A Horse by the Sea is a Poem

On fishing, not catching, at the Wairarapa's windy edge

We fishermen met on the square in Martinborough last Sunday morning. The streets there were famously laid out in the shape of the Union Jack, but also named for American states; we did a pit stop at the public bathrooms between Texas Street and the cross of St. George. Coffee’d up, sunnies on, and the kids strapped in with a large stainless steel mixing bowl in case anyone got sick, we pointed the utes out of town and out of both Empires, chasing the Pahaoa river southeast to the sea.

The Wairarapa’s hard eastern rind is always thicker than you remember. The hills start just past Marty and don’t quit til they hit the waves. Any route through the maze is a hour of endless curves and ancient one-lane bridges. It’s not wild land at all, not by the mythic American definition. Like most of NZ it’s been thoroughly worked and is still punching the clock, though without the industrial monotony of the Canterbury Plains down south or the Big Middle back home. There’s no horizon, for one thing, and not enough flat land to pitch a tent. The endless gullies and ridges are quilted in three distinct patterns. There are the clear-cut paddocks, where violent green of spring grass is stitched with sheep tracks and scattered with Seuss-like cabbage trees. There’s the pastoral glens of Empire trees, maples and oaks and such, but also those skinny poplars that always seem so planted to me, each one a human intention as clear as a lit candle. And then there’s the pine plantations. Someone—something—must’ve planted those ten thousand pinus radiata, close as corn and right up to the fenceline, but no signal remains. If the poplars are people, the pines are money, stacked airless and dark. They’re ghost forests. Spreadsheets of future toothpicks. I averted my eyes and watched for cute baby lambs instead.

We swerved off the dirt track and into a darling homestead to pick up some local friends. The dad came out to say they couldn’t go just yet. His son was laid out on the couch. “Cut himself with a saw. He’s a bit fainty.” Gouts of blood, I imagined. “He was cutting down trees.” This was 9 am on a Sunday. No worries, mate, if the boy’s too hurt? The dad shrugged. “We’ll catch up.”

Onward we drove. The kids demanded an ETA but I had no idea. It’s an island, kids. We’re not gonna miss the ocean. Finally the sky opened up and then around one last bend and there it was, the Pahaoa carving through a black gravel beach, colliding with a mysterious limestone outcrop and then forking off into the Pacific.

Turns out fishing—which I ain’t done since I was twelve, yanking trout out of a stocked Colorado pond—is half just hauling gear. We parked the utes in a paddock and marched to the beach bearing tackle and poles and buckets and dry kid clothes and chilly bins and water bottles and apples and chippies. The local friends arrived only minutes later, the father and a teenage daughter and the young treecutter, now revived, a boy of maybe ten who greeted us all with a bloodied thumbs-up.

Now the real fisher-dads kicked off their shoes and sunk lines in both river and ocean straightaway. I followed their brief instructions and did the same. My son had been excited by the story of fishing: wave this giant wand and you’ll summon an invisible beast from the depths! The facts of the matter, though—the finicky line, the wind, a pole taller than you are—could only hold his attention so long. There was a beach to explore, and a crazy crop of driftwood. Whole trees bleached white as whalebone. Round, white stones pale as china and thin as saucers. I let him run. To fish you must literally turn your back on your child. The relief among both parties is profound. I cast awhile into the waves, and let go the twitch that haunts a standard beach picnic: Is everybody having fun? Have we completed the mission? How long should we stay? The answers were all in the sea.

We cast from the riverbank, from the rocks, from the beach. We had mussels for bait and those big surf-casting poles you just stick in the sand and watch. No one caught anything. The kahawai never showed. The sun rose towards noon. My borrowed rod was a cigarette in my fingers, marking time for time’s sake. The light was diamond-bright and the sea spray filtered the hills into a wild, haptic green. The wind was relentless. No gusts, no caprice, just the hard shear of a planet spinning in space. A northerly, if memory serves, so last Sunday the planet spun from pole to pole instead. Prove me wrong.

I put down my pole and joined the kids for leftover birthday cake and sandy lollies in the shape of dinosaurs. The other dads fished on. I climbed around on the weird white rocks. Ancient sea bed, they’d have to be, heaved up when the volcanoes made these islands. Soft as butter cream. Their shards, polished in the surf, became those saucer-like stones. My son announced he was bored and then gathered the stones and sat down on the sand to stack them. Then he and another kid dug a foxhole under an enormous drift log. If this were a picnic we’d have left hours ago.

But then we’d have missed the horses.

We’d headed back when the blowing sand began to sting. Turning from the beach we spotted them grazing in a little herd around the utes, tails flicking in the wind. The kids called out in wonder. Dads too, our wonder weighed down by the buckets and bags. I counted eight of them. Six small bays. One spotted grey. One tall, handsome pinto that walked right up to us to say hello. Hello, we said back. The local teenager held out her hand, as you do, so the horse can catch your scent. “Nobody knows who owns them,” she said. “They’re here all the time.”

So it wasn’t a dream. It was just Pahaoa. I was glad they remained unclaimed. A horse by the sea is a poem. Eight horses around your car at the mouth of a river is a surplus of signs I cannot fathom. We’d brought fizzy drinks for the kids, a closing toast for those windy fatherless hours, and now they slurped at their cans and surveyed the horses like we’d thrown a pre-Derby cocktail party. The pinto seemed equally delighted. We gave her nose a pat. Her coat was toasty in the sun. A horse’s eyes are huge, my son said. The teenager fed her an apple. The mission was complete.

Thus restored, we did another luckless hour on the mud flats dragging for flounder, then piled back in the utes and headed for home. The kids were zonked out on sugar and sun and mud. In the backseat they took turns donning the sick bowl as a helmet. The kid under the bowl swatted blindly at the other two as they all shrieked with laughter. Guys, we said. Stop screaming. Calm down. What are you even playing?

It’s VR, they said. We’re playing VR! You put this helmet over your eyes and you can see this whole world in there!

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