In some ways, the land is still as I remember it. Emerald-green hills dotted with darker green pines, eucalyptus, rimu, kauri and tree ferns flash underneath the airplane as we circle over the rolling landscape that stretches southeast from New Zealand's largest city. It's been a long time, so I can't place the exact locations I'm looking for as we fly south from Auckland in our borrowed Cessna 182. But somewhere there, underneath the left wing, is the farm I lived on all those years ago. And somewhere, on one of those roads stretching out to the right, is the place where, in the space of a few critical moments one night, my life forever changed.
Looking down at the once-familiar trees and hillsides, old memories stir and wake again, bringing me back to a time and place before I knew I wanted to be a writer; before I knew how the world looked from the sky. I was 19 then, and I'd run halfway around the world to this dramatic island country in search of adventure and either escape or myself, depending on how you wanted to look at it. I found all of that and more. And as the memories come charging out of the past again, I realize that this tiny mountainous country, tucked away in the South Pacific east of Australia, was really the place where all of it-the flying, the writing, and my life as I know it today-began.
The land looks very different to me now, of course, returning to speak at the New Plymouth Aero Club and explore the country by air. Oh, it's still every bit as breathtakingly beautiful as it was all those years ago. No doubt about that. I remember walking around for the entire six months I lived here with my eyes agog at the sheer, unbelievable beauty of the masterpiece Mother Nature had created in such a short span of miles.
But while the land may be the same, my perspective on it has changed. Not just because of the intervening years, but because I can now view it from the unique vantage point I've come to take for granted in the United States-that of a thousand feet up in the sky. When I lived on the Hamilton family's farm here, I thought we were out in the middle of nowhere. But when I took off from Auckland in the 182, we simply crossed the bay, hopped over a ridge, and found ourselves just down the road from the farm. Looking out the left window of the Cessna, I can still see Auckland's bay, as well as all the ridgelines that define the edges of the broad, rolling valley where I once lived. I hadn't realized the farm was even in a valley, let alone a valley that was so close to the city.
"This must be how people feel when they get their very first airplane ride!" I find myself thinking with a kind of awed wonder as I suddenly see places I once knew as pieces of a larger, geologic picture I'd never seen or understood before. I've flown so long in the U.S. that I almost can't get my mind to return to a time when I didn't comprehend the big picture as well as the details. But when I lived in New Zealand, I didn't have the money for planes. I hitchhiked or took buses-which meant I'd never seen the land from the air before. Not even from an airliner.
Of course, the view isn't all that's changed in my life since I lived here. But my perspective on some of the bigger changes is also being altered as I revisit New Zealand's land and sky.
