In Transformer's 2: Revenge of the Fallen, you know, the one where Shia Labeouf dies and goes to transformer heaven, there is a scene that takes place in the same area where Al Capone was held and 12 Monkeys was shot.
It's the Eastern State Penitentiary, a strange dilapidated prison across the street from some alternative cafes in the heart of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The building was designed as the first literal penitentiary--one where convicts would actually pay penance for what they did. It had plumbing before the White House, and when it was built in 1829, it was one of the most expensive structures ever made on American soil.
The logic was simple, put everyone in solitary confinement so they could think about what they did. For 23 hours a day, convicts would sit in their cell. For an hour, with a leather mask over their face so they couldn't see the guards, they were allowed out in their own yard. Most went crazy.
Now it's a tourist site and also a popular set for post-apocalyptic styled movies. While the tours are horrible -- too many 'um's and not enough goulish tales -- its abandoned buildings do make for a great film set, though it may be better served as a prison for some of America's greatest directors. Take Transformers 2 executive producer Steven Spielberg, for example, who is now making an Indiana Jones 5 (he's also working on the Adventures of Tintin: the Secret of the Unicorn).
Like Al Capone and the prison itself, it may be time for this film institution to retire itself. Cancel the sequels, eliminate anything with unicorn in the title, and head across the street to one of those alternative cafes.
Showing posts with label Travel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Travel. Show all posts
Monday, July 27, 2009
Monday, September 22, 2008
Albino Road Kill
Sam Sanfillippo
Madison, Wisconsin
The rumor is that he died twice on Omaha Beach during World War II. His heart stopped beating for a period of seven minutes, he came to, then went out again and finally came back for good. “I’ve been living on borrowed time ever since,” is how roadsideamerica.com quotes him. Whatever the case, I believe that Sam may be dead now, and this time for good. But, while we all die, few leave a legacy quite like Sam Sanfilippo, and I’m not just talking about the stuffed albino squirrels.
We first heard about Sam from roadsideamerica.com and put a mark over Madison, Wisconsin to see him on our way East. It was early morning when we called up the Cress Funeral Home where Sam (and his displays) work.
“Hello, my wife and I are driving through the area and were interested in seeing the displays.”
“Sure, come on by,” a polite voice said.
We said our goodbyes and hung up the phone.
“He knows you meant the squirrels, right, not a body on display?”
“Yes,” I lied, and wondered what the hell I had just got us into.
Non-plussed, we put our faith in the website’s directions and arrived minutes later at the sort of funeral home where you hope to never go. It’s not that the people aren’t nice, just the opposite in fact, but it’s always been my opinion that funeral homes shouldn’t involve neon signs or neighbor a Taco Bell.
Thankfully when we arrived the manager didn’t take us to any cadavers, but took us to the basement where, aside from the smell of formaldehyde, we found what we had been looking for: Sam Sanfillipo’s prized possession.
The room opens with a stuffed tuxedo clad cod, and ends with three rooms full of stuffed fish, various exhibits of road kill (including stuffed albino squirrels) all displayed in strange dioramas including three white squirrels dancing at a topless bar, a wild west bar scene where one chipmunk gets caught cheating at cards, and a few scattered raccoons and birds that didn’t escape a driver’s tire.
The exhibit, at least according to the website, was created by Sam when he realized that old people didn’t like dead things. An odd cure to say the least, Sam started putting road kill in unique poses to make them laugh at death and relax at the prospect of passing on. Apparently it worked, though sitting surrounded by small whirring engines, stuffed fish and plenty of chipmunks I couldn’t help but feel that mortality was staring me down. But, I’m young and Sam is an old man (if he’s still with us), and for a man that’s stared down death two times, I’ll take his word that stuffed squirrels will lighten even the most somber mood.
Madison, Wisconsin
The rumor is that he died twice on Omaha Beach during World War II. His heart stopped beating for a period of seven minutes, he came to, then went out again and finally came back for good. “I’ve been living on borrowed time ever since,” is how roadsideamerica.com quotes him. Whatever the case, I believe that Sam may be dead now, and this time for good. But, while we all die, few leave a legacy quite like Sam Sanfilippo, and I’m not just talking about the stuffed albino squirrels.
We first heard about Sam from roadsideamerica.com and put a mark over Madison, Wisconsin to see him on our way East. It was early morning when we called up the Cress Funeral Home where Sam (and his displays) work.
“Hello, my wife and I are driving through the area and were interested in seeing the displays.”
“Sure, come on by,” a polite voice said.
We said our goodbyes and hung up the phone.
“He knows you meant the squirrels, right, not a body on display?”
“Yes,” I lied, and wondered what the hell I had just got us into.
Non-plussed, we put our faith in the website’s directions and arrived minutes later at the sort of funeral home where you hope to never go. It’s not that the people aren’t nice, just the opposite in fact, but it’s always been my opinion that funeral homes shouldn’t involve neon signs or neighbor a Taco Bell.
Thankfully when we arrived the manager didn’t take us to any cadavers, but took us to the basement where, aside from the smell of formaldehyde, we found what we had been looking for: Sam Sanfillipo’s prized possession.
The room opens with a stuffed tuxedo clad cod, and ends with three rooms full of stuffed fish, various exhibits of road kill (including stuffed albino squirrels) all displayed in strange dioramas including three white squirrels dancing at a topless bar, a wild west bar scene where one chipmunk gets caught cheating at cards, and a few scattered raccoons and birds that didn’t escape a driver’s tire.
The exhibit, at least according to the website, was created by Sam when he realized that old people didn’t like dead things. An odd cure to say the least, Sam started putting road kill in unique poses to make them laugh at death and relax at the prospect of passing on. Apparently it worked, though sitting surrounded by small whirring engines, stuffed fish and plenty of chipmunks I couldn’t help but feel that mortality was staring me down. But, I’m young and Sam is an old man (if he’s still with us), and for a man that’s stared down death two times, I’ll take his word that stuffed squirrels will lighten even the most somber mood.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
A Catalog of Today's Modern Freaks
Kate and I dropped our bags at our hostel—-a place that looked alarmingly similar to a swept-out crack house—-wrung out our clothes and set out on the town, initially determined to find some authentic Kiwi cuisine. Naturally, we had no idea what this might consist of—-our hosteler had mentioned something about a blowtorch and a possum, but I thought he was joking (it turns out the dish is quite popular)—-and so we walked down the main street of Auckland in search of food and with no real destination in mind.
As we marched down Queen Street we passed underneath the ornate metal awnings that are so prominent in New Zealand and Australia and took our first gander at Auckland. It was a large city, and we were in the heart of it surrounded by large and grey concrete skyscrapers stretching out in every direction. Off to our right was a green hill called Arthur’s Park where the University of Auckland sits, and in every other direction sprawled the Central Business District of the city. Apart from Arthur’s Park (it’s actually not on a hill but an extinct volcano), Auckland looked as most cities do when it is cold and raining: rather uninviting. The buildings looked like business, the weather discouraged exploration, and Auckland is large enough that it’s tough to wander more than its city center without some form of transportation. Right now we only had our two feet. The natural cure to this was a bar or pub where we hoped to find some local company, if not a beer or two. Never mind that it was seven in the morning, blame jetlag if you’d like, but a warm meal and a good drink sounded like the trick.
Unfortunately, Auckland and I were working off of separate clocks, and our options for food extended no further than McDonalds, Burger King, Subway, a Dunkin’ Donuts, numerous kebab shops, and a series of threatening looking Korean places. Kebabs, it seemed, were about as ethnic as Auckland seemed to get, and bars didn’t open for some time.
So, it seemed, kebabs were it.
Fortunately, this bade well for my affinity toward any food that is easily eaten by hand, filled with slices of meat, and a leading cause of heart disease. But even I have limits. In the block where our hostel was located there were four separate kebab shops which most people (including myself) would consider overkill. The reason for this is traced back to New Zealand’s age old stereotype of being a land of sheep, not men. And, with sheep outnumbering humans ten to one (that’s 40 million sheep), it’s no wonder that farmers are trying to offload their lamb meat in any way they can, kebabs included.
As we ate we pulled out the few pieces of information we could gather on Auckland and decided what to see. Each website and tour book we sorted through mentioned the following at least once: that Auckland is known as the City of Sails (Aucklanders own more boats per capita than anyone in the world), that Auckland has the highest concentration of Polynesians in the world (also true), that Auckland has a nice bridge, two harbors, lots of volcanoes, and one bonafied Sky Tower, a fact that was mentioned more than anything else in our pamphlets.
Don’t worry, either. If you come to Auckland, you won’t have much of a choice to see the bridge, harbors, volcanoes, or Sky Tower. You’ll undoubtedly cross the bridge, the city rests on harbors, and volcanoes are generally pretty tough to miss. As for the Sky Tower, well, it’s about as easy to miss as, say, a bullet in the chest. Auckland’s Sky Tower punctures the city skyline like a giant, unsightly dart. Certainly it is the city’s pride and joy, much like the Epcot Center is to Orlando or, more appropriately, the Space Needle is to Seattle. That is to say that most Aucklanders probably think it’s ugly as sin, but tourists just eat it right up.
What puzzles me is the absolute popularity of Sky Towers.* Calgary has one. Moscow has one (quite a big one at that). Sydney has one, too. And of course, my hometown Seattle has one and is, I can say rather proudly, the only one that doesn’t look like a skewered cupcake. Sky Towers, in case your hometown doesn’t have one yet (it’s only a matter of time) are large poles built high into the air and topped with a restaurant. Usually the gimmick is that the restaurant rotates, too, so that diners can see a 360° panorama of the city as they eat. Some also put shopping malls atop the poles, too; the one in Sydney has two restaurants and a cafe up top and costs AUS15 just for the elevator ride. Auckland’s Sky Tower houses a casino along with its restaurant and also happens to be the tallest tower in the Southern Hemisphere, coming in at 328m, or about 1,000 feet (for comparison, the Eiffel Tower is only 300m, and is, no doubt the most famous sky tower around). Of course, if you consider that about 300m of Auckland’s Sky Tower is just a series of elevator shafts and stairs, then the substantial portion of the structure (the actual building) is only about 28m high, making it one of the shortest buildings in the Southern Hemisphere. Calling itself the tallest tower is a bit like putting on a set of wooden stilts and calling yourself the world’s tallest human. Height aside though, the purpose of Sky Towers will forever remain a mystery to me and my guess is that most Sky Towers were built by short men who were trying to overcompensate. Either that or some people find the gimmick of spinning in circles at 1,000 feet while trying to eat irresistible. Of course, to save a few dollars you could just microwave a Hot Pocket and climb to the top of a very high telephone pole and get the same experience. Whatever the case, there is no more appropriate place than New Zealand for something as offbeat as an extreme dining experience such as this one.
