Please read Chapter One first.
Sacred Gift Farm
Now enable me to present our whole story. We’re back in the twenty-first century.
So we stayed in the apartment of our solicitor’s in-laws for our first month in New Zealand. We had to stay in the city for thirty days before heading up to the Far North — where we had purchased forty acres to build our dream house — because our two dogs and two cats were to rest in quarantine in the Big Smoke, as Aucklanders refer to the city. We have yet to meet a Kiwi who can explain to us why the city is called the “Big Smoke” or even where the name Auckland comes from. I’ll tell you later about Lord Auckland, who never set foot in New Zealand, but I still don’t know about “Big Smoke.” It is an odd name because as world cities go, Auckland is not much more than a pleasant little puff, really.
Now there has to be a very good reason why a gay couple who originally traded southern Missouri and Little Rock, Arkansas,for glitziest Southern California decides to quit their very American California Dream and emigrate from the USA and immigrate to a sheep farm in the Far North of New Zealand. To quit everything they always wanted, and worked so hard to obtain, for a new idea of Paradise.
Six stops after the end of the world.
From The OC, Oh My Gawd! To Whatuwhiwhi and Taipa Township on Doubtless Bay in the Far Far North of the South South Pacific.
There has to be a good reason why a gay couple, us that is, decides to drop out and retreat to a remote sheep farm in New Zealand rather than aspire to, oh, I don’t know, a stylish little apartment on Capri or a tastefully remodeled and refurbished A-gay villa on the shores of Lake Como. Or Mykonos, or Marbella, or even the new gay U.S. Mecca, Palm Springs, California, for goodness sakes.
•••
You can probably guess very well why we didn’t drop out of Southern California and tune back into our boyhood home states. Which I left at a very tender age of youngest manhood and my domestic left when he was free, kind-of-white, and twenty-one. My domestic partner, that is. Our little inside irony, which I’m sharing with you. My domestic, get it? He is not exactly white, not a maroon or an octoroon, not a quadroon or a quintroon, or even a hexadecaroon. But not exactly white.
Beau La Joie Rodrigue is from a long line of Basque shepherds from the Pyrénées Mountains, which lie in the southwest of Europe between France and Spain and spill over into both of those lovely old countries. From a long line of Basque shepherds, Beau La Joie Rodrigue and his whole family were kind of “a little brown” — as the ex-Presidents Shrub like to say about certain individuals. Beau descends from a long line of Basque peasants who emigrated from southwestern France to the good ole U.S. of A.
Well, not at first, not directly.
From France, Beau’s grandparents had gone to Canada, naturellement, and after Port-Cartier in Québec, they immigrated a little south and a trifle west to the Liberal State-of-Being, to Massachusetts that is, to the old whaling port of New Bedford — hail, Queequeg! — around about the earlier part of the twentieth century. In New Bedford they ran out of steam for moving from place to place but still had steam enough to have a child, a daughter, Delia Marie La Joie. Beau’s mum.
Dee was born not far from the house of Herman Melville’s sister, where Herman stayed on his many visits to New Bedford in the mid-1800s, when he wasn’t chasing Big Moby Dick around the globe, even as far away as New Zealand.
It was in New Bedford that Beau’s mother grew up and eventually got married, to another French Basque type, and within a year she gave birth to a daughter, Arleen. But her marriage turned out to be a great disillusionment.
Nevertheless, little Beau La Joie Rodrigue came along eight years later. And he was the apple of his mother’s eye and the entire world to his big sister, Arleen.
When Beau was seven years old, Papa Rodrigue was found to have a girlfriend on the side, or two or three, it seems, and Mama La Joie decided to move herself and her two children “far away from all the Canucks in New Bedford and their rakish berets,” as she said. And so she and Arleen and Beau worked their way south and west some more, always southwest it seems, and finally stopped in Arkansas, of all places, in Little Rock, the capital city, not so many miles from where I was born, though Beau and I didn’t meet each other and step up to love until years later after we had left Arkansas and Missouri far behind. Anyway, his mother presented to the Great State of Arkansas “the cutest, the smartest, the most full of life, so full of la joie et la vie” (his mother’s words), little, brownish, and very big-headed Arkansas-Basque shepherd boy.
Though he never saw a real sheep-in-the-wool until he and I came Down Under to New Zealand. Spent all his growing-up years in his mama’s French bakery, first in New Bedford and later in Little Rock.
“The Little Basque Dough Boy Bakery and Café”
If you’ve ever been to Arkansas’ premier metropolis, I’m sure you know that bakery and café.
So Beau grew up to be a real Arkansas boy but a 100 percent city boy, an Arkansas City boy — in California, everybody thought this was a joke, an oxymoron.
