Raglan, dad and the fam part one
It's hard to write while i am here, because everything is kind of "with" someone. Even when i'm not directly in conversation or on an excursion, there's that kind of expectation that i ought to be back for dinner, make sure to catch the last bus, comment on the latest dumb thing in the news, and so on.
There are so many emotions and experiences coming up for me that there is a lot i would like to remember, and thus wish i was journaling about, but before the first thing can settle there's another thing. Because i can't travel at my own pace, i'm buffeted about by everyone else's, caught up in their eddies, bobbing over their wake. If there's one thing that this holiday is doing for me it's making me even more assured that my decision to live as a single person with no close friends or family is far and away the best thing for my mental health.
Which is not to say i am suffering or that i am finding any of this unpleasant. It's nice to see dad again, to see the step fam, to eat their food, to slot into their schedule. It's different. It's so very different from my normal work life that i have well and truly evacuated my brain from all of those work stresses, and only when i briefly read a news article tangentially related to my job do i get that creeping sense of anxiety. For the most part, despite running on other people's schedule and never feeling like i can completely relax... it's still much more relaxing than an ordinary work week. Family may be worse than solitude, but work is definitely worse than family.
Let me try wind back to arriving at the airport a couple weeks ago. The flight was fine, dad was waiting at the airport, i got some cash out, picked up a SIM card and jumped into his new EV.
As regular readers of my LJ, y'all know that not only do i not drive myself, but i also never use taxis and avoid internal combustion vehicles as much as possible. I can probably count on one hand the number of times i sat in an internal combustion vehicle over the past year, and they were all shared shuttle bus rides to parties or that work thing. When i was planning my trip dad said i should rent a car, to which i responded with how i avoid cars and had willingly let my driver's license lapse. He offered to take me on a road trip to wherever i wanted to go, but i expressed reluctance at burning that much carbon just for kicks. I said i'd rather just stay close to home and use my bike, and reminded him that this trip was the whole motivation behind me buying a folding bike in the first place!
I forgot that one of my dad's personality traits is feeling some kind of shame or guilt when he perceives someone to be "out-charitying" or "out-environmentalisting" him. Since being here and talking to him more about this stuff i realize that it stems from his relationship with his own father, who was a serious philanthropist that spent most of his life in developing countries and quietly put hundreds of underprivileged kids through school. Apparently they got into arguments about the nature of charity, moral virtue and so on, and somehow that's left him with insecurity around his own social and environmental impact. Anyway, just before i arrived my dad sold his internal combustion vehicle and used a small unexpected windfall to buy an EV. I don't know how much impact i had on that decision, but i will say it was quite a surprise and a thrill to drive the ~150km from the airport to his house in a no/low emissions vehicle. Although it was still very weird to sit in a private car again for the first time in many years.
My dad lives in Raglan. This is small town of a few thousand people that is renowned for having one of the best surf breaks in the world. Surfers flock here from all over, but it's also still just a small town and a cheap seaside day trip for the people who live in the landlocked rural center of Hamilton and its surrounding townships like Cambridge, Te Awamutu and so on.
Raglan is at the end of the road. You leave Hamilton, cross the range, get into town, and that's all there is. Yes, there are a few gravel roads heading into the mountains to get to a scattering of even smaller coastal settlements, but nobody will cross the range unless they are specifically coming to Raglan, and if you want to leave Raglan to get anywhere else you have to go back across the range. It's an isolated bubble inside a country that itself is an isolated bubble. It's also known for having a bit of a hippie vibe, which is why it appeals to my environmentalist dad (in particular) and leftist step-mom (somewhat less so).