This country is all about extreme, baby.
If eating and spinning at the same time doesn’t sound like enough of a rush for you, have no fear. You may now Sky Jump off the top of the Sky Tower down toward the street below for a nominal fee, a process in which you free fall for about 16 seconds before you are slowed to a stop by an attached wire. Only a few blocks away you can strap yourself in and walk down the side of a building like Spiderman. You can bungee jump off of the top of the Harbor bridge just north of the city, too. And there’s also abseiling (rappelling) down waterfalls, jet boating, aerobatics (where you fly your own WWII fighter plane), black water rafting (you put a tube around your midriff and float down a pitch black, eel-infested, underground river), the rather inventive “fly by wire” (imagine a jet traveling 106 mph and tethered to a string), river sledging (white water rafting without a raft), and, my personal favorite, something called Zorbing—-a process by which you climb into an air filled bubble and roll down cliffs and over water. Kiwis invented extreme sports, and everyday they come up with an entirely new and fun way to defy death. The genesis of all this was the bungee jump itself. New Zealand claims fame to creating the commercial success of the bungee jump as Kiwis have been paying good money to jump off bridges, buildings, and balloons since 1986 (A.J. Hackett being the first and most famous Kiwi of them all). The actual origin of the sport begins far earlier than this, and was not, I’m sad to report, the result of some sap hooking luggage straps together and jumping off a bridge, though that’s not far off. The real history is actually much more interesting.
The real fame goes to two separate groups: the natives of Pentecost Island (an island of Vanuatu), and the Oxford Dangerous Sports Club. As Pentecost Island is one of a series of islands north of New Zealand (an island chain where the Maori most likely came from) you could say it’s in native New Zealander’s blood to jump from high precipices. It is on this island that the locals were found jumping off of 35m wooden towers with vines attached to their feet. The story is that they do this for a variety of reasons. Firstly, it is a sort of rite of passage, a bit like a bar mitzvah except instead of yamikas they wear loin cloths, and instead of saying Mazel Tov I imagine the Vanuatu say “oh shit” as they plummet 100 feet straight down. The second reason is that somehow jumping off a platform—-“land diving” as it was originally called—-ensures a good yam harvest. Supposedly the ground is blessed when one’s shoulders touch the earth, which, let’s make this clear, would mean that your head would have to be well into the ground for it to work. This is done when the yams are ready to harvest and—-were it not the case the Vanuatu would be extinct long ago-—when the tree vines are at their strongest. The best origin story of all though, is that “land diving” can be traced back to a man named Tamalie who, as legend tells it, was in such hot pursuit of his unloving wife (insert hot Tamalie joke here) that when she climbed a tree, tied a vine to her legs and jumped off he followed suit with such vigor that he failed to attach vines to his own legs and plummeted to his death. To prove they’ve learned their lesson the men of Pentecost Island now land dive regularly.
In the 1950s a BBC crew documented this on film and brought their footage back to England where a man named David Kirke caught wind of the Pentecost Islander’s escapades. David Kirke also happened to be a member of a society called the Oxford Dangerous Sports Club (DSC) that, after hearing about it from Kirke, all thought this land diving business was a great idea. And so, on April 1st, 1978 David Kirke and four others jumped off of the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, England, survived, and gave birth to a sport that has since swept the world. As an aside, this feat was relatively tame for the DSC, who has since done a variety of activities that are remarkably insane. David Kirke, for instance, went on to invent a device pointedly called the human catapult. Prior to closing shop, the DSC also pioneered street luging, and has since formed world organizations with fun names like the “British Elastic Ropes Sports Association”. Now an enterprise unto itself the DSC has reformed as the Oxford Stunt Factory (OSF), a group that has taken bungee jumping to an entirely new level by bunging jumping into a 2.5kg napalm explosion and bungee jumping whilst set on fire. They’ve also helped set the Guinness World Record for mass fire breathing, not something you would expect from the stiff-necked folks at Oxford University, but true no less. Odds are you’ve seen these men at work, too. Ever seen James Bond’s GoldenEye? That was an OSF jump off the dam at the beginning of the movie and was not, contrary to what the film might hint, organized by the British Secret Service.
Anyway.
Considering that New Zealand culture is a hybrid between Polynesian and English culture, bungee jumping came quite naturally to the Kiwis and they have carried on the tradition of extreme sports ever since. While South Island is far more involved in high flying, super-fast, death defying stunts (Queenstown, specifically), Auckland is at least attempting to keep pace with a few bungee jump locales of its own and can even boast to be home to the world’s longest bungee jump from a building: a feat done by the man himself, Mr. A.J. Hackett, at none other than Auckland’s Sky Tower. The fall was 180.1m (about two football fields) and ended a brisk 12m above the concrete sidewalk below.
After discovering New Zealand’s flair for inventing new forms of suicide (sorry, sports), I began to wonder what else Kiwis had been up to. Consider that here, standing at the base of the Sky Tower two world records had been set: one for the tallest tower in the Southern Hemisphere and one for jumping off of it. Such a high concentration of world records was a bit abnormal to boot, and was a fine clue as to how nutty Kiwis really are. After all, I decided, it takes a psychotic mind to crawl into an air bubble and roll down a cliff, and perhaps an even crazier mind to hop on an inner tube and float down an eel-infested pitch black cave. Surely these people’s feats had been documented elsewhere. The question was where to look.
This is how I arrived at the Seattle Public Library tallying up New Zealand’s presence in the Guinness Book of World Records, or, if you prefer its lesser known title, A Catalog of Today’s Modern Freaks. I expected New Zealand to be in there a few times just like everyone else. I knew, for instance, that Sir Edmund Hillary would be listed as the first man to climb Mt. Everest (and you thought he was British) and that New Zealand was probably mentioned in regards to some sort of sheep record (they do hold the record for “Most Sheep Sheared in 24 hrs”, 2,220 of them), but I had no idea that Kiwis had been so bloody busy.
Apart from having dozens of records set on New Zealand soil—-most of them having to do with Cricket or Rugby, though an honorable mention should be made to Ashrita Furman, the American who, apart from holding the most Guinness Records in the world, set the underwater juggling record at 48 minutes in Auckland—-New Zealanders themselves boast a whopping 22 records of their own. Granted, some of these are owed to the land itself—-take the Largest Death Toll from a Geyser Eruption for instance (four), or the World’s Largest Squid, a 16 foot Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni (say that three times fast) caught in the waters between New Zealand and Antarctica—-but the majority are owed to the citizens themselves like Clint Hallam of Christchurch who holds the record for “Most Hand Amputations on One Arm”, or Maurice Bennett of Wellington, creator of the world’s largest toast mosaic.* Even New Zealand’s most famous fictional character, Gollum (from the Lord of the Rings) holds a record as the “Most Extensive Digital Character on Film”. Oh yes, I should also mention that it was a New Zealander, Ernest Rutherford, who first split the atom, fathered nuclear physics, and was referred to as “a second Newton” by Albert Einstein, but really, most hand amputations? Wow.
Not bad for a country with a population of barely four million. My home state of Washington (boasting a population of over five million) has only eight Guinness World Records to its name, none of which involve splitting the atom or summiting Mt. Everest (though we did make the world’s largest apple pie).
Kate and I were wondering if New Zealand also qualified as the windiest place on earth, too, as we stood staring over the Waitemata Harbor, a choppy white-capped body of water that looked nothing like the serene haven in the tourist pictures we had seen. We couldn’t figure out where all of Auckland’s countless boats had gone, and assumed they had been blown away sometime earlier. We leaned out over the rail of the dock, looking at the natural harbor we had come so far to see, the same body of water that in all the pictures looked a calm and inviting blue, and said the only thing that came to mind.
“Huh.”
The two of us were soaking wet, cold, suffering the indefatigable jetlag that comes with the journey to New Zealand and were still trying to wrestle with the fact that we were an entire world away from where we had been just twenty hours earlier--an effect of flying that I can never easily shake off. We were also waiting to be wooed by exotic New Zealand, but hadn’t yet discovered anything more striking than the difference between American and Kiwi Ketchup (theirs tastes like apple cinnamon). As we walked back up Queen Street surrounded by the buildings of Auckland I got scared that the rest of New Zealand might be just as cosmopolitan as its largest city. It wasn’t that Auckland was boring; it just didn’t feel distinctly Kiwi, and as I found out, it isn’t.
In all of its urban glory, Auckland has detached from its heritage enough that New Zealanders consider the city the sort of red-headed step-child of their fair and rural country. Aucklanders don’t mind this one bit, either, as they consider the rest of New Zealand to be their dated Uncle who still believes in keeping the Sabbath holy and talks about life on the farm and the good old days when sheep were sheep and men were men.
To put it lightly, there is something of a growing rift between urban Auckland and the rest of New Zealand. Auckland, to the rest of the country, is dangerously progressive: people shop on Saturdays, bars are open past six o’clock, and citizens can drink on Sundays. The respective opinion is that Aucklanders are queer ultra-liberal city folk and everyone else is a redneck. This is nowhere clearer in the fact that The New Zealand Herald isn’t actually a national newspaper as the name might hint, but instead is written by Aucklanders, for Aucklanders. The city is a sort of Manhattan in that it has its own gravitational pull and could care less if the rest of the country went ka-blooey because, odds are, they wouldn’t even notice. And, in turn, other Kiwis don’t refer to the city dwellers as New Zealanders, Kiwis, or countrymen but as JAFAs, an affectionate nickname that means Just Another Fucking Aucklander.
