Passing through the Southern Alps, on the Trans-Alpine Railway, watching my shadow ripple over sidings of gravel, fence posts and fields. These mountains are sobering. Millions of years old, but the result of a constant faulting and folding. The Australian and Pacific plates crush together, moving at the speed of fingernail growth. Forcing the land upward with slow-motion violence. The mountains cast their shape for millennia, but continually erode. Thousands of tons’ worth of rock calving off and grinding away down river.
The rivers wash the rocks to smooth stones. Lying in beds meters deep, they wait, eventually get filtered out to sea and polished to sand. On the ocean floor, they stratify as silt, compact down. Minerals solidifying back into sheets of rock. Buried under further layers, returning to the core, liquefying in furnace-like heat – then the whole cycle repeating.
A life-span seems insect-like in comparison. Here I’m a mayfly, tempted to believe it’s all without meaning. The sidings spring up from the ground, become sheer walls. It grows darker, then black beyond the electric light of the viewing platform. The train’s now entered the Otira Tunnel.
The wheels punch in the blackness, the erratic gangway between carriages squeaks like a tui. Over the tannoy, a tour-guide explains that the tunnel was once the longest in the British Empire. It was a marvel of engineering back then, but now there’s little more to say, except that it will take about fifteen minutes to get through to the other side. Darkness always fascinated me. Perhaps because there are no more outer forms to project onto. No more mountains in the dark. No more trees or faces, or even stars.
I remember how as a child in Wales I went on a school trip to the Big Pit Mining Museum. They gave us helmets with lamps, then lowered us down in a cage lift. The darkness seemed crushing, but I found myself somehow bigger than the limits of my own skin, expanding in that continued moment of imagined pulverization.
We followed the miner-tour-guide’s instructions and turned off our lamps. The disembodied voice told us to put our hands in front of our faces. Raising my hand, I saw nothing but the sheerest blackness. Felt the cold air of the draft against my wide open eyes.
When the lights and faces returned, I allowed the group to walk on without me – just a few yards around a corner was all I had the courage for. But the mystery of that darkness was irresistible. I had to be further from the irreverent noise of their tramping feet, the long bouncing shadows they cast in desecration of that purity of stillness.
New Zealand darkness seems different, unnerving and prehistoric. Or perhaps it’s because I’m no longer fresh like a child, corroded by time and the world. A mayfly destined for a graveyard, where headstones melt as obituaries shift to Facebook timelines. Like tracks with stations marked, so go the journeys of individual lives, mapped-out in hindsight. Childhoods and possibilities that can never be revisited. One direction only. Every line must terminate somewhere.
But then comes a rush of air, the sounds changing suddenly. Sunlight pops back, the landscape unfurling from the mouth of the tunnel. Fields of yellow tussock. Massive blue skies. The colours all brighter upon return, lancing through my nostalgia.
Mountains may dissolve, but these moments of rebirth occur too. Marvelous things really can be achieved. Aotearoa continues to offer new futures to thousands of immigrants each year; freshness and optimism are hallmarks of the Kiwi spirit. The Otira Tunnel reminds me.
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