Ranana (London), Viewpoints
Have you ever travelled a road so many times before you know its rough edges? Know when you’ll fall into a hole that rattles the teeth of your car’s wheels and ensures you’ll need a wheel alignment next time the car’s in for a servicing?
Do you know how much of the corner the oncoming driver is going to cut so that if you had to make an exaggerated wheel correction to account for it, you’d still stay on the road? Familiarity.
I grew up on a road like that. I knew exactly which corners I could drive into at speed so that I could feel the camber direct the wheel around the lip of it and set me to course again. I wouldn’t do that these days on Farm Road because they just don’t make roads like they used to!
The River Road is beginning to have a recognisable familiarity to me in its construct. I can feel it twist and turn beneath me as Craig drives adeptly into its corners. I can feel its serpentine S-shape movement, that same undulatory locomotion used by most snakes on land or in water. I’m feeling the road’s body shape now.
The closer we get to Hiruharama I have an increasing awareness of the rising emotions in me. They feel unfathomable. I’m aware of the space within the confines of the car, the way the trees of the bush stand uniformly shoulder to shoulder above me and how the awa (river) below me seems oblivious to anything else except the notion of motion. Its own, peacefully onward.
Ruaka Hall
I’m fidgety, so Craig pulling off to the side of the road at Ranana (London) comes as a great relief to me. We stop outside Ruaka Hall, this architecturally incongruous Art Deco building, her pristine geometric shapes juxtoposed against the rounded, fullsome backdrop of hills and scrub. She stood, blindingly virginal in mostly white. I heard the Dylanesque intones in my head, “what’s a sweetheart like you do’in in a place like this?” And I can’t help thinking, “exactly!”
To the degree that unison is possible on this roadside canvas I’m curious where we make our markers my travelling companion and me. I’m compelled to read the stone monument, to commemorate the Battle of Moutoa, May 14, 1864 “They fought that we might live together in peace” while Craig headed to view the Marae (Meeting House) with its wharenui (literally ‘big house’, a communal house) to the right of the Hall. The words on the monument left me feeling totally perplexed. I said as much to Craig when we returned to the car.
I feel a chaos rising in my body and I have no idea what it means. I recall my time spent in a collective of visual artists, writers, actors, dancers and musicians in Sydney’s Newtown. Newtown, that last bastion of bohemia. I do believe they irrevocably changed my way of interpreting and my awareness for how spatial relations work. They taught me that the area between people told a story.
This trip (read space) has had a sense of extreme interiority from the get-go, an interiority of almost Chekhovian proportions. As we leave Ranana the inner chaos is confounding to me still, and has the hallmarks of that ‘thing’ that was happening back up at the Aramoana Hill Summit. I’m at a loss for words, I can’t explain it. We’re moving again, thank goodness. It’s familiar that movement and somehow comforting.