Much of New Zealand is a far cry from its sheep herding past, but don’t worry, while you can jump, swim or Zorb all you like throughout much of the island country, the upper part of New Zealand’s North Island (inventively called Northland) has missed the adrenaline buzz altogether and remains as unchanged as the sheets at our hostel. And this is where Kate and I were headed.
* Sky Towers are so popular, in fact, that an organization exists in support of the structures so that Sky Tower aficionados can get together and chat. It’s called, rather boldly, the World Federation of Great Towers, a veritable “who’s who of international towers” according to the Sunday Star-Times. Boasting a membership of 23 “Great Towers” (not including the Eiffel Tower, though curiously enough a copy of the Eiffel Tower in Blackpool, England does boast a membership) the federation spans a whopping four continents.
* Clint Hallam may not actually be from Christchurch, but this is where he was serving a prison sentence for fraud when he lost his hand to a circular saw. Apart from serving time in New Zealand, he was also wanted for fraud in Australia, and even managed to steal about 10,000 dollars in France while he was in the hospital for his re-attachment surgery which leads me to the well-worn truth that when it comes to crime, yes, the one armed man is to blame.
As we marched down Queen Street we passed underneath the ornate metal awnings that are so prominent in New Zealand and Australia and took our first gander at Auckland. It was a large city, and we were in the heart of it surrounded by large and grey concrete skyscrapers stretching out in every direction. Off to our right was a green hill called Arthur’s Park where the University of Auckland sits, and in every other direction sprawled the Central Business District of the city. Apart from Arthur’s Park (it’s actually not on a hill but an extinct volcano), Auckland looked as most cities do when it is cold and raining: rather uninviting. The buildings looked like business, the weather discouraged exploration, and Auckland is large enough that it’s tough to wander more than its city center without some form of transportation. Right now we only had our two feet. The natural cure to this was a bar or pub where we hoped to find some local company, if not a beer or two. Never mind that it was seven in the morning, blame jetlag if you’d like, but a warm meal and a good drink sounded like the trick.
Unfortunately, Auckland and I were working off of separate clocks, and our options for food extended no further than McDonalds, Burger King, Subway, a Dunkin’ Donuts, numerous kebab shops, and a series of threatening looking Korean places. Kebabs, it seemed, were about as ethnic as Auckland seemed to get, and bars didn’t open for some time.
So, it seemed, kebabs were it.
Fortunately, this bade well for my affinity toward any food that is easily eaten by hand, filled with slices of meat, and a leading cause of heart disease. But even I have limits. In the block where our hostel was located there were four separate kebab shops which most people (including myself) would consider overkill. The reason for this is traced back to New Zealand’s age old stereotype of being a land of sheep, not men. And, with sheep outnumbering humans ten to one (that’s 40 million sheep), it’s no wonder that farmers are trying to offload their lamb meat in any way they can, kebabs included.
As we ate we pulled out the few pieces of information we could gather on Auckland and decided what to see. Each website and tour book we sorted through mentioned the following at least once: that Auckland is known as the City of Sails (Aucklanders own more boats per capita than anyone in the world), that Auckland has the highest concentration of Polynesians in the world (also true), that Auckland has a nice bridge, two harbors, lots of volcanoes, and one bonafied Sky Tower, a fact that was mentioned more than anything else in our pamphlets.
Don’t worry, either. If you come to Auckland, you won’t have much of a choice to see the bridge, harbors, volcanoes, or Sky Tower. You’ll undoubtedly cross the bridge, the city rests on harbors, and volcanoes are generally pretty tough to miss. As for the Sky Tower, well, it’s about as easy to miss as, say, a bullet in the chest. Auckland’s Sky Tower punctures the city skyline like a giant, unsightly dart. Certainly it is the city’s pride and joy, much like the Epcot Center is to Orlando or, more appropriately, the Space Needle is to Seattle. That is to say that most Aucklanders probably think it’s ugly as sin, but tourists just eat it right up.
What puzzles me is the absolute popularity of Sky Towers.* Calgary has one. Moscow has one (quite a big one at that). Sydney has one, too. And of course, my hometown Seattle has one and is, I can say rather proudly, the only one that doesn’t look like a skewered cupcake. Sky Towers, in case your hometown doesn’t have one yet (it’s only a matter of time) are large poles built high into the air and topped with a restaurant. Usually the gimmick is that the restaurant rotates, too, so that diners can see a 360° panorama of the city as they eat. Some also put shopping malls atop the poles, too; the one in Sydney has two restaurants and a cafe up top and costs AUS15 just for the elevator ride. Auckland’s Sky Tower houses a casino along with its restaurant and also happens to be the tallest tower in the Southern Hemisphere, coming in at 328m, or about 1,000 feet (for comparison, the Eiffel Tower is only 300m, and is, no doubt the most famous sky tower around). Of course, if you consider that about 300m of Auckland’s Sky Tower is just a series of elevator shafts and stairs, then the substantial portion of the structure (the actual building) is only about 28m high, making it one of the shortest buildings in the Southern Hemisphere. Calling itself the tallest tower is a bit like putting on a set of wooden stilts and calling yourself the world’s tallest human. Height aside though, the purpose of Sky Towers will forever remain a mystery to me and my guess is that most Sky Towers were built by short men who were trying to overcompensate. Either that or some people find the gimmick of spinning in circles at 1,000 feet while trying to eat irresistible. Of course, to save a few dollars you could just microwave a Hot Pocket and climb to the top of a very high telephone pole and get the same experience. Whatever the case, there is no more appropriate place than New Zealand for something as offbeat as an extreme dining experience such as this one.
This country is all about extreme, baby.
If eating and spinning at the same time doesn’t sound like enough of a rush for you, have no fear. You may now Sky Jump off the top of the Sky Tower down toward the street below for a nominal fee, a process in which you free fall for about 16 seconds before you are slowed to a stop by an attached wire. Only a few blocks away you can strap yourself in and walk down the side of a building like Spiderman. You can bungee jump off of the top of the Harbor bridge just north of the city, too. And there’s also abseiling (rappelling) down waterfalls, jet boating, aerobatics (where you fly your own WWII fighter plane), black water rafting (you put a tube around your midriff and float down a pitch black, eel-infested, underground river), the rather inventive “fly by wire” (imagine a jet traveling 106 mph and tethered to a string), river sledging (white water rafting without a raft), and, my personal favorite, something called Zorbing—-a process by which you climb into an air filled bubble and roll down cliffs and over water. Kiwis invented extreme sports, and everyday they come up with an entirely new and fun way to defy death. The genesis of all this was the bungee jump itself. New Zealand claims fame to creating the commercial success of the bungee jump as Kiwis have been paying good money to jump off bridges, buildings, and balloons since 1986 (A.J. Hackett being the first and most famous Kiwi of them all). The actual origin of the sport begins far earlier than this, and was not, I’m sad to report, the result of some sap hooking luggage straps together and jumping off a bridge, though that’s not far off. The real history is actually much more interesting.
The real fame goes to two separate groups: the natives of Pentecost Island (an island of Vanuatu), and the Oxford Dangerous Sports Club. As Pentecost Island is one of a series of islands north of New Zealand (an island chain where the Maori most likely came from) you could say it’s in native New Zealander’s blood to jump from high precipices. It is on this island that the locals were found jumping off of 35m wooden towers with vines attached to their feet. The story is that they do this for a variety of reasons. Firstly, it is a sort of rite of passage, a bit like a bar mitzvah except instead of yamikas they wear loin cloths, and instead of saying Mazel Tov I imagine the Vanuatu say “oh shit” as they plummet 100 feet straight down. The second reason is that somehow jumping off a platform—-“land diving” as it was originally called—-ensures a good yam harvest. Supposedly the ground is blessed when one’s shoulders touch the earth, which, let’s make this clear, would mean that your head would have to be well into the ground for it to work. This is done when the yams are ready to harvest and—-were it not the case the Vanuatu would be extinct long ago-—when the tree vines are at their strongest. The best origin story of all though, is that “land diving” can be traced back to a man named Tamalie who, as legend tells it, was in such hot pursuit of his unloving wife (insert hot Tamalie joke here) that when she climbed a tree, tied a vine to her legs and jumped off he followed suit with such vigor that he failed to attach vines to his own legs and plummeted to his death. To prove they’ve learned their lesson the men of Pentecost Island now land dive regularly.
In the 1950s a BBC crew documented this on film and brought their footage back to England where a man named David Kirke caught wind of the Pentecost Islander’s escapades. David Kirke also happened to be a member of a society called the Oxford Dangerous Sports Club (DSC) that, after hearing about it from Kirke, all thought this land diving business was a great idea. And so, on April 1st, 1978 David Kirke and four others jumped off of the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, England, survived, and gave birth to a sport that has since swept the world. As an aside, this feat was relatively tame for the DSC, who has since done a variety of activities that are remarkably insane. David Kirke, for instance, went on to invent a device pointedly called the human catapult. Prior to closing shop, the DSC also pioneered street luging, and has since formed world organizations with fun names like the “British Elastic Ropes Sports Association”. Now an enterprise unto itself the DSC has reformed as the Oxford Stunt Factory (OSF), a group that has taken bungee jumping to an entirely new level by bunging jumping into a 2.5kg napalm explosion and bungee jumping whilst set on fire. They’ve also helped set the Guinness World Record for mass fire breathing, not something you would expect from the stiff-necked folks at Oxford University, but true no less. Odds are you’ve seen these men at work, too. Ever seen James Bond’s GoldenEye? That was an OSF jump off the dam at the beginning of the movie and was not, contrary to what the film might hint, organized by the British Secret Service.
Anyway.
Considering that New Zealand culture is a hybrid between Polynesian and English culture, bungee jumping came quite naturally to the Kiwis and they have carried on the tradition of extreme sports ever since. While South Island is far more involved in high flying, super-fast, death defying stunts (Queenstown, specifically), Auckland is at least attempting to keep pace with a few bungee jump locales of its own and can even boast to be home to the world’s longest bungee jump from a building: a feat done by the man himself, Mr. A.J. Hackett, at none other than Auckland’s Sky Tower. The fall was 180.1m (about two football fields) and ended a brisk 12m above the concrete sidewalk below.
