Familiar/Strange

In 1970, Fred Ferrentino decided to ditch the scene in the US of A and move his family to New Zealand. I was five at the time, and I still remember the way the air smelled the day we stepped out of that pencil thin Boeing 707 onto the tarmac in Auckland. New Zealand smelled different to California. It was this fresh rich grassy earthiness that was unlike anything my young nose had previously inhaled.

I moved away in 1984, and have been back to New Zealand six times since. That dawn arrival has surprised me every time I’ve stepped out of the terminal. Even though it’s surrounded by a big city now, 55 years after the first time I caught a whiff, the air outside of Auckland International Airport still smells different. There are plenty of tells that Toto ain’t in Kansas anymore – the sparrows walking the carpets inside the terminal building, the burble of softer accented and less urgent voices, the various sightings of men in short shorts, or gumboots, or bare feet, the light switches and door handles, the colorful waterproof banknotes – but step outside into the calm pre-dawn, and the smell tells me with absolute certainty where I am.

Home?

No. Not really, not anymore. Familiar, for sure. An olfactory switch that immediately makes me want to take off my shoes; pulling me back decades, scratching at imaginary sandfly bites and tasting the salt water of Waihi Beach on my skin. But strange too. My nose has become accustomed to the dry air of the American West. My skin does not know what to make of all this luxuriant humidity. My now twangy accent feels jarring and out of place down here. My brother Ric moved back to the US in 1980. I moved stateside at the age of 19, and only my parents remained in the land of the long white cloud.

Being on the other side of the planet, I didn’t really keep up with my old high school friends. And reconnecting with some of them via social media during the dark months by my father’s bedside as he argued with pancreatic cancer in 2012 left me feeling like some leftover song lyric. But there was this other web of connections that cracked open and grew, starting about 25 years ago, all stitched together by the common thread of mountain biking. And with each long flight to the bottom of the world, I got to know some more of these remarkable friends, and through their coercion, learned more about the country of my upbringing than I had ever really paid attention to during my formative years.

Meanwhile, a reverse migration of the Ferrentino clan occurred. My brother Ric retired, and with his kiwi wife Vicki moved down to Havelock, where he began his quest to land the biggest kingfish in the Marlborough Sounds. Their daughter, my niece, followed soon after. And so between them, my other brother in Nelson, some good friends in Rotorua, Wellington, Nelson, and Christchurch, I realized I had a pretty robust list of “people to see, things to do” should I find an excuse to point myself south again. Ric deciding he wanted to throw himself a decent shindig to celebrate turning 70 created the perfect excuse, and so I found myself a few weeks ago standing outside the terminal in Auckland before sunrise, gulping in lungfuls of the old familiar while waiting for my connecting flight to Blenheim on the South Island.

A few days of great conversation and spectacularly unlucky fishing later, I pitched up in Nelson, picking up a loaner Ibis Ripmo AF from Mike Stylianou. Stylie, along with his partner Sandra, is the New Zealand importer of Santa Cruz and Ibis. He has at various times ripped my legs off in Nelson and Santa Cruz over the years, so I dropped him a note asking if it made sense to bring a bike down and try to sell it. He responded that the global mountain bike glut was alive and well in NZ and that it was a fool’s errand to bring a bike down for the sake of selling it, but that he had a nice bike I could borrow. And so that was set. Sweet. Sweet as.

I had some concerns, though. The Ripmo AF is a very nice little tank of a bike, but with a 170 ZEB and a MaxxGrip Assegai up front, it signaled a bit more serious intent than my aspirations of rolling some classic bikepacking tracks out west. I was afraid of being overbiked. But then again… About a decade or so earlier, I had been on my way to visit Stylie, and recalling the previous trip when I had shown up with on a Santa Cruz Highball shod with Maxxis Crossmarks and proceeded to get completely beaten to pieces by the primal brutality of Nelson riding, Stylie had said in one of his emails; “Bring some Nelson tires this time, Mike. Nelson Tires.”

We caught up over coffee, faffed around with pressure settings, then headed out to Silvan Forest for a sampling of De La Luna, the trail that Stylie and Sandra and crew had built over the prior year of “Friday afternoons”. As the front tire skittered over loose kitty litter atop hardpack into the first chunky dropping switchbacks, I thought maybe being overbiked wasn’t so bad.

A day later, after the long grind up through Codgers, even after deciding to keep things semi mellow and opting to take the “less murderous” Te Aro Koa trail down from the top of Fringed Hill road, I had lost count of the number of times I thanked that big fork and that stiiicky Assegai for saving my sorry ass as I pinballed through root gardens and rock sections so varied and diverse that they might as well have their own dictionary of definition the same way the Norse do for describing snow.

