We Bowled in the Rain

On the end of a thing

Summer was already wrapping up. The light was changing. The last camping trip I’d packed wool blankets. Then last Thursday, the final night of Bowls, a slow wintry rain rolled down off the Taruruas and settled over the Greytown Bowling Club.

This was all wrong. Bowls—lawn bowling, for the Americans, but here always just bowls—is a peak summer affair, played in sunnies and jandals (those are flip-flops, y’all. The most Kiwi word.) Our season was running late after a rainout last month, plus we’d skipped Waitangi Day. We had to wrap things up, and soon. But could we bowl in such moody damp? We sent a teammate who lives across the street on a recon mission. He found one of the regular volunteers mowing away, rain be damned. The official club decree went out by Facebook: Business House Bowls were ON.

There’s two kinds of bowls at the Greytown club. Serious Bowls is pretty much test cricket: weekend-long matches with crisp uniforms, tea breaks, and the visiting club’s banner run up the flagpole at the gate.

Thursdays, meanwhile, are just Business House. Entry-level games, all comers welcome, just six precious evenings a summer. A happy hour with mild sport attached. The teams are inscribed on a clubhouse whiteboard: the local café, the realtor, the housepainters, the roofers, the pub. Our team is just dads. We wear flammable Temu buttondowns featuring a giant rooster holding a spatula. The group text christened us Bowls Deep. I mumble it every time, but it makes the aunties giggle over their canned G&Ts.

Each Thursdays we show at 6 p.m. sharp and raid the club’s shed of ancient bowls. You pick a pair—it’s never balls, thank god, just bowls. They’re all brown or black lumps of some midcentury plastic that ends in -ite. Each set has a pictogram stamped on one side. This season I’ve bowled tūī birds, bulldogs, and the pyramids of Egypt, but I’ve had my best luck with the butterflies. You’re chasing the jack, a little yellow ball tossed to the other end. Closest team to the jack wins the end. Five ends to a match, two matches a Thursday: a summer at the bowls packs New Zealand’s shortest, sweetest season with ends.

It’s not bocce or petanque. Bowls are hamburger-shaped, with one side heavier than the other. They don’t roll straight. To hit the jack, you don’t aim for the jack. You bend it like Beckham, aiming maybe twenty degrees to either side. Your angle of attack is called the green. How hard you roll, that’s the length. Each week I try to remember my high school calculus—all the water running through pipes, all those ladders sliding down a wall. Doesn’t help much. My bowls streak through the crowd like wayward comets or curl up short like tired dogs. Occasionally I’ll drop one in there. Said a school teacher who kicked our ass a few weeks back: ‘One out of six you’re the best bowler I’ve ever seen.’

And so it was last Thursday. It’s weird bowling in jackets and proper shoes. The pitch looked flat without the summer sun, and played like rug in a flooded basement. No matter. We dads had brought our families for the final night. Our wives chatted and humored us while our kids dashed in circles chugging Sprite. The clouds broke up but the benches stayed wet. Air temp and beer temp settled into the same non-summer cool. I rolled a couple daggers. I landed a couple in the next game over.

Still, the match came down to the final end. We were down 7-6 to a young farmer and his mates who definitely beat us last year. Our skipper—our closer—was my mate the volunteer fireman. Dude wakes in the middle of the night to hose down fatal crashes on Highway 2. He wasn’t gonna sweat a friendly bowling rivalry.

The fireman stepped to the mat—there’s a little plastic mat you bowl from—and surveyed the field. The farmer’s team had the two closest bowls to the jack: two more points, that would be, and an easy win. The foreshortening of the long pitch makes it hard to understand what’s happening at the other end. It’s too far to spot the butterflies. Your teammates just rolled ‘em but now the bowls all look the same. You’re rolling backwards into your own memory. You gotta sneak past all the dark lumps you couldn’t control—or smack ‘em clear and take what comes.

a hero will rise

The fireman bowled. No wobble. Medium green, length about right. A good bowl dawdles toward the end; the fireman’s came in a little hot. But then it knocked aside one of the farmer’s bowls—CLUNK—and then another—CLUNK—then kissed the jack and flopped to its final rest beside one of our own. Bowls Deep for the win, 8-7.

We whooped! High fived! We recounted the miracle for the wives and kids! Such glory it was! Two bowls felled at a single blow! On the season’s final roll, no less!

Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof.

That line in Ecclesiastes has been bugging me for years. In the golden days of January, scooting off to opening night in my chicken shirt, the verse made no sense. Bowls in January is the book’s more famous eat, drink, and be merry. Bowls every week is the verse they made into a song: A time to cast away bowls / a time to gather bowls together.

Now on a rainy March night we gathered up the butterflies, bulldogs, and pyramids of Egypt and stowed them in their dark shed. Our daughters turned cartwheels across the darkening pitch. A rainbow appeared, right over the fireman’s house.

We gathered in the clubhouse to hear the final standings. The win had earned us a glorious third place in the relegated bottom half of the table. There was the weekly raffle for a meat pack, and heartfelt applause for the dedicated club members who’d put on the whole show. Then a club official rose to declare Business House Bowls closed for the season. There’s an old brass bell hanging in the clubhouse, for just this moment. He rang the bell, and summer was done. //

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american.nz is a free weekly letter from an American writer in Aotearoa New Zealand. I’m Dan Keane. I live in Greytown, in the Wairarapa. These are my letters home.