After discovering New Zealand’s flair for inventing new forms of suicide (sorry, sports), I began to wonder what else Kiwis had been up to. Consider that here, standing at the base of the Sky Tower two world records had been set: one for the tallest tower in the Southern Hemisphere and one for jumping off of it. Such a high concentration of world records was a bit abnormal to boot, and was a fine clue as to how nutty Kiwis really are. After all, I decided, it takes a psychotic mind to crawl into an air bubble and roll down a cliff, and perhaps an even crazier mind to hop on an inner tube and float down an eel-infested pitch black cave. Surely these people’s feats had been documented elsewhere. The question was where to look.
This is how I arrived at the Seattle Public Library tallying up New Zealand’s presence in the Guinness Book of World Records, or, if you prefer its lesser known title, A Catalog of Today’s Modern Freaks. I expected New Zealand to be in there a few times just like everyone else. I knew, for instance, that Sir Edmund Hillary would be listed as the first man to climb Mt. Everest (and you thought he was British) and that New Zealand was probably mentioned in regards to some sort of sheep record (they do hold the record for “Most Sheep Sheared in 24 hrs”, 2,220 of them), but I had no idea that Kiwis had been so bloody busy.
Apart from having dozens of records set on New Zealand soil—-most of them having to do with Cricket or Rugby, though an honorable mention should be made to Ashrita Furman, the American who, apart from holding the most Guinness Records in the world, set the underwater juggling record at 48 minutes in Auckland—-New Zealanders themselves boast a whopping 22 records of their own. Granted, some of these are owed to the land itself—-take the Largest Death Toll from a Geyser Eruption for instance (four), or the World’s Largest Squid, a 16 foot Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni (say that three times fast) caught in the waters between New Zealand and Antarctica—-but the majority are owed to the citizens themselves like Clint Hallam of Christchurch who holds the record for “Most Hand Amputations on One Arm”, or Maurice Bennett of Wellington, creator of the world’s largest toast mosaic.* Even New Zealand’s most famous fictional character, Gollum (from the Lord of the Rings) holds a record as the “Most Extensive Digital Character on Film”. Oh yes, I should also mention that it was a New Zealander, Ernest Rutherford, who first split the atom, fathered nuclear physics, and was referred to as “a second Newton” by Albert Einstein, but really, most hand amputations? Wow.
Not bad for a country with a population of barely four million. My home state of Washington (boasting a population of over five million) has only eight Guinness World Records to its name, none of which involve splitting the atom or summiting Mt. Everest (though we did make the world’s largest apple pie).
Kate and I were wondering if New Zealand also qualified as the windiest place on earth, too, as we stood staring over the Waitemata Harbor, a choppy white-capped body of water that looked nothing like the serene haven in the tourist pictures we had seen. We couldn’t figure out where all of Auckland’s countless boats had gone, and assumed they had been blown away sometime earlier. We leaned out over the rail of the dock, looking at the natural harbor we had come so far to see, the same body of water that in all the pictures looked a calm and inviting blue, and said the only thing that came to mind.
“Huh.”
The two of us were soaking wet, cold, suffering the indefatigable jetlag that comes with the journey to New Zealand and were still trying to wrestle with the fact that we were an entire world away from where we had been just twenty hours earlier--an effect of flying that I can never easily shake off. We were also waiting to be wooed by exotic New Zealand, but hadn’t yet discovered anything more striking than the difference between American and Kiwi Ketchup (theirs tastes like apple cinnamon). As we walked back up Queen Street surrounded by the buildings of Auckland I got scared that the rest of New Zealand might be just as cosmopolitan as its largest city. It wasn’t that Auckland was boring; it just didn’t feel distinctly Kiwi, and as I found out, it isn’t.
In all of its urban glory, Auckland has detached from its heritage enough that New Zealanders consider the city the sort of red-headed step-child of their fair and rural country. Aucklanders don’t mind this one bit, either, as they consider the rest of New Zealand to be their dated Uncle who still believes in keeping the Sabbath holy and talks about life on the farm and the good old days when sheep were sheep and men were men.
To put it lightly, there is something of a growing rift between urban Auckland and the rest of New Zealand. Auckland, to the rest of the country, is dangerously progressive: people shop on Saturdays, bars are open past six o’clock, and citizens can drink on Sundays. The respective opinion is that Aucklanders are queer ultra-liberal city folk and everyone else is a redneck. This is nowhere clearer in the fact that The New Zealand Herald isn’t actually a national newspaper as the name might hint, but instead is written by Aucklanders, for Aucklanders. The city is a sort of Manhattan in that it has its own gravitational pull and could care less if the rest of the country went ka-blooey because, odds are, they wouldn’t even notice. And, in turn, other Kiwis don’t refer to the city dwellers as New Zealanders, Kiwis, or countrymen but as JAFAs, an affectionate nickname that means Just Another Fucking Aucklander.
Much of New Zealand is a far cry from its sheep herding past, but don’t worry, while you can jump, swim or Zorb all you like throughout much of the island country, the upper part of New Zealand’s North Island (inventively called Northland) has missed the adrenaline buzz altogether and remains as unchanged as the sheets at our hostel. And this is where Kate and I were headed.
* Sky Towers are so popular, in fact, that an organization exists in support of the structures so that Sky Tower aficionados can get together and chat. It’s called, rather boldly, the World Federation of Great Towers, a veritable “who’s who of international towers” according to the Sunday Star-Times. Boasting a membership of 23 “Great Towers” (not including the Eiffel Tower, though curiously enough a copy of the Eiffel Tower in Blackpool, England does boast a membership) the federation spans a whopping four continents.
* Clint Hallam may not actually be from Christchurch, but this is where he was serving a prison sentence for fraud when he lost his hand to a circular saw. Apart from serving time in New Zealand, he was also wanted for fraud in Australia, and even managed to steal about 10,000 dollars in France while he was in the hospital for his re-attachment surgery which leads me to the well-worn truth that when it comes to crime, yes, the one armed man is to blame.
Saturday, August 9, 2008
Dinner with the Locals: Tasman, Tornadoes, and a Tarnished Reputation (Travel)
The best story about New Zealand occurred in 1642 and involved a man named Tasman, a few members of his crew, and the local natives. Considering this is also how New Zealand was discovered, it’s not a bad place to start off this book, either.
Here goes.
Having been charged with discovering the great Southern Continent--and, if not that, then some very nice spices—-Abel Tasman found himself off of the shores of New Zealand with a few canoes headed toward his boat and very little clue as to what was going on. This was due to the fact that no European had seen native New Zealanders before (called Maoris), and no Maori had seen a European before. The Maoris stopped short of Tasman’s ship and started blowing trumpets and waving their arms, a gesture now better understood to have meant “go away or we’ll kill you”, but was misinterpreted by Tasman as an invitation for a hoedown. The Dutch Explorer called his music players to the deck and, with the help of the Maoris, created the first documented dueling-band shindig in the South Pacific.
Needless to say, Tasman was quite impressed with this and, being the perceptive man he was, decided that he liked these Maoris. They might be savages, but boy could they carry a tune! He sent out a welcome party of four men to make proper introductions and, upon seeing them, the Maoris rammed the welcoming boat, took them captive, beheaded them and ate them for dinner. So, apart from celebrating August 22 as the day of New Zealand’s first hoedown, it is also celebrated as the day Maoris discovered white meat.
Since then, New Zealand has been on the up and up, but rather quietly. It’s spent a good deal of human history just sitting in its own corner of the world politely minding its own business. There was that whole matter of humans showing up sometime around 1,000 years ago, followed by a second set of different humans about 700 years later, but then there was a lull for a good long time when the only thing people heard about New Zealand involved a sheep and a very lonely farmer. In fact, that’s where New Zealand is right now historically, lodged somewhere between total obscurity and bad jokes. That is to say, no one knows just exactly what New Zealand is doing.
This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, either, considering that New Zealand is so remote. When I was at the local library researching my upcoming trip there I found books on the country nestled comfortably between My Life with Headhunters and Surviving the Arctic. I pulled from the shelf every single book available on New Zealand (there were four) determined to learn everything I could about this country before going there myself. And, apart from a few other facts that I’ll dish out as I go along (I’ve got to keep you reading somehow), I’ve pretty much brought you up to snuff.
Somehow, while planning for this trip I thought it would be a great idea to take along my fiancé who knew less about the Pacific than I did, but possessed a few traits that I suspected would come in handy along the way: common sense for one, bravery, good looks, and a bit of charm, too. She was anxious to go (as she always is when she is offered free plane tickets) and so soon there were two of us planning a sojourn to the South Pacific.
This would not be our first time to the Southern Hemisphere. A year prior the two of us were standing in La Bellavista district of Santiago, Chile wondering just what the hell we were doing there. One of the more valuable lessons learned from that trip was the realization that south isn’t always the direction of warmer climes. In fact, you could say there is a precise geographical line running around the belly of the world that marks the spot where places stop getting warmer and start getting colder. Of course, we remembered hearing something about this line in grade school and how the seasons were flip-flopped, but that all seemed ridiculous.
“Besides,” I reassured Kate, “I checked the weather report and it said 72 was the high.” But by that point Kate was less in a listening mood than she was in a hypothermic state. And if you’ve ever been to Chile (as the name hints) then you know that asking a Chileno about warm winters is like asking a fire hydrant the way to the drug store. It just doesn’t get hot down there. The end result of this is that Kate and I were cold on the trip, but nowhere near as cold as the glare she gave me when we first sat on a park bench and watched our breath freeze before us in sandals and t-shirts.
“Boy this is a cold 72, isn’t it?” I said, rubbing my hands together for warmth. And that’s when the look was given.
