SEEING OURSELVES AS OTHERS SEE US
Tales from The Catlins, where Diana Noonan lives on an 800sqm section, from which she sources 70 per cent of her food.
Decades ago, I lived on the West Coast of the South Island. In many ways, its towns seemed like anywhere else. But the moment you ventured into more rural spots, especially the warm, wet, jungly hills close to the frost-free coast, things began to feel distinctly Appalachian (the term ‘hillbilly’ is now discouraged).
Those were the days when young men and women, dreadlocked, dressed in homespun jumpers and intent on self-sufficiency, flocked to the West Coast from the city to pursue their dreams. It was not unusual to spot them on the sides of remote back roads, their shovels and machetes at their sides, as they headed home from their slash and burn gardens to their damp teepees or sod-roofed huts.
Back in town, the local citizens, and the children at the high school where I taught, called those folk ‘hippies’.
Any references to them were accompanied by sniggers and a rolling of eyes, as if the ‘interlopers’ might have had three fingers or, at the very least, were so busy enjoying the fruits of what were said to be their ‘illegal harvests’ that they were not part of the real world. They were definitely thought of as folk to be wary of.
I was reminded of the hippies this week, when a young woman called Lottie – a university lecturer who was developing a small garden in Dunedin – leaned over the fence where I was gardening. One thing led to another, and she was soon on my side of the fence as she and I gathered cuttings and plants for her to take home. She was effusive in her thanks, and her praise of my food forest and orchard, and as she went out the gate, I leaned on my fork and was filled with nothing short of a rosy glow. But then, as she opened the boot of her vehicle to place her bundle of plants in it, I saw her glance back with a puzzled, almost nervous, expression. And suddenly, I was back on the West Coast, and wondering if Lottie might be viewing me in quite a different way to what I thought.
This was not helped by the sight of my husband, who had been scything grass beside me when Lottie had arrived, and was now leaning on his scythe, watching her, as he chewed a piece of dry grass. He was also very (very) much overdue for a visit to the hairdresser, and had tied a bandana around his head to keep his fringe from falling over his eyes. Both he and I were wearing rather grimy hand-knitted jumpers (mine was covered in smears of decaying kelp). And our son, home for an unexpected visit, was dressed – quite literally
– in rags (he had forgotten to bring gardening clothes with him, and had dived into our rag bin out of necessity). He was also swigging from a glass flagon of kombucha in between barrowing loads of sheep manure into the orchard.
I raised my hand to wave Lottie off, but she had taken some sort of fright and was now scrambling to open the driver’s door of her car. I wanted to call out to her that we didn’t always look like this – that there was hot running water in the house, and not a drug plantation in sight. Alas, there was no chance. She had started the car, and her vehicle quickly disappeared down the road.
“She’s in a hurry to get somewhere,” said my son, as he popped the flagon onto the top of a fencepost.
“Of course she is!” I snapped. “Wouldn’t you be if you’d arrived in the middle of nowhere and found us?”
My husband looked over at me as if I was having some sort of existential crisis.
“And as for you,” I said, barely able to contain my mounting distress, “you will be going to the hairdresser – tomorrow.”
I marched inside to make the appointment, hoping, rather desperately, that Lottie had noted our dwelling was not a damp teepee, and certainly not in possession of a sod roof!