Adventure Divas (25 page)
I toe-kick with a vengeance, grunting with every hard-earned step, focusing only on the next one to come. I imagine my thighs as separate units that propel, without failing. I don’t know how much time goes by, but I suddenly become aware of Ricky, who is touching me lightly on the shoulder, stirring me from my kinetic revelry. I lift my eyes and take in the totality of where we are.
Holy shit. “We made it?” I whisper to Ricky through the panting, my head slightly bowed with exhaustion. The narrow, hundred-yard summit, part Italy and part Switzerland, adorned by two crosses.
“Here vee are at the top of the Matterhorn,” Ricky says. “I am proud of you. You vill alvaays remember this, my champ,” he says, smiling, his mustache crusted with ice.
He is, once again, right. Alps and countries and rugged humbling peaks pour across the distance, and for the first time on this trip I see through another portal: gratitude. I am determined not to cry, or keel over with a heart attack, or plunge my ice ax into the sky in victory. Despite the cheese and yodeling, this is no time for clichés. All I can think of is apologizing to Ricky for turning into such a bitch (“It is normal, my champ,” he assures me) and getting a picture of Sky Prancer on the summit. She made it!
I slog over to Ben. “Please take her picture,” I say, and wedge Sky Prancer into the crisp snow in front of a hard-earned backdrop, and he clicks; her blue hair perfectly matches the piercing sky behind her. Ben lowers the camera and the weary but blissed look in his eyes tells me that we have all waged our individual battles getting up here.
Digger and Ben shake hands. Paul fastidiously covers Keith, who is shinnying toward the edge to get a better shot. It dawns on me that all of the tension these past two weeks was about the high stakes attached to our common investment—reaching this summit. So many things could have gone terribly, horribly wrong, and they did not. Caught up in my own nerves, and my own unchecked ego, I had failed to truly understand that each of us was packing a few extra pounds of pressure—but now I hear it hissing off into the nearly fifteen-thousand-foot ether.
Our time on top is brief, filled with a wordless communication. We relish our success in the cracks between doing our jobs—filming, directing, protecting one another. Our kind of yodel, I guess. There is no high-fiving, but there is a pure and happy visceral moment together.
We begin the descent, the most dangerous part of any climb. Adrenaline surged us up the mountain, but a new rhythm accompanies our troupe back down. Funnily enough, I don’t see Zermatt, only layers and folds and jutting peaks of snow-covered majesty.
5.
STROPPY SHEILAS AND MANA WAHINES
Stroppy sheilas are uniquely Kiwi gals with grit. “Stroppy” . . . derives from the adjective “obstreperous,” meaning boisterous and untameable. Stroppy women . . . are feisty and hard to handle, and they are viewed with a mixture of annoyance, wariness and respect. “Sheila” is a curious antipodean colloquial term for women—it’s the other half of “bloke.” Sheilas lived down on the farm, wore print frocks and were good sorts. . . . It’s a term that’s dying out—sadly, because it has far more going for it than its decorative, defined-by-their-tits-and-bums successors, such as the “chicks” of the seventies or the “babes” of the nineties.
—SANDRA CONEY, AUTHOR AND EXPERT ON NEW ZEALAND’S WOMEN’S HISTORY
“
O
kay, so keep the cameras low, focusing on the boots and hooves. Don’t pull up until the last line. Is Ram Cam holding?” I ask.
We bought an old hi-8 video camera at an Auckland pawnshop and have spent the last hour rigging it with bungee cords and duct tape to the neck of a very smelly, very oily, very fidgety hundred-and-twelve-pound ram. Two local Kiwi farmers, wearing black singlets and gumboots, yip and shuffle to keep the herd of seventy-five sheep within some semblance of control. The occasional rogue sheep is chased down by a border collie, or by one of us. We have exactly one chance at this opening standup, as these sheep are going to be too traumatized, and scattered, for a second take.
“Okay!” I yell. The farmers start whooping and running, driving a heaving mass of off-white curly hair toward me as I start the standup.
“Waaay down under there are a quiet couple of islands”
Holy crap.
“where bucolic scenes can be deceptive, and rogue politics are the order of the day.”
Oh shiiiii—
“It’s a place where pastoral conservatism meets twisted brilliance”
A thundering cloud of terror-stricken sheep, who are unused to being Hollywood extras, begins to overtake me. Nanoseconds before impact, the cloud bisects and snakes around me with the g-force of spring runoff in a slot canyon. One. More. Line.
“where biculturalism is a verb—and it’s all run by stroppy sheilas!”
I hit the dirt and protect my torso as the maelstrom passes in a final
baaaaah
ing melee.