Needless to say, we weren’t going to make that mistake again, not that it would be much of a problem anyway. After all, New Zealand was nothing like Chile. Forget that they share identical latitudes or coasts on the same ocean. This was New Zealand, neighbor to Fiji, Tahiti, the Cook Islands, there was no way this country was going to be cold. This was nude beach territory. Parrots and kiwis and Mangrove forests didn’t sound like the contents of a cold landscape. And consider those Maoris paddling out to dinner back in 1642. There was nothing about them being bundled up like Eskimos. I mean, come on, this was the South Pacific and Kate and I packed accordingly: flip-flops, snorkel gear, beach towels—-we had learned our lesson.
And so I’ve compiled a list of all the people that would have been better prepared to land in Auckland, New Zealand than yours truly:
1) Sir Edmund Hillary
2) The Abominable Snowman
3) Santa Claus
4) Anyone with an ounce of sense
And,
5) Kate
Number Five had grown privy to the fact that when it’s summer up in America it’s cold down here and smartly packed away a fleece jacket. In the off chance that it might rain in the sunshine paradise of New Zealand I myself had brought a rain coat, and thank god, too—-the weather is anything but pleasant in the dead winter month of August.*
You might even say it’s downright miserable.
The trouble is that no one ever mentions New Zealand’s other, slightly less tropical neighbor, the continent of Antarctica. Both Antarctica and Fiji are about a thousand miles away from New Zealand (very few things are less than a thousand miles away from the country) and both have an equal pull on New Zealand’s climate and geography. Being neatly wedged between tropical paradise and a continent’s worth of ice has given New Zealand a transitory climate that stretches nicely between the two. The result is tropical forests to the north, glacial Alps to the south and nearly every other climate in the world spread somewhere in the middle.
A second indicator that New Zealand’s weather might be less than sunny is found in the country’s native name, Aotearoa, or Land of the Long White Cloud. When I first read this (before the trip) I thought it was some native metaphor where clouds were actually snow-capped mountains or something of the sort, but Lord no, I was wrong. It’s quite literal and rather spot-on.
It seemed that August was a month that belonged more to Antarctica than Fiji in Aotearoa. It wasn’t snowing, but it was cold and raining and the two of us had rather poor first impressions of the island country. On the other hand, I can happily report that the very same August Kate and I stepped foot in New Zealand was an atypical month of wretchedness. More succinctly, Dorothy had better weather on her trip to Oz than we did on our trip to New Zealand. She only had deal with a tornado. So says New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research:
I’d like to reemphasize that part about floods, hailstorms, tornadoes and severe windstorms, in case you missed it. Let’s also make sure no one gets mixed up with the metric conversions, either: 9.0° Celsius is about 48° Fahrenheit, Tornados are bad, and twice the average rainfall roughly translates into a steady downpour. New Zealand receives about 50 inches of rain annually and doubling that number—-as happened in August 2004-—puts New Zealand’s average rainfall on par with the Amazon Rainforest, if not slightly above.*
Kate and I had no idea of any of this as we stood outside the arrival gate of Auckland’s airport, hands on our hips and staring into the grey blanket of rain before us with expressions on our faces that can best be described by what Kate said next.
“Huh.”
I felt much the same way. Most people utter this when they make an unexpected realization, if you think about it. It’s not entirely poetic, but incredibly suitable for even the most landmark discoveries—-Einstein upon discovering the Theory of Relativity; Lewis and Clark upon reaching the Pacific; Tasman when his welcoming party weren’t so much welcomed as eaten—-all christened their discoveries with a scratch on the head and a resounding “huh” or the equally suitable “well I’ll be damned”. I’m sure of it.
So, we let the rain soak us with surprise, made the appropriate clothing adjustments, and took a shuttle into New Zealand’s largest, most cosmopolitan city, determined to fight the rain and enjoy our time on New Zealand’s North Island.
Auckland is boasted as New Zealand’s cultural and urban hub. It has the largest population, about 1.3 million-—one third of New Zealand’s entire citizenry—-and to say it is growing is something of an understatement: two out of every three people that have moved to New Zealand since 1991 have moved to Auckland. This is a city on the rise. Young adults dominate the city demographic and this is made no more obvious than by walking down Auckland’s main street from beginning to end without seeing a single grey hair. In short, Auckland is on the up and up and has been for some time.
Few cities in the world are more geographically fascinating than Auckland. Apart from being built on or around sixty extinct volcanoes, the city sits on a nine kilometer stretch of land that separates the Tasman Sea from the Pacific Ocean. For this reason, Auckland sports two harbors on two separate bodies of water, a feat which few cities in the world can boast.
As for calling Auckland the cultural mecca of New Zealand, well, that’s a separate issue all together. Firstly, saying that any city is the ethnic center of New Zealand is like Wichita boasting itself as the cultural hub of Kansas. Mathematically speaking, zero culture equals zero cultural hubs. That’s not to say New Zealanders—-Kiwis, as they’re called—-are shallow or boring, it’s just that their history, what little of it there is, is remarkably civilized, even considering all that cannibalism and headhunting.
This is not the first time this absence of culture has been mentioned, either. Of those four books my local library had on this antipodean country one was titled Verdict on New Zealand, a collection of essays by various authors on their respective opinions of the island country. Essays like “An Unextraordinary People” by Henry Demarest Lloyd, “A Biologically Standardized People” by Sydney Greenbie, or the equally exciting “A Temperate and Reasonable People” by James Bryce set the tone for the rest of the essays that are just as complimentary. It wasn’t exactly a stellar read, but I flipped through them anyway and can tell you how Kiwis got this way in the first place.
History is to blame.
Any type of European history in the South Pacific begins with Abel Tasman, the man who was, as we already know, incredibly inept. Apart from this, it’s rather safe to say that Tasman single-handedly prevented the Dutch from taking over most of the South Pacific. In fact, Tasman was really only good at naming things and got to do a sporting lot of it on his 1642 voyage where he named, among other things, New Zealand, which means “New Sea Land” in English. Naming places was Tasman’s only real talent though. When he discovered Tasmania and New Zealand he named them, but didn’t bother to circle the islands or effectively claim them for Holland, which was, rather understandably, something of a priority for his superiors. In the case of New Zealand he didn’t even get off the boat and have a look around. To sum it up, when it came to exploring Abel wasn’t very able (sorry, couldn’t resist).
My favorite quote about the man comes from Russel Ward, an incredibly detailed historian
who described Abel as such: “Tasman was as good a navigator and certainly as great a bully as any other blue-water sailor of his day, but he seems to have entirely lacked the first requisite of any good explorer: curiosity.” And even though Tasman named an undiscovered island after him (and a New Zealand cape after his wife), Tasman’s boss, Anthony Van Diemen, didn’t have anything particularly positive to say about the explorer, either. He wrote that Tasman:
Which is a polite way of saying Tasman stank to high heaven.
That more conscientious successor was the hero of the South Pacific, Captain James Cook, who arrived on the scene in 1769 and claimed everything he saw in the name of England, including Australia and New Zealand. He was much worse at naming things than Tasman—-the pinnacle of Cook’s creative flare happened when he named an island speckled bay the Bay of Islands—-but was much better at charting new territory and claiming it for England.* Beyond that, Captain Cook was a Jack-of-all-trades who, aside from boldly going where no man had gone before, can put discovering Antarctica, studying the transit of Venus, circumnavigating the globe, and curing scurvy on his list of accomplishments—-all which was done in just ten years, too. As if this weren’t enough, Captain Cook was also considered a God on the island of Hawaii (they killed him when they found out he wasn’t) and was considered of such importance to the world because of his expeditions that, at the height of the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin issued orders that made it illegal to fire upon any of Cook’s ships. Captain Cook didn’t accomplish this by being stupid, either. Unlike Tasman, when Cook saw a rowdy group of Maoris paddling toward his men he didn’t pull out the trumpets; he pulled out his guns, shot a volley of warning shots over their heads, and then shot a volley of warning shots through their heads when they didn’t respond. What’s important about this is that Cook introduced England to New Zealand, and introduced New Zealand to guns.
After Cook, other Europeans started showing up in steady numbers, primarily to fish, whale and trade. People were quick to realize New Zealand was a fisherman’s paradise. In New Zealand’s Bay of Islands, for instance, up to five marlins were captured a day and humpback whales were prevalent enough that, for a short time, they were captured with nets. It was through these fishermen that Maoris were introduced to a high volume of guns that, as soon as they figured out how to use them, they used to shoot each other in record numbers.
The trick is the term “Maori” is a bit of a misnomer. At the time of European settlement, about ten separate and distinct tribes existed throughout New Zealand and each had been waging a war on one another for as long as any of them could remember. The whole mess of inter-tribal warfare was never much of an issue though, because there was only so much damage you could do with a spear. Guns were a separate issue all together. As soon as the Maoris felt the power of gunpowder at their fingertips, they smiled, had a good chuckle, and proceeded to decimate each other. Take the Maori native named Hongi for instance, who, having returned from England with a load of guns proceeded to kill a thousand Maori in Auckland and fifteen-hundred Maoris in Waikato. All told, of the 100,000 or so Maoris that were present when Europeans arrived 50,000 were killed with the discovery of the musket. Eventually the Maoris grew privy to the notion that if they kept this up they would kill (and eat) each other to extinction, and so made peace and started shooting Europeans instead.
Anyway, here is where New Zealand history gets a bit dull. The Maoris and the Europeans fought, the Maoris inevitably surrendered, and then the Europeans started shooting themselves to the point that they realized they needed to bring some order to New Zealand. And so a group of them politely asked England to take over their country. Not surprisingly, England obliged and in 1840 New Zealand got its first British government, marking the first time in history a country actually asked to be ruled by Britain. Most other countries were fighting against such an idea tooth and nail. When Britain tried to push New Zealand toward independence in the early twentieth century most Kiwis were indifferent or even opposed the idea. Being independent just sounded like a lot of work. Eventually New Zealand grudgingly achieved dominion status (in 1907), but the mark of English culture remains in the country.