To be honest, pulling into town as an adult i immediately placed it into the bucket with every mountain biking slash ski bum village i visited cycling through BC, and having spent a bit more time here now i can confirm that it's exactly that. The thing about these adventure sports guys is that on the surface they seem all peace and love with open minds and laid back attitudes, but really they're just jocks of the sea/mountain. Jocks who smoke more pot than farm or city jocks except they don't play team sports, which makes them worse, actually. Yeah, there are vegan platters and organic bakeries and craft beer and the cosmopolitan vibe brought by every moneyed tech bro in the world dropping in to catch a wave, but that also makes it a bit libertarianish and manospherical. I'm not sure if i was forced to live in a village of a few thousand people i'd pick this one over one that was a rest stop on the highway to somewhere more interesting.
But fortunately i don't have to make that choice because this is where my dad chose to retire.
Like, seriously. He called in his retirement last week. Apparently the step fam has been pushing him to do it for months, if not years, and recent health scares have led him to taking the plunge. He's 68, i think. He hadn't told me, but he and my step mom both had pretty serious treatments for skin cancer in the past year, he's had some kind of kidney failure, he's got osteo-arthritis, his hands are all swollen up, etc etc. It reminds me a bit of my mom not really letting me know she had cancer till it seemed it was terminal. I don't mind - i don't think anyone should feel they owe it to anyone else to share their personal shit - but i was a touch surprised he hadn't used it to guilt me into visiting sooner. But perhaps i had a sixth sense after mom and that's why i booked this trip even though i had never planned to come back down under.
So, my dad lives in the countryside. Some rich "local farmer" lobbied the district council for years into turning one of his tracts of land into a new suburban development, and that is where my dad bought and built his retirement home. Building out a suburb in a hippie town, there are lots of environmental regulations - for instance they're trying to rewild the hillsides into gullies where kids can play, meanwhile cats are banned completely due to the terror they unleash upon native fauna. The view is gorgeous - across a harbor inlet, golf course, farmland, mountain, sea... But it's still a residential suburb where rich people are building their holiday homes and retirees are building their dream houses, where there is only one road in and out and it's across a bridge, so it's practically a gated community even though there isn't a gate. It is possible to walk or bike into town, but everybody drives. I have Some Feelings about that, and i think my step-mom does too, but dad adores the location. He's started constructing a splendid garden and seems at peace. He hopes this will be the place he'll live out his years - close enough to nature to feel like he's within reach of the wilderness, in a community with lots of fellow greenies, while still having a real town with a hospital, university etc less than an hour's drive away.
Also, his last grandkid is here. My step-sister lives in town with her husband and her second daughter (the first is fully-grown and moved to Australia). They were the first family i met within a couple days of arriving here. Last time i saw my step-sister we were both 15, i think, and last time i spent any extended time with her we would've been 11, 12, around that age. It was really weird to see someone i only knew as awkward tween, rebellious teen, my mirror-sibling - same age but opposite gender - suddenly manifest as a homeowner, a working professional, a wife, a mother. In some ways it all felt very strange, but then when i saw her drawing flowers with her 7-year-old, i was like... yeah nah, that same girl i knew is still in her. I wonder if she saw shades of the same boy in me?
This weekend we will probably be meeting up with my step-aunt and her husband who i haven't seen since i was a tween, and who i remember visiting for their kid's first birthday (a baby who is now fully-grown herself). I think still lined up will be seeing my step-brother who is a bit older (who i have actually met several times as an adult) and the first kid of my other step-brother who everyone wants me to meet because he's a flamboyant, effeminate artist whose gender or sexuality somewhat confuses the fam and who they think i might somehow connect with. (It's giving "all black people know each other" vibes, but to be fair my lesbian auntie did send one of the most supportive and comforting letters when i came out as trans so maybe there is something to be said for connecting with other gender non-conforming folks?)
Anywho. Family. Fucking ughhhhh.
I have been getting out and doing some other stuff. I'll leave the story about completing the 20km Tongariro hike with my aging dad for another day, but i will say that stuck here in ass-end of nowhere (aka Raglan) i have managed one little bike ride up Mount Karioi and also hauled my bike on the bus across to Hamilton where i rode up the river towardd Auckland as well as poking around some of the Hamilton suburbs and getting over my crushing nostalgia and anxiety of a few entries ago.
