I joined her, hood tight around apprehensive features.

“You don’t happen to know how long it’ll last for, do you?”

She turned. Sodden cropped hair plastered a tanned and friendly face, her hazel eyes curious in spite of the deluge.

“Think it’s here to stay. The locals have been praying for it”

Cornish accent.

“I was fancying a swim” she added as an afterthought

She smiled at my goggle eyes and concern turned to awe.

“But you’ll get wet!” I jested, shaking the torrent of water out of my fringe and trying to see her clearly.

“It’s sooo lovely when it’s raining – warmer in there than here!”

It wasn’t hard to follow her logic.

“Yeah I may as well too. My plan was to hitch to Takaka today but there’s not much hope of that now I suppose”

“Takaka? I’m driving to Takaka!”

“Oh no way!”

I took a moment to read her.

As a hitcher, you often have to remind yourself that not everyone with a car and a license is offering you a ride simply by merit of talking to you. I retained a polite indifference all the way up to the point she offered to take me, then accepted – a portrait of amazing grace.

Mary had conditions though.

“I’m going to Riwaka Resurgence on the way and you’re definitely going to have to swim there!”

“Freezing to death in a river with you is a small price to pay for a ride” I laughed. “Can you give me 20 to pack up?”

“Hoody-hoo! Hop to it then!”

Our first stop was 10 minutes down the road at an op-shop. I would soon learn that traveling with Mary was not merely as simple as getting from A to B.

Staring longingly at some leather jackets I could not hope to fit in my 50 litre pack, I was startled by her slamming a book of Hindu Fables down into my arms. It looked a hundred years old; the cover eaten by time.

Where did she she just come from??

“For your Yoga retreat!” she announced with glee, then winked, letting me know how unfortunate it would be for me to go for the stretches and skimp on the philosophy. Latent Catholic guilt made my hands tremble as I fingered through the undoubtedly profane pages but I was drawn to the colourful depictions of devas and deities.

I glanced up to find her watching me read.

“It’s beautiful” I admitted. And then, in a desperate attempt to change the topic

“Hey! that’s a lot of CD’s you got there, friend!” indicating the stack she held. 

“Música para la salsa” Mary intoned, grooving slowly backwards with a shimmy of her shoulders. With a parting raise of the eyebrows, she sprung down another aisle, narrowly avoiding a woman holding a giant China Tea set, who then set to brooding in the direction Mary had disappeared.

I gave the woman a shrug of my shoulders that said “I’m not with her”

As if in response, a voice called from the other end of the shop “We can have a dance party on the way, OK amigo?”

The disgruntled woman sniffed as she walked toward the counter, making me grin in spite of myself.

One and a half hours, 10 salsa CD’s, a pair of Levi’s, a stack of books, shirts and a pair of hiking poles later, Mary emerged from the shop to join me, aglow with the thrill of the hunt.

“Alright, I guess I’m done” she admitted

I nodded my agreement.

For my part, aside from the Yogi “How-to” manual, I’d scored myself a set of sketching pencils (a mere dollar!), and two other books: ‘The Four Hour Work week’ (adventure was poisoning my resolve to return to an Auckland 9-5) and ‘A Book of Travelers’ Tales’ by Eric Newby that Mary had all but guaranteed I’d adore.

“Right!” she exclaimed “To the Library, then!” 

“There’ll be books!” I supplied

“And electricity! Imagine!”

As we waited for our phones to charge in the tangled mess of cables the resident backpackers had amassed, I tried (not very hard) to look at some IRD statements then promptly abandoned it. Gazing round at the army of peopled puffer jackets and laptops, I spotted Mary halfway down a nearby aisle.

Spying and prying through half the books in the building, Mary was worshiping at the Cathedral she knew best. She had been a librarian in a previous life, and I could as good as watch her ‘to-read’ list growing in real time. She glanced up in a guilty panic.

“Ok that’s it, If we don’t go now, we never will!” 

Our next stop was, of course, the famed Riwaka Resurgence, and Mary had appointed me chief navigator  – a role I’ve never really excelled at.

“Oh so you were a librarian and in hospo?” I interrogated her as we drove

“Yep, couldn’t do 40 hours of the same thing – I’d go nuts!”

“Same. What did you say you studied again?”

“Art History”

“Oooh cool, hey did I tell you I’m reading a historical novel about Michaelang-“

“Is that the turnoff?” Mary cut across my babble, eyes darting to a side road on the left. Miffed, I answered in the negative as we passed it and joined a backed-up queue of cars on the Takaka hill.

“Nope, I’ve got the route right here” I protested, face close enough to my phone to whisper a quick prayer into it that I was right. “We’ve come through the intersection and…oh yeah that was totally our turn off” I finished with a grimace.

Our eyes met over the console then followed each other’s gaze out the back window toward the distant cars approaching us in the queue.