And that’s the real problem with New Zealand. Until recently it hasn’t wanted its own culture, its wanted English culture, which is why New Zealand is sometimes referred to as being “more English than England.” Only recently have Kiwis shied away from this and started looking for their own identity. But consider that New Zealand isn’t even 100 years old: as most countries measure their history by centuries instead of decades this puts New Zealand in its developmental years.
The one other issue is that, as I said before, New Zealand is remarkably civilized. It never does anything wrong. It is a nuclear free country, doesn’t over fish, granted women the right to vote 25 years before America, established minimum wages early on, introduced pensions long before anyone else, and established child health services around the same time six year olds were making wonderful knit-tops in America. No slavery, peace with the Maoris, environmental protection, New Zealand has it all, which is just too bad. If they had convict history, massive bloodshed, and maybe a nuke or two, why, then they’d have some history, but instead, other than those first few clashes with the Maoris and a boat accident in the 1980s (I’ll get there), everyone has gotten along quite civilly in New Zealand. The country is immensely progressive, traditionally conservative, and is such a successful melting pot of culture that the result is a country that has had a bit of trouble gaining a fixed self-identity. And so, for a good while they embraced English culture as their own.
The whole attempt at being “more English than England” backfired though. The problem was this: what do you get when you try to imitate an overly mannered, remarkably civilized person (such is the tea and crumpet English stereotype, no)? I’ll tell you that you don’t get anything more exciting. No, you get someone more manner conscious and drier still. And for a good long while Kiwis were such outstanding gentlemen that onlookers labeled them as temperate, reasonable, biologically standardized, and (what was the other one? Ah yes), “unextraordinary.”
For a while it looked like this was it for New Zealand, but then, and no one’s quite sure why, they started to change. Lately there has been a remarkable backlash and things have taken a turn for the more exciting. It seems New Zealand finally hit cultural puberty and is striking off on its own. If we had to pinpoint any one moment in the country’s history to mark this change it would probably belong to A. J. Hackett who, presumably fed up with taking the stairs or the elevator as the well-mannered gentleman he was raised to be, decided to go jump off a bridge, then a cliff, then the Eiffel Tower, etc. all with a bungee cord strapped to his ankles and gave birth to extreme sports in New Zealand. Kiwis haven’t looked back since, and now, like any adolescent they’ve become addicted to adrenaline sports, fast food and movies.
* If there is any sort of confusion to what August, or any month’s climate is like in the Southern hemisphere, just add six months to it, and you’ll get the Northern Hemisphere equivalent. So, their August is our February.
* For comparison, New York City averages 40.9 inches of rainfall annually. Seattle, the reputed rainy city of America receives only 36.2 inches. The wettest place on earth, Mawsynram, India however, received an annual rainfall of 467.28 inches, so we shouldn’t complain.
* The Maori’s knack for naming places goes well beyond either Cook or Tasman though. Consider Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikima ungahoronukupokai-whenuakitanatahu. It’s Maori for “the brow of the hill where Tamatea, the man with the big knees, who slid, climbed and swallowed mountains, known as the Land Eater, played his nose-flute to his loved one”. These days it’s usually abbreviated to Taumata, but still, it’s spicier than Cook’s Bay of Islands.
Here goes.
Having been charged with discovering the great Southern Continent--and, if not that, then some very nice spices—-Abel Tasman found himself off of the shores of New Zealand with a few canoes headed toward his boat and very little clue as to what was going on. This was due to the fact that no European had seen native New Zealanders before (called Maoris), and no Maori had seen a European before. The Maoris stopped short of Tasman’s ship and started blowing trumpets and waving their arms, a gesture now better understood to have meant “go away or we’ll kill you”, but was misinterpreted by Tasman as an invitation for a hoedown. The Dutch Explorer called his music players to the deck and, with the help of the Maoris, created the first documented dueling-band shindig in the South Pacific.
Needless to say, Tasman was quite impressed with this and, being the perceptive man he was, decided that he liked these Maoris. They might be savages, but boy could they carry a tune! He sent out a welcome party of four men to make proper introductions and, upon seeing them, the Maoris rammed the welcoming boat, took them captive, beheaded them and ate them for dinner. So, apart from celebrating August 22 as the day of New Zealand’s first hoedown, it is also celebrated as the day Maoris discovered white meat.
Since then, New Zealand has been on the up and up, but rather quietly. It’s spent a good deal of human history just sitting in its own corner of the world politely minding its own business. There was that whole matter of humans showing up sometime around 1,000 years ago, followed by a second set of different humans about 700 years later, but then there was a lull for a good long time when the only thing people heard about New Zealand involved a sheep and a very lonely farmer. In fact, that’s where New Zealand is right now historically, lodged somewhere between total obscurity and bad jokes. That is to say, no one knows just exactly what New Zealand is doing.
This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, either, considering that New Zealand is so remote. When I was at the local library researching my upcoming trip there I found books on the country nestled comfortably between My Life with Headhunters and Surviving the Arctic. I pulled from the shelf every single book available on New Zealand (there were four) determined to learn everything I could about this country before going there myself. And, apart from a few other facts that I’ll dish out as I go along (I’ve got to keep you reading somehow), I’ve pretty much brought you up to snuff.
Somehow, while planning for this trip I thought it would be a great idea to take along my fiancé who knew less about the Pacific than I did, but possessed a few traits that I suspected would come in handy along the way: common sense for one, bravery, good looks, and a bit of charm, too. She was anxious to go (as she always is when she is offered free plane tickets) and so soon there were two of us planning a sojourn to the South Pacific.
This would not be our first time to the Southern Hemisphere. A year prior the two of us were standing in La Bellavista district of Santiago, Chile wondering just what the hell we were doing there. One of the more valuable lessons learned from that trip was the realization that south isn’t always the direction of warmer climes. In fact, you could say there is a precise geographical line running around the belly of the world that marks the spot where places stop getting warmer and start getting colder. Of course, we remembered hearing something about this line in grade school and how the seasons were flip-flopped, but that all seemed ridiculous.
“Besides,” I reassured Kate, “I checked the weather report and it said 72 was the high.” But by that point Kate was less in a listening mood than she was in a hypothermic state. And if you’ve ever been to Chile (as the name hints) then you know that asking a Chileno about warm winters is like asking a fire hydrant the way to the drug store. It just doesn’t get hot down there. The end result of this is that Kate and I were cold on the trip, but nowhere near as cold as the glare she gave me when we first sat on a park bench and watched our breath freeze before us in sandals and t-shirts.
“Boy this is a cold 72, isn’t it?” I said, rubbing my hands together for warmth. And that’s when the look was given.
Needless to say, we weren’t going to make that mistake again, not that it would be much of a problem anyway. After all, New Zealand was nothing like Chile. Forget that they share identical latitudes or coasts on the same ocean. This was New Zealand, neighbor to Fiji, Tahiti, the Cook Islands, there was no way this country was going to be cold. This was nude beach territory. Parrots and kiwis and Mangrove forests didn’t sound like the contents of a cold landscape. And consider those Maoris paddling out to dinner back in 1642. There was nothing about them being bundled up like Eskimos. I mean, come on, this was the South Pacific and Kate and I packed accordingly: flip-flops, snorkel gear, beach towels—-we had learned our lesson.
And so I’ve compiled a list of all the people that would have been better prepared to land in Auckland, New Zealand than yours truly:
1) Sir Edmund Hillary
2) The Abominable Snowman
3) Santa Claus
4) Anyone with an ounce of sense
And,
5) Kate
Number Five had grown privy to the fact that when it’s summer up in America it’s cold down here and smartly packed away a fleece jacket. In the off chance that it might rain in the sunshine paradise of New Zealand I myself had brought a rain coat, and thank god, too—-the weather is anything but pleasant in the dead winter month of August.*
You might even say it’s downright miserable.
The trouble is that no one ever mentions New Zealand’s other, slightly less tropical neighbor, the continent of Antarctica. Both Antarctica and Fiji are about a thousand miles away from New Zealand (very few things are less than a thousand miles away from the country) and both have an equal pull on New Zealand’s climate and geography. Being neatly wedged between tropical paradise and a continent’s worth of ice has given New Zealand a transitory climate that stretches nicely between the two. The result is tropical forests to the north, glacial Alps to the south and nearly every other climate in the world spread somewhere in the middle.
A second indicator that New Zealand’s weather might be less than sunny is found in the country’s native name, Aotearoa, or Land of the Long White Cloud. When I first read this (before the trip) I thought it was some native metaphor where clouds were actually snow-capped mountains or something of the sort, but Lord no, I was wrong. It’s quite literal and rather spot-on.
It seemed that August was a month that belonged more to Antarctica than Fiji in Aotearoa. It wasn’t snowing, but it was cold and raining and the two of us had rather poor first impressions of the island country. On the other hand, I can happily report that the very same August Kate and I stepped foot in New Zealand was an atypical month of wretchedness. More succinctly, Dorothy had better weather on her trip to Oz than we did on our trip to New Zealand. She only had deal with a tornado. So says New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research:
A convergence of intense depressions (‘lows’) around the Chatham Islands led to the extremes of cold, high rainfall, hail, snow and wind which enveloped New Zealand in August [2004]. These produced storm force southerlies, which brought wintry conditions to many areas. The prolonged period of storms from 11 – 30th August produced two high rainfall events producing floods, two severe hail storms, four heavy snowfall events to low levels, record ground frosts, a destructive tornado and the worst southerly wind storm to batter the Wellington area in more than a decade. Nationally, this was the coldest August since 1992. Kelburn in Wellington recorded 7 consecutive days from 23-29 August with maximum temperatures of 9.0°C or less, making this the longest cold spell there since July 1981…It was very wet, with about 200 percent (twice) of average rainfall…
I’d like to reemphasize that part about floods, hailstorms, tornadoes and severe windstorms, in case you missed it. Let’s also make sure no one gets mixed up with the metric conversions, either: 9.0° Celsius is about 48° Fahrenheit, Tornados are bad, and twice the average rainfall roughly translates into a steady downpour. New Zealand receives about 50 inches of rain annually and doubling that number—-as happened in August 2004-—puts New Zealand’s average rainfall on par with the Amazon Rainforest, if not slightly above.*
Kate and I had no idea of any of this as we stood outside the arrival gate of Auckland’s airport, hands on our hips and staring into the grey blanket of rain before us with expressions on our faces that can best be described by what Kate said next.
