THE RIVER © 2008 by STEPHEN BUSBY
The River
At the riverbank on a cold early-May morning, two women are packing waterproof bags into a canoe, or waka, as they tell me it ought to be called. They are kind, but I’m ill-equipped and unenthusiastic. My footwear is flimsy, the waterproof trousers they’ve given me are tight (they pull at my groin), and I’ve come with too much luggage, some of which Huhana—the plump and authoritative one—is now packing back into her jeep. I put on a yellow lifejacket while Miri—the guide who will come with me—watches with a sombre air. She hasn’t spoken, despite our having touched noses in the required way.
The river-lands here are flat; the river itself shallow, slow-moving. There will be rapids later, treacherous perhaps. I have paid money for the chance of some treachery in the hope of being shaken out of my trough.
Now the two women have begun their slow chanting again: the sequence of sounds loops back on itself, repeated on a rising note, more strident. They are standing and singing towards the water. I close my eyes, allow sound to penetrate me. The blankness begins to lift; a breeze stirs my hair. There is only the noise of their voices. For the first time, I feel lightness: some small thing is lit, I know I may choose to do this rather than to have it be done.
The chant stops. I open my eyes. Huhana is smiling: she bends down and brings some of the river up in her cupped hands, holds them out towards Miri, who with her fingers flicks some drops in my direction. I feel the sprinkle on my face, then she does the same for herself—splashing river-water up over her head: her sleek black hair tucked beneath the woollen bonnet, her full eyebrows, the lips moving to some interior prayer. Huhana takes a small knife from her pocket, strides over to the undergrowth nearby and returns with a large, green fern leaf in her hand.
“This will also protect you,” she says to me and bends down to the waka, where she inserts the stem of the fern into a small hole at the stern.
She gestures for me to get in. I do so, feeling the first wobble as my right foot moves the canoe in the water, my left foot lingers on the ground. So I must give myself to the river, relinquish the ground, trust I will be held in something that does not hold. I lower myself down to squat on the floor of the waka, which sways while Miri climbs in behind me, picks up a paddle, and pushes off. She instructs me how to move my paddle through the water, and there is a satisfying forward surge as I realise through the muscles of my arms and the grip of my fists on the cold plastic of the paddle that there is relationship here with the river: a simple thing, but like a child I am suddenly full of it, laughing and unencumbered as we leave the shallow riverbed, moving with the current into the middle where it is not slow at all. I look back at Huhana, receding: she’s watching us, mouthing something, I think.
For the first time, I become aware that this is a body of fast-moving water flowing between two banks of land, because I am on it, carried, in it and now of it: it isn’t some abstract or picturesque thing; no longer is there land with a river running through it—instead there is river and grey sky and something over there that I once knew as land. It has all changed (I marvel): this river is real and the land only relatively so. I’m struggling to explain to myself something that my soul has already gathered in, so instead I focus on my arms, feeling their lovely push in the water, and I’m smiling broadly because it is new and I know that for once I have done the right thing.
Mid-morning. In front of me the fern shivers in the wind, while from behind sounds the steady splash of the paddle. Miri has told me that I need not paddle and so am free to be with the river: to watch the riverbanks run by. The land has risen up to cradle us inside a gorge: on the sides are trees and giant ferns amid rock formations and large boulders. Occasionally smaller infant rivers feed into ours, tumbling down stringy waterfalls to reach us where our river is stirred briefly, but always moving on fast, absorbing everything in its flow.
I begin to open to the power and grace in the running water; there’s something vulnerable in me, hidden away. I no longer have recourse to any law other than in this river, other than in Huhana’s assurance that I will be safe, that its spirits will survey us. So I sit with my paddle on my lap, sometimes dropping my hand into the shock of cold water where it thrills and grows numb.
Around midday Miri steers us towards a shale beach on the right-hand bank. She jumps out and pulls us up so that the waka scrapes onto ground again. I regret this, though am hungry for lunch. She takes one of the canvas bags farther up the ridge of sand, produces sandwiches, and we sit side-by-side facing the river as if another place were laid at the table on the water.
I sink into the silence now that the splashing and the drama of all movement have gone. In front of us the gorge stretches into the sky. I turn to observe Miri, who is sitting, small and contained, on a large stone, munching, looking I think at nothing, yet seemingly alert. I ask how long she has been doing this.
