Cambridge, Leamington and a lot of memories
As it turned out, the emotional breakdown i had in Hamilton did not persist through to Cambridge.
The newly-built cycle path between that old rural center and one of its outlying townships is far beyond anything that existed back when i lived in New Zealand, which served well to diminish the nostalgia slash traumatic flashbacks. It's a concrete path that for the most part avoids any roads, and when it does follow a road it's a back-of-the-paddock country road. But you can tell it's designed by cyclists who are sport/leisure cyclists and not commuters because it winds up and down into gullies (New Zealand term for canyons and depressions that are inconvenient to farm so are left full of native bush) and the steep banks of the Waikato river.
It's not especially efficient to snake up and down, even with the well-engineered switchback boardwalks that keep the grade relatively pleasant for the mostly-retired folks i passed riding e-bikes in the other direction. It was kinda nice to zip along those boardwalks with the cool coverage of native bush, but in honesty the country cycling i most remember from when i was a kid was along long, flat farm roads passing dairy farms, horse studs and the odd fruit orchard or cornfield. Of course that stuff is still there, but i didn't see as much of it as i planned.
One of the weirdest parts of that new cycleway is that it pops out literally at the driveway of one of the houses we used live in Cambridge. In New Zealand it's common for people with big properties to subdivide their own property and put a unit (prefab/mobile home) out the back, which results in street addresses like "9A" and "27C". Those backlot units are where i grew up, but alas you can't really walk up and take a picture as an adult because you'd be a weird creeper trespassing on private driveways.
So you will just have to imagine my emotions as i suddenly found myself at the bottom of this hill i biked up hundreds of times as a kid. The gravel driveway, the postbox with our number on it. I remembered the neighbor's shrubs i had hidden underneath when i had run away from my dad and did not want him to pick me up one weekend. Now a fence and not a hedge, but it all still looked more-or-less the same, right there on the edge of town where the steepness of the slope made it impossible to continue development (unless, apparently, you are building a scenic cycleway).
Of course the first place i cycled was my elementary school - not the first school i attended in New Zealand, but after a flurry of one-month-here, one-month-there as we migrated from Auckland through Hamilton, the first school where i made it through a full term.
It's still just the tail end of summer holidays here, so the kids aren't fully back (which likely would've triggered some other odd clothing-related childhood trauma - seeing school uniforms everywhere), but there were still after-school care programs going on, so i didn't feel comfortable charging in to take a million photos. Still, there it was, the old walnut trees that we used to climb, just as high and terrifying as i remember - it's amazing the teachers let us go, but that's how it was back then, the era of bullrush (British Bulldog) in the playgrounds and corporal punishment in the classrooms. There were kids BMXing up and down the pint-sized rugby field doing jumps and wheelies, and i'm sure if i had ventured a bit further in they would've been "going down the gully" - squeezing through a hole in the fence out behind the school, where bamboo stalks and steep muddy paths led down to the river. Gosh, even around the front of the school they still had the painted hop-scotch squares and handball (four square) courts - some of my most-remembered childhood lunch break activities.
Then past the school and up to the main road, where we waved to the Queen when she rode past in her limo in 1990. And across that alarmingly rickety tall bridge across the river to Leamington... The bridge i was cycling to school one day and it was a rain storm and i hit the brakes but they failed, so i swerved to avoid rear-ending the car in front and went head-on into a car coming the other way, over the handlebars, into the windscreen... Thinking about it now the driver must have been freaked the fuck out that they had had a head-on collision with a child, but i just picked myself up and dusted myself off and went along my way, as you do when you are a baby.
And then Leamington, the residential suburb on the other side of the river. Cambridge overall was and is a reasonably affluent country town, but Leamington was "the poor side". As a kid i didn't really understand urban planning or social geography, but as an adult it's much easier to see. The houses on that side were less varied, lots of prefab homes and properties subdivided into "A", "B" and "C" units. Cars rusting out on the front lawn. Light industrial zoning with big trucks constantly cruising past. The marae (local Māori community center) is out there. It's not really poor poor, but definitely a marked difference to the unique homes, heritage buildings, tree-lined streets and (nowadays) separated bike lanes on the Cambridge side.