Mama La Joie Rodrigue’s Gâteau Basque as made in
The Little Basque Dough Boy Bakery, Little Rock
(If you don’t like to bake, you can skip over this recipe. It will just make you hungry.)
Pastry
4 ounces unsalted butter, at room temperature. ½ cup sugar. Freshly grated zest of 1 lemon. 1 pinch salt. 1 extra-large egg. 1 extra-large egg yolk. 1½ cups all-purpose flour. 1 tsp baking powder.
Filling
¼ cup sugar. ¼ cup all-purpose flour. 4 extra-large egg yolks. 1¾ cups whole milk. ½ vanilla bean, split lengthwise and scraped. 1 tbsp light rum. ½ tsp almond extract. ¾ cup black cherry preserves. 1 egg, beaten, for egg wash.
1. To make the PASTRY: In a bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream the butter, sugar, lemon zest, and salt on low speed until smooth. Add the egg and egg yolk and mix until blended. In a small bowl, whisk together the flour and baking powder. Add the flour mixture to the butter mixture and mix on low speed until a soft dough forms. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured work surface and divide it into two pieces. Wrap in plastic wrap, and refrigerate until firm, at least 30 minutes.
2. To make the FILLING: In a medium bowl, whisk together the sugar and flour. Add the egg yolks and ¼ cup of the milk and whisk until smooth. In a medium saucepan, heat the remaining 1½ cups milk with the vanilla bean and its scrapings, until steaming. While whisking, pour ½ cup of the hot milk into the yolk mixture. Whisk the yolk mixture back into the hot milk and cook over medium heat, whisking, until boiling and thick, about 4 minutes. Strain the filling through a fine mesh sieve into a bowl. Discard the vanilla bean. Stir in the rum and almond extract. Place a piece of plastic wrap directly on the surface of the pastry cream to prevent a skin from forming and refrigerate until cool, at least 2 hours (and up to 6 hours).
3. Preheat the oven to 325F. Set a 9-inch diameter flan ring with 1-inch sides on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Spray the inside of the pan with vegetable oil spread. Working between two pieces of plastic, roll out the larger disk of dough to an 11-inch round. Remove the plastic wrap and ease the dough into the flan ring, pressing it into the edge and leaving the overhang. Spread the preserves evenly over the bottom of the pastry shell. Add the pastry cream in dollops and then carefully spread it over the preserves. Working between two more pieces of plastic wrap, roll out the second disk of dough to a 10-inch round and lay it over the pastry cream. Press the edges of the top and bottom crust together and cut off the overhang using the back edge of a knife. Using the tines of a fork, lightly score the top crust in a crosshatch pattern. Brush the top of the tart with the remaining egg wash. With the tip of a knife, poke 3 or 4 holes in the top to allow steam to escape.
4. Bake in the center of the oven for 55 minutes or until the top is golden brown. Transfer the baking sheet to a wire rack and let the tart cool completely. Serve your GÂTEAU BASQUE at room temperature or chilled, cut into wedges.
(Note: There are two sorts of Gâteau Basque: one is made with the pastry cream inside two layers of cake. There is another in which the dough is much softer and creamier and does not have pastry cream in the middle. In some parts of Euskal Herria, the Basque Country between France and Spain, the cakes are filled. In some, they are plain inside.)
[Adapted from Mama La Joie Rodrigue’s recipe—as remembered by Beau]
Well, I am sure you know very well why the two of us didn’t seek peace and quiet and nature in our native states of Arkansas-Missouri. Let me put it this way. My sister, back near the stateline — town to remain nameless, okay? I have to protect myself and Big Sis — my Big Sis had this hairdresser who moved to her town and was the best hairdresser, she swears on the Holy Diaper of the Baby Jesus, swears that Texarkana “Tex” was the best hairstylist since Madame Pompadour’s own personal hairdresser in the 1760s.
One night, a year or so after this hairdresser and his one-and-only — Ralph or Rafael or something like that — who was also a hairdresser in the very same shop, although not nearly as good, according to my Big-Haired Big Sis, moved to our mid-sized stateline town, some young Dukes-of-Whatever shot up those Texas hairdresser boys’ old Victorian mansion. Good, clean fun, harmlessly shot out all the windows on a Saturday night when the town was quiet, so quiet you could hear that church mouse sigh, harmlessly shot out all the windows, including the beautiful and expensively restored curved bow-window in the sitting room. Harmlessly—I mean to say nobody was killed. Or even injured, for goodness sake.
(Now perhaps you understand why the state’s favorite son thought “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was an enlightened policy. No, Willie, you can paint lipstick on a hog and call it Monique but it’s still just a hog—I hope I’m not getting into the same trouble President Obama got into with Sarah What’s-Her-Name, formerly from Wasilla. Or with Monica What’s-Her-Namesky.)
Anyway, discrimination and inequality are just that. Discrimination and inequality. And they are not good, clean fun.
