Meeting of the Waters

When I was a kid we had two playgrounds. The river and the hill. More of the hill later. The river was mostly the Waipa which wended it's very circuitous route through peaty, muddy landscapes from the the rangitoto Range and Waipa Valley to meet the Waikato at The Point. The Waikato, of course is the river everybody knows at Ngaruawahia because it's the one you cross on the way to Auckland. It's the one in all the old photos of the Ngaruawahia Regatta. The one in the background of the competitions at Turangawaewae Marae when the waka majestically appear around the bend and your heart stirs in the same way it does when your team performs the haka or you hear the bagpipes.

It's also big. More dangerous. We were raised on stories of kids who'd strayed too far out when swimming at The Point or jumping from the railway bridge. They'd have tried to swim to shore but the sheer power, the deceptive lugubriousness and the sheer weight of current and water would take them too far, too fast. They'd be found (in various states of decomposition depending on the teller of the tale) tangled in branches of fallen riverside willows or even on the bar at Port Waikato - a hundred and fifty miles to the north. I'd never known one of these poor kids, never noticed any of my gang missing. But we knew it had happened. Everybody said so.

The Waipa didn't have this reputation. Near our place on Waipa Ave it was narrow enough to swim across and not so swift that you'd be taken too far. It was wide enough to be a challenge, though and as we kicked and pounded the water and looked into the tannin green, part of the excitement was the thought of not making it, not touching the tangled mat of roots on the other side and being swept down to the junction, past the Point and swallowed by our river's bigger, meaner sister.

So our playground was the bank of the Waipa with its swimming hole and giant willow branches. We built huts, dug tunnels in the muddy dirt, tortured the eels and the occasional unfortunate frog. Gangs of us spent entire summers muddy and wet and happy in the water just a hundred metres from our home.

I remember the water being brown but not muddy. After all it passed through flat, peaty dairy country on its way to us but it wasn't an unpleasant colour. I'd even call it fresh. Although visibility was poor the water was in fact clear for a few feet until the tannin lowered the curtain shielding eels, floating bodies and Marie Thompson's tanned, bikini clad body from view. Clean dirt my mother would have called it. We didn't mind swallowing a mouthful as we fought in the shallows and never felt dirty even when we were covered in the mud that started to surround the swimming hole as the summer progressed and a thousand bare foot steps had broken down the soil of the bank.

We even had a boat a couple of years. Dad's twelve foot tinny. He used it during his brief career as an eel fisherman and we were sometimes allowed to fire up the ancient Seagull motor, take a bunch of inflated inner tubes and pootle up and down by the swimming hole. Well, that was the agreement we had with Mum. In fact we'd head miles up river until home and safety and rules were out of sight. Then we'd shut off the motor , chuck the tubes into the water and float back, yelling insults to each other, telling our latest filthy jokes, slipping in and out of the water and basking on the hot, black tubes like so many hairless, raucous otters. Within sight of home we'd fire up the motor, head upstream and repeat. Grouse fun.

I've been back to that hole many times. It's just down the road from where my mother now lives overlooking The Point. It's not the same, of course. The bank is overgrown, the hole silted up and the water looks dirty. Actually dirty - although I notice people still swim down at The Point. I guess industrial dairy farming and an increased population have degraded the water quality somewhat. But there doesn't seem to be as many kids around either. The grassed area down there and the river bank used to swarm with them. Me and my mates. We would have cleared away the undergrowth, dug some steps down to the water, nailed some bits of wood to the willow - a ladder for the climb to the jumping branch. We would have reattached the old rope swing. Maybe it's just older people living around there now. Maybe these days kids aren't allowed to disappear all day and risk their lives in the river. Maybe the giant eels got them. Maybe my memory of sun soaked, endless, carefree summers is actually a fantasy. I hope not. I hope not because it's part of what makes me a New Zealander - that opportunity to hoon about, safely(?) in the semi wild. That openness and freedom and connection to place. It's part of what makes me Pakeha - having the opportunity to call that paradise my stamping ground, my turangawaewae. I'd hate to think I made it up.