Aside from my recognizing every single street name, every single park, every single tree, i also had the overwhelming sensation that it was just like Vancouver - the endless, vast suburbs of Burnaby, Surrey etc. Mile upon mile of single family homes arranged in a grid layout. But that's not particularly Canadian urban planning either - Australia is filled with suburbs like that, and the US too. But my hatred of them must have started in New Zealand. While every moment unlocked another childhood memory - and not unpleasant ones - i also could not help but think why the fuck would anyone voluntarily choose to live like this. What an awful, hideous, miserable way for human beings to organize themselves. I hate the suburbs so fucking much, and here is where it all started.
But there was the park where we got told off by the council for hauling a lawnmower and mowing a cricket pitch in the middle. There was the park where someone had strung up a rope swing in the bush out the back. There was the place where my guitar teacher lived - formerly on the outskirts of town, but now instead of a view out to Mount Pirongia there's a green belt and then a whole new subdivision. And not an accessible, kids-on-a-bike-friendly residential grid like the rest of Leamington, but one of those even more hideous "only one road in and out" squirly whirly cul de sac subdivisions that are the epitome of pedestrian-hostile, classist, fucked-up urban development. (My dad kinda lives in one of those now, and i will write a whole nother entry about it.)
The town has changed. But Leamington has changed the least. Although we lived in a few different places on both sides of the river during my time in New Zealand, all of my friends always lived on the Leamington side. So i knew it all. Every street name brought up another memory. I went down the main shopping area and it was exactly the same. Well, nowadays apparently sushi is a thing in New Zealand - God knows nobody would have dared to eat raw fish in Cambridge 30 years ago - but aside from the two (!) sushi places it was fish'n'chip shop, Chinese takeaway, grocery store and a couple of bakeries/cafes. And not those fancy French patisserie kinda bakeries, but Scottish-style cream buns and sweet cakes and meat pies and sausage roll joints. I had completely forgotten that that was a thing in New Zealand, but when i walked in i was like... yeah nah, i totally remember this.
I bought a sausage roll for $4.50. I think they were a dollar when i was a kid. I squirted some tomato sauce (ketchup) into the paper bag in delight as the memories came flooding back. I sat out front and watched the guys roll in with jandals (flip-flops) and shorts and a black singlet (tank top), grab some meat pies to take back to the work site... Unaccompanied kids walking barefoot along the sidewalk, popping in to buy some lollies (candy) or a Coke. That's the New Zealand i remember growing up, that was the place i lived, and here it was, still the same.
I cycled back to Cambridge proper after that, and it has changed much more. The main drag has hipsterized in a way that brought to mind every "charming" ye olde country towne of Canada, Australia and the US. You know, the arts and crafts shops, the fancy restaurants offering 100-mile food, organic this, vegan that, craft beer, local winery, yoga, wellness bla bla bla. Small town cosplay for rich people, the fucking worst. But i still saw the tree in the center of town that we used to climb. The thing was, with the town gentrified to the level that it had, i didn't get those flashback moments as much any more. But maybe also because all my friends lived on the other side, this downtown area just wasn't as much a defining part of my youth experience, despite cycling through it every day.
I walked around the tiny little lake in the center of town, somewhat confused because the train station i remember growing up does not exist any more. The branch line was already decommissioned in the 1950s, but all the infrastructure was retained till the 1990s. Now there is no indication a railway ever used to be there. A big shopping mall development has gone up that i couldn't even really see because of car-centric planning making it hard to bike to/around. But the lake where mom liked to walk is still there, and i had to do a loop because one keen memory i have of the place was mom throwing her wedding ring in during a walk one day. It was a few years after the divorce and i think it provided some closure that was important for her. It's weird, though, because i thought that lake was going to bring back a ton of memories for me and it didn't, not really.
So i went past my middle school, and then the high school, and neither of those brought much back either. All the school grounds have been so filled in with dozens of prefab buildings to handle the 2x population explosion that they're practically unrecognizable. I'm sure if i had walked in i would've found the quad or the water fountain where my group used to hang out, or this, or that, but it just feels odd walking into school grounds as an adult, even during the holidays. The carpark was inexplicably full, and i didn't want to meet another asshole with a clipboard.