She looks at me, then turns back to the river. “All of life,” she says.
“May I know how long that is?” I ask.
“Thirty-six years,” she replies.
I sense that she is not averse to words, and so I stumble on. “Not thirty-six years as a guide, you don’t mean?”
“Thirty-six years with the river,” she says. “We are born here; we played here; we learned everything here; we are here. The river gives life; I know every part of the river—this part the most, what you will see.”
“What about the rest?”
“Yes,” she shrugs, “the rest also, of course, right down to W_, but right down there is not ours.”
“Not yours—you mean you don’t own it?” and I realise my mistake.
She smiles, seeing me see this. “The river,” she says, turning more fully to face me, “is life. Is everything. When I was young, we eat from it, wash in it, go everywhere in it. It is higher, stronger then, before all the dams and the changes. Then we go downriver and up, sometimes even from W_.”
The thought of paddling upriver stills me: what sort of strength and determination would one need to do that, when the will to simply steer downriver is beyond me? “How far away is that?” I ask, aware that my questions are too rational.
“Five days,” she says. “Soon you see a stretch of land on the other side where all our iwi lived and remains of the Marae, too. We were forced to leave—there was no electricity or water and so they say we must not stay. Soon the steamers stopped coming up the river, too; it was too shallow because of all the water being taken away for electricity. Then they told us that we could not live where there was no electricity, but we did not need it before. My grandmother remembers the big steamers with all the tourists coming up the river, and they stop at a hotel halfway up and dance and eat and sleep. We pass where the hotel was tomorrow and where the boats were tied up.”
She stops, turns away, continues to eat. She is like no one I can know. I wonder at what she would be able to do with her will and sincerity: when she speaks of the river, it is as much an intimate fact as her family, her tribe, or iwi, as she says.
I wonder if she has children and what they will do. She turns towards me. “I have children,” she says and smiles. “Maybe one stays with me with the river and with Huhana; the rest they will go.”
In the afternoon, the gorge grows higher and the undergrowth piles up on either side of us: boulders, giant ferns and other trees, sometimes a small hut perched on an outcrop of rock high up on the slope, but I cannot tell whether these are lived-in places or tricks of the fading light.
The river grows narrower and finer as it threads its way through the gorge. The sound of Miri’s paddling is harder to hear, because the river speaks with a wilder voice, and piles of rocks and boulders are gouged out of the slopes and piled in the now-rushing waters around us. Sometimes Miri tells me to paddle—hard in places—but she does not tell me where to go, where the way is between the rocks, and so I don’t know. She is steering us and I am paddling fast so that we are not sucked into places we must not go, and the waka bobs and pitches—we are both wet and it is wonderful and we are fast approaching a ridge in the river up ahead beyond which the water dips down out of view.
I lift my paddle out of the water and tense myself; there is some seed of happiness and exhilaration in me that is new. We go over the top and down and I am whooping! I turn to look at Miri with wide child-eyes, and she smiles and says, “This is the beginning,” and “You must not turn around. You must see where we go.”
The light is dropping behind the trees that line the uppermost edge of the gorge, and I would not claim that we have navigated any rapids; no, rather we have surrendered to the river and, thanks to some miracles, it has conceded to our having slipped through. Here the waters are calmer and a little wider so we are slower, and I’m surprised when Miri steers towards a grand-looking rock sleeping in the river up ahead. After lunch she had instructed me to climb up the little beach to pick some small fern leaves, which she now tells me to take out of my pocket, to hand her one, and, while she steers along the side of the rock, to place a fern on it and she will do the same.
As I do this, she begins to sing—her voice strong and high, echoing around us. She places her own fern and touches the old rock as we slip by. “It is one of the spirits who keep us safe in the river,” she says when I ask, and goes on chanting for a while. Listening to this, the tips of my fingers trailing in the water made clearer by the rapids, I too thank the rock and the spirits of these places. I turn to look at Miri: her shining brown skin is wet with water, her eyes half-closed.
“To have come here this far is fortunate,” she says. “Most of the tourists fall out further back.”
