Carry the weight
My Mum was what you might call an indoors woman, although I don’t think it was entirely by choice. As a girl, she used to say, she’d been confined by her stepmother to the back of the house: the kitchen, the laundry, the back porch. They lived on the slopes of Maungakiekie, but I never heard her talk about roaming that parkland.
Except, when she met Dad, a boy off a backblocks farm, he took her hunting. There’s a photo, the pair of them in sturdy outdoor gear, him wearing a beanie, her a beret. She’s gamely grinning, with a battered pair of boots hanging round her neck. He’s got a large dead animal slung over one shoulder.
It’s posed: that animal is a skin, a floor rug, and those boots are much too big for her. But the point of the photo is clear: she’s holding the rifle.
Much later on, as a family, we used to go camping. Real camping, mostly off the grid, up gravel roads in river valleys, with canvas tents and Tilley lanterns and food cooked in billies. We kids loved it and Dad turned into competent family Dad, except that one time he was violently ill after eating foraged green apples in Totoranui.
Did Mum like it? I like to think she did. Her life was about putting up with three boys and Dad all the time, but I was a Boy Scout so when we went camping, I pitched tents, rolled river stones around the fire and got up first to light it in the morning. Did that give Mum any respite? I don’t know. She wore a pair of brown striped pants, flared, that somehow served as both city style and outdoor wear. Just the thing with a parka.
Then came the season we got serious about it. Tramping the Routeburn. The high passes, the freezing lakes, the thrilling mysteries of the bush. And straight away, on the first climb, Mum said she was sorry but she couldn’t do it. So I said, “I’ll carry your pack."
And I did. Her pack balanced on top of mine. Climbing and climbing, I remember so much climbing, and on the last day that long breathtakingly beautiful descent to Lake Wakatipu.
I was 16, it was our last family holiday together. And up there in the sky, in those glorious mountains, one of us weighed down and the other free, my Mum and me, we both loved it.