How I became a Snow Sayer

Frozen rain and lines on maps - a poem and photo essay

Snow, Waiouru Camp 1965 (Photo: Mike Wicksteed)

I - Over the rainbow

It happened gradually and unintentionally. One day I realised I could tell when small ice crystals were going to fall from the sky and I began to share this cold tip with those around me. Folk were initially dubious, but when I proved to be right more than not, my reputation spread like a blizzard’s blanket. Sports coaches began to seek me out, particularly if there was a critical match coming up. Friends and neighbours would quietly ask the question almost before saying hello. Penguins and polar bears would…no,  I’m kidding.

My first experience with snow was in 1961 and came about because I was a ‘paper boy’. (Bear with me.) I delivered newspapers for an afternoon daily, the Auckland Star. Six days a week I would collect my pile of folded-in-half, large, flat rags from the pick-up depot and load them into saddle bags. Then I would ride off on my route around the South Auckland suburb I lived in - much like the boy in this 1961 photo.

Auckland Star delivery boy 1961
(Auckland War memorial Museum - Tamaki Paenga Hira)

from Riding the news

 

Down Kenderdine, my small-boy legs bowed and toes

just touching pedals, trying not to brake

too hard, lock-up, be thrown off with the weight,

trying to remember whether the next box

was a tube or slot, pick up time on the move

via a one-handed roll or further fold to fit,

not like runs that road-pitched at the front step.

 

Downhill, green canvas saddlebags

bulging with ninety inky newspapers, 

other dailies rolled, rubber-banded, stacked

their rags in panniers fixed over 

rear wheel carriers and in front-mounted

grocer’s brown wicker delivery baskets, 

not like my flat-folded, frame-straddled Stars.

 

Down Bridge, houses stopped by the railway line,

the jailed bank robber's lifeless end-place

standing shamed, yesterday's paper gone all the same,

dog-leg to Cambridge, then part-push, part-ride,

up the footbridge to run out the run on Puhinui with

a lap to where seal became gravel on Roscommon,

one last past the quarry, where houses turned to grass…

 No One Home, Keith Westwater (Mākaro Press, 2018)

My meet-up with snow came about not because of reverse climate change in balmy Auckland (which would have made headlines around the world) but because I won a competion organised by the Star for its delivery boys (who, in those days, were all boys).  The competition involved writing an essay on world affairs (as if we had time to actually read the newspapers we were delivering) and the prize included a trip to Christchurch in the South Island.

It took place in early winter 1961 over a long holiday weekend. On arrival after my first trip in an aeroplane, I remember being startled by Christchurch’s cooler clime. I was billeted with the family of a man who worked for the Auckland Star's sister daily - named, imaginatively, the Christchurch Star. The double eiderdown placed on my bed was very welcome.

On the Sunday, my hosts took me on a drive over Banks Peninsula (Horomaka) to the settlement of Akaroa. Unlike every other place in the country, Akaroa was founded by French settlers. They arrived in 1840  to lay claim to the South Island, but Britain had beaten them to it by a mere week. (It was like a photo finish in a sailing ship marathon.) The colonists decided to stay, rather than return home to France, and to this day Akaroa has a Māori place name and French rue.

While it didn't snow during the trip, it had done so a day or two previously, so there was plenty of the white stuff lolling about on the peninsula's higher ground.

Snow on Banks Peninsula (Canva AI generator)

A long time after my trip south, I wrote this annotated poem. The last stanza describes my reaction on seeing snow for the first time.

Christchurch and Banks Peninsula/Horomaka - a short history

 

Sparks fly as Horomaka tries mightily to right Maui’s up-turned waka.     A legless tarantula, Banks Peninsula grows fat on Canterbury loess.     Moa graze Horomaka’s trees unaware of pecking order changes coming to Aotearoa.   Before Ngāi Tahu came Kāti Māmoe gatherers of pounamu and before them Waitaha gatherers of kai.   Captain Cook two thousand years too late banks on the peninsula being an island.     Ghosts of Ōnawe’s dead stalk Horomaka’s hills taiaha still parrying Te Rauparaha’s lead.     Banks Peninsula may not be Mururoa because le waka Français is slow to Akaroa.   Landing at Lyttelton Canterbury pilgrims trek the Bridle Path to their new Angleton.   On first seeing snow, a boy sings “Over the Rainbow” on the road to Akaroa, not knowing one day he would return to learn about loess and snow.