“Uh, I think we got it,” says Michael Gross, with a big, warm laugh. He gives me a hand up and we swap a the-things-we-do-for-TV look. Of medium build and height with dark hair, glasses, and a friendly, full-body slouch, Michael has been a creative conspirator on all things diva ever since he edited the Cuba show. For two unrelated grown-ups, he and I have developed an oddly fraternal relationship. Our shared sense of quirk led to this stunt, which will give sheep—which outnumber humans seventeen to one in New Zealand—top billing in the show.
Ram Cam lies trampled in the mud, detached from its four-legged tripod (quad-pod?). The camera is destroyed, but we spool the tape back into the cracked casing. “It can be salvaged,” Michael says with uncharacteristic optimism.
“Right,” I say, wiping a chunk of sheep doogie off my forearm. “Guess we’d better get going to the first interview if we’re going to make it on time.”
“Good morning Auckland. Today the burn rate is eight minutes, so be sure to lather on the number thirty,”
advises Channel Z, Auckland’s modern rock station.
“
Aoteoroa
is what the indigenous Maori people call New Zealand,” says Simon Griffith, this episode’s producer, who lives in Seattle but was raised in New Zealand. “It means ‘land of the long white cloud.’ But the cloud doesn’t protect you from the hole in the ozone layer,” he adds, scratching his brown beard with a burly forearm. Simon is unusually
lumberjack
for a producer. Must be his brawny Kiwi blood. He is driving us from the pastures farther into the farming communities outside of Auckland. In addition to Simon and Michael, our crew is rounded out by Liza Bambenek, a young, strong, Santa Fe–based camerawoman with a mop of short dark hair; and Jan McKinley, a local soundwoman, who will keep us from getting lost time and time again.
“Weird. You hear the burn rate statistics here like you might hear the price of pork bellies in Iowa, or weekend box office sales in L.A.,” I say.
“Why New Zealand?” many people asked in the weeks running up to this shoot. “Kind of ‘soft,’ isn’t it?” A seemingly domesticated set of islands was an unlikely location for one of our shoots. Yet, New Zealand’s importance lies in its unique political reality: The country, quite literally, is run by ladies. On September 19, 1893, New Zealand became the first country in the world in which women got the vote—a full twenty-seven years before the United States. And as of this writing, women hold nearly all the key positions in the country: prime minister, Maori queen, Supreme Court chief justice, governor general, and attorney general.
Women run the country.
Interesting.
Outside of utopian sci-fi novels, my images of societies in which women head and control the power structure are limited to Amazonian legend.
What kind of sociopolitical tectonic shift occurred to create this reality? Is New Zealand a particularly fertile place for divas? If so, why? And there were other things that intrigued me about the country beyond its feminized politicians. New Zealand’s progressive political reputation extends to race relations. Today’s Maori, the country’s first-nation people, and Pakeha, New Zealanders of European descent, are said to have created a relatively peaceful bicultural modern-day society, despite the shadow of British colonial rule.
Oh yeah, and there was a certain fish-loving writer on the wild and wooly South Island I wanted to meet.
In any case, we decided there was more than enough here to justify a
Divas
shoot. We hopped on a plane, mapped out a three-week road trip through the North and South Islands, and, striving to serve both fashion and function, rented a bright orange 1972 Valiant.
The Valiant is a sedan manufactured from 1966 to 1976 by the now-defunct Plymouth division of Chrysler. The quintessential muscle car, the Charger, might be considered its groovy uncle. Valiants were huge sellers in Australia and New Zealand and were popular as souped-up race cars. Attached to this particular Valiant’s tail end, like a poorly buried lead, is a boxy, off-white caravan with an orange racing stripe, replete with faux teakwood paneling on the inside: home.
“Hard to believe, but the Valiant was originally manufactured as a compact car. Got the same body type as the Duster,” says Simon, who, along with fellow Kiwi Jan, will do most of the driving on this trip because the rest of us tend to veer to the right side of the road into oncoming traffic.
“I bet the metric system stuck here, too,” says Liza, who joins me in having experienced the United States’ debacle in metrics during grade school.
“I like the color—and the fact that it was made the same year Shirley Chisholm ran for president.”
Liza looks at me, puzzled. She’s not that old.
“Yeah, she’s a fine old sheila,” muses Simon (about the car, not Chisholm), tapping her dashboard with affection, apparently inured to the fact that the car is without brake and tail lights. His patience with the Valiant will serve us well, it will turn out, as Old Sheila will break down repeatedly over the next three weeks.
