The Diving Board

Luke Elworthy wrote The Diving Board as part of his MA in Creative Writing at Victoria University’s Institute of Modern Letters.

IT ARRIVED in 2011, halfway through our first summer in Marlborough. We found it at the end of the road, perched on the steep, boulder-strewn bank of the Wairau, jutting out over the deepest pool we know. It might have been a landing craft from a far-off galaxy, such had been the sudden mystery of its touch-down. A timber diving board. But it was not like any riverbank diving board we had seen.

Two thick, felled pine spars rose two metres from the bank, straightish but still covered in rough bark, lashed and bolted together in the shape of an X. The spars supported two big planks carefully laminated together, the top extending beyond the lower for greater spring, six metres long all up. At the end closest to the bank the board was secured around a huge boulder with thick truckers’ tie-down straps. The surface had been covered in gritty non-slip paint. A beautiful job – done for no other reason, apparently, than the pure fun of it.

When we crept to the board’s edge, more than three metres above the pool, a view all the way to its stony bottom, it was a beautiful, thrilling sight. How lucky we were, we told each other, as we jumped in for the first time. We enjoyed perhaps half a dozen diving visits that first summer. The board would last hundreds of years, the children said. I was less sure.

Although not much wiser than them to the wilful ways of the Wairau in flood, as I cycled with my son and his friend down to the river in March I doubted the structure would see out the coming winter. It was still in place that day, but we had left our swim too late. The boys were cold and I couldn’t muster the enthusiasm. The boys put on masks and looked for eels downstream. That, I thought, would be the end of the diving board, too. Come winter the river will flood and the board, despite its masterful design, will be swept away. The board felt like it belonged to us, as it must have to everybody who leapt from it. Rather than trying to get a river pool to ourselves, as we had in the past, it had become a pleasure to meet a swimming stranger, leaping from the launchpad that belonged to all of us. But who had built it? Would someone from the council remove it? We met a council employee diving in, he doubted any of his colleagues would want it gone. Perhaps, he said, the mayor himself had stripped and jumped off.

I was wrong about the last swim of summer. We got down there once more, to see boys from the air force base, stripped off to their black rugby shorts, testing the wondrous construction of the platform to its limits as they ran, bounced, took off, splashed into water as clear as vodka. Bombs, dives, back-flips, one an attempted somersault, his back hitting the water with a molten slap.

I asked the air force boys if they had built the diving board, aware I sounded like a health and safety inspector, preparing a case to rip away this dangerous apparatus for unauthorised community fun. They had not, and did not know who had, but when they said ‘‘whoever put it up needs a community service medal,’’ I nodded in agreement. With that they were off in their truck, saying ‘‘Here you go . . . it’s all yours.’’

All yours. When it’s six pm in late March and you’re on a New Zealand riverbank, 20 minutes from town, a half-kilometre or more across to the farthest channel in the huge gravel riverbed, it really is. We leapt a few times more, floated down the rapids, getting sucked momentarily into a little whirlpool, then pulled out our dinner from the chillybin, enjoying the last of the autumn sun.

For our family, the diving board had become like a barometer, marking little seasonal tipping points. Like the rains last May that brought the first big flood. We had

The board felt like it belonged to us, as it must have to everybody who leapt from it. Rather than trying to get a river pool to ourselves, as we had in the past, it had become a pleasure to meet a swimming stranger, leaping from the launchpad that belonged to all of us.

never seen the river rise all the way to the stopbank, drowning the remains of the crop harvested in late summer.

WE GOT down to the river as soon as the waters receded, the worst of the mud dried. Sure enough, most of the board had disappeared, leaving only its pine supports now poking uselessly into the air. But, as we got closer I saw there was something too perfect in the structure’s removal, as if its departure had been unrushed, rather than it being broken up and carried off in an angry brown torrent. The tie-downs had disappeared, too. Might it have been carefully disassembled? And might it come back? I told the children not to get their hopes up.

By late spring there was no sign of it. The river was still there, of course, the rapids tossing you over the shingle down into the deep pool, the big boulders to leap from, but without the board it wasn’t quite the same. Never mind, I said, it had been fun while it lasted.

We checked a couple more times as spring became summer, but the pine struts sat lonely. We talked about rebuilding it ourselves, worried our skills were not up to it. Then, in November last year, ripping upriver in a friend’s jet-boat, the river high and slightly discoloured, I saw the board, restored to its full glory, proudly guarding the pool once more. We tied the boat up and jumped in. The diving board took another hit in the rains of midsummer, when its downstream strut slumped. But the elves of the Wairau Diving Board Club got on to it quickly. It lost a bit of height thereafter, but from the end of the board, as you stood gently springing above the water, it was still high enough to make you pause before you jumped.

We went down to the river again last night, now late into our second summer here. By now, I should know that summer’s last swim might not be quite that, especially this dry season.

It is too easy to forget that autumn is officially here, on a 26-degree day, the land so parched you can see its bones. But as we pulled up and waited for the dog to catch us, we saw that the board had snapped, just beyond the struts, both huge slabs fractured.

Had it taken one running diver too many? And if so what had become of them when they fell? Or was it a case of, as the German exchange student suggested, a fatal bolt of lightning in the storm that came last month?

I hope the answer remains as secret for me as the board’s making was. But I do want to salute its builders, to thank them for the hours of pleasure they have given us, and many more who live around here. I want to pass on a message to them: I will provide two replacement planks, in the hope the board can be rebuilt, that we might get a last leap.