From Kaitia we got in a van that took us up Ninety Mile Beach to Cape Reinga, the very top of the North Island. Camped on the beach with two German women. The next morning I took a long walk along the deserted beach and caught no fish with my line and safety-pin fishhook, prying trilobites of the rocks for bait. The jungle is thick and dense. It hugs the steep valleys, caves dramatically into the Pacific Ocean.

            We get a great ride in a flatbed all the way down to Auckland listening to Bob Marley in the wind and into it. At the Parnell Garden Lodge Kerin shows me around and flirts.

            I make myself at home in the big old house and stay a few days, getting to know the Swedish girls.  One night I work selling oil paintings door to door. The paintings are ugly, motel-room quality. I sell two for $300 ($50 for me). But something happens that makes me quit at the end of my shift. A young mother likes this harbor-scene painting and says she has to have it. But doesn't have the money, so we drive to her pocket-teller to get the $100 for this rotten painting and all the while I feel like a fraud, I mean, I'm sure her kids could have used that money.

            Hiiam buys a red hat and leaves for Singapore. "Good luck my friend" I say, and unexpectedly he gives me a hug and says good-bye.

            I tell the Swedish girl I'll go hitching with her. I had already been to the Northland, but Lisa, with her blue eyes, is just too beautiful to refuse.

            The next day we hitch all the ay up north in maybe fifteen different rides - cars practically screeching to a stop at the sight of Lisa. A great ride with a truck driver who points out all the refineries and spots where trucks had plunged into gullies, with country music blearing....

"Trailers for sale or rent
Rooms for lent fifty cent
No phone, no pool, no pets
Ain't got no cigarettes"

            The sun glows red at the Hone Heke Lodge and I'm happy.  Lisa crawls into my bunk to stay warm. My arm kept falling asleep, but I didn't care.

            I'm up at dawn and take a walk. I see a small bird with a worm in its mouth and say to it, "the early bird gets the worm."

     POEM: the clickity-clack sound of Now whacks the rod out of shape, and shit, the whole engine goes spinning, ricocheting off into the future. Independent of You the music plays on, the buckle-belt side-trip opens up like drunk-smoke flowers.

            I helped our ride load two tons of sand onto the bed of his trailer. Working the jack, fingers trying to pop the hood, the engine reached 250 degrees and began to overheat. I jump into the door of the moving car. The Maoris, he explained, would eat their captives. "They're related, ya see, if they eat each other's family!"

            At Paihea, Bay of Islands, I walk along the beach playing harmonica and thinking, and Lisa and I become friends. I pick her a little red flower and she tells me about her heroin addiction.

            We catch the ferry to Russel and find a hostel overlooking the bay. An explosively beautiful place. I sit with a German on the balcony as he makes jewelry from seashells. He says,"we're vaiting for ze sunset now", pronouncing the words carefully.

                   "Man cannot stand a meaningless life."         -Karl Jung

            The day pulls its long strings together as we sit drinking cold beer on the verandah, not saying anything. The yachts glimmer white, swaying obediently with the tide. A child with an orange hat throws stones into the water, running barefoot on the beach with quick jumps. A small outboard speeds across the harbor - across the changing greens , browns, and blues. The shadows begin to creep away from the boats as we spin away from the sun, and the crack of my third Lion Red opening.

            At night a Norwegian plays guitar for us and we watch the candle struggle to stay lit in the wind.

            The next day we hear a crash and run down to the road. A car was hanging off a cliff and a man with a bloody hand is sitting on the rail opening and closing his fingers.. A woman with red hair and green eyes stands there, beautifully. The German says, "I like ze girl mit ze green eyes."

            It rains hard and I sit in the kitchen and play harp with Perry the Norwegian. We leave the next morning and the ferryman has me take the helm. "Just shoot for the island", he says then disappears below deck.

Got a ride to Opura and stood for an hour beside the road talking to the cows. "Roast Beef. Hamburgers. Scares ya doesn't it." Lisa's laughs like a Scandinavian goddess. A Maori couple pick up up and pass a smoke around. They take us all the way to Auckland.