A note on Nelson riding: It is steep. The climbs are stout, and the descents do not fuck around. Many trails start up in native Beech forests, where the surreal tractability of the Beech leaf is juxtaposed against an absolute chaos of tree roots that really take a bit of getting used to. As you drop out of the Beech into the “temperate broadleaf forest” below, the roots become less of a problem but are replaced by rocks and soil conditions that can range from “ball bearings on cement” dry to “slippery as a greased eel” wet. As the local trail network has grown, there has been some push to develop singletrack that is more accessible to a broader population of riders. Grade 3 stuff instead of grade 5, as described by people down there. However, this is a geologically violent land for the most part, and it gets hit from the west with weather that at times verges on Old Testament biblical. So, in a few short years, those carefully built grade 3 trails have eroded into a gnarl of exposed forearm thick roots, skull sized rocks, and wheel channeling ruts through a clay that in the right/wrong conditions defies any attempts at traction. Basically, intermediate trails degrade quickly into expert ones.

This is true for much of New Zealand, but especially Nelson. It probably applies with some variation to Coastal British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest, but in the same way that the air smells different down here, the trails have their own feel to them as well.

And so my riding becomes this immersion into texture as much as color and sound and scent. The way tires hook into the dirt here is different than what I am used to. They call gravel “metal” and so I find myself churning uphill through forests ringing with birdsong that can’t be heard anywhere else on the planet, noticing the way the clay based dirt beneath the gravel pulls at my tires while wondering about how much more potentially awesome the whole gravel scene would be if it was called “metal riding”. Listening to bellbirds and tui calling out from thickets of manuka, kawakawa, cabbage tree, any number of beech species once you get up high, then the big podocarps totara, matai, rimu, on and on. Birds found nowhere else in the world, singing from trees that grow nowhere else in the world. It smells different it feels different it looks different.

The hills are steep. The clay that makes my tires feel sluggish uphill is conditionally treacherous on the downs. If it’s wet, pucker up. If it’s dry, it might be heroic unless it is really dry in which case it’s back to being sketchy again. Unless it’s covered in beech leaves. Lean, learn, feather the brakes, lean, learn, repeat.

Beech leaves really are like corn flakes, both in appearance and ability to retain moisture. So they create this constant carpet wherever the trails run under beech trees that at times feels like going up a tire size or installing inserts or suddenly having way plusher compression damping. Everything gets quieter under the beech, and driftier, and more comfortably predictable. It is hard not to feel like a hero riding in the beech. Until things get steep and rooty, and then you are quickly reminded of your less than superhuman abilities and it’s back to eyeballing bail-out options while panic braking and once again thanking the NZ Ibis importer for that great big fork and that sticky front tire.

This is not solely a Nelson phenomenon. I found myself overheating big brake rotors in Hanmer Springs, Craigieburn, the rain hammered west coast, even the Port Hills of Christchurch. “Nelson tires, Mike. Nelson tires.” Fuck, may as well apply that to the whole bloody South Island. What New Zealand may lack in sheer landmass it more than makes up for in intensity of corrugation and the sheer diversity of ways that traction can be completely elusive. And I say this with awe and respect and admiration. Everywhere I have ridden so far down here has been intensely challenging in a fascinating way. It’s like the same sort of education I received up in British Columbia last summer, but with an almost kaleidoscopic explosion of vegetation types, bird species, and traction nuance.

I come home from each ride dirty and humbled, feeling like I just spent four hours conquering the great unknown. Then I realize that I basically strugglebussed a whopping 28km that ate 1000m of climbing and that there are spry kiwi septuagenarians staying at the same lodge who probably hiked that same distance in about the same time, with 25 kilograms of weight on their backs. They nod sympathetically and tell me that I’ll be alright after a pint and some chips, but I can sense that they don’t really know why I seem so shattered after every ride. I suspect people here are quietly, gently, optimistically tougher than I am, tougher than a lot of people are, made from some of the same resilient stuff as these magical ancient forests that I am stumbling through.

The clock is ticking. I have five more sleeps until I get to complain about air travel and dystopia again. Five more days of listening to birdsong, of eating meat pies and feijoas, of hunkering down in huts and waiting for squalls to pass, of slithering around on trails that challenge me on every level while trying my absolute level best to get my average speeds up to about 8km/h, of riding with friends who seem to only grow more gracious and graceful with time, of soaking in a place that in almost every way makes me feel hopeful and optimistic even as it completely beats me down.

It’s not home, but it’s familiar. And strange. But also so comfortably just right in so many ways. I will miss this, all of this.