulous self confidence the final boost it had so badly needed for so long.
Even through a mouthful of wire I could apparently be entertaining, and I glimpsed finally that there could be more to existence than the cycle of school, family life and homework which had somehow contented me for the past decade. I also passed School Certificate that holiday and Dad gave me my first ever driving lesson. On returning from Kaikoura I was barely ever found at home.  I was growing up at last.

Meeting up with my usual friends at the end of that January, I think they could sense the change in me, we were all changing – it was inevitable even for us.
But for me, that one memorable summer seemed the catalyst which transformed years of swelling emotional and hormonal critical mass into something finally resembling an adult. As chain reactions go, it was hardly the Big Bang but the strangeness and joy of it all encouraged me to write.  I kept a diary and I loved trying to describe all the new experiences and people I was suddenly encountering.  I’m still writing to this day.

Some thought always goes into an illustration - I'd been thinking about this one for thirty years!

Frost and space

Midwinter is upon us, and those clear, frosty nights present opportunities for certain, peculiar creatures of the night...

Astrovan and, naturally, Astrohut.  (Photograph: Mark Mullen)

Prolific sociobiologist Desmond Morris describes teenagers as suffering from an almost irresistible urge to venture out at night and bond with their own kind, all for the ultimate purpose (as most of Morris’s work seems to circle back to) of enthusiastic procreation.
At that age, my friends and I were no different, or at least we didn’t think so. Strapping a comfortable mattress on to the roof rack of our van, we would set forth on a Saturday night to cruise for heavenly bodies.
I urge anyone feeling impressed or appalled to hesitate before sending your ‘‘man points’’ or outraged complaints: the objects of our intense interest really were in the heavens, and the mattress was simply a comfortable viewing platform – we were stargazers.

It’s difficult to remember exactly where the fascination began.  I suspect it came from preoccupation with two equally geeky branches of science; fiction and physics, back in our fourth form. But ultimately the nocturnal camaraderie shared over the remaining secondary school years led to friendships which last to this day.
We named ourselves the ‘Star League’: we had coffee in thermos flasks, telescopes in our vehicle (soon christened the ‘astrovan’), Queen tapes in the cassette player and absolutely no concept of cool.  None of us would ever be compared to a Greek God, but we knew just where to find Orion, Mars, Jupiter and even Venus. (And yes, I even know that those are actually the Roman names).

Most of my memories of these sessions, when the whole universe seemed to open up to us through the cold eye-piece of a telescope, took place in the icy, inky darkness of midwinter. Darkness fell early enough for us to star gaze on a school night and there would be no residual heat-haze in the upper atmosphere.
Eventually, an opportunity came our way that only a Star Leaguer could rapturise about.  We had been invited to spend a night at (the now defunct) Blackbirch observatory, perched high atop a snowy mountain near Blenheim.  We would be looking at the sky from inside a huge motorised dome – just like real astronomers.
It was the end of July, and there was so much snow on the summit that we doubted we would get up at all.  In fact, our vehicle was eventually abandoned at the snowline and we found ourselves crunching through heavy snow carrying, among other things, a very large telescope and a crate of milk.
We might have been science nerds, but snow was a rarity where we came from and a savage snow-fight was absolutely mandatory before anything serious could take place.

After an unidentified stew and a fuzzy high-altitude viewing of Ready to Roll (I seem to recall Elton John’s Lennon tribute ‘Empty Garden’ at number one that week), we donned, gloves, scarves, jackets, another jacket, balaclavas, and hit the sky hard.
On reflection, I believe this was the first time I ever stayed up all night, and possibly never for better reason.  The dome was our frosted Cathedral for worshipping the heavens, and we travelled spellbound through space like never before –and probably never again.  We skirted distant spiral galaxies and basked in the far-off glow of colossal gas nebulae. We explored shimmering star clusters and even briefly joined a recently-discovered comet on its unimaginably vast journey.  The entire cosmos was our playground, and our mothers weren’t there to call us in.

Sketch showing the interior of the Blackbirch dome. (27/6/82)

Many hours later, exhausted by cold and wonder, we sprawled on the nearby kitchen floor – under-floor heating being a recent and hugely welcome novelty.  But before long the eastern sky soon began to glow, and sunrise was yet another spectacle to be added to our visual embarrassment of riches.  In unspoken consent, we piled outside into the rapidly-dwindling darkness to watch.
The only cloud all night now provided a burning scarlet ribbon rippling across the sky, while the hushed, snowy landscape around us blushed pink in the dawn light, ringed by golden peaks etched with cold blue shadows.  It was indescribably beautiful, a Renaissance master’s vision of Heaven.  But alas, we were young, and our silent awe soon turned to another noisy snow-fight in an irreverently short period of time.

The Star League was to last for many years afterwards (some might argue that it still does).  We’d camp during the school holidays (‘astrocamps’, naturally) in the isolated wilds of Marlborough, still braving the cold while we communed with each other and the Universe at large. Studiously written and preserved ‘viewing’ reports and photographs pasted into albums have now become precious, tattered glimpses into our own pasts. What began as an astronomy club became an inseparable group of friends who weathered their often confusing, but sometimes utterly wonderful adolescence together in a beaten-up van with a mattress tied to the roof.  And while the constellations circled above us we gradually, irrevocably grew into adults. We sold the astrovan, left home, graduated, married, travelled - one of us even became a real astronomer and actually served at a new observatory right next to the one we stayed up all night in.