            The bunching of rooftop drunkspit runs up and down plywood faces. but the crumbled description doesn't even scratch it and the wasp stupidly struggling against the glass sees all this with a thousand insect eyes, the rooftops, mud, smoke, everything.

            Two guys learn the Chinese-yoyo on the living room. And there's a lot to learn - turns and loops and spins.

Michelle says, "And I ask myself where will I be next year at this time? Still bummin' around?"

Tony says,"Do you mind me asking - How old are you?"

She smiles, "that's a rather personal question isn't it?"

            Perry arrives from the Northland and talks me into going downtown and playing on the street, "busking," they call it. He dances around the sidewalk doing his "rocker" imitation and we make enough money for a beer.  Later we write Lisa a birthday song with lines like, " even though you're not a member of NATO / you can still squeeze my tomato," and it goes over big at the party.  (Luckily she only understands half of it.)

            Perry and I head south and hitch a great four-hour ride all the way to Rotorua. The Canadian girl says, "New Zealand looks like one big golf course," and in a way, it does.

            After four hours of trying to hitch in the rain, we gave up and got a bus to Taupo. From there we spent three days climbing the volcanos in Tongariro National park,  through supernatural lakes in misty craters. Struggling up the lava I decide to quit smoking.

            Two rides to Wellington, the capital city, and a place called The Beethoven House where Ludvig Von plays 24 hr.a day in every room.  Wellington entertains - fights in the streets, The Evergreen Cafe where tired prostitutes rest their feet and a huge transvestite brings you drinks.

            Perry and I play on the ferry to the South Island and go over big.  A cute Swiss girl named Brigette with a pierced nose decides we'll get married, steal a yacht, and sail around the world collecting pet monkeys.  "I love monkeys!" she squeals.

I wake up in Picton with Germans everywhere and wait for my hangover to heal out by the river.  A ride down to Blenhiem leaves us stuck next to the road for six hours without a lift in the blistering sun. We get to Nelson by sundown.

            A beautiful girl rides by on a bicycle, using one hand to steer as she curls a lock of blond hair around her ear with two fingers.

            Sunshine laying flat on the table, on the lawn. I sit in the shade of the porch, balanced on the two back legs of a wooden chair,  feet on the rail. Time moves slowly.
I spend it simply wondering.

            The sunshine falls on the German's fat toes. She curls and stretches them happily. Sunlight falling on the trees, on the picnic tables, on the lawn. The day continues to roll along, regardless of how I look at it.

            Back in Nelson I decide to take a bus down the West Coast because I hear the hitching stinks. I meet Alison, Lisa, Patrisha, Suzanne, Judy, Jane, Carla, Ross, and a dozen others.  In Graymouth we drink beer out by the river with the fog hanging low and feeling like characters in a movie.

            The next day in Blackball I go fishing by myself and crawl out on a broken bridge, letting my line down 40 feet to the big green river. Digging for worms, a flightless bird the size of a chicken walks up to me, fearlessly.

            Out of the cab of a truck I can see the mountains rise up radically  from turquoise lakes. A ride with a guy who has stickers all over his car like "trust in the lord", and "rejoice." So we talked about God and he took us all the way to Te Anau.

            The next morning its raining hard and our treking plans are shot. The rain falls hard, endlessly. I read Catch 22  and listen to the deluge on the thin roof, watch the water fall past the window. The British girls are bored. I'm involuntarily rude.

            The weather clears and we get a bus up to Milford Sound - I dig the ride with my face pressed up against the glass.  We twist our way through the valleys of Fjordland, steep and dark with white-capped mountains overhead. Waterfalls carve deep grooves in the stone, polished smooth by the glaciers.  The bus took us to the start of the Routeburn Trek and so began four days in the mountains.

            After claiming a bunk at Holden Hut I took a walk as darkness fell and sat by myself on a bridge.  A bird lights on a branch in front of my face and we look at each other for a long time. I decide right then to live an unselfish life.  Walking back a mist hung low over the lake. I couldn't fall asleep but wasn't restless in the quiet darkness.

