I'm Over the Hill

On the midlife grace of the train to Welly

We Greytown dads gather on the Woodside platform in October’s new light of spring. The boys are regulars, dressed sharp for the day’s meetings ahead. Shirts creased, a glow of aftershave, a handsome wool snapbrim, a bitchin’ chore coat I covet immediately. I’m a grad student in a ballcap and bog-standard black windbreaker who tells himself his hiking boots somewhat resemble those in fashion thousands of miles away. One of the dads is leaving a bike in the station’s lonely bike rack: he’s flying up to Auckland for work and won’t be back until the late train home tomorrow, when he’ll strap on a headlamp and ride home in the dark. That’s what you get for living in the middle of nowhere, he says. He doesn’t lock the bike up. The helmet will wait two whole days hanging loose on the handlebars.

We enter the train and separate into our commuter cones of silence. I always take seat on the east side, even when it’s facing backwards. East feels like West to me here in ways I can’t explain—the Pacific’s that way, or maybe every signpost in the Southern Hemisphere feels quietly, permanently reversed. In the flats the view ain’t much different, but there’s a precious stretch between Featherston and the tunnel when you rise up off the valley floor. On the west side you’re backed up to the rising hills, which are green and pretty enough. If you sit on the east, though, you can gaze out over the paddocks as they drop below you like a great green quilt, and then, down below a long plain of wandering cabbage trees, is Lake Wairarapa. It’s a puddle, as lakes go, ten feet at its deepest, and thus a moody sort of mirror. This morning, under high clouds, it was all at once silver, mud, and hospital green.

Then the Remutaka foothills rise around you and the lake and valley are gone. This is maybe my favorite stretch of the whole line. For a few short minutes it’s just the train and a mountain rising under its cloak of semi-native bush. It’s all regrown after a 19th-century clear-cut. These days you cannot see the ground beneath, only the green, the silver ferns, the stubborn yellow-flowered gorse, and a bunch of other things I should know the name of by now. But it’s pure grace up there. You don’t need names. It’s just a train climbing skyward through trackless green.

All too soon the tunnel closes in. Before it was finished in 1955 the old line went all the way over the hill. I wish I could’ve seen it, though the old photos gently remind us there would’ve been more stumps than trees. Now there’s just this 9km-long metaphor. There’s no light or signal inside. If you don’t have a playlist or podcast loaded you’ll be stranded in the silence of your own head. Today I am listening to an old friend sing beautiful songs about dad life, true love, bridges, and gardening in a city far, far away. Maybe the best part of middle age is that you can say ‘plants are awesome’ and just stop there. Seasons are pretty cool, full stop. The kids are growing like plants and we’re all going to die someday but that is not really news or even a revelation anymore. My son got up early to practice the piano this morning with a blanket around his shoulders because it’s New Zealand and houses are cold. I kissed him on the head. I don’t know what he thinks of all this, but I’m in a dark tunnel with good tunes and a warm thermos of coffee and I’m good.

On the other side of the tunnel, over the peak but still well up in the hills, is Maymorn. The highway doesn’t go through Maymorn, so you only ever see it from the train, and the platform up there is often shrouded in a primordial mist: Jenny and I have a firm conviction that Maymorn doesn’t actually exist. This morning, though, the sun was just clearing the mountaintop in a glorious, golden beam. In a construction site hard by the rails a family of ducks was strutting purposefully through the dirt, all in a line, a mother and father and half a dozen ducklings trailing behind. The dad swiveled his green head this way and that, proud as punch or scared as hell.

Down we rolled into the Hutt. Dearest Hutt, I skip right through you. I’m deep in the tunes or a podcast by then. The clotheslines roll by. Back hedges pressing through their fences. A parking lot full of buses. The graffitied rear-ends of warehouses. More commuters pile in at each stop but we Wairarapa kids already own the window seats. I keep my eyes out for the river, wide and tree-lined. For the few seconds we’re scooting over that bridge I feel like we’re right back in the countryside. Could be anywhere in NZ, really. It’s a small, wet country thick with short rivers. This week’s been dry enough the Hutt is low in its stones, taking one last lazy bend before it dives into the sea.

Wellington Harbour, though! We’re all on board now for the final show. This is why you grab the eastern window. Just past Petone the harbour appears all at once at your elbow and the whole city turns to water. Sunlight pours down over the green mountains and does its shiny-coin thing on the waves. Matiu sleeps like a cat in the sun. The South Island ferry chugs through its wide turn to the harbour mouth. Just below the tracks they’re slowly getting that new bike path together; today was the first time I’d seen it flat enough for a wheeled thing to travel on. The new, vaguely war-like concrete barriers have been heaped there long enough to grow a bright green coat of ocean plants just living their best lives. There’s no wind today and the water’s still enough you could almost skip a rock all the way to Eastbourne. I’ve been going to the gym lately. Maybe one day I’ll be strong enough.

The harbour slips away behind the railyards and we pull into Wellington station. Together we disembark and do the walk. The train has conveyed us here—a bus before that, for the Greytown kids—and now we are a school of fish, in every possible black windbreaker, boots of all ages and shines, sneakers crisp and sneakers grey, suit coats and light puffers and the odd scarf, ear buds or big cans, backpacks well-loved to courtroom-ready. I know one Greytown mate has a desk two blocks away. Another, I’m pretty sure, is in a shiny glass building a ways up the waterfront. But I don’t see them now. No time to look. The school is on the move. The station doors are open and we flow right in. There are birds in the eaves. The old grocery store is long gone. We stop for none of it. We cannot break the spell. We swim as one through the hall, under the clock, and scatter south into the city.

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