…Horomaka comprises two extinct volcanoes which were active less than half a million years ago. Their craters… now form the harbours of Lyttleton and Akaroa...Maui is a God in Māori mythology who raised the North Island while fishing from the waka (canoe) of the South Island.   …The lower slopes of the peninsula are mantled with a yellow, wind-blown silt, called loess, which was blown by the nor'westers during the most recent ice advances…    …Moa bones as well as gizzard stones of these and smaller birds, are common in the loess...   Waves of Māori settlement punctuated human settlement in the area before Europeans arrived. Pounamu is a jade or greenstone found only in the South Island. Kai is food.   …Originally Banks Peninsula was an island, but it became tied to the Canterbury Plains at some late stage in geological history. …Captain Cook thought it was an island, charted it as such and named it after Joseph Banks, his expedition scientist…   …During the inter-tribal Musket Wars, Te Rauparaha, Ngāti Toa warrior chief from the lower North Island, attacked settlements on Banks Peninsula, where Ōnawe pa was destroyed and many Ngāi Tahu were killed. A taiaha is a traditional Māori weapon.      When an advance guard of (French) settlers arrived [in Akaroa] in August 1840 they found that British sovereignty had already just been proclaimed over all of New Zealand…. Mururoa was a French nuclear test site in the Pacific Ocean.   The “First Four [English settlement] Ships”…arrived at Lyttleton [in] 1850…the immigrants soon made their way across the Bridle path over the Port Hills to the site of Christchurch…   Reference:  A.H. McLintoch (Ed), An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, R.E. Owen, Government Printer, Wellington, 1966

Keith Westwater

II - Sound slowly going AWOL

Waiouru and Ruapehu
(National Library, photo by Gordon Onslow Hilbury)

My seminal relationship with snow started three years after the Banks Peninsula introduction. I had joined the NZ Army at 15 as a boy entrant (again, no girls, but that is another story). The Regular Force Cadet School was located in Waiouru, a military camp perched on the southern edge of a volcanic plateau in the centre of the North Island. The camp had been set up to train Second World War soldiers and its army architecture, interspersed with parade grounds, reflected this. The surrounding tundra-like tussock grass gave it a distinctly gulag ambience.

Waiouru barracks with snow
(Keith Westwater, personal collection)

Ruapehu, which has a permanent snow cap, is the largest of the plateau's still-active volcanoes. Waiouru Camp, at an altitude of 2,700', is 15 miles to its south-east.  The 9,000' massif looms over the Camp in a majestic but sinister way, which I became instantly aware of when I leapt off the troop train in the early hours of 13 January 1964. It was mid-summer in New Zealand, but behind me the mountain glinted in the moonlight like an iceberg marooned in a desert.

Waiouru Railway Station
(Grantham House Publishing, painting by W.W. Stewart)

Over the next three years, my experiences with snow were curated.  Most snow descended on us intermittently during winter, less so in autumn and spring, but even summer was not immune to a rogue raid. The heaviest falls came from the southeast, because the Antarctic snow factories could send their produce our way on a route unimpeded by land. The higher the snow-bearing clouds had to rise, the more load they loosed. Waiouru’s altitude made it a ‘dump it all on me’ destination.

Snow was shy with it’s ETA. Some mornings we would wake up, look out our windows and smile, as there would be no square-bashing today - snow had captured the parade ground and all points around. At other times, flurries fell from the sky all day like waves of paratroopers.

Snow-covered Waiouru parade ground
(photo: Keith Westwater)

The arrival of snow from the south-east impressed most - a gradual greying, partnered by stillness, sound slowly going AWOL. Advance flakes would rattle noiselessly on the ground, before the main body invaded. Sou’west snow storms were a coarser breed, less friendly, but at the point of delivery, still noiseless and ineffable.
 
My Waiouru practical snow tutelage came to an end in December 1966. By then, I had learned to read the physical runes of snow’s imminent arrival, but didn’t know what I didn’t yet know about its earlier portends. The next four years would rectify that.