I was surprised how little i felt for the Cambridge side, after it all. I really think my strongest memories are tied up in times with friends after school around Leamington. But i did have one friend who lived on the Cambridge side - my best bud R. He actually didn't live in town but on a small farm with a gully out the back, his family had chickens and i think a goat or something. Well. That whole fucking farm is gone. In fact, everything around where his house used to be is suburban development. Any hint of it once being farmland, completely obliterated. All of the houses are new - obviously, built in the last 30 years - and they are like mansions. Grotesque buildings with multi-car garages and boats on trailers out the front, you know the drill.
It's so sad, they could've built up the town center, restarted the train service to Hamilton, they could've done a mixed use, multi-storey central business district, but nah, rather steamroll the farms, add a bunch more suburban sprawl, and try turn the main street into a tourist attraction. Le sigh. The main road leading into Hamilton is now a multi-lane highway with multiple exits and overpasses that allow car-owning people living in the new developments to commute into the city and avoid the main street altogether. I mean, i say it's sad, but it's completely unsurprising, because this is just how urban development happens in New World countries. Everyone wants their McMansion.
I wondered, as i finally made it out to the real farms and the sweet, nostalgic smell of horse feed filled my nostrils, if 30 years from now that'd all be suburbs too.
Anyway, the last place i really wanted to see was Sanitorium Hill, aka the Maungakawa Scenic Reserve, a spot where mom would often take us to get away from the hustle and bustle and just wander around the rhododendrons and native bush. It's far enough out of town and on a road to nowhere that nobody would drive up by accident, and it's not scenic enough for tourists to bother, so there were rarely more than a handful of people up there... and today it's same as it ever was. The hill is extremely fucking brutal. It's "only" about a 350m climb, but it does that over just a couple of kilometers, with very tight switchbacks that were hairy enough to get over in a motor vehicle back in the day, much less do it on a folding bike. It took me an hour, pausing to take a breather on every corner. But once i was up there, it was just me and the sheep, on top of the world. I'm so glad i went up, i feel like it was a tribute to my mom to make the pilgrimage.
I walked the short bush trail up there, going through the dense ferns and rainforest that i guess would have covered the whole area before the Māori (and later Pākehā settlers) started felling and farming. I met an old lady who was turboing her way around the track who reminded me of my mom. She had bought a place up there, but i don't think she was a longtime resident because when i mentioned being there as a kid she didn't respond with any memories of her own. Does that make me more of a local than these carpetbaggers living in glorious mansions on the hill? I thought, as i zoomed back down - and just as we did when driving down back in the day - what a glorious place to own a house, ay? View right across the Waikato plains. Whoever she was, she's living the dream.
I picked up some avocados from an honesty box out front of one of the richy rich hobby farms on the way back. I figure if you're gonna be an affluent prat living out your rural fantasy the least you can do is give back to the community by selling your harvest in a roadside stall instead of charging a fortune at a hipster market downtown or whatever. It was comforting to know that despite the gentrification of the area there are still folks selling avos and plums and eggs to passing drivers - or cyclists - for a pittance.
I had been considering getting a motel and staying overnight, so i'd have time to explore the river trails on foot, or cycle the farm roads past all the horse studs back to Hamilton, but the climb to the top of the hill had destroyed me, so i took dad up on his offer to pick me up. I told him to meet me at a dairy (convenience store) where i just sat out front sipping an L&P (lemonade). An American couple in a sporty rental rolled up and the lady called out the window if she could buy smokes inside. It reminded me of forging letters from our parents so we could go to the dairy and get smokes as kids. I realized i hadn't even noticed them in there - New Zealand famously passed a law banning cigarettes altogether for anyone born after 2009, although the current (conservative) government recently overturned it. Still, i told the American to just go in and see. As if walking 5 steps to a shop is too much effort. They left the engine running the whole time while she popped in. Fucking, Americans in a nutshell right there. Nobody will ever beat them for having the biggest, baddest car culture in the world.
