Summer collapses into fall
And all at once, summer collapsed into fall
Greetings, dear reader. As Oscar Wilde once said, “All at once, summer has collapsed into fall,” and so it has, with autumn now firmly entrenched.
There is always this golden light that comes with spring and autumn. Summer brings relentless brightness and winter a droll greyness. But spring and autumn are like an old kerosene lantern, lighting up trees and hills with a softer glow. Of course, the days are growing shorter, and the fire is now regularly used.
First, this week, I will tell you about the antics that a long Easter weekend brings to Carterton, the rural town nearest to us, deluged with visitors from the city for a balloon festival and other events.
And I’ll update you on the farm, where work continues ceaselessly, as we prepare for winter and plan for a cold, dry season.
It’s Thursday afternoon, before Easter, and I regret my decision to go to the local supermarket for a few small items. Carterton New World has some exciting foibles; it has a very strange one-way system in the car park, a cunning trap for visitors, and the supermarket serves as a default social gathering site.
I realise it will be bad when the traffic grinds to a halt two kilometres from the store. With thousands of visitors in town and kilometres of road works, it’s a shambles. Local Facebook groups grumble about the jams, and the rat-runs out the back are overflowing with traffic.
In the middle of the only roundabout in town is a woman yelling and protesting about Vinnies. This is a second-hand store in town owned by St Vincent De Pauls and has caused a minor scandal because the operator has been “forced out” by the “committee.” Accusations have been flying on social media as to why and a petition has been set up to reinstate the fellow; nearly 500 people have signed it already. Vincent De Pauls is having a terrible PR day.
A picture posted on social media showing her with the town clock in the background resurrects the other great Carterton scandal. How much the clock cost to repair, the colour scheme, how long it took, and the annoying “bing bongs” it makes on the quarter hour. The town is enraged.
I turn into the car park, and I’m met with people going the wrong way around the one-way system. It’s packed solid, and some tense standoffs are going on as townies try and negotiate with the locals in their utes. I see a local man with a beard as large as mine trying to inch around a Tesla, “for fuck’s sake!” he exclaims. The controversial clock is bing bonging happily across the road, and for added measure, the volunteer fire siren bursts into song at more than 120db, adding to the ambience.
The siren is also a sign of controversy. People do not like the loudness of it, and locals know that it is required; otherwise, the fieries won’t know to go and rescue people from, you know, death and all that.
Inside the supermarket, it’s chaos. I look at one of the staff and raise my eyebrows. “You do know,” she says, looking at me cooly, “we are closed tomorrow, and if people don’t come in and do a full shop, they may starve.”
That and you can’t buy beer, thanks to Jesus.
I never understood that. How a man from 2,000 years ago’s lasting legacy to New Zealand prevents us from buying beer three times a year. Oh, I missed the other lasting legacy, of course, genocide.
I’ve made it to aisle one, where two people are obliviously blocking the way, and another two have a catch-up, adding to the jam. On the other side of the barricade is old mate with the beard from the car park. “For fuck’s sake!” he says again, looking at me. As we pass each other, he says to me, “clusterfuck” I nod and say “, indeed.”
The locals are running about with boxes of beer and dog food, which is precisely what I came to get. The visitors are trying to find something to stock their AirBnB pantry, no doubt, and just getting in the way. As I move through the aisles, I can hear old mate trailing behind me, letting out a “for fuck’s sake!” every few minutes.
An elderly woman is blocking the dairy aisle; she is examining every cheese product one by one before planning to move on to the yoghurt section. Old mate For Fuck’s Sake utters his famous line before backtracking via the frozen route to finally arrive at Nirvana, the beer section.
Once outside again, the carnage is continuing with cars in all directions interspersed with trolleys and people having a good old chin wag. None of this particularly bothers me; I think living rurally, you learn that everything is easier if you slow down and worry less. I remember a similar scene at a city supermarket a few years ago where the traffic was backed up into the street. People were incoherently shouting in rage and tooting horns. Here it is far more relaxed.
