Green.
“The color of money?”
Oh no, green everywhere. All green.
“With envy?”
Oh no, so much green, all the shades of green, even ones you’ve never seen before and don’t have names for. It’s all green there, so green you feel like you are being sucked into the fecundity, that the green will swallow you, compost you, grow out of you, like tendrils reaching and spiraling from a log, then moss will cover you, and then you are gone.
“That sounds unpleasant.”
It is unpleasant, but you don’t notice it at first. When you fly over the North Island and its peninsulas and the small islands that swim beside it like green fish, you think, “Oh how beautiful!” but then you land, and you’re so taken in by the loveliness, and the clarity of the light, and the plethora of new, saturated colors, and the warmth the people have for complete strangers, that you don’t notice that the landscape is seeping into you. The green surrounds you, pulsing behind everything else, and you’re breathing the pollen, and the trees and plants; they flourish inside of you. And that’s just in Auckland, the most concreted-over part of the whole place.
Then you get in your car and drive South. At the top of the Bombay hills you can see the next county through the fronds of the tree ferns over hanging the motorway: the Waikato. A quilt of even more shades green, with fields and fallows, and rolling volcanic hills making the quilt undulate. It rises in the air and slides back down, and you drive into it. If you turn left and drive east, you’ll have to traverse gorges and a range of mountains before you get to the Pacific. If you turn right, you can drive through the soft, pushed hills, their grass corrugated by sheep tracks. Eventually you will get to the black sand and the churning Tasman Sea, and views so wide you can always see the arc of the Earth. And you have to get away from all that green, so you turn right at Hamilton, and you drive west, and the road curves and climbs and drops, with farms on either side, then trees and forest, then farms again. Eventually the road twists like a corkscrew up and over the crest of hills that break before the coast.
“The color of money?”
Oh no, green everywhere. All green.
“With envy?”
Oh no, so much green, all the shades of green, even ones you’ve never seen before and don’t have names for. It’s all green there, so green you feel like you are being sucked into the fecundity, that the green will swallow you, compost you, grow out of you, like tendrils reaching and spiraling from a log, then moss will cover you, and then you are gone.
“That sounds unpleasant.”
It is unpleasant, but you don’t notice it at first. When you fly over the North Island and its peninsulas and the small islands that swim beside it like green fish, you think, “Oh how beautiful!” but then you land, and you’re so taken in by the loveliness, and the clarity of the light, and the plethora of new, saturated colors, and the warmth the people have for complete strangers, that you don’t notice that the landscape is seeping into you. The green surrounds you, pulsing behind everything else, and you’re breathing the pollen, and the trees and plants; they flourish inside of you. And that’s just in Auckland, the most concreted-over part of the whole place.
Then you get in your car and drive South. At the top of the Bombay hills you can see the next county through the fronds of the tree ferns over hanging the motorway: the Waikato. A quilt of even more shades green, with fields and fallows, and rolling volcanic hills making the quilt undulate. It rises in the air and slides back down, and you drive into it. If you turn left and drive east, you’ll have to traverse gorges and a range of mountains before you get to the Pacific. If you turn right, you can drive through the soft, pushed hills, their grass corrugated by sheep tracks. Eventually you will get to the black sand and the churning Tasman Sea, and views so wide you can always see the arc of the Earth. And you have to get away from all that green, so you turn right at Hamilton, and you drive west, and the road curves and climbs and drops, with farms on either side, then trees and forest, then farms again. Eventually the road twists like a corkscrew up and over the crest of hills that break before the coast.
Finally when you get there, you just want to rush to the water, to get away from the green which is making your lungs ache, and you drive through Raglan and park your car at Ocean Beach and run onto the black iron sands, so hot from absorbing the sun that it will peel your feet, you can feel it burning through your sneakers, and at the last minute you shed your shoes and your jeans and your shirt and plunge into the dark water. It is so strong and thick and malevolent that you get pulled under by a wave almost immediately. There are signs you don’t see until after, with skulls and crossbones, and they are not warning about pirates; you should not be swimming there—it’s only for whales and sharks and bait fish. And as the wave pushes you out and down to the sea floor, which is far deeper than you could have known, you realize nothing in New Zealand is what you thought. It is alive and it is wild, the land bigger than the people imposed on it, the sea bigger than the land, and you are held under by the force of the water.
You open your eyes and you realize you are surrounded by the deep sea black green of the Tasman, and you give in; you’ve been swallowed by green after all. But then randomly, impersonally, the sea lets you go. Imperceptibly at first, you start to rise, the sea green-black moves and changes and you are back in blue: midnight blue, then indigo, dark slate blue, then ultramarine, through navy, phthalo, then the suns shoots through it and you see cobalt and shafts of turquoise, then steel and azure. Everything lightens, the surface beckons: cornflower, dodger blue, sky blue but not sky, soon baby blue, Alice blue, then finally air. You look up and do see the sky—bright royal blue, punctuated by huge white clouds, and then you remember to get the hell out of the water before it takes you again. You stagger from the blue across the black towards the green beyond; it reaches out to cradle you.
You open your eyes and you realize you are surrounded by the deep sea black green of the Tasman, and you give in; you’ve been swallowed by green after all. But then randomly, impersonally, the sea lets you go. Imperceptibly at first, you start to rise, the sea green-black moves and changes and you are back in blue: midnight blue, then indigo, dark slate blue, then ultramarine, through navy, phthalo, then the suns shoots through it and you see cobalt and shafts of turquoise, then steel and azure. Everything lightens, the surface beckons: cornflower, dodger blue, sky blue but not sky, soon baby blue, Alice blue, then finally air. You look up and do see the sky—bright royal blue, punctuated by huge white clouds, and then you remember to get the hell out of the water before it takes you again. You stagger from the blue across the black towards the green beyond; it reaches out to cradle you.
