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.