The car was in reverse before I could react.

With great skill, Mary turned backwards onto the top of a small bank from where we could see the road we wanted – below and to our left. As the cars behind us closed in, she paused at the point of no return to ask me how it looked. Peering down the short slope and desperate to make amends for my mistake, I told her that most famous of kiwi-isms:

“She’ll be right”

We’d barely gone over the verge when – SKEEEERUSHHH – we were stuck on top – nose out on the busy highway, a queue of cars to the fore and rear of us, their drivers watching with mounting interest.

“Get your shit together boy!” Mary laughed and ploughed the car onward against my protests as we bumped and scraped our way down onto the road, fitting perfectly into a gap between the bank and a parked car.

Liiike a glove!

The swim was absolutely worth my navigational blunders.

Pouring forth from the depths of rock in the Takaka hills is the tapu (or sacred) Riwaka Resurgence. A more alluring body of water, I have not seen. Azure blues and greens gifted their hue to rocks so deep beneath the surface that by rights, we ought not to have been able to see them. Peering down at it from the platform, I was transported back to when Maori settlers would have stumbled across it for the first time, and what the response to something so exquisite could have been.

“Of course it’s tapu” I murmured

“What’s that? Hey, come check out these little critters!”

Snapping me out of my reverie, Mary beckoned me over, her nose glued to the safety rail where a few dozen triangle-shaped bugs were carrying what looked like fluffy pollen to and fro across the timber.

“Ah yes, glam rock beetles, I’d recognize the haircut anywhere ” I concluded, pointing out the upright blonde fluff they sported like 80’s rockers.

This tickled Mary. “I love that. Are they setting up for a gig then, what do you reckon? Excuse me! Any idea what these are?” she swung around to face a woman we had passed on the staircase. She loved to get to the bottom of these things.

The woman ambled over, still catching her breath.

“Ahh damned things, yes I know them, they eat my lemons at home! They’re lemon flies!”

She flicked one off the rail.

It did not fly.

“They do look a bit damned, don’t they? Mary shook with silent laughter “Satan’s little lemon plague” she said with a wink to me.

The woman nodded, satisfied we were on the same page.  

“Time for a swim!” said I, and sprung down the steps three at a time, to a point in the river where things seemed a little less sacred. To my surprise, this time, it was me who had to convince Mary to front up to the icy challenge.

“Ooh it’s a little cold” she hesitated

“You’ll be fine once you’re in!”

I did a flip like a Seaworld dolphin then scrambled out as fast as I’d got in, convincing no one.

“Yeah, that or have a cardiac arrest” Mary smiled, still unsure

By this stage, she’d dressed down to her togs and waded waist-deep out into the pool. Dappled sunlight filtered through the trees and beamed off the crown of her head, bringing chestnut hair and tanned skin into full relief.

We were at the stage of friendship where really I had no right to convince her of what water she should or shouldn’t jump into and I voiced the thought aloud

“I don’t know you so I don’t know what to say except it’s great once you’re in!“

“Saying nothing at all is probably a good bet!” she shot back with a laugh.

I took the hint, and when I next turned around she was doing laps around the pool without concern.

“What the hell, how are your bones not aching staying in that long?” I demanded

“Hooody-hoo! It’s quite lovely once you’re in!”

“That’s what I’ve been saying!”

“Nothing at all my dear, you were quite right to say nothing at all” Mary laughed, delighted.

As the sun sank and rendered Takaka river a crimson artery, we followed it’s lifeblood upstream to arrive at long last in the hippy capital itself. A one hour drive had been transformed into a day full of tea-stops, in-car salsa parties, swims, lookouts, sandwich breaks, shopping sprees, library hangs, and craft beers that had left both heart and tummy quite full. As we sat by the river with our meals and a bottle of red, I had a sudden and bittersweet intuition that this would be the last I’d see of Mary, op-shop champion, salsera and inquiring soul in one.

Her plan was to stay and work at an Apothecary nearby.

“Do you think the Apothecary lady will notice your herb line?” I asked, sniffing through the strands of Thyme, Rosemary, Chamomile and a dozen others besides she had hung neatly along her van’s back window.

“I don’t know but if I’m not a witch by the end of the week, I’ll be let down”

“Me too.”

“Give me a call when you’re out of the retreat yeah, and you know you don’t HAVE to go back to Auckland right?”

Briefly I allowed myself the fantastic image of traveling at Mary’s side, forgetting all about home and the tragedy I was running from. But just as quickly, I repressed it. I knew that with wanderers like her, goodbyes had to be said to keep the magic alive.

I know that solitude is sacred.

And it makes days like ours – when they do happen – all the more precious.

 

P.S. I did see Mary again, weeks later, when she snuck up on me at a street market stall filled with didgeridoos, sitars, mandolins and half a hundred other instruments which she insisted on learning with me.

But that’s a story for another time.