Evening. I’m lying on a mattress, looking up at the ceiling of the Marae: this long cavernous tribal home. All around me, the walls are a riot of polished wooden carvings: an assembled mass of near-human heads and animal forms wriggling and snake-like with pearly white eyes, and everywhere an ancestral questioning gaze. These are the tribe’s forebears and guardian spirits, Miri has said, telling me about some of the women and animals, but nothing of the men, for that is not her domain. I have read that one is responsible to such spirits and, if this relationship is maintained in balance, they will reciprocate. Now I will sleep under their watch. How would I live with the ancestors? I am electric with energy: my whole body is switched on. There is the noise of an animal scratching about outside, while next to my pillow is a snake, its carved mouth hangs half-open.
That night, I dream of my mother skinning a rabbit in the kitchen sink, of my father pulling a new calf from a cow, of a bird shot with my brother’s gun, but that will not die: its bead eye looks up at me as it skitters around, grounded. In one dream I’m kneeling on the riverbank, but the river is dry: I have cupped it all away in my hands. I cry out and wake to find Miri’s face, concerned, above me. I wonder if she will take me in her arms, but she does not.
In the morning, we walk together to the river to find that some divine hand has strayed everywhere in the night: along the little pathway, the wet undergrowth on either side is hung with large-looped spiders’ webs heavy with dew. A new sun shines low along this royal corridor, but the best is waiting for us at the water’s edge: wisps of morning mist lie suspended over the surface of the river, and in the stillness, the clear waters mirror the gorge opposite. A bird is hooting repeatedly yet quiets once Miri begins her slow chanting, and I stand, eyes closed, facing the water: so this is prayer. Miri pushes us off and we are soon near the middle, moving slowly through the mist, which seems always to escape us, suspended a few hundred metres or so forever ahead.
To be out in the early morning; to be gliding along the bottom of a high gorge in silence; to see my breath forming as I dip my paddle in and out of fast water; to have been gifted this, and to have the grace to receive it; to hear the rise and fall of the paddle behind and to not know for how many centuries these people have done this; to feel so moved and be still moving; to know truly—even momentarily—that one is in the right place; to know that something in me had the intelligence at last to cross the globe in order to be here this morning; to live in awe, however briefly; to forget my name and to remember it again; to dip my hand in chilled running water, then to lift it wet against my face; to give thanks; to hope; to long; to love in perpetuity; to feel family; to look across the surface of the water at the pattern of wet mud and grasses growing over stone so perfectly mirrored in the water that I remember from my childhood a cardboard tube we pointed at the light and looked through while twisting it to see a kind of moving kaleidoscope of symmetrical colours forming and un-forming; to still feel wonder at this forty years on.
A bird flies ahead of us low over the water. Something plops into the river far away on our right. There is a hooting noise that echoes off the green walls. Rain begins to fall, pattering, then faster. Everything is transparent and bright. I look up: drops fall into my face, and the surface of the river is alive with little choppy waves, leaping all around. I hear Miri shouting: we’re almost at the rapids and must paddle over leftwards to prepare for the way down. There were forty-six rapids yesterday and there will be fewer today, Huhana had told me, but they will be steeper and I will be glad of having had practice.
Suddenly the first one is upon us, then the next, and after that it is one long string of obstacle-rocks in churning water: foam and high wind, paddles struck against stone and pushed off again; the waka twisting and rearing amidst the ridges of submerged stone. My arms and body grow numb, but there is no time for apprehension: just sit as upright and flexibly as you can (some inner wisdom tells me): there is no paddling to be done because you are in the middle of something that has the strength to take you down, to force you under if you try too much control.
All the time, the rain comes down and the wind whips up the water, and throughout I sense Miri’s poise behind me—taking us away from the worse-looking places, then paddling fast forwards so that we don’t meet the next fall too slowly. Sometimes she steers us into the wildest places and I am whooping again, and sometimes she sings, then we are thrown by a wave against a huge rock that I had thought we were safely by, and—in an instant—I am half-flung out into the waters and the waka is almost on its side. I struggle upwards and feel my hand scraping against rock—sudden pain; gasping I use the paddle to help push us further away. I look down at these arms and hands moving us through the surging water as if they were not mine—there is blood forming where one of them grips my plastic handle. I lift this bloodied hand and wipe it against my cheek; I am all exhilaration.
Later, Miri secures the waka with a rope hanging from a landing stage, then while I watch, she strips off her lifejacket and dives into the river. I look and she bobs up farther away and starts to sing: the sound reverberating off the rock walls, echoing inside.
Copyright © 2008 by Stephen Busby