            We took off up the trail the next morning in good weather - the rainforest thick with ferns and moss. Waterfalls everywhere, running clear and beautiful over moss-covered rocks,  everything alive and green.

            By the time we reach the saddle it has started to rain. Tiny palm trees and the Kea, a mountain parrot, the size of a duck. It continued to rain as we hiked down to the Routburn Falls Hut where I take a short nap sitting up in front of the fire - then down to the Flatts Hut where I talk to Karen over coffee. Later Astrid arrived and I fell in love with her again, her long body, her soft, round eyes.

            I walk a little way up the path that leads along the flat river basin - cold blue water wiggling down the valley, the sun coming down through the rainforest in a thousand shades of green. The mountains stand straight up, laced with waterfalls. 

"So know constantly that this is only you, empty and awake and eternally free as the innumerable atoms of emptiness everywhere."           -Jack Kerouac

            I get a ride out of Queenstown with my "Merry Christmas" sign but he points me in the wrong direction, and like an idiot, I go. Get a ride with a plumber who stops at this depressed little gold mining town. Old men with dirty clothes and rotten teeth pull passionately on hand-rolled smokes and dig long, narrow holes for the plumber. He drops me off at a pub in the middle of bum-fuck-nowhere, and I step inside after realizing there's no traffic at all. The woman says, "Oh, we seen a hitchhiker here before....sat out there for a few days - right out there," and points out the window.

            I shoulder my pack and set out down the empty highway, walk for an hour without seeing a car going either way. But then up the road comes this mini-van, I give my best smile, and when I see brake lights I run for them.

            It was a young Maori couple with their new child. I bought them fish & chips and they asked me to drive, so I took us all the way to Christchurch, reminding myself over and over to stay on the left-hand side of the road as I saw headlights bearing down on me.

           Arrived after midnight and had a few hours of fitful, shivering sleep on a bench,  and when I found a room the next morning I slept for two days.

      I walk the streets of Christchurch - the specter of myself reflected in a storefront window, blue hood of my raincoat pulled tightly around my puffy face. Sit in Cathedral Square and watch Japanese take photographs of themselves, later finding the center of Christchurch - crafts, musicians, food, life.

               Heading north I couldn't get a ride for hours but my spirits remained high. Eventually get picked up by a beekeeper and we talk about honey. I walk for hours surrounded by sheep, mountains, and fields of green grass swimming in the wind. A ride with a surfer-dude, then a German who takes me all the way to Kaikoura. I walk along the rocky coastline and think about Taoism.

            During the night a drunk Maori puts his fist through all the windows in the hostel.

            The next morning I get a ride first thing with this guy in a sportscar who drives like a madman - two half-full bottles of Jack Danials clanking around my feet and rifles in the back seat. We talk about whiskey and guns and we bullet up to Picton. I sleep on a long bench at the docks.

            Back in Nelson I stayed at Allan's Place and spent time with a happy, pretty, dark-haired, round-faced, Canadian girl.

            Two loud American girls follow Jeff and I to the motorcycle races. We meet a sad-faced Belgian who tells us how he was ripped off in Australia. He followed an ad in some yachting magazine for "crewmember wanted for a round/the/world trip" leaving from Adelaide. As he departs from his small home-town with his brother they're on the front page of the paper, local heros. On his arrival the captain collects $2000 for "visas" and tells them he'll meet them in Sydney in a month. A month later there's nobody in Sydney except seventeen others who had paid this man two grand.  His brother heads home dejected but Cohen continues on, now hoping to catch a boat to Figi.

            Sailboats hiking in the warm wind - bright reflections on the white-foam blue-green ocean. Unexpectedly, Perry makes a running jump off the pier some 30 feet into the water.

            At daybreak we all split up - Jeff for Australia, Perry for Figi, and me for Motueka. We exchange addresses and plan a big trip to Mexico.  I walk a long way before I'm picked up by an elderly couple. "Who do you worship?" asks the old man. Then a ride with two girls named Nicki. 

