“Beau, what are you doing? We should be packing for our trip to Paradise.”
“Give me five minutes. I’m almost done. Here, have a look at this.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a belated announcement of our gay wedding. I’m sending it to all the Defenders of Marriage, the fine folk who signed into law the Defense of Marriage Act in the States. Along with a letter of apology to each of them. For us having wrecked their marriages, or sometimes their second or third marriages.”
“’Til death do us part, so help me God, until the next marriage,” I said and started reading through Beau’s mailing list.
“Dear former President Bill Clinton, Defender of Marriage. You signed the Defense of Marriage Act into U.S. law in 1996. We apologize for what we have done to mess up your marriage to Hillary and thus to cause you to be impeached way back when. We are sorry that gay marriages caused you to become a serial misogynistic exploiter of women, Paula and Gennifer and Monica, and, and, oh, yes, Hillary—”
“Dear Representative Bob Barr of Georgia, Defender of Marriage, and thank you for being the courageous congressman to introduce this legislation to the U.S. House of Representatives. But we are truly sorry for having wrecked your first two marriages and for causing you to acquiesce in your second wife’s having an abortion and for you having cheated on that second wife with your third wife.
“Also sorry about your being photographed at that Republican fundraiser licking whipped cream off that woman’s tits. Was she a campaign contributor? Our fault. Sorry. Anyway, thanks again for introducing this legislation because marriage is the sacred union of a man and a woman. As you have learned so many times with so many women.
“Dear Senator Kit Bond of Missouri, Defender of Marriage. We apologize for wrecking your first marriage and for wrecking the first marriage of your second wife.
“Dear Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, Defender of Marriage. We know you’re dead but mea culpas are still in order to you and your descendants. We apologize for wrecking your second marriage and for causing you to father an illegitimate black child with your family’s maid. Oh, and segregation forever, Strom. Right? Sure. May you Rest In Pieces with only straight white racist folk.
“Dear Senator Warner of Virginia, Defender of Marriage. We apologize for wrecking your first two marriages, especially the one to Elizabeth Taylor because we really like her. We hope your third marriage works out better but we apologize in advance, just in case. And we are sorry Liz’s eight marriages didn’t work out. Marriage really needs to be defended against people like us.
“Dear Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, Defender of Marriage. We apologize for wrecking your first marriage.
“Dear Senator McCain, Defender of Marriage. Boy, we really apologize for wrecking your first marriage and causing you to become an infamous womanizer and to get remarried a month after your divorce and for causing you to call your present wife, Cindy, a cunt in front of all those people, your campaign aides, and the other congressmen.
“Dear Senator Larry Craig of Idaho, Home of Famous Potatoes, Defender of Marriage. We apologize for wrecking your marriage and for your having to plead guilty to—you know. That business in the airport men’s room.”
“Dear Senator Kay Bailey ‘Tex’ Hutchison, Defender of Marriage. We apologize for wrecking your first marriage and we apologize to your second husband for wrecking his first marriage.
“Dear Representative Dan Burton of Indiana, Defender of Marriage, sorry about causing you to father an illegitimate child in 1983. And sorry about wrecking your second wife’s first marriage too.
“Dear Newt Gingrich, Defender of Marriage, thanks for cosponsoring the Federal Defense of Marriage Act. Sorry about your first two marriages. Mea culpa, mea culpa.
“Hope your third marriage works out better, Newt. But we doubt it. We just had a gay wedding so it doesn’t look good for you. So mea culpa again. Also, sorry to cause you to have a six-year affair with your congressional staffer, which was going on while you were helping to impeach Bill Clinton for lying about his extra-marital shenanigans.
“That must have caused you a lot of guilty and conflicted feelings. Maybe not. Anyway, sorry, Newt. Our gay marriage is surely to blame.
“And sorry you were named after a salamander. Maybe that is the fault of Gays, too?”
“Beau, how many people signed this law?”
“Let me see. It passed in the Senate with eighty-five yeas and only fourteen nays. In the House of Representatives it passed with three hundred and forty-two for and only sixty-seven against. It was introduced to the House by Rep. Bob Barr, Defender of Marriages. I mean marriage. ’Til the next marriage do them part.”
“Beau, you aren’t going to send this to all those who voted to pass the ‘Defense of Marriage’ bill.”
“No, just most of them. Just to those who have been married more than once or who have been caught having at least one extramarital affair. They deserve an apology from us.”
“Finish that later. Let’s pack for the honeymoon, Beau. We are going back to Paradise.”
The next day we took the flight from the Kaitaia Far North Airport, where a cattle-guard keeps the cows off the landing strip, to the Big Smoke, Auckland City that is, and then flew straight down to Queenstown in the Deep South of the South Island.
It was the clearest of days and all of New Zealand lay spread out before us like islands of Eden.
Everything looks more beautiful and more perfect from the air, it is true, but you will never see a more idyllic landscape from up there than when you skim over New Zealand.
