Not Bad

I began this entry on the Milford Mariner sitting in the dining room with Aidan while Naomi showered off the cold Tasman sea in our cabin after a kayak and swim off the back of the boat. The sandflies were hovering near my DEET-covered body, but they weren’t not brave enough to land—good news for everyone, really. We have spent the last couple of days contemplating beauty and marveling at every turn that the beauty scale needs to keep shifting higher and higher. And now that we’re here in Milford Sound, we have found beauty so shocking as to be dizzying—we are wishing for an entirely new vocabulary.

Suddenly I understand why Keith’s language has seemed so off to me these last years since our first visit. He thinks of Paekakariki as sort of “ordinary lovely” which has always stunned me. Then, Kaikoura—which is one of the most magnificent places I’ve ever been, snow-capped mountains falling away to azure seas filled with dolphins—he thinks of as “beautiful, but not spectacular.” It is only here in Fiordland that Keith will finally call the landscape “spectacular.” I have thought of him as deluded in a sort of sweet, understated New Zealand way.

It turns out, though, that down here in the deep south, the Kiwis are all confused about the beauty—how could they not be, really? We have moved from one lake mirroring towering mountains to the next. All of the mountain ranges are different here: smooth ones worn by time, jagged ones pushed by earthquake, and straight-sided sheets of granite carved out by glaciers. All of the lakes are different: massive, with waves like the sea; small with waters stained a deep green by tree leaves, steeping like tea; tiny and so mirror-still that I keep turning and turning the photographs on my computer to figure out which way is up. There are so many varieties of magnificent that the word pales, that we have started to use phrases for different kinds of ugly to describe the landscape when we’re bored with the “beautiful” vocabulary. “Look at that cliff face mirrored in the lack below: that is so unattractive,” one of us will say. “Yes, but that waterfall catching the light and glowing from the inside: that is repulsive,” another will counter. “Ahhh, totally hideous,” we’ll all agree, snapping pictures which will never show the grandeur of the place.

We do this in jest because we’re just visiting, but we’ve noticed that, like Keith, the other New Zealanders down here do these things without seeming to notice. At lunch in Te Anau yesterday, we asked how far it was to Queenstown. “Less than two hours,” the barista assured us. “But it’s not a very nice drive,” she said, wrinkling her nose. We discovered she was delusional in both cases: the drive was three hours and would easily have been one of the prettiest drives we’ve ever taken—if we hadn’t taken those other drives this week. We passed through rolling hills filled with sheep and deer farms, crossed racing, rock-strewn streams, and passed around one mountain range and then through a couple of others. “Not very nice,” indeed.

I have wondered about what it does to the brain to live in a New Zealand landscape, whether the natural beauty which surrounds you releases such huge quantities of dopamine and other happy drugs that the kiwi brain forms differently, swimming in new kinds of chemicals. I don’t have any evidence yet that this release of drugs makes people more smart or kind or loving than people elsewhere (although there is anecdotal evidence to suggest this might be the case). It is clear, though, that living in these spaces changes your ability to recognize beauty when you see it.

Aidan and I walked into the wheelhouse for warmth on a still crisp morning, the fur seals playing in the water, the towering edges of the fjord ending nearly a mile above us in a navy-blue sky. There had been a pod of dolphins—one a tiny calf—playing in the wake of the boat. I sighed with a pleasure so deep it moved through my body and said to the skipper, “This is quite a day, isn’t it?”

“Not bad,” he answered matter-of-factly from his position at the wheel. “Not a bad day at all.”

Pics today are pretty obvious and all from Milford Sound: looking out over the bow of the boat at the sound; Michael and Naomi kayaking in the mouth of the sound in the Tasman sea; one of the many lovely lovely waterfalls--first from close up and then watching the twin of our boat as it gets up close to the waterfall--just for scale (the boat holds about 120 people, or sleeps 66 plus crew--not a small boat).