We'd been hiking for three days on what was supposed to have been an overnight trip. Our phones had died, and GPS didn't work out here anyway. I was pretty sure we were still tracking along the coast, but we couldn't find a path upward out of this gully to check.
It had been Anne's idea, this trek through the remote reaches of southern New Zealand. To come here in the first place had been mine. I'd suggested we tuck ourselves away down in the corner of the world because I'd heard it was like BC, which sounds like a pathetic reason to travel anywhere, let alone across an ocean for thirteen hours. We needed a an escape, but it wasn't home we were trying to escape from.
We toured both islands for two weeks in a campervan, but it didn't take long for us to need a getaway from our getaway. This hike was an attempt to leave behind the passive bickering over things of complete inconsequence.
We were lost, but neither of us would admit it. We hiked in silence, but not the comfortable kind that comes from years of knowing someone. We were experienced hikers, but this rarely-trodden park was a challenge. There were deer trails, but mostly we were just bushwhacking as we went.
Colossal moss-covered trees loomed over us, providing some relief from the downpour, creating a blanket of stillness over us that amplified our silence. I tried to find rhythms in the sounds of our boots squishing into the ground, but all I could hear was how out of step we were.
We only kept our heads up to look for a way up the hill that we hoped overlooked the coast. As dusk approached on the third day we spotted an out - some footholds in the rock.
I turned to Anne and asked, 聯You ready?聰 She nodded, and we somehow managed to clamber up the slicked, steep grade.
I didn't know what Anne was feeling as we stepped out onto the bluff, but I felt like we'd just arrived somewhere foreign in an already foreign land. The greens were greener, the rain wetter. The single infinite cloud in the sky even more infinite. I could taste the salt of the fog-covered Tasman below. I couldn't see out more than a hundred metres, but I knew the vastness was out there, stretching to the bottom of the Earth. For the first time I truly felt like we were somewhere new.
Anne looked at me with something that wanted to be a smile and said 聯Where did we go wrong?聰
...
To say that unnamed bluff saved us would be a platitude. It took us another day to find our way out, and years after that to find our way back together. What that place did was allow us to see outside ourselves for just a moment.
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