III -  Waiting for a patina of history

Canterbury University old town site building
(photo by MB on Pexels)

In 1967, the Army posted me from Waiouru to Christchurch to study at Canterbury University. I arrived to find the university’s grey-stone cloistered campus was being relocated in stages from the central city to an outer suburban site. Sir Ernest Rutherford, the world’s first atom splitter, had studied at the old town site in the 1890s. The new site’s high-rise university lecture blocks were characterless, sterile in their modernity, waiting for a patina of history from their own Rutherfords. I had opted to study geography as my major subject. Luckily, and unlike some of my other subjects, the geography department remained at the old campus while I was at Canterbury.

Geography is an enigmatic amalgam of subjects. Some say it’s a jackdaw that picks the twigs out of other disciplines to build its own nest. I liked that it borrowed topic areas from which it fashioned its own lens. One of its facets sequestered the studies of weather and climate and how they could be visually represented on maps.

Early on, I learnt the language of meteorology - its patois and patter. I learnt about air, how it likes to mass and how such bodies have relative pressure (High or Low) and are mobile, but sometimes run out of puff and truculently park up. I learnt how air moves to equalise pressure (which we experience as wind) and that the boundaries between air masses are called, rather militarily, fronts - Warm or Cold. (The term is apt - a front's weather delivery can be violent.) I also learnt how water vapour in the air can condense, form clouds or fog, and fall earthwards as rain, hail, sleet…or snow.

And I learnt how these matters can be shown on charts known as weather maps that if read properly, can help predict the near future or look at the past.  In the map below, for example, was there southeast snow in the days before the 15th of April? The cold fronts exiting stage right pose the question.

New Zealand Weather Map 15 April 2009
(Science Learning Hub – Pokapū Akoranga Pūtaiao,
The University of Waikato Te Whare Wānanga
o Waikato, www.sciencelearn.org.nz)

During my Christchurch sojourn, I had further encounters with snow. Christchurch is sheltered from the south by the land where snow first held my hand - Banks Peninsula. Lyttleton Harbour on its Northern side is home to the port of Christchurch and the Port Hills separate the city from the harbour. Sometimes snow would seize the hilltops and sometimes it would take the city as well. The Christchurch roads would melt the snow quickly, though slushy city streets had far less appeal to me than snowed-up parade grounds.

My time down south finished at the end of 1970 and at the start of the next year I found myself back in Waiouru for a further stay. Early on and with very little afore thought, I began to snow say.

The Snow Sayer

 

Now and then 

and as an aside

he would advise –

in the next day, or so

there will be snow.

 

When asked how he did it

he said he could read

between the lines

of a weather map

the code for snow.

 

To disbelievers he said

that TV forecasters

three hundred miles away

can’t hear pianissimo in

passages of snow.

 

Or, when news came

of his firstborn’s conception

it snowed, so now he was

fated to foretell

the birth of snow.

 

But at night, outside, alone

he sipped the wind

listened to the clouds

ran his fingers over the sky

for spoor of snow.

Tongues of Ash, Keith Westwater (Interactive Press, 2011) 

This was not my last posting to Waiouru and during then and the early 1980s, I became adept at presaging snow’s arrival there. It was not to last, not because I lost the knack, but because I began lodging in places where snow never or rarely came out to play - Auckland, Palmerston North, and lastly Wellington. I have been resident in the capital now for nearly 4 decades. It did snow here in 2011 for the first time in 35 years and I took a photo of its visit to our back yard.

Snow Wellington 14 August 2011
(photo: Keith Westwater)

My snow saying this event was never going to get on parade - its expected arrival had been communicated by weather forecasters in the newspapers for days beforehand.

Rooflessness and tin cups

A poem essay about street beggars

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Image: Canva

The bag lady

she decants each day in cans

scans the drains for plastic treasure

trades lice and rats with lepers

raids the ruins for pins and tapers

 

clears the bins of tripe and crabs

plaits ducted cable to her tresses

drapes her scabs in spats of peat

scrubs the crud from her dresses

 

daubs the seats with lunar runes

pans for stipends with her cup

spiels and reels a descant tune

laces tea with beer and acid

 

her nightly sleep is lanced with pain

as spider bites redact her brain

and render essence of a past

so redolent of yours or mine

 Felt Intensity, Keith Westwater (Mākaro Press, 2015)

 

When I was growing up in 1950s New Zealand, the idea that society would allow people to live on the streets was abhorent to my pakeha (European New Zealander) parents’ generation. Our indigenous Maori population too, particularly those who lived in or who were still strongly connectected to their tribal communities of origin (iwi) were  confounded by a society that could ignore the plights of community’s isolates. Strong Māori cultural values of family connectedness and care were pallisades of inclusion, not rejection.