The weather is much colder than i remember it - despite it being summertime - and the landscape (outside of central Waikato) is much hillier than i remember, but it's an okay place to unwind.
I especially enjoyed my bike ride up to Ngāruawāhia. Somehow i thought i would remember Raglan better, but maybe my childhood memories here are stuck on the beach and not in town? I still haven't been to the beach other than a brief bike ride where i didn't even bother to have a paddle. It doesn't ring a bell at all - perhaps i went to the wrong end of the beach?
Anyway, going up to Ngāruawāhia was great. Cycling along the Waikato river felt like cycling along so many other rivers, in Canada, in Colombia, in Taiwan. And popping out at one of the towns that used to be on the way to Auckland (but now is bypassed by the new highway) i got real flashbacks of stuff that i had long forgotten. The railroad, the kids jumping off the bridge into the river, the Māori elders with moko (facial tattoos), the little cafe serving beans on toast and cheese sandwiches and meat pies and whitebait fritters... Stuff that hasn't changed while the rest of the country gentrified.
I kept on heading up the river to Huntly - a pretty rough and working class town - where i sat out front of a bakery eating a custard slice while waiting for the bus back to Hamilton. Opposite me were a bunch of street preachers telling everyone that God is like your father, He'll always forgive you when you did something wrong, He'll always love you, and on and on. Nobody paid them any attention. Custard slices are a lot sweeter than i remember, but since i had forgotten they even existed until i saw one i was delighted to experience it again.
Back in Hamilton i stopped into a Chinese grocery store for supplies and got to speak Mandarin to some migrant's kids who were stacking shelves and had no idea how to cook, which made them not particularly useful people to ask where to find ingredients. It reminded me again how different Taiwanese food is to Chinese food, as the things i wanted to pick up simply did not exist. I still haven't cooked for the olds... Their pantry is overflowing with shit but they have none of the ingredients i use or ever used. I assume it must be more or less the same food i ate growing up but damn i took a left turn after leaving home.
Still, when in Rome...
There are so many emotions and experiences coming up for me that there is a lot i would like to remember, and thus wish i was journaling about, but before the first thing can settle there's another thing. Because i can't travel at my own pace, i'm buffeted about by everyone else's, caught up in their eddies, bobbing over their wake. If there's one thing that this holiday is doing for me it's making me even more assured that my decision to live as a single person with no close friends or family is far and away the best thing for my mental health.
Which is not to say i am suffering or that i am finding any of this unpleasant. It's nice to see dad again, to see the step fam, to eat their food, to slot into their schedule. It's different. It's so very different from my normal work life that i have well and truly evacuated my brain from all of those work stresses, and only when i briefly read a news article tangentially related to my job do i get that creeping sense of anxiety. For the most part, despite running on other people's schedule and never feeling like i can completely relax... it's still much more relaxing than an ordinary work week. Family may be worse than solitude, but work is definitely worse than family.
Let me try wind back to arriving at the airport a couple weeks ago. The flight was fine, dad was waiting at the airport, i got some cash out, picked up a SIM card and jumped into his new EV.
As regular readers of my LJ, y'all know that not only do i not drive myself, but i also never use taxis and avoid internal combustion vehicles as much as possible. I can probably count on one hand the number of times i sat in an internal combustion vehicle over the past year, and they were all shared shuttle bus rides to parties or that work thing. When i was planning my trip dad said i should rent a car, to which i responded with how i avoid cars and had willingly let my driver's license lapse. He offered to take me on a road trip to wherever i wanted to go, but i expressed reluctance at burning that much carbon just for kicks. I said i'd rather just stay close to home and use my bike, and reminded him that this trip was the whole motivation behind me buying a folding bike in the first place!
