beach

This morning the ocean is almost still, with small whitecaps rising here and there in lazy intervals, as if reminding itself of its sleeping power. Last night, every southern star basked in a faint moonlight glow and the mountains stood dark and blue-hazy. But today a strong weather front came fast: a thick stratus with its leading edge painted crimson by the ascending daylight silently slid over the sea and crept slowly east until it covered the sun.

It may rain.

The west coast of the Southern Island of New Zealand should be dripping wet, with its millions of tea-colored rivulets racing down the steep slopes of the Southern Alps and many powder-blue glacial rivers roaring like lions and rolling heavy boulders on its way to Tasman Sea. Yet the coastal bush, all tangled pungas and ratas and rimus and giant ferns, looks dry and strangely brown: we have learned there was precious little rain here since February, and even now in the fall, when the clouds should be dropping its daily loads of moisture collected all over the Pacific, it just may rain today. Not: surely. Not: again, but: may, and: perhaps.

We drove to the beach last night and caught the very tail of another ruby red sunset. The cabin of two gold miners we used to know, Mark and John, is still here -- tidy, weathered and quiet. Mary, an Australian woman who helped the men during their last years when age and sickness sapped their ability to cope, inherited the place and now walks her dog along the beach every day, passing an old wooden bench half hidden by encroaching gorse bushes, with a hand painted sign: MARK'S PERCH.

Mark was the more assertive younger brother, who mined opals in Australia and gold everywhere, but later settled here on Gillespie's Beach, waiting for big storms to bring shiny gold flakes and deposit them on the black sand. He and his quiet brother John never married. The brothers -- or so the legend goes --had a nice fat account in a bank in Hokitika which they used to lend money to some less enterprising and perhaps less frugal souls. They lived in a boat shed converted into a one-room dwelling, with all their tools and other necessities tucked neatly away.

We were just married when we first came here together, and Mark -- who liked visitors -- fed us some mutton and let us have Pink Pussy, a guest hut sitting in the grassy yard and facing Mt. Cook. We stayed for days and photographed along the beach, bordered by heavy canopies of native bush and tall snowy peaks of the Southern Alps. Come evening, we visited the brothers who, looking like old seals in their dark wrinkly clothes, sprawled on their narrow beds close to the sea-facing window, John on the right and Mark on the left. We used to perch sideways by their big feet clad in thick woolen socks and talk, mostly with Mark, with his brother resting with a sleepy expression of a man who did not need to talk in order to enjoy the evening.

There was a common tone to our talks and maybe our keen desire to learn, too, because we also wanted a life with few outside bounds and with the rules we would make ourselves. But in these early days 33 years ago we still could not quite imagine how to make it work, while the brothers had already managed just this kind of life. They could now rest easy on their single beds, talk about the well- remembered uncertainty of prospecting in distant lands and the hard toil which strained their bodies, and be just where they wanted to be.

Then one day a real storm came, hurrying across the ocean on the wings of thundering waves and pounding the beach for hours. And after many lean months -- or so Mark told us -- the gold finally came in, its yellow flakes shinning like crazy cat's eyes against black grains of sand. Out came the old sluice box lined with red carpeting, and the hoses, and a small pump, and several shovels. Oh, did we shovel hard, piling the sand on top of the box and watching it slosh down the carpet while the gold flecks, trapped, yellowed the carpet with its rich glow.

I was just trying to calculate how much gold we were getting with every shovelful, and how much it would bring the brothers in some very real money, when Mark suddenly called it quits. The gold was all around us, shining, beckoning, there were four of us and we were not tired, but no -- the brothers folded the hoses, packed the pump, and rolled the sluicing box back to its corner in a shed. Then Mark settled down to pluck a fat Northern Canada goose he shot the day before and planned to roast for our supper, and John first checked his possum traps (they were empty) and then sat in the grass by the Gillespie's Lagoon with a sheep trapped between his knees and proceeded to shear its long scraggly wool. Slowly.

I looked again at the golden flakes scattered all over the beach, and could not stand it anymore. I walked straight to Mark and asked him why they stopped sluicing their gold, since this was the first good, fruitful storm in so many months. He looked up at me with his merry brown eyes and replied: "I don't want to start hating it" and went back to work on his dinner bird, with sea breeze stirring goose down clinging to his hands.

I thought about Mark this morning after I stopped photographing the crimson edge of the front, put my camera away, and walked down the beach in search of bright round rocks and bits of sea-polished driftwood. I knew there were still images out there, but there was also the moist air, and the warm wind, and the surf pounding the black and shinning sand.

©Yva Momatiuk