 

This phenomenon of ‘homelessness’ as we now call it, is however, a misnomer. The notion of ‘home’ has attendants of family, heart and hearth, the nest. Their absence does not mean that someone does not have a roof over their heads or is not a recipient of accommodation care. Perhaps it should be renamed  ‘rooflessness’, which more clearly suggests a person who lacks shelter and has no habitat that affords a right to food and to rest one’s head in comfort.

 

During my childhood, the safety nets of neighbourhood, church and family were not as threadbare or ripped as they are now. There was little chance that anybody could slip through a hole in the net and sleep rough for any length of time without being rescued by one of these agents of care. Communities prided themselves on the extent to which they looked out for and after our les miserables, our downtrodden, our disenfranchised. In those days, to take absence from society, one had to deliberately and literally ‘go bush’, in the tradition of the Man Alone trying to escape demons or deeds demanding a reckoning.

 

Even our left-leaning governments of the 1940s and 50s began funding construction programmes that assisted low-income folk into newly-built living accommodation. They were dubbed ‘State Houses’. Such schemes would have been regarded as decidedly communist in the United States, but our national character has a strong egalitarian streak, and there is no way back then we would have tolerated homeless beggars on the streets. We couldn’t understand why this acne present in American cities was tolerated or ignored there. It seemed there was more pride in making sure a dime was put in the tin cup than in retooling the foundry of social and economic conditions that forged the cup in the first place.

 

But I shouldn’t have been so smug about our nobleness in housing the homeless. Since those times and in the last 30 years, rooflessness has become endemic in New Zealand. I can’t remember when I first started seeing beggars of no abode on our streets. I began to recognise people who had nowhere to go at night because, like hermit crabs, they wandered town toting their worldly goods, stopping serially at rubbish bins to search for scraps, or scavenging cigarette butts from the pavements. In reality, though, street-visible beggars are only the tip of the homeless iceberg. Many others bereft of roofs use cars, tents, storage sheds, or garages as a substitute for accommodation that is fit for purpose.

 

New Zealand’s homeless probably became visible on the streets in the early to mid 1990s, which was a time that coincided with the start of 9 years of right-wing governments. (To be fair, they had followed on from a supposedly left-wing government that veered violently away from its worker-party roots and carried out savage market-driven economic and social reforms.) I don’t think the right-wingers could believe their luck at what they inherited. But then, like right wing governments always do, they focused on what could be pared back, not on what should be provided, on policies that played to their voter’s prejudices, not on principles of fairness, on redistribution of taxes but not incomes, and on fixing the pothole issues of the day, not on ripping up the roads to penury. The result was a steep rise in unemployment and poverty, and a spike in negative social and health indicators for the population at large. The promised trickle down of economic benefits, as always, defied gravity and flowed uphill to the rich.

 

My education in the state of homelessness in Wellington became more data driven when I started working in the heart of the city about 15 years later. I would walk the retail section’s ’Golden Mile’ at lunchtimes and count the number of beggars. They generally sat accompanied by their tin cup proxies outside luxury goods shops that catered for the cruise ship tourist market.

 

Today there are twenty-three

Dead leaves

scratch the city street.

 

The sky is light-weak,

wearing another winter’s manifest

on a sleeve

abstained by blue.

 

The street’s address

is solid Golden Mile,

where Versace, Gucci,

and Swarovski sup with

the Saatchi brothers.

 

It is voting season too,

the season of evasion,

sanitised reports,

lies disguised as promises,

squabbles about

deciles of squalor,

poverty, jobs, housing,

inequality;

 

during which

politicians will make

the brothers even richer.

 

On Golden Mile

beggars squat.

Today, there are twenty-three

between Tory  Street

and Parliament.

 

Dead leaves

scuffle round their feet.

 

Felt Intensity, Keith Westwater (Mākaro Press, 2015)

The Bucket Man

Wellington homeless man, Robert Jones. Dominion Post (Newspaper): Photographic negatives and prints of the Evening Post and Dominion newspapers. Ref: Dom/1993/1223/1/16-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. /records/22312964

 

A homeless person in Wellington in the early 2000s was particularly emblematic of those times. His name was Robert Jones, which was ironic, because there was also a wealthy and powerful property magnate of the same name. Robert the monetarily poor was dubbed the ‘Bucket Man’ by Wellington’s citizens because of his tote, which he carried with him on his daily street travels. He was noted for giving away much of anything that was given him to other less fortunates living on the streets. He became famous when a photo of a portrait of him appeared in the local newspaper. The painting depicted him with a halo cast from a street lamp behind him, the pole of which formed a cross.

