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.