So when my dad pulled up in his sparkly new EV, i smiled, and thought to myself that maybe New Zealand wasn't quite so bad.
The newly-built cycle path between that old rural center and one of its outlying townships is far beyond anything that existed back when i lived in New Zealand, which served well to diminish the nostalgia slash traumatic flashbacks. It's a concrete path that for the most part avoids any roads, and when it does follow a road it's a back-of-the-paddock country road. But you can tell it's designed by cyclists who are sport/leisure cyclists and not commuters because it winds up and down into gullies (New Zealand term for canyons and depressions that are inconvenient to farm so are left full of native bush) and the steep banks of the Waikato river.
It's not especially efficient to snake up and down, even with the well-engineered switchback boardwalks that keep the grade relatively pleasant for the mostly-retired folks i passed riding e-bikes in the other direction. It was kinda nice to zip along those boardwalks with the cool coverage of native bush, but in honesty the country cycling i most remember from when i was a kid was along long, flat farm roads passing dairy farms, horse studs and the odd fruit orchard or cornfield. Of course that stuff is still there, but i didn't see as much of it as i planned.
One of the weirdest parts of that new cycleway is that it pops out literally at the driveway of one of the houses we used live in Cambridge. In New Zealand it's common for people with big properties to subdivide their own property and put a unit (prefab/mobile home) out the back, which results in street addresses like "9A" and "27C". Those backlot units are where i grew up, but alas you can't really walk up and take a picture as an adult because you'd be a weird creeper trespassing on private driveways.
So you will just have to imagine my emotions as i suddenly found myself at the bottom of this hill i biked up hundreds of times as a kid. The gravel driveway, the postbox with our number on it. I remembered the neighbor's shrubs i had hidden underneath when i had run away from my dad and did not want him to pick me up one weekend. Now a fence and not a hedge, but it all still looked more-or-less the same, right there on the edge of town where the steepness of the slope made it impossible to continue development (unless, apparently, you are building a scenic cycleway).
Of course the first place i cycled was my elementary school - not the first school i attended in New Zealand, but after a flurry of one-month-here, one-month-there as we migrated from Auckland through Hamilton, the first school where i made it through a full term.
It's still just the tail end of summer holidays here, so the kids aren't fully back (which likely would've triggered some other odd clothing-related childhood trauma - seeing school uniforms everywhere), but there were still after-school care programs going on, so i didn't feel comfortable charging in to take a million photos. Still, there it was, the old walnut trees that we used to climb, just as high and terrifying as i remember - it's amazing the teachers let us go, but that's how it was back then, the era of bullrush (British Bulldog) in the playgrounds and corporal punishment in the classrooms. There were kids BMXing up and down the pint-sized rugby field doing jumps and wheelies, and i'm sure if i had ventured a bit further in they would've been "going down the gully" - squeezing through a hole in the fence out behind the school, where bamboo stalks and steep muddy paths led down to the river. Gosh, even around the front of the school they still had the painted hop-scotch squares and handball (four square) courts - some of my most-remembered childhood lunch break activities.
Then past the school and up to the main road, where we waved to the Queen when she rode past in her limo in 1990. And across that alarmingly rickety tall bridge across the river to Leamington... The bridge i was cycling to school one day and it was a rain storm and i hit the brakes but they failed, so i swerved to avoid rear-ending the car in front and went head-on into a car coming the other way, over the handlebars, into the windscreen... Thinking about it now the driver must have been freaked the fuck out that they had had a head-on collision with a child, but i just picked myself up and dusted myself off and went along my way, as you do when you are a baby.
And then Leamington, the residential suburb on the other side of the river. Cambridge overall was and is a reasonably affluent country town, but Leamington was "the poor side". As a kid i didn't really understand urban planning or social geography, but as an adult it's much easier to see. The houses on that side were less varied, lots of prefab homes and properties subdivided into "A", "B" and "C" units. Cars rusting out on the front lawn. Light industrial zoning with big trucks constantly cruising past. The marae (local Māori community center) is out there. It's not really poor poor, but definitely a marked difference to the unique homes, heritage buildings, tree-lined streets and (nowadays) separated bike lanes on the Cambridge side.
