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thegreatunfinished · 6 years

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Maraetai Beach in Myth & Legend

A semi-autobiographical (but highly whimsical) piece that I wrote for the team at Up Country, 2014.

The expansive bush that stretches between Maraetai Heights Road and Rewa Road in the semi-rural Auckland village of Maraetai Beach contains the following features for the eager explorer:

a variety of tracks of varying difficulty and reliability.

peaceful streams and waterways, straddled by fallen trees that are definitely, probably, fine to climb over.

native flora that perform well as resources for building dams, forts, etc. Native fauna that will cease singing to look down from the branches as you walk by; you the invader, they the keepers.

escaped convicts, dressed in rags and with yellow, rotting teeth, hidden in shadows and grim of thought and deed, who carry rusty knives made for cutting the tender bellies of unlucky children who stumble upon their camps.

a tall (reports indicate around seven foot), broad shouldered alien, recognisable by his lumbering gait and his ability to light the ground where he steps. He is slow and silent, but his intent is considered to be sinister. Caution is recommended.

a witch, though she mainly resides at the lonely dead end of Maraetai Heights Road, near the line of trees that mark the beginning of the massive bush area.

The casual inquirer may observe that this seems a lot for one expanse of rural New Zealand wilderness to contain. But this information is supported by eyewitness statements painstakingly collected over years of my childhood as well as deductions made after hours of sitting at the window of the second story lounge, gazing out at the thick green carpet of secrets where the trees, mysteries, dangers and adventures, started.

The convicts are perhaps the least surprising inhabitants. Although it was a small and unassuming neighbourhood in the 1980s, Maraetai Beach was mentioned on the Channel One News with some degree of regularity. Growing up, my hometown seemed a favourite destination for nogoodniks evading the authorities. I've never quite understood why. Perhaps it was those large areas of rugged nature, into which escape must have seemed easy. Famously, a helicopter of serious looking men with guns once landed on our school's soccer field. We were all ushered out to watch. They were there to track down a baddie on the run, and he must have been a real bad baddie this time. My older sister and I walked home that afternoon, closer and closer to the bush where I knew in my heart that this baddie was hiding, peering from between the branches like a scared, angry cat. I probably should have tipped off the men with guns.

The alien was observed by an older kid at school, and described to me while we walked in pairs towards the Maraetai Town Hall for rehearsal of our school play. So confident were the boy's words, so mocking of my ignorance, that I had no option but to suspect he was telling the truth. His friend, walking behind us, was also an older boy and therefore another expert on worldly matters. He confirmed that he had seen the black giant shambling through the trees near my house, just the other night. That evening, and for many evenings later, I was extra-quick to reach out and slam shut my bedroom window, should a black hand shoot out and grab my wrist. Even today it’s a task on which I don’t linger too casually.

The witch I learned about from a closer source: my older sister. She trod lightly upon the details, allowing me to fill in the gaps with images of a decrepit old crone that existed at the dead end of our road, just over the rise and just out of sight. I wouldn't have believed it - my sister already having tried to convince me, only briefly successfully, that Soda Stream syrup was poisonous (she called it "Indian Ink", a perfectly exotic and deadly sounding name) - but her best friend confirmed the hag’s presence also. What choice did I have? By this time, I would have been about eleven, I was already developing a healthy enough skepticism to know that such stories could be lies. But then caution, and an enduring and ill-advised trust of people older than me, encouraged me to lean towards belief and safe avoidance.

These dark secrets were not the only thrilling mysteries of the bush that lined Maraetai Heights Road. We all knew about the wild pigs, big as cars, blood-eyed and with tusks that would cut through a young boy like a toothpick through cheese. Schoolmates warned against crossing certain paddocks that existed on the other side of the trees, lest you run afoul of the gun-toting, maniacally territorial farmers that lived there. Of course, we crossed anyway, either sprinting or scurrying on our bellies. We never saw guns nor crazed farmers, but we believed in them. And there were ghosts among the trees too, though that may have been the one story I myself added. I have always loved and been mortally afraid of ghosts.

That burgeoning skepticism eventually flourished and then hardened, childhood wonder and terror setting into the grey impenetrability of adulthood wisdom. The convicts in my mind started to look less like Dickensian rogues and more like the sad, disenfranchised individuals we see on the front page. They probably didn't wear rags, nor did they cut bellies as often as suspected, but they did once force our door open and steal our potato chips.

I saw an American TV special on aliens in the '90s that starred the exact being that lurked in the Maraetai Beach bush, illuminated footsteps and all. I suppose the story must have been famous enough for my young informant to have read it years earlier in one of those "World's Strangest Mysteries"-type almanacs. Either that or the seven foot ET got bored of scaring tough young kiwi kids and thought he'd try some American ones.

The witch. I've never asked my sister where the terrifying old crone came from, though I'd guess a jumble of Enid Blyton and CS Lewis. Nevertheless, it didn't stop me from repeating the tales and stone-faced warnings to younger cousins, now adults themselves. I should ask them all at our next family Christmas whether they ever think of the old hag that casts wicked magic just out of sight, as I still think of her whenever I see a dimly lit rural road disappear over a rise. Because for all the dull, relentless power of adult rationality, things that get into your head as a kid tend to stay there, fighting for their hard-earned space. I have a theory that people who grew up in isolated areas, particularly near large expanses of untamed nature, forests and beaches and mountains and what-not, have an easy time of imagining shadowy figures and mysterious threats just outside the corner of the eye.

But that may be indulging in self-mythologising. It might be too dismissive of the imaginative terrors harboured by our friends who were raised in suburbs or cities. I still think, however, that the certain type of grim and electrifying sorcery that comes from mixing a child's brain with exposure to wildness is a special one, and New Zealand's landscape gives it a special flavour all of its own.

Because, still. Still , still, still to this day, no matter how worn smooth my sense of childhood adventure and horror is, I cannot look at a wall of trees on the edge of a dark expanse, like that which runs along Maraetai Heights Road, that runs in front of my old bedroom window, that still features so regularly in my dreams, without wondering what lurks, lumbers, crouches or cackles just there, just out of sight, in the wilderness.

#autobio

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