THE SOUND OF SILENCE
In the late summer of 2015, my wife, Catherine, and I went to live in a place that is not quite like anywhere else. It is a place of magic. A place of emptiness. A place of silence and stillness. We left behind the city’s inferno of noise, that ever-present din that stifles thought and smothers reflection.
The place we went to is called Te Maika. It is nothing more than a slither of land – ancient rocks and the ever-shifting sands – that forms the southern heads of Kāwhia Harbour. It lies on the west coast of the North Island, about 30km southwest as the crow flies from Hamilton. No one lives there. No roads lead there and no roads cross it. You get there by boat or ride a quad bike or horse through the hills and across the mudflats. Baches – some dead, some dying, some enduring – sit on the hillsides and in the middle of the imaginary road that, according to a long since forgotten plan, runs along the beach-front. People once lived there, but then they died or moved away and the community vanished. The only permanent residents now are the animals – sheep, wild horses, goats, geese, pigs, deer and the multitude of birds.
So this is where we went to live. We took with us books, photography equipment, pens, paper and the dog. We would earn nothing but would live off our savings as long as they lasted. We could, we knew, live cheaply – it is not hard to do when there is nowhere to spend your money.
This, then, was our exile, the exile we undertook willingly. And why? Why do such a thing? Why live like this? No simple, straightforward answer exists, unless it is simple enough to say: we did it because we wanted to. Or needed to. The idea appealed to us both; the idea of leaving behind the ordinariness of modern existence, the everydayness, the sameness. We wanted something different. And here was Te Maika, so very different, so very unordinary, so very unlike anywhere else. Thirty years ago, my parents bought a place there. For 30 years we have been going there, a week at a time, two weeks at a time, once a year a full month at a time. But never had we lived there. Now the place and the house were like a beacon, drawing us in. That is why we did this. It is that simple.
But there is, too, a more complicated answer, an answer to do with the noise of the modern world and the desire – the need – for silence.
Perhaps, now that I think of it, it was because we had lived for four years in the heart of New York city. So much noise, so much busy-ness, so much getting and spending. Enough to last a lifetime and then another again. From New York we had returned to Wellington, but perhaps what we had really needed was a cure for all that noise. Te Maika would be that cure.
Still, it was never our intention for it to be permanent. For one thing, our savings would only last so long. For another, we knew that living like that would not always be easy – simply being still has a price, of a kind. To be estranged from everyone, cut off and isolated. To live without the comforts of the modern world. We were not so starry eyed as to think we would not come to miss these things. And so we planned to stay one year, perhaps a little longer.