           Drying your face solid in the wind of passing cars. The dog busts up the game, hammerlogged and soft in the saltwater fadelight dusk. Now that the dog has left the room, lost interest, it's all ok, it's all hands in the air. This is a marker in a young man's life, stuck loosely in the sand, fading quickly out of view.

            I buy supplies for a week and set out for the Able Tasman with a Scottsman and a Canadian physicist named Sandy. The sun pounding against the white wall of the liquor store, through a forest of giant ferns, flightless birds. And now this long white beach, this bay, the color of the water.  green blue green blue whitecapped blue blue greenblue green

            Sleep out on the beach under the stars.  At dawn we head up the trail - through the forest, mudflatts, and coastline - stopping at the alluring little coves to sun ourselves. Swim and lay on the white beach. Brown-skin maidens throw smiles.

            When the sun erupts through the thick forest canopy it's like a symphony in green. Prehistoric fern trees loom with Gondwanaland splendor, unbelievable in their enormous symmetries, everything alive. New Zealand is delicious.

           A million rippled dunes laid out perfectly by the tide.

          Watch a colossal full moon rise orange over the Tasman Sea and illuminate a fantastic moving trail on the water. The stars are out and I feel like a speck of nothing under them.

            stop along the beach to swim in the cold ocean, finding step with solitude.  It's a peak moment, like the crest of some invisible wave breaking on the beach.

            Rain again, pelting against the hut window. A Swedish girl with bad teeth borrows my dry underwear. Also last night walking by myself on the mud flats with red-beaked shorebirds, the quote ringing in my head: "wisdom can only be obtained from the viewpoint of solitude."

            We set out from the Arewea Hut in the rain and walk across the flats in bare feet, seashells like razorblades.  I decide to walk the rest of the day without shoes.  After awhile I get into it, mud oozing through my toes, thinking about each step. We walk miles across rainswept foaming beaches and through muddy lakes to the roadhead. On the bus I'm hungry and tired when I see Julia, who worked at the Pavlova in Nelson. She runs to the back of the bus and kisses me quickly, sweetly, then turns and runs off forever.

            First a ride with a pleasant elderly lady who told me about her son working fishing boats in the Irish Sea. Then in Nelson I walk a long way next to the highway singing at the top of my lungs and playing harmonica. A speedy ride with two women late for the ferry. Got along well with the pretty one and we decided to get married so I could stay in the country.

            In Picton I'm greeted by Ester, a blonde Swiss girl with big blue eyes and thick, sensual lips. I sit in the living room watching cricket and hear on the radio that a kitten has gone missing, white with black splotches.

            I walk up and down Picton's main street and stop for a half dozen oysters. A dirty stray dog follows me and looks up at me with a tilted, question-mark face. I'm hip in this rain by myself when suddenly I turn a corner and nearly run right into Brigette. And what a smile she has, with sandy-brown curls. I pick her up in the air, twirl her around, while she giggles and tells me how happy she is to see me. "I've thought so much about you," she says, "I've been here in Blenhiem all along, picking cherries."  I give her my address in N.Y.C. and she has to go, her friends waiting in the car, and that's all it is, a happy, marvelous meeting.

            In walks Ester, filling the room with her smile. She moves through the kitchen, heels thumping, then runs back on her toes, her blonde hair tied on top of her head, swinging. The phone rings and there she goes, almost dancing through the room, now back again.

            The spastic calendar of days and years rattles sputtering on, shaking me silly with its changes, bending me backward with wonder.

   

            on the ferry: Melancholy patterns in the wake

            R  E  V  E  R  B  E  R  A  T  I  N  G

 

            I walk the streets of downtown Wellington digging the faces and little used book and record shops. Wellington is definitely the hippest city in New Zealand - cool hipsters gliding down Cuba St. - the women all look so cool with their little round sunglasses. I walk the streets, stepping into used bookstores to thumb yellow paperbacks and read last pages. The sun dips down in the sky.

