“I feel that I am pressing my face into the hot sand of a tropical beach. I feel lucky to be alive. I am lucky to be alive! Or is it that I am alive to be lucky?” – Terence McKenna
I’m sitting on a beach in Abel Tasman National Park watching the tide go out. My back rests against an oversized piece of driftwood. There is a solitary sand fly crawling across the left lens of my Ray Bans toward the bridge of my nose. I adjust my sunglasses slightly and the bugger retreats to my hand, preparing to dig in. I squish him a little bit and he gets the message: ‘shoo fly, don’t bother me’.
A man hauling a trailer drives by on an ATV and parks on the edge of the promontory. We exchange friendly nods. He unloads boxes of gear and departs, disappearing behind the curves of the inlet. He returns by boat with several others. They load the gear and head for the Cook Straight, riding the remaining bits of river into the sea.
The tide has been slowly receding all morning, revealing patches of muddy sand and collections of thousands of cockle shells polished green and blue and purple. I take off my shoes and socks, roll up my pants, and wade across a trickling stream to an exposed sandbar where a flock of ducks soaks up the sun and enjoys a seafood feast. The ducks aren’t a fan of me, it seems. I get about 50 feet from a pair before they make a waddling retreat to the opposite shore.
I adjourn to the log, digging my swollen feet into the shoals along the way, letting the clam remains scratch and massage their flea-bitten, calloused skin. The water is refreshingly cold.
I walk to a small side trail flanked by large patches of gorse. The bushes are beginning to flower. Fuzzy green pods are emerging from the plants spikey stalks. Small yellow flowers like miniature orchids pornographically beckon bees that buzz past. The nectar-seekers bumble along, their striped backs alternating between orange and black.
I hear a whooping from one of the bushes that belongs to a California quail. The bird is dusky blue and has a single teardrop feather emerging from its head. He’s an order of magnitude friendlier than the ducks, tolerating five feet of separation before flitting over the trail with his buddies and a chorus of whoops.
I trek back along the trail. It’s interpolated with quail and boot prints. I sit on the log and drink lukewarm green tea out of a Nalgene bottle and watch a petrel float past the Jurassic landscape. The riparian mountains are every shade of green, dotted with palm-sized ferns. I can faintly hear the calls of tuis and the pips of small birds over the trickling of the tide.
It occurs to me that I haven’t experienced solitude like this in a long time. The weeks leading up to mid-semester break were hectic and crammed, with no time to visit the Great Outdoors and relax. Here there is no rush. I feel like I can finally think clearly, so I do. I sit and sip and think and write.
The tide has gone all the way out, it’s time to continue the trek. I walk back to camp and trade smiles with a group of trampers relaxing on the beach. I reach the hut and one of our group members says, “Wow dude, where were you? You were gone for almost four hours”
Another says, “You look really happy right now, man.”
“I am,” I say.
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