As I walked I became a part of the story. My footsteps in the damp decaying earth forever changing the forest floor. What air I exhale is absorbed in the surrounding plant life; giving life in a place so dense with vegetation you can almost see the leaves competing for my carbon dioxide waste, and compete they must. Few people come here. In my four-hour hike I never once saw another person.
The walk to the volcano is as unassuming as the sight of the former mountain. From afar both look like an average spot. Somewhere you can experience in just about any corner of the world where it rains enough to turn the hills green in spring. The walk begins in the town and meanders through neighborhoods. The postie rides by on her bicycle delivering the mail. Up a street and down a street, I begin to think I am lost when time after time the road curves around and back again, but shying away behind some bushes along a driveway a fresh sign points the way and I am once again confident in my plans.
As soon as I step on the path the scenery changes from suburban quaint to natural beauty. The path wanders beside a river. It is connected to the sea and rises and falls with the tide. That seems to be a common theme around here. Sea birds and ducks alike swim along the banks. I am startled to see, amongst all the beautiful things nature has to offer, the ugliest duck I have ever laid eyes on.
With the body of a molting goose and the head of a turkey vulture it looks as if it would scavenge the waterways for anything dead or decaying. It swims with its head moving back and forth like a saw blade and it is not very popular amongst the more serene mallards. With a bad mood to match its looks the lone creature takes aim at every passing duck. The mallards easily stay out of its reach for apparently it is lazy as well.
At a small park nestled in a river bend the path curves and you begin the climb to the look out and war memorial at the top of Parihaka. The flora changes drastically and the forest envelopes you in shadows and the sounds of hundreds of cicadas, only they aren’t cicadas; the noise belongs to an insect that resembles a chubby cricket. It is a steep climb and at what I think is the halfway point I stop and rest. Sitting on the path I can see through the trunks of the great ferns and tall trees. I look past the treetops and fern leaves rising up below me and I can see out to the sea.
Though Whangarei sits on a harbor it is miles to the nearest beach and this is my first glimpse of the ocean in days. Moving with the currents it is flat and blue in some places and a silvery sea foam green in others. I try to smell the sea but the wet damp earth all around me is overpowering. The forest smells of life and death as the two intertwine and create one another. It is a beautiful hike, and spectacular in its own right, but it is not a far cry from much of the bush I have scene in other places, including the middle of Auckland, but I am enjoying the nature around me and the solitude keeps me at peace. Nature is like a distant lover, it pulls you in and fools you into thinking you are safe and accepted and then it drives you away. As I left the top and made my way down the scenery changed drastically. Where once the land had been cleared for grazing and building reforestation has turned it into a nursery for kauris. Their slim straight trunks beguile the monsters they could become with time, if allowed. It is these monsters I am hoping to see. Few exist any more, and found in only very specific places I hadn’t heard much about their presence in Whangarei.
Past the nursery I am thinking about the kauri and the devastation caused to it by the settlers when a small sign, tucked into the bush, catches my attention. It is simple and confusing. “Pa, this way” with an arrow. As I had hiked upward I came across what I had thought to be the remnants of a European settlement. I was soon to learn that it was a Maori settlement, and more specifically, a Pa.
These early homes had been built into the mountain and the lava rock. Their many storage pits still dot the volcano. They look like shallow graves dug out of stone. Also carved out are terraces—risers that act as protection from warring tribes, and later, Europeans. These terraces were not successful in protecting the occupants. A great massacre occurred here during the Maori wars. Today the area is been mapped out for the public to see and learn from but the path has overgrown. It is hard to follow in many places and I lose it all together at the end of the loop and have to retrace my steps. It is obvious this is becoming a dark place once again. It may have been mapped but it is not being remembered or observed. 
I stand in the middle of what once was the main establishment. A tree stump is visible through the middle of an ancient cooking pit. About five inches wide it grew for sometime between the end of the settlement and the discovery of the site. The place has the old feel of an attic. I try to absorb its history but the ghosts have gone, even they have abandoned the site. The volcano holds more sights for me still. Tall trees rise up all around. Hopeful that these are kauri I examine them closely. Tall and straight they share two characteristics, but their bark is of the wrong color and is smooth in most places, though with each passing year an exterior ring is blatantly visible. Trying to count them proves to be a lost cause. Like an impressionist painting they are visible from afar but up close I get confused and cannot tell a scar from a year. I continue to try to talk myself into believing they are kauri when a giant rises high above the trees. I can’t see the leaves to identify it, the surrounding treetops close in above me, but I know what I am seeing.
The size and the bark are telling markers of the great trees. Like camouflage clothing spots of color shift in shape and size blending in with the shadows and shafts of sunlight. This bark, when pulled away leaves an indentation. Its legacy flows through the tree so that when cut it bends and warps under your fingers. As I look at it I am trying to come up with a way of conveying its sheer size and a song from childhood pops into my head. It is a song about a man with a very large wife. She is so large that when he goes to give her a hug he has to chalk where he began so he will know when to stop rounding her middle with his embraces. This tree is of a size that I would have to be “a huggin’ and a chalkin’ at least two times with the third just overlapping the first. Maybe I will come across another hiker working their way around in the opposite direction. The man in the song had just such an encounter around his wife.
Maybe it was my hopes or sheer determination to see a kauri but I couldn’t help but feel its presence. It permeates the air around it taking up even more space that its physical form. The forest is quieter here. These are things of reverence and the flora and fauna worship them as is befitting their status. From a meter away my skin tingles and my hair stands up on end singing in praise. The air has grown thicker than water and I feel myself being pulled deeper into the embrace of the forest and the magic of the mountain. We share our energy but the power of the tree is almost too much to bear and I have to move on.
Still tingling from my encounter my next jaw dropping moment almost achieves in breaking my heart in two. There, but three meters in front of me is the stump of a kauri even larger than the first. It is new. The jagged shards haven’t lost their golden hue, little debris has collected on the base and I am in awe that such a thing, after surviving so many axes over the years was cut down so recently and seemingly senselessly. I am driven to find an answer, something that will tell me this tree was chopped down because it was dying and posing a threat to the surroundings, but in its fall it has crushed the symbol of New Zealand. A number of silver ferns lay dead in its wake, and, even more devastating, younger kauris as well. On a steep slope it is held onto the mountainside by friction and young trees. In my mind’s eye I see a great rain causing the ground to slicken and I see the massive trunk slip from its hold and tumble with gravity destroying all living things in its path, and there are many.
A severe wrong has been committed and my heart has slowed. Against my better judgment I climb down the slope to sit upon the fallen giant. It is so freshly fallen that I worry for a moment that it isn’t as stuck as it appears but I am desperate to touch it in hopes of connecting with what once was its greatness, but once I am down there I know that what was there is gone. Dazed I can’t bring myself to leave. I can’t believe it is down—its power and mystery abandoned and betrayed. Now there is only one way to walk the park for if you come upon the felled tree first then it is all ruined. How can we enjoy beauty when we are first slapped in the face with destruction?
January 23, 2006
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