            A poem about this room:  lamp hanging with chipped paint and a schoolroom doorstop.  Light from the unshaded bulb eeks sharp shadows off corners - this room - where so many have slept, dreamed, and moved on.

             The next day Mark asks me if I would like to take his dogs, a floppy-eared mutt and a fuzzy old lab, for a walk. So I take them up Mt. Victoria from where I can see all of Wellington sprawled out below me. The dogs are pleasantly obedient, and it's such a fine feeling to walk with good dogs. I sit at the top of Mt. Victoria, liking Wellington, a city with character.

             Dancing to the ska band, Isibelle moves magnificently, her long black hair swinging, her shapely body swaying in perfect rhythm.

            Wake up at 6:30, pinch some coffee and off I go - smiling at a million cars but not getting a ride. About 11:00 I'm picked up by a racist wild-bore hunter, then an Austrian brother and sister who drop me in Rotorua. Standing there alone next to the road I play my harp loud. A ride with an English guy who takes me all the way to Auckland.

"One of the most remarkable things about the world is that it is understandable."
- Albert Einstein

            "I've always been a jaywalker," says the nondescript Canadian guy.

            Charlie has  peroxide hair, silver lipstick, pink nailpolish, and a paper-thin cotton cut-off teeshirt. "How do I look?" she asks me, tilting her head and flicking her peroxide hair backward.  "Charlie," I say, "you look great."

            I catch the ferry to Waiheke Island for a few days with Caroline, a sweet Australian girl. I feel free, the a happy windblown traveler, no worries, no complaints. We hitched from the ferry and found a great backpacker's hostel up in the woods.

            On a walk we find an old shipwreck and climb all over it, playing captain. Boards stick up through the deck, a hull of sand and rotten wood, indistinguishable rusted parts. On the way back I show Caroline how to skip stones. 

Ye 'Ol Blackpool Store brags, "If we don't have it, you don't need it."

"Parents teach their children that they are not allowed to stare at people because it is rude.  The result is that most human beings never really see another person after they are five years old."   -Eric Berne

 On the cliffside: the wind on the blue-green water, running over the surface like opening an oriental fan, erupting in a billion tiny ripples and dancing across the bay - dropping stones of air everywhere to swim back and meet in some invisible place.

            "The idiot procession of the alienated across the land in their polluting machines " - Graffiti on Waiheke Island

            Nancy spent two years in Papua New Guinea with the Peace Corps and is on her way home. We talked for hours. I marveled at her courage. "Malaria isn't really so bad," she said.   In return for her stories I sat down with a map of New Zealand and showed her my favorite spots.

One of the California girls thinks she's pregnant.

"So do yo think I'm with?"
"No Laurie, don't worry about - I'm sure you're not."
"That's kind of weird."
"I'm not the one- I'm not the one-"
"Finish your godamn sentence!"
"Forget it."

            A walk through the four-lane ghost-town of the Auckland-corporate-wasteland. So much mirrored glass. Then up to the Fortress, where I lay down in the grass and watched the sunset, feeling tremendous.

            I have diner with Caroline and she's sad that I'm leaving. I'm sad too, but happy to be moving. Keith drives me to the airport with dazzling speed - snaking in and out of traffic like a madman. At the airport I find none of the hassles I expected and sit at the window of the terminal taking in my last New Zealand sunset.

            The flight is almost empty and I stretch out over three seats and sleep. It goes on forever, with ten thousand miles of planet rushing under me. I'm not restless. The past three months of experience is echoing sweetly in my head.

            I'm in New York at 5:30 a.m.. The sun begins to rise and the city skyline looms colossal, magnificent, outlined by a red, cloudless, pre-dawn backdrop. I can't imagine anything looking better.

            At Grand Central Station I'm dropped off at exactly the same spot I left from a season ago. I stand there with my backpack on my shoulders as the first rays of sunlight strike the tallest buildings and I can't move, I can't pull my eyes away from Grand Central.