Even the Sky Looks Larger

Ko Wainui te maunga

Mount Wainui is just a tiddler, 722 metres at its peak. But from my kitchen window in Paekakariki, beyond the backyard and the bald flat paddocks, past the hill pasture and monotonous pines, Mount Wainui appears hefty, rugged, rebellious.

I’d heard there was a track to the summit, but that it was long and difficult, and not well marked. Too cautious to attempt it alone, I was excited to see the Regional Council was offering a tramp up there as part of their outdoor events program – it included a helicopter ride part way. But it was booked out. There was a limit of 31 people. Did I want to be fourteenth on the waiting list?

I put my name down with little hope, but a tinge of entitlement. I’d watched Wainui’s weather as I washed countless dishes, noted the few times each year when snow lay on its slopes. I’d seen it cloaked by cloud, and felt oddly proud when it stood starkly black against an early sky. My children hailed silhouetted clusters of tall trees on its horizon – a lollipop, a dinosaur. I’d looked at this mountain, and I wanted to know what the mountain saw when it looked back.

A few days before the trip, the co-ordinator phones to say I’m in. He recommends hiking sticks (what?), and asks how much tramping I’ve done, (minimal), and if my knees are good (untested). I reassure him, hang up, and begin to worry. There’s no time to train. I borrow a stick. I dig out my boots.

We assemble at MacKays Crossing. The helicopter will take us to about two hours walk from the summit. This makes me less nervous about my level of fitness, and more nervous about crashing. It’s my first helicopter ride, and I thought it would be toward the end of the tramp, and potentially optional. But there’s little time to fret. I’m ushered, stick clamped to my side convinced I’m going to accidentally catch it in the deadly blur of rotor blades, and tucked into one of the first flights. Once aboard and aloft, I relax. It feels buoyant, without the lurching forces of a glider flight I once took. I look down as we pass over my house. Disappointingly, it’s just like Google Maps.

The day is fine, but up on the hillside, it’s a cold half hour as the rest of the party is ferried up. Everyone puts on jackets. I realise that until now the boots and polypropylene have felt like dress-up. It starts to drizzle.

We set off, single file, across the tussocky grassland into abrupt bush. I wonder if a day will come when I look at a line of trampers and not think of The Lord of the Rings. At first I concentrate on my distance from the person in front of me. Close enough to feel I’m not slowing everyone down, but far enough to avoid any vegetation springing back as they push through. Soon we settle into a collective pace. I listen to banter between friends and foreign accents. Three men are discussing the merits of different GPS devices. The track is marked by fluorescent triangles, which both comfort and jar in their contrast to the bush. Some kind of moss or lichen hangs like tattered lace from trunks and branches. It suggests mist, but the earlier drizzle has passed, and it’s surprisingly dry underfoot.

We emerge at the trig on the peak. The weather has cleared, and layers are shed, sandwiches unwrapped. One man leans back on some springy shrub, puts his hat over his face, and appears to nod off. I shell my boiled egg and look at the long awaited views. There are other mountains, and bodies of water – the Pauatahanui Inlet? I can’t orientate myself, and feel strangely panicked. I turn toward the familiar coast. I glance down at Paekakariki and think about finding my speck of section, but it seems tiny, so trivial. At this height the sea is visible beyond Kapiti, around the edges of the island. I take one poor photo and give up, something in the landscape difficult to do justice, like photos of the moon. Somehow even the sky looks larger, though I can’t think why this would be. I’m still holding my boiled egg when, on some invisible sign, everyone hoists on their backpacks, adjusts their straps.

We head down the northern side. I grapple with my stick, surreptitiously trying to gauge how others operate them effectively. The ground is crumbly rock, and apparently unusually dry this year. As the walk wears on the talk tails off, and my thoughts bob, my mind less tethered. I’m tugged back sporadically by vaguely abusive warnings from a woman ahead on the track. Hole! Root!

There’s a surprise as we pop out of the bush. Four white double cab utes, and smiling DoC workers bearing lemonade Popsicles. They drive us over ‘the boring bit’; a dusty road cut into a hillside of baby pines, to DoC owned Whareroa Farm. It’s a short hike down the hill. Some mountain bikers overtake us. We pass jandalled picnickers with their folding chairs and chilly bins. A truck air-brakes on the nearing highway. Back at MacKays Crossing we fill in evaluation forms, thank our guides. It’s been less than six hours.

Arms deep in suds, I still regard Wainui daily. I spy the pinprick glint of what I guess is the summit trig. I imagine myself up there, looking back, but not toward my house, my kitchen, as I’d always supposed. Instead, the horizon pushed back, the curve of the sky. Looking out, looking up.