Well, those gay hairdressers closed up their shop lickety-split, put their antebellum mansion on the market at a cut-rate price,and hightailed it back home. Home being Texas.
I mean, really.
We were not going to take that path and retire back home, home being Arkansas and Missouri, in our case, and not Texas. Same difference, in my book, if you are gay. Even if Houston does have a lesbian mayor now. No, that route was not for us, but bless those who can handle it.
So Beau and I started scouting around and about the world some years ago, every vacation we got, looking for the perfect locale to spend time reading and writing and being close to nature in our planned and well-thought-out retreat. A retreat that we hoped would be a long spiritual-intellectual-artistic retreat from the ills of the twenty-first century world, a long enjoyment of a more natural life as we thought it was meant to be lived. In California, we had little time for reading and writing. I mean, the café latte lines took up all of our free time, not to mention all those endless hours on the treadmills at the gym, keeping buff. Remember, we lived in the heart, or maybe I should say the pulsating muscle, of The OC and as Out-Gay-California-Men, we had a reputation of buffness to try to live up to.
And as for nature, well Mother Nature had been abused and battered and beaten down and chased away from the Southern California coast for so long by her development-aholic children that it had become too tiring for us to seek out those places that weren’t covered over with strip malls, condos, and faux Mediterranean-style housing developments. When I first started teaching at the university, the Interstate 5 Freeway I took to school had four lanes with two more lanes of service roads running alongside in some places. By the time of my last trip to my office, to empty out my desk and bequeath my textbooks to other profs who were remaining behind with hang-dog looks of envy and fatigue, the freeway had expanded to twenty-six lanes with the world’s biggest concentration of Mercedes-Benzes, SUVs, Beemers, and Hummers carrying their Starbuck’s-drinking, cell-phone-talking chattel north and south in an endless round-the-clock frenzy. One of the widest and busiest roads on the entire planet, according to Wikipedia.
No one in New Zealand believes us. About the twenty-sixlanes, that is. To get to our farm here, you drive north from Auckland for about five hours on a narrow and hilly and winding two-lane blacktop, State Highway 10, as it is grandly designated, crossing several one-lane bridges on the way, until you come to the longest of those one-lane bridges, at least as long as a faraway Los Angeles city block.
Go 2.2 kilometers past that long one-lane bridge, go two humps after the very small settlement of Taipa Township, that is, and you will probably drive right past the metal road we built to our coastal farm, even if you are carefully looking for it. In New Zealand, everyone refers to gravel roads as metal roads. It is a British habit to call crushed stones “road metal.” You will see that there are many things in New Zealand that represent England’s traditions and habits, such as Queen Liz’s picture (“and all her hairs” in place, at least the ones you can see) on every single piece of gaily colored filthy lucre that you will handle. And there are many more things in New Zealand that represent a part of Merry Olde England that no longer even exist back in that Sceptered Isle.
So, in sum, drive about four hundred kilometers north of Auckland, one hundred and ten kilometers north of the last traffic light in the city of Whangarei, a long, long, really long way from the last-call sale at Neiman-Marcus in Fashion Island, Newport Beach, The O.C. And then hang a sharp right, right onto our metal road.
—Photo by the author—
Now drive slowly through the paddocks, over the stream, between the ponds, wind through the native forest and up over the hump at the top of the hill to our farm, spread out along the New Zealand Far North coast, overlooking one of the world’s most perfect and hidden beaches.
But just another beach in New Zealand.
And, don’t forget, in KiwiLand we drive on the left side of the road. Or the wrong side, as Beau and I call it.
If you do miss our farm road, you will arrive in ten or fifteen minutes at California Hill, so called because some fifty years ago an old dude from California built a house on that Kiwi hill. A real adventurer because even today the majority of Americans don’t really know where New Zealand is. All they know is that the Lord of the Rings was filmed there, that the land is uncommonly beautiful, and that it is far, far away, like Paradise or the idea of true and permanent happiness in this present earthly life.
You will see a small highway sign announcing the spot where the old guy from California built his house so many years ago, when the road was still a narrow metal road all the four hundred kilometers from Auckland. KAREPONIA, says the sign. KAREPONIA HILL. Apparently, the Māori language doesn’t have an “l” or an “f” and so it is called Kareponia. Māori is a beautiful language that sounds a lot like vowel-lavished Hawaiian, to which it is related in a cousinly sort of way. The Polynesians used to paddle around the Pacific as if it were a little pond, peopling all the romantic and idyllic islands from Hawaii to Easter Island to New Zealand and everything in between.