Aside from my recognizing every single street name, every single park, every single tree, i also had the overwhelming sensation that it was just like Vancouver - the endless, vast suburbs of Burnaby, Surrey etc. Mile upon mile of single family homes arranged in a grid layout. But that's not particularly Canadian urban planning either - Australia is filled with suburbs like that, and the US too. But my hatred of them must have started in New Zealand. While every moment unlocked another childhood memory - and not unpleasant ones - i also could not help but think why the fuck would anyone voluntarily choose to live like this. What an awful, hideous, miserable way for human beings to organize themselves. I hate the suburbs so fucking much, and here is where it all started.
But there was the park where we got told off by the council for hauling a lawnmower and mowing a cricket pitch in the middle. There was the park where someone had strung up a rope swing in the bush out the back. There was the place where my guitar teacher lived - formerly on the outskirts of town, but now instead of a view out to Mount Pirongia there's a green belt and then a whole new subdivision. And not an accessible, kids-on-a-bike-friendly residential grid like the rest of Leamington, but one of those even more hideous "only one road in and out" squirly whirly cul de sac subdivisions that are the epitome of pedestrian-hostile, classist, fucked-up urban development. (My dad kinda lives in one of those now, and i will write a whole nother entry about it.)
The town has changed. But Leamington has changed the least. Although we lived in a few different places on both sides of the river during my time in New Zealand, all of my friends always lived on the Leamington side. So i knew it all. Every street name brought up another memory. I went down the main shopping area and it was exactly the same. Well, nowadays apparently sushi is a thing in New Zealand - God knows nobody would have dared to eat raw fish in Cambridge 30 years ago - but aside from the two (!) sushi places it was fish'n'chip shop, Chinese takeaway, grocery store and a couple of bakeries/cafes. And not those fancy French patisserie kinda bakeries, but Scottish-style cream buns and sweet cakes and meat pies and sausage roll joints. I had completely forgotten that that was a thing in New Zealand, but when i walked in i was like... yeah nah, i totally remember this.
I bought a sausage roll for $4.50. I think they were a dollar when i was a kid. I squirted some tomato sauce (ketchup) into the paper bag in delight as the memories came flooding back. I sat out front and watched the guys roll in with jandals (flip-flops) and shorts and a black singlet (tank top), grab some meat pies to take back to the work site... Unaccompanied kids walking barefoot along the sidewalk, popping in to buy some lollies (candy) or a Coke. That's the New Zealand i remember growing up, that was the place i lived, and here it was, still the same.
I cycled back to Cambridge proper after that, and it has changed much more. The main drag has hipsterized in a way that brought to mind every "charming" ye olde country towne of Canada, Australia and the US. You know, the arts and crafts shops, the fancy restaurants offering 100-mile food, organic this, vegan that, craft beer, local winery, yoga, wellness bla bla bla. Small town cosplay for rich people, the fucking worst. But i still saw the tree in the center of town that we used to climb. The thing was, with the town gentrified to the level that it had, i didn't get those flashback moments as much any more. But maybe also because all my friends lived on the other side, this downtown area just wasn't as much a defining part of my youth experience, despite cycling through it every day.
I walked around the tiny little lake in the center of town, somewhat confused because the train station i remember growing up does not exist any more. The branch line was already decommissioned in the 1950s, but all the infrastructure was retained till the 1990s. Now there is no indication a railway ever used to be there. A big shopping mall development has gone up that i couldn't even really see because of car-centric planning making it hard to bike to/around. But the lake where mom liked to walk is still there, and i had to do a loop because one keen memory i have of the place was mom throwing her wedding ring in during a walk one day. It was a few years after the divorce and i think it provided some closure that was important for her. It's weird, though, because i thought that lake was going to bring back a ton of memories for me and it didn't, not really.
So i went past my middle school, and then the high school, and neither of those brought much back either. All the school grounds have been so filled in with dozens of prefab buildings to handle the 2x population explosion that they're practically unrecognizable. I'm sure if i had walked in i would've found the quad or the water fountain where my group used to hang out, or this, or that, but it just feels odd walking into school grounds as an adult, even during the holidays. The carpark was inexplicably full, and i didn't want to meet another asshole with a clipboard.