We drive Old Sheila through the bright green, lazy rolling hills and farmland that surround Auckland until we reach Marilyn Waring’s farm. Waring is a former member of Parliament (the youngest ever—she was only twenty-two when she first entered the hallowed halls in 1975) and author of the book
Counting for Nothing,
which is widely regarded as a seminal work of progressive economics. Trundling down the loopy driveway, we spot a person in a gray T-shirt, lumbering gumboots, and black khaki pants emerge over a grassy knoll. She has a stout, efficient build and short brownish-gray hair, and her thick hands are clapping together.
“Come on darlings! Come on!” she chortles to the hundred or so goats that trail behind her. This is our first—and unforgettable—image of the intellectual powerhouse who imploded some of the most sacred orthodoxies of economics, and made her country famously No Nuke.
We have one day with Waring. A busy academic, lecturer, and prolific writer, she made it clear we would have to join her routine in progress and interview her along the way as time allowed. So after perfunctory introductions we get down to business: farm chores.
CHORE #1: FEEDING THE PIG
“Here, shake this, Holly,” says Marilyn, shoving a bucket of slop into my hands. “Tam! Tammi! You awake? Where are you, pig? There she is. She didn’t feel well yesterday. Come on. Come on. Yes!”
“Uh, have you had her a long time?” I ask.
“Yeah, probably about six or seven years. We picked her up late one night wrapped in a towel at the local hotel, and she’s named after the barmaid—come on, Tammi!—because, well, the barmaid was a redhead,” she says as a 104-pound, wiry, auburn-haired creature lumbers its way over to us snout first and starts, well,
pigging out
on slop. Marilyn explains that Tammi is the resident garbage disposal, thereby keeping away possums and other scavengers.
“How long have you lived the farm life?” I ask.
“About fifteen years. When I was in Parliament I represented a rural constituency. Actually, Helen Clark’s [the prime minister’s] family home and her parents were in my constituency. I was so envious of the lifestyle.”
“The lifestyle of your constituents?”
“Yeah. I knew I just couldn’t live in town forever; I never really was a city person. I was forced to be in the city part of the time I was in Parliament but it’s just not me, so it had to be a farm. You know, you have to be quite resilient,” she says.
“Do you have to be more resilient to live on a farm or to be in Parliament?” I ask, knowing she was elected to Parliament three times, and trying to lead this discussion toward something less agricultural.
“It’s completely different,” she begins. “I found Parliament personally really brutal. Of course, in the 1970s there were only ever four women in the Parliament and for one whole session I was the only woman in the government.
“But the resilience that’s required on the farm means really hard calls: Sometimes when animals are sick and cows are having calving trouble you have to make up your mind about life or death. Here,” she says, nodding at the expanse of the farm, “you’re working all the time with elements that are more powerful than any humans can ever be, and the only way to survive is to work
with
them. Whereas in politics humans assume they have power
over,
most of the time. So this is much better,” she says, letting Tammi lick the last bit of grub from the pail.
CHORE #2: GETTING THE CRITTERS IN THE SHED
“Come on, come on, girls!” Marilyn says, somehow successfully guiding an organic mass of goats in the right direction simply by gentle command. I doubt her fellow Parliamentarians were as easily herded.
“You were twenty-two, right, when you entered Parliament? I mean that’s—”
“That’s a baby. But when you are twenty-two you don’t think about it, and besides, you know, people in their twenties have a right to be there. Women have a right to be there. Indigenous peoples have rights to be there. It’s supposed to be a house of
representatives,
so it shouldn’t have been so quaint,” she says frankly, referring to the largely white and male legislature she became a part of.
“Did you do something about that?” I ask.
“Well, in lots of ways I don’t think I achieved anything. I can’t show you a memorial or a private bill or anything that I managed to pass. Sometimes I think some of the most important [achievements] were stopping some of the worst things happening. In the seventies and early eighties it was a really important time in New Zealand for the women’s movement and for me to act as a kind of a bridge and sometimes as an interpreter—just to be there, you know, screaming, ‘Excuse me but . . .’ ”
No memorial, maybe, but in fact Marilyn is responsible for her country’s antinuclear stance—a formidable contribution. Marilyn felt strongly that there should be no nuclear weapons inside New Zealand’s sovereign territory and committed a now legendary act of political courage. In June 1984, she announced that she would vote against her party in favor of an opposition bill to ban nuclear weapons.
Marilyn’s political party, the National Party, controlled the government, headed by Prime Minister Robert (“Piggy”) Muldoon. In response to Waring’s revolt, Muldoon dissolved Parliament and called a snap election four and a half months earlier than the election would have been held (some say Muldoon was visibly drunk at the time). The Labour Party, then in opposition, won the election in a landslide, bringing the Muldoon government to its knees and ushering in a proud antinuclear era in New Zealand’s history.
All this was the result of a gutsy stand by Marilyn, who has just said to me, “I don’t think I achieved anything.”