I forgot that one of my dad's personality traits is feeling some kind of shame or guilt when he perceives someone to be "out-charitying" or "out-environmentalisting" him. Since being here and talking to him more about this stuff i realize that it stems from his relationship with his own father, who was a serious philanthropist that spent most of his life in developing countries and quietly put hundreds of underprivileged kids through school. Apparently they got into arguments about the nature of charity, moral virtue and so on, and somehow that's left him with insecurity around his own social and environmental impact. Anyway, just before i arrived my dad sold his internal combustion vehicle and used a small unexpected windfall to buy an EV. I don't know how much impact i had on that decision, but i will say it was quite a surprise and a thrill to drive the ~150km from the airport to his house in a no/low emissions vehicle. Although it was still very weird to sit in a private car again for the first time in many years.
My dad lives in Raglan. This is small town of a few thousand people that is renowned for having one of the best surf breaks in the world. Surfers flock here from all over, but it's also still just a small town and a cheap seaside day trip for the people who live in the landlocked rural center of Hamilton and its surrounding townships like Cambridge, Te Awamutu and so on.
Raglan is at the end of the road. You leave Hamilton, cross the range, get into town, and that's all there is. Yes, there are a few gravel roads heading into the mountains to get to a scattering of even smaller coastal settlements, but nobody will cross the range unless they are specifically coming to Raglan, and if you want to leave Raglan to get anywhere else you have to go back across the range. It's an isolated bubble inside a country that itself is an isolated bubble. It's also known for having a bit of a hippie vibe, which is why it appeals to my environmentalist dad (in particular) and leftist step-mom (somewhat less so).
To be honest, pulling into town as an adult i immediately placed it into the bucket with every mountain biking slash ski bum village i visited cycling through BC, and having spent a bit more time here now i can confirm that it's exactly that. The thing about these adventure sports guys is that on the surface they seem all peace and love with open minds and laid back attitudes, but really they're just jocks of the sea/mountain. Jocks who smoke more pot than farm or city jocks except they don't play team sports, which makes them worse, actually. Yeah, there are vegan platters and organic bakeries and craft beer and the cosmopolitan vibe brought by every moneyed tech bro in the world dropping in to catch a wave, but that also makes it a bit libertarianish and manospherical. I'm not sure if i was forced to live in a village of a few thousand people i'd pick this one over one that was a rest stop on the highway to somewhere more interesting.
But fortunately i don't have to make that choice because this is where my dad chose to retire.
Like, seriously. He called in his retirement last week. Apparently the step fam has been pushing him to do it for months, if not years, and recent health scares have led him to taking the plunge. He's 68, i think. He hadn't told me, but he and my step mom both had pretty serious treatments for skin cancer in the past year, he's had some kind of kidney failure, he's got osteo-arthritis, his hands are all swollen up, etc etc. It reminds me a bit of my mom not really letting me know she had cancer till it seemed it was terminal. I don't mind - i don't think anyone should feel they owe it to anyone else to share their personal shit - but i was a touch surprised he hadn't used it to guilt me into visiting sooner. But perhaps i had a sixth sense after mom and that's why i booked this trip even though i had never planned to come back down under.
So, my dad lives in the countryside. Some rich "local farmer" lobbied the district council for years into turning one of his tracts of land into a new suburban development, and that is where my dad bought and built his retirement home. Building out a suburb in a hippie town, there are lots of environmental regulations - for instance they're trying to rewild the hillsides into gullies where kids can play, meanwhile cats are banned completely due to the terror they unleash upon native fauna. The view is gorgeous - across a harbor inlet, golf course, farmland, mountain, sea... But it's still a residential suburb where rich people are building their holiday homes and retirees are building their dream houses, where there is only one road in and out and it's across a bridge, so it's practically a gated community even though there isn't a gate. It is possible to walk or bike into town, but everybody drives. I have Some Feelings about that, and i think my step-mom does too, but dad adores the location. He's started constructing a splendid garden and seems at peace. He hopes this will be the place he'll live out his years - close enough to nature to feel like he's within reach of the wilderness, in a community with lots of fellow greenies, while still having a real town with a hospital, university etc less than an hour's drive away.