I was surprised how little i felt for the Cambridge side, after it all. I really think my strongest memories are tied up in times with friends after school around Leamington. But i did have one friend who lived on the Cambridge side - my best bud R. He actually didn't live in town but on a small farm with a gully out the back, his family had chickens and i think a goat or something. Well. That whole fucking farm is gone. In fact, everything around where his house used to be is suburban development. Any hint of it once being farmland, completely obliterated. All of the houses are new - obviously, built in the last 30 years - and they are like mansions. Grotesque buildings with multi-car garages and boats on trailers out the front, you know the drill.
It's so sad, they could've built up the town center, restarted the train service to Hamilton, they could've done a mixed use, multi-storey central business district, but nah, rather steamroll the farms, add a bunch more suburban sprawl, and try turn the main street into a tourist attraction. Le sigh. The main road leading into Hamilton is now a multi-lane highway with multiple exits and overpasses that allow car-owning people living in the new developments to commute into the city and avoid the main street altogether. I mean, i say it's sad, but it's completely unsurprising, because this is just how urban development happens in New World countries. Everyone wants their McMansion.
I wondered, as i finally made it out to the real farms and the sweet, nostalgic smell of horse feed filled my nostrils, if 30 years from now that'd all be suburbs too.
Anyway, the last place i really wanted to see was Sanitorium Hill, aka the Maungakawa Scenic Reserve, a spot where mom would often take us to get away from the hustle and bustle and just wander around the rhododendrons and native bush. It's far enough out of town and on a road to nowhere that nobody would drive up by accident, and it's not scenic enough for tourists to bother, so there were rarely more than a handful of people up there... and today it's same as it ever was. The hill is extremely fucking brutal. It's "only" about a 350m climb, but it does that over just a couple of kilometers, with very tight switchbacks that were hairy enough to get over in a motor vehicle back in the day, much less do it on a folding bike. It took me an hour, pausing to take a breather on every corner. But once i was up there, it was just me and the sheep, on top of the world. I'm so glad i went up, i feel like it was a tribute to my mom to make the pilgrimage.
I walked the short bush trail up there, going through the dense ferns and rainforest that i guess would have covered the whole area before the Māori (and later Pākehā settlers) started felling and farming. I met an old lady who was turboing her way around the track who reminded me of my mom. She had bought a place up there, but i don't think she was a longtime resident because when i mentioned being there as a kid she didn't respond with any memories of her own. Does that make me more of a local than these carpetbaggers living in glorious mansions on the hill? I thought, as i zoomed back down - and just as we did when driving down back in the day - what a glorious place to own a house, ay? View right across the Waikato plains. Whoever she was, she's living the dream.
I picked up some avocados from an honesty box out front of one of the richy rich hobby farms on the way back. I figure if you're gonna be an affluent prat living out your rural fantasy the least you can do is give back to the community by selling your harvest in a roadside stall instead of charging a fortune at a hipster market downtown or whatever. It was comforting to know that despite the gentrification of the area there are still folks selling avos and plums and eggs to passing drivers - or cyclists - for a pittance.
I had been considering getting a motel and staying overnight, so i'd have time to explore the river trails on foot, or cycle the farm roads past all the horse studs back to Hamilton, but the climb to the top of the hill had destroyed me, so i took dad up on his offer to pick me up. I told him to meet me at a dairy (convenience store) where i just sat out front sipping an L&P (lemonade). An American couple in a sporty rental rolled up and the lady called out the window if she could buy smokes inside. It reminded me of forging letters from our parents so we could go to the dairy and get smokes as kids. I realized i hadn't even noticed them in there - New Zealand famously passed a law banning cigarettes altogether for anyone born after 2009, although the current (conservative) government recently overturned it. Still, i told the American to just go in and see. As if walking 5 steps to a shop is too much effort. They left the engine running the whole time while she popped in. Fucking, Americans in a nutshell right there. Nobody will ever beat them for having the biggest, baddest car culture in the world.
So when my dad pulled up in his sparkly new EV, i smiled, and thought to myself that maybe New Zealand wasn't quite so bad.