“Huh.”
I felt much the same way. Most people utter this when they make an unexpected realization, if you think about it. It’s not entirely poetic, but incredibly suitable for even the most landmark discoveries—-Einstein upon discovering the Theory of Relativity; Lewis and Clark upon reaching the Pacific; Tasman when his welcoming party weren’t so much welcomed as eaten—-all christened their discoveries with a scratch on the head and a resounding “huh” or the equally suitable “well I’ll be damned”. I’m sure of it.
So, we let the rain soak us with surprise, made the appropriate clothing adjustments, and took a shuttle into New Zealand’s largest, most cosmopolitan city, determined to fight the rain and enjoy our time on New Zealand’s North Island.
Auckland is boasted as New Zealand’s cultural and urban hub. It has the largest population, about 1.3 million-—one third of New Zealand’s entire citizenry—-and to say it is growing is something of an understatement: two out of every three people that have moved to New Zealand since 1991 have moved to Auckland. This is a city on the rise. Young adults dominate the city demographic and this is made no more obvious than by walking down Auckland’s main street from beginning to end without seeing a single grey hair. In short, Auckland is on the up and up and has been for some time.
Few cities in the world are more geographically fascinating than Auckland. Apart from being built on or around sixty extinct volcanoes, the city sits on a nine kilometer stretch of land that separates the Tasman Sea from the Pacific Ocean. For this reason, Auckland sports two harbors on two separate bodies of water, a feat which few cities in the world can boast.
As for calling Auckland the cultural mecca of New Zealand, well, that’s a separate issue all together. Firstly, saying that any city is the ethnic center of New Zealand is like Wichita boasting itself as the cultural hub of Kansas. Mathematically speaking, zero culture equals zero cultural hubs. That’s not to say New Zealanders—-Kiwis, as they’re called—-are shallow or boring, it’s just that their history, what little of it there is, is remarkably civilized, even considering all that cannibalism and headhunting.
This is not the first time this absence of culture has been mentioned, either. Of those four books my local library had on this antipodean country one was titled Verdict on New Zealand, a collection of essays by various authors on their respective opinions of the island country. Essays like “An Unextraordinary People” by Henry Demarest Lloyd, “A Biologically Standardized People” by Sydney Greenbie, or the equally exciting “A Temperate and Reasonable People” by James Bryce set the tone for the rest of the essays that are just as complimentary. It wasn’t exactly a stellar read, but I flipped through them anyway and can tell you how Kiwis got this way in the first place.
History is to blame.
Any type of European history in the South Pacific begins with Abel Tasman, the man who was, as we already know, incredibly inept. Apart from this, it’s rather safe to say that Tasman single-handedly prevented the Dutch from taking over most of the South Pacific. In fact, Tasman was really only good at naming things and got to do a sporting lot of it on his 1642 voyage where he named, among other things, New Zealand, which means “New Sea Land” in English. Naming places was Tasman’s only real talent though. When he discovered Tasmania and New Zealand he named them, but didn’t bother to circle the islands or effectively claim them for Holland, which was, rather understandably, something of a priority for his superiors. In the case of New Zealand he didn’t even get off the boat and have a look around. To sum it up, when it came to exploring Abel wasn’t very able (sorry, couldn’t resist).
My favorite quote about the man comes from Russel Ward, an incredibly detailed historian
who described Abel as such: “Tasman was as good a navigator and certainly as great a bully as any other blue-water sailor of his day, but he seems to have entirely lacked the first requisite of any good explorer: curiosity.” And even though Tasman named an undiscovered island after him (and a New Zealand cape after his wife), Tasman’s boss, Anthony Van Diemen, didn’t have anything particularly positive to say about the explorer, either. He wrote that Tasman:
Did not employ. . . great. . . eagerness to establish the extent of the lands discovered or the nature of the inhabitants, and regarding the principal issues [of claiming the bloody country for Holland], left everything open for a more conscientious successor.
Which is a polite way of saying Tasman stank to high heaven.
That more conscientious successor was the hero of the South Pacific, Captain James Cook, who arrived on the scene in 1769 and claimed everything he saw in the name of England, including Australia and New Zealand. He was much worse at naming things than Tasman—-the pinnacle of Cook’s creative flare happened when he named an island speckled bay the Bay of Islands—-but was much better at charting new territory and claiming it for England.* Beyond that, Captain Cook was a Jack-of-all-trades who, aside from boldly going where no man had gone before, can put discovering Antarctica, studying the transit of Venus, circumnavigating the globe, and curing scurvy on his list of accomplishments—-all which was done in just ten years, too. As if this weren’t enough, Captain Cook was also considered a God on the island of Hawaii (they killed him when they found out he wasn’t) and was considered of such importance to the world because of his expeditions that, at the height of the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin issued orders that made it illegal to fire upon any of Cook’s ships. Captain Cook didn’t accomplish this by being stupid, either. Unlike Tasman, when Cook saw a rowdy group of Maoris paddling toward his men he didn’t pull out the trumpets; he pulled out his guns, shot a volley of warning shots over their heads, and then shot a volley of warning shots through their heads when they didn’t respond. What’s important about this is that Cook introduced England to New Zealand, and introduced New Zealand to guns.
After Cook, other Europeans started showing up in steady numbers, primarily to fish, whale and trade. People were quick to realize New Zealand was a fisherman’s paradise. In New Zealand’s Bay of Islands, for instance, up to five marlins were captured a day and humpback whales were prevalent enough that, for a short time, they were captured with nets. It was through these fishermen that Maoris were introduced to a high volume of guns that, as soon as they figured out how to use them, they used to shoot each other in record numbers.
The trick is the term “Maori” is a bit of a misnomer. At the time of European settlement, about ten separate and distinct tribes existed throughout New Zealand and each had been waging a war on one another for as long as any of them could remember. The whole mess of inter-tribal warfare was never much of an issue though, because there was only so much damage you could do with a spear. Guns were a separate issue all together. As soon as the Maoris felt the power of gunpowder at their fingertips, they smiled, had a good chuckle, and proceeded to decimate each other. Take the Maori native named Hongi for instance, who, having returned from England with a load of guns proceeded to kill a thousand Maori in Auckland and fifteen-hundred Maoris in Waikato. All told, of the 100,000 or so Maoris that were present when Europeans arrived 50,000 were killed with the discovery of the musket. Eventually the Maoris grew privy to the notion that if they kept this up they would kill (and eat) each other to extinction, and so made peace and started shooting Europeans instead.
Anyway, here is where New Zealand history gets a bit dull. The Maoris and the Europeans fought, the Maoris inevitably surrendered, and then the Europeans started shooting themselves to the point that they realized they needed to bring some order to New Zealand. And so a group of them politely asked England to take over their country. Not surprisingly, England obliged and in 1840 New Zealand got its first British government, marking the first time in history a country actually asked to be ruled by Britain. Most other countries were fighting against such an idea tooth and nail. When Britain tried to push New Zealand toward independence in the early twentieth century most Kiwis were indifferent or even opposed the idea. Being independent just sounded like a lot of work. Eventually New Zealand grudgingly achieved dominion status (in 1907), but the mark of English culture remains in the country.
And that’s the real problem with New Zealand. Until recently it hasn’t wanted its own culture, its wanted English culture, which is why New Zealand is sometimes referred to as being “more English than England.” Only recently have Kiwis shied away from this and started looking for their own identity. But consider that New Zealand isn’t even 100 years old: as most countries measure their history by centuries instead of decades this puts New Zealand in its developmental years.
The one other issue is that, as I said before, New Zealand is remarkably civilized. It never does anything wrong. It is a nuclear free country, doesn’t over fish, granted women the right to vote 25 years before America, established minimum wages early on, introduced pensions long before anyone else, and established child health services around the same time six year olds were making wonderful knit-tops in America. No slavery, peace with the Maoris, environmental protection, New Zealand has it all, which is just too bad. If they had convict history, massive bloodshed, and maybe a nuke or two, why, then they’d have some history, but instead, other than those first few clashes with the Maoris and a boat accident in the 1980s (I’ll get there), everyone has gotten along quite civilly in New Zealand. The country is immensely progressive, traditionally conservative, and is such a successful melting pot of culture that the result is a country that has had a bit of trouble gaining a fixed self-identity. And so, for a good while they embraced English culture as their own.
The whole attempt at being “more English than England” backfired though. The problem was this: what do you get when you try to imitate an overly mannered, remarkably civilized person (such is the tea and crumpet English stereotype, no)? I’ll tell you that you don’t get anything more exciting. No, you get someone more manner conscious and drier still. And for a good long while Kiwis were such outstanding gentlemen that onlookers labeled them as temperate, reasonable, biologically standardized, and (what was the other one? Ah yes), “unextraordinary.”
For a while it looked like this was it for New Zealand, but then, and no one’s quite sure why, they started to change. Lately there has been a remarkable backlash and things have taken a turn for the more exciting. It seems New Zealand finally hit cultural puberty and is striking off on its own. If we had to pinpoint any one moment in the country’s history to mark this change it would probably belong to A. J. Hackett who, presumably fed up with taking the stairs or the elevator as the well-mannered gentleman he was raised to be, decided to go jump off a bridge, then a cliff, then the Eiffel Tower, etc. all with a bungee cord strapped to his ankles and gave birth to extreme sports in New Zealand. Kiwis haven’t looked back since, and now, like any adolescent they’ve become addicted to adrenaline sports, fast food and movies.
* If there is any sort of confusion to what August, or any month’s climate is like in the Southern hemisphere, just add six months to it, and you’ll get the Northern Hemisphere equivalent. So, their August is our February.
* For comparison, New York City averages 40.9 inches of rainfall annually. Seattle, the reputed rainy city of America receives only 36.2 inches. The wettest place on earth, Mawsynram, India however, received an annual rainfall of 467.28 inches, so we shouldn’t complain.