And because New Zealand is a relatively small country of two main islands, about the same land size and population as Colorado — though Colorado is only two hundred and eighty miles wide by three hundred and eighty miles long, whereas New Zealand stretches itself out almost one thousand miles from north to south — you almost feel as if you are looking down on a globe map.
You can easily see New Zealand’s place in the world, outlined by the South South Pacific and the Tasman Sea. Every main feature is recognizable if you have looked at a map of the islands even once
There is Taranaki-Mount Egmont, the active but for-the-moment-quiescent volcano on the west coast of the North Island, looking just like Mount Fuji in Japan, two of the most symmetrical volcanic cones in the world;
And now the narrow Cook Straits between the North and South Islands, only twelve miles wide at its narrowest point and infamous for its rough waters, strong currents, and strong winds;
Now we are flying over the Marlborough Sounds, the drowned river valleys on the northeast of the South Island, the sunken prow of Maui’s Canoe, long fingers of water extending southwest into the upper part of the island. The narrower channels close to the Cook Straits are filled with whirlpools, vortices, dangerous maelstroms. And were once notorious for another reason — it was in the Queen Charlotte Sound that some of Cook’s men became the first European delicacies for those locals they happened to piss off;
Soon we see Mount Cook/Aoraki, New Zealand’s highest mountain at twelve thousand, three hundred, and sixteen feet. Cook/Aoraki has three peaks and sits in the Southern Alps, the first obstacle after the tip of South America to the powerful winds of the Roaring Forties, those winds that blow around the world easterly between the band of latitude between forty and fifty degrees South.
We fly down the backbone of the South Island, the Southern Alps, safe in our plane and then suddenly the land seems to rise up and threatens to scrape the bottom of our craft. In reality, we are beginning our descent to Queenstown, skimming over the mountain tops, which, thankfully, fall away suddenly to reveal the long valley and Lake Wakatipu, which zigzags north-south like a staggered lightning bolt with Queenstown on one of the bends.
The mountains round about this ski-and-extreme-adventure-sports destination illustrate that literal-minded and rather boring Kiwi propensity for naming places. They are called The Remarkables. Apparently, some early settlers found the mountains to be remarkable, which they are, and decided to call them, well, The Remarkables.
As our plane touches Southern ground, my memory is carried back to December of 2000 and the very first trip Beau and I made to New Zealand.
In September of 2000, you will remember we had been invited by Beau’s little company, IBM, to attend the summer Olympics in Sydney, of which IBM was the major sponsor. On our first trip to New Zealand, just three months later, Kiwis would often ask why we came to New Zealand and how we liked it. In fact, they still ask us that regularly.
“Well, I was sent to the Olympics at Sydney in September and fell in love with Australia and met a lot of Kiwis there too. So we wanted to visit KiwiLand as soon as possible. Even though I was a tad disappointed in the Olympics—I came away with only a silver medal. It’s amazing how important in your life 0.01 of a second can be,” I would say.
“What was your event?” they would ask politely, with an uncertain look on their faces.
“I don’t like to talk about it. I’m sorry I brought it up. Tell me about The Remarkables.”
A week before that first trip to New Zed in ’00, I had one of my famous — to my mind — dreams. It was a remarkable dream. Perhaps I should call it The Remarkable Dream.
In the dreamscape, I was walking through a small, almost medieval-looking hamlet, full of peasants and rustic townsfolk. There were piles of hay in the streets and giant birds, ten, twelve feet high, being taken to a market.
I looked down a dirt side street to the sea and was amazed to see a giant man wading along the coast in front of the town. He was up to his knees in the water, which must have been rather deep, for he was hundreds of feet tall. He had long brown hair, a heavy reddish beard, and was definitely on a mission of some kind.
I pay attention to my dreams, even writing them down, but so often find them inexplicable. This one seemed merely entertaining but I could discern no subconscious meaning for my conscious mind to try to understand. Freud and Jung were of no help.
So there we were in New Zealand, our first foray, December 2000, trying to forget the U.S. stand-off election between Al Bore and George W. Shrub. And their ridiculous would-be vice-presidents.
Every day in New Zealand, someone would rib us.
“You still don’t have a new president. We need to send in an International Team of Election Monitors.
Where is Jimmy, Mr. Jimmy Carter, when the U.S. really needs him most?
“He’s probably in Nicaragua or Ghana or the Palestinian Territories looking for third-world election fraud. He needs to be in the Banana Republic of Florida and the U.S.A. to observe how fraud is practiced with Yankee ingenuity! Southern Yankee ingenuity. Maybe we should say Confederate Yankee ingenuity.
“The Republican governor of Texas and his Republican governor brother of Florida are stealing an election while Jimmy and his team spend their time nosing around in Ghana and Haiti!
“And your Supreme Court? Diana Ross and her Supremes would do a far better job than that lot!”
