Loving the Barrier! Our experiment in togetherness-in-our-later-years-on-a-small-and-quiet-island continues. The first half year of the experiment has been very successful. :-) Spring is springing up here, there and everywhere! No doubt you have beautiful flowers around you to enjoy as well. Here’s some of the heather whose pink blossoms emerged not long ago. There's so much of it it’s considered a weed, but it's a beautiful weed. Here’s the southern end of Medlands Beach, on a nice calm day, where we swim often. We met our 100th person! I mentioned before that we’re keeping a list of everyone we meet. When we got into the high 90s we bought a wee gift, a chocolate heart, to give as a surprise to the 100th person. It worked out great that she was someone doing a nice surprise for us, delivering our coop order! And not only that, we picked up our 101st person at the same time, because Beth will soon be having a baby! At present we’re up to 116. A couple of weeks ago we attended the panel discussion that was part of "No Barriers – small island, big ideas’ organised by the Awana branch of Rural Women. The scenario is a flu pandemic that kills everyone on the planet except those in a few isolated locations: Great Barrier Island, Antarctica and the International Space Station. Here are the experts invited from around the country to explore if and how this could happen (sorry to say it’s very possible) and how the island’s residents might respond. The 2.5 hour discussion and Q&A was taped for National Radio and filmed for YouTube. The fourth sign says “Karen: sci-fi writer” (www.karenhealey.com). We went to her writing workshop the next day. I hoped to pick up some tips for writing, editing and publishing. I did! The heart of the workshop was a participative collaboration in constructing fiction. She presented a scenario related to the weekend’s theme – six astronauts stranded on the International Space Station when the pandemic wipes out most of humanity and severs their communication. The emergency capsule can take only three of them back to Earth, and they have to work out which three. We created characters and a plot. Another event we attended was a community meeting about waste reduction initiatives. I startied writing a few paragraphs to tell you about it, but it grew into a full article that Charlotte published on Happyzine! Here it is: http://happyzine.co.nz/2015/09/11/great-barrier/ This month’s description of wave phenomena! We often walk to the water’s edge at Kaitoke, perhaps 300 hundred metres from our house, though separated from us by large dunes. One day the waves were breaking closer to shore than we’d ever seen them there. The waves are always much larger at Kaitoke than at Medlands, where we usually swim on the ocean side. Sometimes they're frighteningly large. On this day they were pretty darn big – the swells I’ve described that advance like large tunnels with one shiny blue side open. The action of the swells had scooped out some of the sand all along the beach so they were breaking lower than where we were standing. After they broke they didn’t come up far at all, so we could stand quite close, the closest we’d ever been to huge breaking swells. It also seemed that as they neared the shore they picked up addition water rolling back off the curve of sand, which made them get even larger just before they broke.Their crashing, which must have also echoed off the scooped out sand, was the loudest we ever heard! I wish I could have recorded it for you! They were so close we could see the spray rising up above them like in a slow motion video. We never know what we’ll find at Kaitoke Beach! The tsunami warning last week was a scary reminder that this island is not a good place to be if a tsunami comes. Five years ago everyone evacuated in their cars to the top of the hill on the way to Blind Bay or to one of the other ridges along the road to the north or south. Six hundred years ago a 1 metre tsunami traveled 1 kilometre inland. A 4-5 metre tsunami would be devastating. When we lived in Golden Bay, I always liked knowing the Spit was there for protection from tsunamis. We never did put together a “Grab & Go Emergency Kit”. Have you? Here are some photos of the track to Kaitike Hot Springs, a lovely 45-minute walk that starts ten minutes from where we live. It begins following a hillside in a ponga-nikau forest, crossing several streams. Then the track comes out into the open, along the border of the huge Kaitoke Wetland along the forest edge (a ancient shoreline!), here mostly regenerating manuka and kanuka, and sometimes crossing the wetland on a boardwalk, with closer views of the mountains. The sky was brilliant blue when we left but before long it clouded over. Never mind, we were soon soaking in warm sulphur waters! This is a waewaekaka (kaka’s footprint) fern that grows prolifically in the area. And here's part of a plaque with info on the Maori history of the springs.
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