Also, his last grandkid is here. My step-sister lives in town with her husband and her second daughter (the first is fully-grown and moved to Australia). They were the first family i met within a couple days of arriving here. Last time i saw my step-sister we were both 15, i think, and last time i spent any extended time with her we would've been 11, 12, around that age. It was really weird to see someone i only knew as awkward tween, rebellious teen, my mirror-sibling - same age but opposite gender - suddenly manifest as a homeowner, a working professional, a wife, a mother. In some ways it all felt very strange, but then when i saw her drawing flowers with her 7-year-old, i was like... yeah nah, that same girl i knew is still in her. I wonder if she saw shades of the same boy in me?
This weekend we will probably be meeting up with my step-aunt and her husband who i haven't seen since i was a tween, and who i remember visiting for their kid's first birthday (a baby who is now fully-grown herself). I think still lined up will be seeing my step-brother who is a bit older (who i have actually met several times as an adult) and the first kid of my other step-brother who everyone wants me to meet because he's a flamboyant, effeminate artist whose gender or sexuality somewhat confuses the fam and who they think i might somehow connect with. (It's giving "all black people know each other" vibes, but to be fair my lesbian auntie did send one of the most supportive and comforting letters when i came out as trans so maybe there is something to be said for connecting with other gender non-conforming folks?)
Anywho. Family. Fucking ughhhhh.
I have been getting out and doing some other stuff. I'll leave the story about completing the 20km Tongariro hike with my aging dad for another day, but i will say that stuck here in ass-end of nowhere (aka Raglan) i have managed one little bike ride up Mount Karioi and also hauled my bike on the bus across to Hamilton where i rode up the river towardd Auckland as well as poking around some of the Hamilton suburbs and getting over my crushing nostalgia and anxiety of a few entries ago.
The weather is much colder than i remember it - despite it being summertime - and the landscape (outside of central Waikato) is much hillier than i remember, but it's an okay place to unwind.
I especially enjoyed my bike ride up to Ngāruawāhia. Somehow i thought i would remember Raglan better, but maybe my childhood memories here are stuck on the beach and not in town? I still haven't been to the beach other than a brief bike ride where i didn't even bother to have a paddle. It doesn't ring a bell at all - perhaps i went to the wrong end of the beach?
Anyway, going up to Ngāruawāhia was great. Cycling along the Waikato river felt like cycling along so many other rivers, in Canada, in Colombia, in Taiwan. And popping out at one of the towns that used to be on the way to Auckland (but now is bypassed by the new highway) i got real flashbacks of stuff that i had long forgotten. The railroad, the kids jumping off the bridge into the river, the Māori elders with moko (facial tattoos), the little cafe serving beans on toast and cheese sandwiches and meat pies and whitebait fritters... Stuff that hasn't changed while the rest of the country gentrified.
I kept on heading up the river to Huntly - a pretty rough and working class town - where i sat out front of a bakery eating a custard slice while waiting for the bus back to Hamilton. Opposite me were a bunch of street preachers telling everyone that God is like your father, He'll always forgive you when you did something wrong, He'll always love you, and on and on. Nobody paid them any attention. Custard slices are a lot sweeter than i remember, but since i had forgotten they even existed until i saw one i was delighted to experience it again.
Back in Hamilton i stopped into a Chinese grocery store for supplies and got to speak Mandarin to some migrant's kids who were stacking shelves and had no idea how to cook, which made them not particularly useful people to ask where to find ingredients. It reminded me again how different Taiwanese food is to Chinese food, as the things i wanted to pick up simply did not exist. I still haven't cooked for the olds... Their pantry is overflowing with shit but they have none of the ingredients i use or ever used. I assume it must be more or less the same food i ate growing up but damn i took a left turn after leaving home.
Still, when in Rome...