The piece de resistance in the balloon festival is the night glow. Balloons are tethered and spout fire, giving the overall effect of massive Chinese lanterns. Thousands are in attendance, children and families. Down the road, every grandmother in Wairarapa is at Stan Walker, wistfully wishing they could adopt him. It is a veritable sea, I am later informed, of Mrs Doyle (from Craggy Island) lookalikes. I am sure there was much tea drinking.
It’s good to see the balloon festival back. It’s a significant boost for the area, and after four years of “the thing we do not mention” and the tragedy of 2012 remembered, it feels good to see the massive bags of gas silently gliding over the farm in the still autumn morning.
The picture below was taken by my good friend David. He is very tall, and I notice that in pictures of him in the balloon, he is wearing a sturdy hat. I suspect this is so that the top of his head did not catch afire. He is a much braver man than me, I must say. But, as you can see, the views are incredible. Plus, the flights were not cheap, which led me to calculate how much beer I could buy instead. That led me to wonder about how much beer a balloon could lift. But let’s not go there today.
Back on the farm, the days are growing cooler, and the animals and trees are changing for winter. The sheep have their woolly coats ready to go, the horses are growing their winter coat, and the dog’s weather jackets have been brought out from the hot water cupboard in readiness for those sub-zero mornings. Precious pups that they are.
Apples, quince, and figs have been dropping. K has been making fig paste in bulk. This is delicious as a late-night drunk snack with crackers and brie. The brie bill is enormous; I am sure we have consumed several kilograms this month alone, but worth it.
Deadly Dave the Fencer has just finished installing a fence and hanging K’s handmade gates at the glamping site, not two hours ago. This is a significant milestone. K has been hosting a few test subjects over the last few weeks, and they all come back with glowing reviews. Easter saw two hardy souls stay on a colder night, but the bell-tent stayed warm and welcoming with fires lit under cool skies. Sleepy Hollow is now operational.
This is significant for us; it has been K’s project from the start, and she’s managed all the challenges along the way, from wayward contractors, two floods, having to hand build the majority of it herself, supply chain delays, the design, planning, and execution. We can now charge her out as a Glamping Consultant at $180 per hour—or $140 cash per hour plus a box of Pinot Gris.
I’ll post a tour of the finished result soon, and then you can all throw money at us to come and stay.
Baleage was done late last month; it was getting too far on in the season for hay. Contractors turned up and cut the paddocks, then turned them magically into wrapped bales that looked very pretty strewn across the bottom fields. We will use some and store some for sale later in the year. We have somewhere in the region of seven to ten tonnes of the stuff.
Because everything on the farm breaks, in this episode, the septic drip field has sprung a leak, causing a bog in the neighbour’s laneway, meaning that it will be impossible to get a tractor down there with feed come winter. Now begins the Wairarapa dance of trying to get contractors to come and fix it.
I have learned more than I ever wanted to know about septic systems and how they work. Ours is a four-stage system that pumps the wastewater to a drip field, basically small pipes laid in a big run that “drip” the water into the surrounding area. It is either blocked or broken somewhere. Now the race begins to coopt contractors into fixing it ASAP.
My first port of call is the Septic Man, who looks after our setup. “I might be able to get there later in the month”, he tells me. In contractor speak, that is a hard no. But I keep him on the hook. Then it’s off to the installer, who is not responding to my emails or calls, which is annoying. As of yesterday, I have spammed every drainage and septic company in the valley. The next step will be turning up on their doorsteps.
And no, Three Waters won’t fix this, unfortunately.
I hope this finds you well. I will write again soon. Please share this on Facebook and other places if you enjoyed it; subscription is free. Until then, stay safe.
PS A hot air balloon could lift eighty-dozen beers. Makes you think.
Brilliant, as always. Thanks for brightening my Tuesday.