It became a huge joke for people and rather embarrassing for us. As well as rather frightening. We thought Jimmy Carter should certainly be red-faced to monitor elections in third-world nations when we can have our own homegrown third-world coup d’etat-style election in America.
After a few days in the pretty little resort town of Queenstown, we hired a car — Kiwis say “hired” a car instead of “rented” a car. It sounds to me as if the car has been personified, and I always picture a one-on-one negotiation between a driver and an automobile with the auto saying how much he will work for and demanding that meals be included.
We drove up the Lake Wakatipu Valley to look for Paradise. Some of the Lord of the Rings films had just been filmed in the vicinity of Paradise, New Zealand, and this is where Beau and I were first smitten with stars in our eyes for New Zealand, where we first fell in love with the beauty of the islands.
I have to tell you that Paradise is located on some maps of the South Island, marked as being just north of Lake Wakatipu, up the Dart River Valley. But you will not find it. There is no village or settlement named Paradise.
It is more of an imaginary region in this part of the upper valley. Imaginary, yet very real, visible, in fact, in the area’s beauty and unspoiled and majestic tranquility.
As an aside, I should tell you that the New Zealand Army, which has about forty-five hundred soldiers, helped to build Hobbiton for Peter Jackson’s trilogy. Which grossed over three billion dollars, with a capital ‘B,’ more than Star Wars or the Godfather trilogies. A real Kiwi success story. Way to go, Mr. Jackson. Way to go, New Zealand Army.
I like the fact that the army in New Zealand has nothing better to do than build a Hobbiton for Hobbits.
So that first trip, searching for Paradise, Beau and I stopped at a brand-new lodge on the shores of Lake Wakatipu, about fifteen minutes out of Queenstown. That night, after a gourmet dinner and some of New Zealand’s fine wine, the brightest double rainbow appeared over the narrow lake, over the sheer rock mountains that rise up on the opposite shore.
We have never seen so many bright rainbows, usually double, as we constantly see in New Zealand. I think “Land of the Long White Cloud” should be renamed “Land of the Double Rainbows.” Or maybe, “Land of the Long White Cloud and of the Double Rainbows and of Hobbits.”
The owner of the lodge joined his guests for a glass of port in the main lounge and related to us the story behind the name he had chosen for the lodge: Matakauri Lodge.
The glacier finger lake, Lake Wakatipu, he explained, is only three miles wide at its widest point but stretches out for almost fifty-twomiles, running south for twenty miles, turning east and running for twelve miles, and then turning sharply south again and running for its final twenty miles. The mountains run straight into the lake, forming a deep canyon, about thirteen hundred feet at its deepest point.
“There is a strange rhythmic rising and falling of the water level in Lake Wakatipu, roughly about six inches up and down every five minutes,” he said. “In scientific terms, this is called a seiche, a standing wave, or a stationary wave, in an enclosed or partially enclosed body of water. Māori legend has a different interpretation.”
— Enter my dream, stage right —
“This strange and rhythmic rise and fall of the water level in Lake Wakatipu is caused by the beating of a giant’s heart from the depths. The giant, Matau, abducted a chief’s daughter. The chief offered his daughter’s hand in marriage to anyone who could rescue her from the giant.
“Matakauri played soothing music, which caused the giant, Matau, to fall asleep. With the help of local villagers, Matakauri then set the giant on fire. The giant, the Taniwha, was burnt to death in his music-induced sleep.
“His flaming corpse burned a massive hole in the ground where he slept, an elongated ‘S’ shape where he lay curled up, slumbering on his side. His head lay at the little village of Glenorchy, at the north of the lake, and his feet lay at Kingston in the south.
Queenstown sits on Matau’s giant knee.
“The fire caused this massive and long hole in the earth but it also melted the snows from the surrounding mountains and caused the formation of Lake Wakatipu. Now, although the giant was burned, it is impossible, so say the Māori, to destroy the heart of a giant.
“His heart, still alive in the depths of the lake, continues to beat, causing the entire body of water to rise and fall, rise and fall, every five minutes.
“My lodge is named Matakauri, Matakauri Lodge, after the man of the legend, the one who killed the giant.
END OF CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Wait for the next chapter on Substack or buy the whole book on Amazon
IF YOU LIKED THIS, PLEASE GIVE MY HEART A LITTLE TAP AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS POST
Aaron Allbright’s novel in five parts will be published soon.
IN A DESERT OR A CITY
BOOK I
‘PRINCE CARTIER’ or HOW I LEARNED TO LOVE BEING GAY WITH MY SAUDI PRINCE AND TO START WORRYING
BOOK II
MONSIEUR LE PRINCE, PARIS
BOOK III
THE MYSTERIES OF PARIS
BOOK IV
TYROMANCY AND LUCIFER
BOOK V
WHY WAIT FOR THE LIGHT?