* The Maori’s knack for naming places goes well beyond either Cook or Tasman though. Consider Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikima ungahoronukupokai-whenuakitanatahu. It’s Maori for “the brow of the hill where Tamatea, the man with the big knees, who slid, climbed and swallowed mountains, known as the Land Eater, played his nose-flute to his loved one”. These days it’s usually abbreviated to Taumata, but still, it’s spicier than Cook’s Bay of Islands.
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Dispatches from Tacoma - Life in Titsville (travel)
About six months ago I stopped to speak with a man walking his dog who, after a bit of banter about funny pet tricks, told his dog to “play Tacoma”. Immediately the dog rolled over, put his feet up in the air, and stuck out his tongue in clear imitation of a dead canine.
This was depressing for two reasons. First, no dog I have ever owned does what I ask — when I tell my dog to sit she’ll usually give me an irritated look and then go pee on the rug. The fact that someone had their dog doing parlor tricks was, while certainly impressive, a bit frustrating. The second (and far more depressing) reason was that my wife and I just moved to Tacoma ourselves.
As native Washingtonians and Seattleites at that, we picked on Tacoma just like everyone else. For those that don’t know of the rivalry between the two towns, understand that this was as crippling as a Yankees fan being relocated to Boston. And now, our careers took us there.
As the third largest city in the state, Tacoma is home to a few highly-prized claims to fame. It’s most popular attraction is the pulp mill, or at least it’s scent, referred to as the “Tacoma Aroma”. Driving through the city is like sharing a garbage bag with a terrified skunk.
Then there is the Tacoma Dome, a massive wooden dome—actually the largest wooden dome in the world (there are so many!)—that is the city’s true pride. It’s visible from nearly anywhere in Tacoma, not so much because of its size, but because the entire structure is painted a lovely kaleidoscope pattern of baby blue — the sort of pattern that looked great in the 1970s when most everyone was high.
But it’s not smells or domes that make a city. It’s the people and the culture. They are Tacoma’s true charm, and, walking the streets it’s no surprise that the fastest selling show in the Dome’s history, the show that sold out all 23,000 seats in under thirty minutes was none other than WWF Smackdown.
But the bad blood began long before Hulk Hogan paid his respects, back when the trans-continental railroad bypassed Seattle and came to stop in Tacoma instead. This was not the fault of Tacoma of course, it was the fault of the railroad owners who didn’t want to lay tracks where all the soon-to-be-valuable property was already purchased. And so, the railroad company chose the terminus of the Northern Pacific railroad to be a small city with a population just short of a baker’s dozen called Tacoma. The rivalry has been bitter ever since.
When we first moved there I progressed through the seven stages of grief (stopping for a good while on depression because it allowed for drinking), finally made it to acceptance and decided to chin-up. In fact, when our friends helped load up our sofa and made a few slanted remarks about my future home I got downright defensive (this was part of the eighth stage of grief: convincing your wife that moving is worth it) and stuck up for the city. I barely believed it myself.
The next day I did a bit of research on the city--after all, maybe I had a point, maybe life in Tacoma wasn’t be so bad--and hit the books at the library. This was not a good idea. Despite my initial optimism, my hope quickly waned when I drudged up other, not-so appealing facts about Tacoma, the self-named “city of Destiny”. Take, for instance, the fact that the fastest-selling concert (as opposed to show) ever to be held at the Tacoma Dome was a Backstreet Boys gig that sold out at a rate of over ten tickets a second. Just as I was about to relapse into depression and head for the nearest bar, I found one last book on the city.
It had pictures, so I gave it a look. It was rather uneventful history book about the founding of the city and I was getting tired and thinking about that beer when I saw it. It was a grand picture of Mt. Rainier and the uncut landscape that would become Tacoma. The caption read as follows:
It took a bit of explaining but eventually she was satisfied by this discovery, too (how’s that for a great wife).
Since then, life in Tacoma (Titsville, as I like to call it) hasn’t been altogether unpleasant. I am constantly on the lookout for other well-named buildings or structures throughout the city (the Boobies Building, Jubblies Park), the wife and I are getting along fine, and I can now even get our new dog to sit without piddling on the carpet, though having her “play Tacoma” is a long way off.
(Part One of Dispatches from Tacoma)
This was depressing for two reasons. First, no dog I have ever owned does what I ask — when I tell my dog to sit she’ll usually give me an irritated look and then go pee on the rug. The fact that someone had their dog doing parlor tricks was, while certainly impressive, a bit frustrating. The second (and far more depressing) reason was that my wife and I just moved to Tacoma ourselves.
As native Washingtonians and Seattleites at that, we picked on Tacoma just like everyone else. For those that don’t know of the rivalry between the two towns, understand that this was as crippling as a Yankees fan being relocated to Boston. And now, our careers took us there.
As the third largest city in the state, Tacoma is home to a few highly-prized claims to fame. It’s most popular attraction is the pulp mill, or at least it’s scent, referred to as the “Tacoma Aroma”. Driving through the city is like sharing a garbage bag with a terrified skunk.
Then there is the Tacoma Dome, a massive wooden dome—actually the largest wooden dome in the world (there are so many!)—that is the city’s true pride. It’s visible from nearly anywhere in Tacoma, not so much because of its size, but because the entire structure is painted a lovely kaleidoscope pattern of baby blue — the sort of pattern that looked great in the 1970s when most everyone was high.
But it’s not smells or domes that make a city. It’s the people and the culture. They are Tacoma’s true charm, and, walking the streets it’s no surprise that the fastest selling show in the Dome’s history, the show that sold out all 23,000 seats in under thirty minutes was none other than WWF Smackdown.
But the bad blood began long before Hulk Hogan paid his respects, back when the trans-continental railroad bypassed Seattle and came to stop in Tacoma instead. This was not the fault of Tacoma of course, it was the fault of the railroad owners who didn’t want to lay tracks where all the soon-to-be-valuable property was already purchased. And so, the railroad company chose the terminus of the Northern Pacific railroad to be a small city with a population just short of a baker’s dozen called Tacoma. The rivalry has been bitter ever since.
When we first moved there I progressed through the seven stages of grief (stopping for a good while on depression because it allowed for drinking), finally made it to acceptance and decided to chin-up. In fact, when our friends helped load up our sofa and made a few slanted remarks about my future home I got downright defensive (this was part of the eighth stage of grief: convincing your wife that moving is worth it) and stuck up for the city. I barely believed it myself.
The next day I did a bit of research on the city--after all, maybe I had a point, maybe life in Tacoma wasn’t be so bad--and hit the books at the library. This was not a good idea. Despite my initial optimism, my hope quickly waned when I drudged up other, not-so appealing facts about Tacoma, the self-named “city of Destiny”. Take, for instance, the fact that the fastest-selling concert (as opposed to show) ever to be held at the Tacoma Dome was a Backstreet Boys gig that sold out at a rate of over ten tickets a second. Just as I was about to relapse into depression and head for the nearest bar, I found one last book on the city.
It had pictures, so I gave it a look. It was rather uneventful history book about the founding of the city and I was getting tired and thinking about that beer when I saw it. It was a grand picture of Mt. Rainier and the uncut landscape that would become Tacoma. The caption read as follows:
The Indian name for Mt. Rainier is Tacoma (meaning ‘Nourishing Breast’), whenceNourishing Breast. This was a fact I could get behind. Seattle is just some guy’s name. Tacoma is downright naughty. I immediately ran home and told the missus the good news.
comes the name of the nearby city.
It took a bit of explaining but eventually she was satisfied by this discovery, too (how’s that for a great wife).
Since then, life in Tacoma (Titsville, as I like to call it) hasn’t been altogether unpleasant. I am constantly on the lookout for other well-named buildings or structures throughout the city (the Boobies Building, Jubblies Park), the wife and I are getting along fine, and I can now even get our new dog to sit without piddling on the carpet, though having her “play Tacoma” is a long way off.
(Part One of Dispatches from Tacoma)
Fish Up Your Skirt (travel)
“Excuse me, are those fish up your skirt?”
This was, I suspect, what was said after a customs official at the Melbourne airport heard “flipping” noises from underneath a woman’s dress. Upon further investigation it was discovered that, indeed, the woman was attempting to smuggle fifty-one live fish into Australia by stuffing them up her skirt.
This is the most recent news article I've received on Australia and it's only one of many that include, in a quick rundown: an arsonist caught working for a fire brigade, a casino blackmailed with chocolate bars, and an unfortunate incident that occurred when Sydney police accidentally sent images of child pornography to 1,800 local schools over the internet.
These are just the highlights, of course. Certainly the most famous news to come from Australia in the past two years is the confirmation that a dingo really ate someone’s baby back in the 1980s. This comes after the accused mother was jailed, divorced and made to suffer an onslaught of sitcoms that used her suffering cry (“a dingo ate my baby!”) to get a few good laughs when, it turns out, a dingo really did.
Such is the nature of Australia though: cruel, quirky, and consistently original. Sure, the country has its history and culture, its famous books and painters like every other nation, and for the most part I’ve tried to include all that in these pages, too, but if you’re just as interested in women who smuggle fish up their skirt, then this is the book for you.
Then there is New Zealand, whose history not only involves a hefty supply of cannibals and deadly geysers (the world’s most deadly at that), but a nice set of public toilets in the Northland that is, rather quaintly, the country’s most admired art piece to date. Of course, there are the glowworms, too, and a preposterous amount of sheep in New Zealand, and fewer countries in the world have done more to promote new uses for the bungee cord than this South Pacific nation, which alone makes it quite an interesting place to learn about.
I’ve included it all in here, as much as I could at least. All of the facts are factual, all the truths are truthful, and the opinions shared are just that. When it comes to absolute specifics with dates and names I’ve been as accurate as my research will let me be--though it seems that no one can agree on whether Melbourne’s first name was Batman or Batmania (including Melbournians) or whether the last Tasmanian Aborigine died in 1876 or 1888.
But that’s as far as my disclaimer will go. Anything else is entirely my fault, and that’s all right with me.
Enjoy.
(Preface to The Dingo, the Baby, and Other Misadventures)
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