Over the hills

The first thing I noticed about New Zealand when we visited in April was the hills. New Zealand has the most amazing hills I’ve ever seen—amazing in their variety, their texture, their color. It’s as if some species of giants had a Hill Fair at a local high school: Hill building contest. Points awarded for originality and beauty. All winners will be displayed together in exhibit in middle of Pacific Ocean.

There are hills that are gentle and rolling, hills that are rocky and glacier-carved. Hills covered with grass and brush (and sheep) and others covered with the stubble of cultivated pine trees—or the incongruous ruin of harvested trees, remaining bits helter-skelter down the hill like the aftermath of a tornado. There is almost no end to the variation in the hills (we’ve seen a tiny part of this country, but a huge number of kinds of hills). As we traveled through the South Island, I took pictures of the different kinds of hills, and thought about what they reminded me of: spiky ones that looked newly-formed, gently-sloped ones that looked like the rain and wind had shaped them over millennia, hills that were totally out of scale—way too large to rise out of the flat, otherwise-hill-free plane or too small and unaware of the huge hill behind it. The hills tell the story of the forming of this land, the divergent and sometimes violent ways the land pushes up from the sea.

Now that we live here, I’m getting more and more familiar with a single set of hills. Paekakariki is a tiny village that rambles over the little strip of land between the sea and the hills. Because of this, either the sea or the hills (or both) make up nearly backdrop of every scene here. The most magnificent houses have views out the front to the sea and out the back to the hills. Our house, tucked in one of the steeply rolling sand dunes of this town, has glimpses of both, but views of neither.

I feel held by the hills. At first they felt looming and otherworldly. Now they feel protective, somehow benign and magnificent features on the daily landscape. They remind us, here in a place where the sea changes color and texture from moment to moment, that there are stable places that are just as captivating as the changing waves. Unlike the hills of Wellington, which are dotted with Victorian houses, perched like mountain goats in the most unlikely places, these hills are a patchwork of olive green grass, tufts of deep green bushes, and a scattering of blue and yellow and white wildflowers. And sheep (or occasionally, cows) stitch the whole thing together, offering a sense of scale and slope on impossibly steep swaths of green.

The hills hold the clouds, too, catching tufts of grey against the green. And they hold this little village, which is nestled in the crook of these hills as they sweep first close to the sea and then pull away. I don’t feel protected or sheltered, because the weather comes at us from the sea (just now the wind picks up outside and whistles in from the west). But I somehow feel held in scale by the hills, held against the vastness of the sea in this little island so far away from any large land anywhere. Rather than providing shelter, the hills anchor my sense of place, forever capturing the undulating waves in rock and green. And they feel old and solid next to the ever changing sea.

No matter how long we stay in New Zealand, it's hard for me to imagine that I'll ever tire of the hills, or that I'll ever be able to see other landscapes without holding these in my mind. They are classically New Zealand, strong and magically beautiful but not showy or loud. They hold me like the clouds on this grey day, and help me remember that this is an island risen from the sea where water and land meet, where waves in the sea meet waves in the land. In my liminal, between-everything space, there is structure and solidity in the zone between the hills and the sea.