Early 2024 and early 2025
In and around Okere Falls, New Zealand
I could not understand why Scott’s alarm was going off, and I had no idea why he’d changed his alarm to sound like R2D2, bleeping and blurting robot language at me at 7 a.m. the morning after I’d flown in from Bangalore.
It was February of last year and we were in New Zealand because we’d planned to run an ultramarathon before we both got injured and decided to go anyway, since we’d already bought the tickets. Scott picked me up in Auckland and we drove south to Okere Falls, where we were staying in a nice little trailer surrounded by forest and just uphill from a brilliant, frigid lake. I sat up and crawled to the edge of my bed, which was lofted over the bathroom on the far side of our temporary home. R2D2 whistled and jabbered. Why was Scott not waking up, is what I wanted to know. Also, did he like Star Wars now? In two decades of friendship I had never once heard him mention Star Wars or even sci-fi, so what in the exact hell was happening? Hello? It is 7 a.m.
Scott opened the door to his room on the opposite side of our place and bumbled out. He squinted up at me.
“Is that your alarm?” he asked.
“No, what? I thought it was yours.”
We both turned to look out the window, where the sound was by then obviously coming from even if we couldn’t see anything. It was a tūī, a small-ish, hook-beaked bird that flashes the colors of gasoline in the sun. I had no idea birds could sound like that.
-
“Turn off your light!”
A year later and I was back in New Zealand, this time in the middle of the race I’d planned to do the year before, only I was running alongside my friend John instead of Scott. The sun was by then well below the horizon, and the canopy above us must have been thick, because the only light that found its way to the ground came from our headlamps.
John had stopped a few meters behind me. I turned around and looked at him. “Turn off your light,” he told me again, and before I did I saw him turn his head to the left. Neon green slivers shone just off the path, like hallucinogenic grass stains dripping down the darkest velvet curtain. I could hear John’s smile when he spoke. “Glow worms!”
-
The pūkeko is a blue-black bird with a red beak that is not so affectionately known as a swamp hen. They are pretty and goofy and quite common in New Zealand, but Nikki, who had come with me this year along with my parents, could not seem to spot one. I pointed them out as they tramped through the grass along the side of the road, but she glanced over a second too late. They were out in the yard behind the home where we were staying, but she was still asleep. She had gone ahead to a hot spring spa and when I showed up with my dad about half an hour later, about a half dozen pūkekos were hassling a man in a parking lot to give them more of whatever he had in his palm. I told her this as we were leaving together and she said, “what the hell.”
-
Back to the race. John and I were trudging along what looked like the same cave-dark trail through what might as well have been the same one square mile of forest when he stopped again and told me to look off to my right. I turned off my light all by myself this time and stared into a pair of golden orbs like two small, luminous street lights. Slowly my eyes traced the outline of the creature’s body. She or he was standing upright or sitting back on her haunches, maybe the height of my knee give or take but who can say, inspecting us as much as we were inspecting her. “What is that?” John asked, and I told him I had no idea.
The little creature swiveled her head back and forth, just like a cat when they’ve hyped themselves into the zoomies, muscles tensed and ready to sprint for no reason, though in this case the small thing probably thought she had best get out of our sight. John and I pondered her for a moment more and then her coiled legs sprung and she rustled off through the trees. Back at home the next day, John’s brief Googling told us that we’d almost certainly seen a brushtail possum, a creature that, I am sorry to say, does look a bit cuter when left to the imagination.