When some of us meet up, every few years or so, it’s inevitable that we’ll again feel that irresistible nocturnal compulsion which Desmond Morris didn’t mean. And eventually we end up outside in the cold, bundled up warmly and gazing up at the stars.

The Southern Lights

35 years ago, New Years Eve in New Zealand made world headlines,
but not for any reasons you might expect. 

The final day of 2013 has dawned hot and bright – already the best day weather-wise since Christmas, over a week ago.  And this is quite natural, as this also happens to be my first day back at work, since finishing an absurd 22 hour shift on Christmas Eve.

Part of the reason for this rather long day was my determination to complete a project which I first began working on in the middle of this year, but then found less and less time available to work on as my job spiralled into the purgatory of ‘admin’.

Today is the 35^th anniversary of one of the world’s most famous UFO sightings. And it happened more or less above my head as twelve-year-old me slept on oblivious to the fact that the Marlborough skies were at that moment full of a phenomenon which I usually sent everyone else to sleep with.

I do remember seeing the now-famous footage shot by Quentin Fogarty’s camera crew, soon afterwards, on their return to Blenheim in the very early hours of December 31 1978. Although reportedly feeling as if their Argosy freighter was being played with by the mysterious objects like a lumbering fishing boat surrounded by a mischievous pod of darting, leaping dolphins, the film sadly does little to convey this. Instead a fuzzy, ‘squashed orange’ bumped around TV screens all over the country (and eventually the world) accompanied by Fogarty’s excited narrative.  In fact, I’m pretty certain we didn’t even have a colour TV then, but the even less impressive result did little to curb my enthusiasm.

Despite being the only case of unidentified flying objects ever verified by multiple radar sources and visual sightings simultaneously, (amounting to several reliable witnesses including  experienced air crews and air traffic controllers), and on top of all that actually filmed – few people seem to remember this incident today.  The only echoes of it I was aware of years later came from seeing pilot Captain Bill Startup’s son ribbed in my seventh form class, because of his father’s experiences.

I managed to acquire both Bill Startup’s book (The Kaikoura UFOs) and journalist Quentin Fogarty’s (Let’s Hope They’re Friendly!) for my research, and each give fascinating accounts - Startup’s  factually, and Fogarty’s more emotionally.  Either way, it’s clear that there was an awful lot more to this story than the public was ever made aware of, and this was emphasised further by the white-wash report prepared by the New Zealand Defence Force.  The nearby Japanese Squid fishing Fleet and/or Venus rising explanations offered are both embarrassingly inadequate, and perhaps the reaction of an anxious Government caught short by the possibility of foreign aircraft making merry in our airspace while the Cold War still loomed.

To me it’s very appropriate that this event occurred during the festive season, book-ended by child-like amazement and looking to the future. The universe, and even some aspects of New Zealand history, is still full mysteries. As we enter a bright new year may we never lose our capacity for wonder.

Happy New Year!

Stardust Memories

Anyone get music for Christmas?  Be very careful how often you play it – some albums may never find their way out of your head...

As most of us have now begun our summer holiday, here’s a not-especially proud look back at some of the albums , Christmas presents or otherwise, which somehow came to embody certain of my summers long past.  You probably have your own – music which either by choice, necessity or desperation became inextricably entwined with memories of certain December/Januarys when summers really were long and hot.  So why don’t you tell me about them - as a wise man once said: “When we share, we heal”.

Summer 1977

First I can remember would have to be The Story of Star Wars – the first album I ever owned.

Videotapes and DVDs were as much a part of the future as droids and lightsabres, but the magic of audio cassette technology condensed the film soundtrack down to roughly 24 minutes on each side, and provided wonderfully baritone linking narration from Afro-American actor Roscoe Lee Brown (To Kill a Mockingbird). I could now replay Star Wars as many times as I wanted – and I did: again, and again, and again.  Every moment from the opening 20^th Century Fox fanfare to Alec Guinness solemnly wrapping up by promising that: “The Force will be with you, always” became indelibly embedded in my 11-year-old mind. No wonder it was going to be many long years until I finally got a girlfriend.

Summer 1980

I’m probably even less proud of this one, but it really wasn’t my fault.  Leaving town on a two week family holiday to the Nelson Lakes National Park, perhaps inspired by the name of our destination (I can think of no other justification) my father picked up the cassette of a Willie Nelson album called Stardust.  I think we’d call it a ‘covers album’ these days, and it got thrashed severely over the following fortnight. At the end of ‘Georgia’, possibly his most well-known effort, Nelson repeats the line “on my mind” over and over again, which I now believe was actually some kind of insidious audio-brainwashing. Because even now, in my poor mind perfectly good songs like ‘Moonlight in Vermont’ and ‘Sunny side of the Street’ are forever associated with Willie’s arid, quavering warble.

Summer 1984

My first year away from home must surely have developed some more refined musical tastes.  Mixing with ferociously-trendy design students from all over the country must have exposed me to many new and challenging kinds of music?  Well, yes…it did, but what I chose to play this summer was the soundtrack to an unknown movie called FM. (It apparently went on to ‘inspire’ long-running radio station sitcom WKRP, which perhaps gives some idea of its flavour.)

Although often found at the bottom of bargain bins, this album showcased tracks from Foreigner, the Eagles, Steely Dan and that colossus among one-hit wonders – Boston’s mighty “More than a Feeling”.  A camping holiday with friends in the wilds of Marlborough’s back-country was spiced up no end by this collection of ‘past-its-sell-by-date’ 70s rock and our air guitars got a damn good work-out that summer, I can tell you.