 

The Bucket Man died on the city streets he trudged in the winter of 2003, following a spate of particularly cold nights. His death caused an outbreak of compassion from the citizenry both for him (belatedly) and the rest of Wellington’s homeless. It also provoked a singularly uncaring response from city hall. The cold-hearted councillors focused on trying to prevent the city's nomadic homeless from trekking and sleeping on the CBD's streets. Yes, the Council twined to the right.

 

The Bucket Man Poems

(for Robert Jones, 1942 – 2003)

 

The Stations of the Bucket Man

 

1

One Monday, Mr Jones walked out

of his Tinakori Hill campsite

with his birth certificate

bank statement and will

knelt in the gutter

at the intersection

of Grant and Park Streets

and died.

 

2

He was an urban Man Alone

before he went bush in the city.

His mother said his downfall

was his (bleeding) sensitivity.

 

3

The artist who painted him

with a halo and cross

was asking us to reflect

on what we would say

if we met on the street.

 

4

He stopped daily

at the Golden Arches 

buying coffee and a bite to eat

in lieu of loaves and fishes.

 

5

The stockbroker’s assistant

nearly threw him out

of the counting-house 

seeing he was not a Pharisee.

 

6

From his portrait

he looks over the shoulder

of the businessman

who wanted to buy his burial.

Who does he think he is?

 

7

 

One Christmas

there was room for him at the table

but he declined

stopping instead on the porch

to chat about the garden.

 

8

When he gave Wellington’s poor

money and clothes given him

they were, for a while

rich beyond relief.

 

9

In church he placed in the plate

twenty dollars just given him

then said to his benefactor

two would do.

 

10

One cold night

not long before he left us

he rested in a bus shelter

and told a passing Samaritan

he was alright

and thank you for asking.

 

11

At his funeral it was said

how useful a bucket was

living on the street –

for washing at the public fountain

for carrying things in

for using as a hat

when God wept on you.

 

12

Blessed are Wellington’s homeless

for they shall inherit the earth

on Tinakori Hill.

 

 

Conversation at the Gates of Heaven, 30 June 2003

 

Let’s see now…Jones, isn’t it? Robert William, of no fixed abode, Wellington, born in Australia.

Yes.

 

Yes, yes, I have it now…. You’re the rich Bob Jones who lived it rough on Tinakori Hill and distributed property to the poor.

Yes. You’re not confusing me with another….?

 

No, no, we have you as having no earthly encumbrances of any note and no notes of any worth, but your constant gifts of donated items to the needy were noted.

[Embarrassed shuffle.]

 

Well, I must admit, they really fast-tracked you, didn’t they? I mean, you’ve only been gone a couple of minutes and here you are! Most do at least a little time in purgatory.

[Silence.]

 

Right! Right! Well, everything seems in order. Go on through and make yourself at home.

Thank you.

 

Hang on a minute! Who are you giving those sandals to? What are you doing with that bucket?

 

 

Situation Report, July 2003

 

• Mr Jones was a very private former public servant living on the streets of Wellington who scattered angst and guilt amongst the middle classes with his presence and politeness.

• In the days since his death, I have had no reports of real or apparent resurrections or insurrections and no incidents of small scale or wholesale conversions to the carrying of buckets in the streets.

• He will probably be remembered as a living parable of antipathy to modern city life.

• Only City Hall has been moved – as a precaution, I am sure – to ban the homeless from assembling or gathering together in his name.

Tongues of Ash, Keith Westwater (Interactive Press, 2011) 

 

It is perhaps fitting that recently in New Zealand, state and local agencies responsible for responding to natural disasters have begun looking to formally incorporate iwi and where they live (marae) into their response plans, so that the displaced from disaster-affected communities can be quickly roofed and fed. Marae have already demonstrated their ability and unselfish willingness to do just that during and following major weather and earthquake events. Now we just need the values underpinning these community acts of rescue and care to become the bedrock of reforms upon which all of society's homeless can become roofed and fed. The country has, however, just elected a new right-wing government. I won't hold my breath.