Dick Frizzell
WALKING THROUGH TREES
I have a special memory of walking through trees … getting lost, getting found, being entranced. I must have been about 14. I was staying with an “uncle” and “aunty” in a shack – possums on the roof, possums in the roof – at Waimarama, in Hawke’s Bay.
I have no idea why I was there … summer fun for Richard or something … and I remember being very alone in this dark hut, hunkered down in the middle of a large stand of stormravaged poplar trees.
One day, a young girl magically manifested at the edge of our yard, grandly announced that her name was Margot, and challenged me to follow her back into this mad tangle of grey and silver trunks.
Which I did, without a thought – and I’ll never forget it: the silver light overhead, the heady scent of poplar pollen, the sense of being totally enveloped by a complete world. And there’s lithe young Margot leaping ahead of me, into and over healthy and rotting undergrowth. It was like following Audrey Hepburn into the Florida Everglades.
Fast forward 50 years and Jude and I were living at Waimarama while we built our Haumoana house, and we found ourselves threatening to lie down in front of a huge machine about to fell a pretty copse of these very same poplars.
The local busybody said the trees posed a constant threat to his wife, who had to walk through this hail of falling limbs every time she went to clean the public toilets by the beach.
Of course, this bombastic fool had talked the regional council into giving him a substantial contract to take out this danger to life and limb, and he declared we “Auckland hippies” weren’t going to stand in his way.
We didn’t win, but the scent given off by the mangled stumps did remind me, suddenly, of Margot.