Finding Beauty

Coming from the Panhandle of Texas, I considered myself an expert in extreme weather. Growing up in a place that saw 75 degree temperatures and brilliant blue skies one day only to be followed by freezing, blowing snow the next will make you feel that way. And as a former resident of Hawaii - known equally for it's dramatic green mountains and it's flat golden beaches - I thought myself well-versed in extreme geographic changes as well. However neither the Texas weather nor Hawaii's beauty could have prepared me for the things I've seen this week.
To look at New Zealand on a map isn’t that impressive. Two islands, diminutive in size when compared to their nearest continental neighbor, Australia. But if traveling in a minivan that has a bed, dining area and entertainment room has taught me one thing it’s this – you can pack a lot of stuff into a small place.
When I last left you we were budding residents of the Hang Dog, which would incidentally become just as addictive as our host had warned us on our first night.
Since then much has changed. I am sitting now in the well-equipped and completely middle-classed Holiday Park in Fox Glacier (the town, not the actual glacier).
If you’ve got a moment get out a map of New Zealand and check out the distance between Abel Tasman (the most Northwestern corner of the South Island) and Fox Glacier (about a four or five hour drive down the West Coast). It’s not very far – just far enough to realize that beauty comes in all shapes, forms and textures.
I’m no artist but I got an appreciation for color this week. We’ll start on Wednesday. After a restful night at the Hang Dog Lisa and I got up and headed for Totaranui – the gateway to the Abel Tasman Coastal Track. The track is a hike which had been suggested by guidebooks and word-of-mouth alike. No amount of prose or talk could have prepared us for what lay in store.
I can’t take you to that place but this is the closest I can get. It’s an excerpt from my journal written while actually laying on one of the most pristine and least crowded beaches I’ve ever laid eyes on.
To borrow a line from Jimmy Buffet – “There’s this one particular harbor. And I happen to be there right now. When God began creating colors for the world this is where He came to create blue.
The hike to get here (which followed a drive that would turn the most seasoned rollercoaster fan green about the gills) crept and crawled through humid, dense rainforest. Suddenly the dust path would give way to sand and there she would be – the Sea. I have stood on her shores as she raged against the coastline. I have watched her pound into age old rocks and slyly steal away the earth one grain at a time. But here – here she puts on her most dazzling blue dress and waltzes with the earth in translucent waves. She dances across the golden sands. It is as if the Sea is smiling here – and the whole earth smiles with her.
There are shades of blue in the water that man has yet to name. I can’t describe it other than to say that there is no where in the world that you can climb out of a cab or stumble from some fluorescent lit hotel and see this. It must be – at least to the smallest degree – sought after and pursued.
That beach was all a girl chasing summer could hope for. Granted the water was a tad chilly but the complete isolation and the golden warmth of the sun put me right into the mindset to listen to Jimmy Buffet tunes and drink something frozen with an umbrella in it.
Now flash forward to today. Following yet another guidebook must-do and more hear-say, Lisa and I traveled down the coast in pursuit of something I have heard of but never actually seen. Today the girl chasing summer took a detour on the road to sandy beaches and found herself at the base of winter’s most daunting and timeless ally – a glacier.
Now this may sound a little silly but before today a glacier was something that did not command the correct amount of respect from me. They were simply large blocks of moving ice. Very sslllooowww moving ice. Very distant very slow moving blocks of ice…You get the point. But after today – that is a completely different story.
A glacier tour around here will run you about $85 New Zealand. They give you some sturdy boots, clamp-on spikes for walking on the ice and rain gear (if you are smart enough to request it – I was not). Than a very good looking guy straight off a Bounty Paper Towel commercial swings a pickax over his shoulder and leads you through a quick hike onto the glacier for amazing views and lots of pictures. Well – that’s what the brochure said. In reality, Mr. Bounty takes you from your bus into a driving rain shower where your Scotch-guarded, budget-friendly Adidas windbreaker becomes immediately obsolete and your camera is tucked away in layers of material in hopes that the torrential downpour won’t leak through your already damp backpack. I’ll admit – 25 minutes into our 4 hour tramp I was thinking that $85 would have been much better spent on a new raincoat and a cup of hot chocolate than tramping through dense undergrowth following some lunatic with a pickax that seemed to think this was just a normal walk on a lovely afternoon.
The rain even dampened my first glimpses of the glacier but as we neared the monster (which is about 13 km in length – you get to convert that to miles) I must say that I became much more interested in that slow moving block of ice.
By its very nature a glacier is an enormous and intimidating sight. I’ve often seen ice conforming to the land be it a slick layer on a road or a thick sheet on top of a pond or water tank but never have I seen the land conforming to the ice. This glacier is not a result of a force of nature – it is a force of nature itself cutting a slow path to the ocean, leaving a carved valley in its wake.
By the time we reached the base (sopping wet to my very skin) and put our cramp-ons onto our boots, you could see the rocks and dirt that had been drug into the ice and smoothed out. Deep, dramatic cracks appeared giving the glacier a strange appearance as if it was a gushing river frozen in an instant instead of a huge formation made slowly and deliberately over hundreds of years.
We tromped, completely wet and half frozen, onto the ice which displayed shades of white and blue that equaled the purity – if not the shade – of the ocean I had seen just days before.
Mr. Bounty, in all his good lumberjack-like appeal, made walking on the monster while swinging his pickax look romantic, heroic even. This little Texas farm girl with soaking wet pants and boots much too wide for her feet made walking on the ice look like – well, walking on ice. My movements were so calculated and over exaggerated that I must have looked like Bambi on ice minus the endearing cuteness.
Despite my graceless movements, I was becoming enthralled with my surroundings. The same substance that I had so recently swam in was solid all around me. I marveled at the fact that the ocean’s blue had looked so warm and inviting but the same color (albeit a different shade) was stony and cold. But no less beautiful.
Water from the recent rain and ever present melting factors had washed out tunnels and created new, impromptu streams on the glacier surface. The air was surprisingly moderate – the coldest part at the edges of the glacier where an ever present wind chilled the surroundings. Walls of ice rose up like false waves made of glass. The terrain quickly and constantly changed. The rain had stopped at the base and held off for as long as we were on the ice. Here were those views so talked about! A random ray of sunlight bounced off the distant end of the glacier creating a blinding white that must be about the same brilliance as the light seen at the end of many a metaphoric tunnel.
Walking back to the bus, my knees screamed in agony but my mind was too busy trying to put together words to describe what it had just seen to pay much attention. This is as close as I can get to describing it:
Beauty does not always mean comfort. Beauty is an awe-inspiring, mind-altering sight that is beyond comprehension and outside our realm of understanding. It is as simple a wave washing up on a deserted shoreline and as complex as a sold wall of ice so hard that time cannot stop its progress.
Beauty is not always about your perspective but also about your ability to perceive. It is timeless and effortless. And sometimes you’ll find it on a warm ray of sunlight, a guidebook suggestion or in the tracks of Mr. Bounty’s freshly carved ice steps.

I hope you are all doing well and enjoying the beauty around you as well. Our time grows short - only a week in New Zealand! Time flies here just as quickly as it did in the Northern Hemisphere.

Love from the road...