Well, these days, there are two new dudes from Kareponia, U.S.A., paddling our red and lavender Kevlar and fiberglass kayaks around Doubtless Bay and the vicinity. But we are known in the Far North as “the boys.” When we first arrived here, we even received a delivery of our new two hundred and thirty-volt appliances, a washer and dryer, our dishwasher and Cuisinart,and other basic necessities, as well as a few cases of excellent New Zealand wine, as good as any wine in the world, and better than most, all addressed to:
THE BOYS
2 Humps After TAIPA TOWNSHIP
FAR NORTH
So there you go. We are those Taipa boys that your mama may have warned you about when you were a kid. Watch out for those Taipa guys.
You’ll notice that I keep referring to New Zealanders as Kiwis. Funny thing about that because Kiwi has three very distinct meanings.
A Kiwi is (1) a person of New Zealand, be it Māori or Pakeha. A Māori is a “native” human being who came from Polynesia about seven hundred-or-so years ago, killed and ate all the giant Moa birds, giant like extra huge ostriches, and fought and pillaged each other’s villages until some “non-native” human beings came on the scene after Captain Cook’s voyages in the late 1700s — more about Cap’n Cook later on. Not to be missed. Then these English, and the Scots and the Irish, mostly unsavory traders and tricksters and members of the Anglican Church Missionary Society and other lowly types, ended up with the prime land and resources and gave the natives some muskets — which were usually traded for smoked heads of Māori slaves and prisoners. The savages’ condemned men would be herded aboard the British ships and the civilized captains would decide which heads they wanted —those heads would later be smoked and “baked” and delivered, in return for muskets. But the civilized Brits kept plenty muskets for themselves, of course, to fight and win the Musket Wars against the Māori, who were still learning to use their newly obtained muskets. The Brits considered the Māori to be savages but they considered their own selves to be capitalists, honorable merchants who were investing in human capital. From Old French via Latin capitalis—from caput, head.
(Does this remind you at all of the getting-to-know-you that took place between the American Colonists and the Native American Indians?)
Well, those assorted and rather motley Brits were called Pakeha by the Māori. Which is, I guess, what Beau and I now are. Late-coming, newly-arrived Pakeha. Yankee Pakehas from Dixie and almost Dixie, via the State of Kareponia.
So, in sum, a Kiwi is a human New Zealander, be it a Māori or a Pakeha of any sort.
Now all these human beings were named after a kiwi, (2) a flightless bird found only in New Zealand — flightless like all birds indigenous to New Zealand. Apparently, New Zealand split off from Gondwanaland, from the rest of the ancient southern precursor-supercontinent that is, before mammals came on the evolutionary scene, and so kiwis never developed the means of flight since they had no predators except for the Māori peoples — or as people hereabouts would say, Moa on that later. Local joke, but sad, as you know, because the Moa are extinct. There are no Moa. At any rate, a kiwi is about the size of a chicken and nearly as scarce as hen’s teeth. Nearly extinct and thus highly prized in New Zealand. Things always become highly prized once we humans have killed most of them or used them up in some way.
All Americans know what a kiwi looks like from seeing the picture on a can of Kiwi shoeshine paste. Which was originated in Australia by a Scottish-born entrepreneur who named it “Kiwi” after his wife, who was born in New Zealand. Kiwi shoe paste, sold in over one hundred and eighty countries around the planet. That’s a lot of shiny shoes, a lot of spiffy, shiny-shod folk. In the Far North of New Zealand, we mostly wear gumboots, rubber galoshes, that is, or go barefoot in the summer.
(An aside here: In the mid-1990s Kiwi International Air Lines was established, based in New Zealand. I am sorry to say that this is emblematic of most New Zealanders’ ideas of astute business practices. Imagine naming an airline after a flightless bird that is almost extinct because it can’t get off the ground. Kiwi Airlines went into liquidation in 1996 and its CEO was convicted on five counts of fraud. The Securities Commission in New Zealand took the unusual step of publicly announcing that this CEO had acted without moral regard. Indeed.)
A kiwi is also (3) a kind of fruit, with a sort of banana-strawberry taste, small like a little oval-shaped brownish-green and fuzzy animal of some sort. Like a miniature hedgehog who hasn’t grown quills yet and is just fuzzy. Or a rolled-up rodent who is green on the inside — or yellow inside, like the newer variety, which tastes even better. Also known as a Chinese gooseberry, as they are native to China, even though everyone now associates them with New Zealand, except possibly the Chinese, especially the natives of Shaanxi Province in China. In Taiwan and Hong Kong, a kiwifruit is called 奇異果 (kay yee goh). A sort of transliteration of “kiwifruit,” literally meaning “strange fruit.”
Strange fruit.
Which reminds me again of our first day as New Zealand’s newest immigrants, in church with the archbishop. A descendant of Queequeg.
End of Chapter 2
Wait for the next Chapter on SUBSTACK or buy the book here via Amazon
Aaron Allbright’s novel in five parts will be published on Substack.
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?