Random connections, Hokitika, and falling in love with farming

Originally published January 2018.

Sometimes you meet a kind farmer one time at a contra dance in a small little mountain town in North Carolina, talk about permaculture for two hours, find out that he has a farm in New Zealand with his partner and lives there most of the year, and you go visit them 6 months later on their beautiful organic farm in Hokitika, NZ. I met Rob Danford at a random contra dance at the Apple Barn in Valle Crucis, NC around 6 months ago. I danced a few dances with Rob as my partner, and in between turns and twirls and claps, found out that he has been dancing for 30 years, me being very aware that I probably was not up to 30-year dance experience par, him giving humble pointers when that became apparent. You don’t talk very much in the middle of contra dancing, especially if you’re me who takes extra effort to focus really hard to remember the order of the dance as it is, because your conversation can quickly cause you to be the one that messes up the whole line, and even though everyone smiles when they try to lead you back to where you’re supposed to be, everyone is secretly saying “omg this effing new girl doesn’t know what the heck she’s doing (insert internal eye roll).” That is an exaggeration. But people can get very touchy about their contra dancing.

So I didn’t really talk in depth to Rob much that day, until after the dance, during the community potluck that happened afterwards. I found out Rob is a farmer, manages a property in the Boone area, has his degrees in permaculture/sustainability and botany, does a lot of work with plant breeding, specifically a certain type of sweet red bell pepper (it had won prizes), and man oh man did he know a lot about plants.

I just kept asking question after question, fascinated by his knowledge and finding so much endearment in his authentic passion for sustainable farming. Somewhere in the middle of my asking about his methods of plant breeding, or us talking about how important the relationship between insects and plants is in farming, or us moaning in complaint about the American food system, Rob begins a sentence with:

“Yeah at my farm in New Zealand….”

WHOA WHOA WHOA

“Rob did you just say your farm in New Zealand??”

“Yeah I live there October through May with my partner.”

“Wait Rob I’m going to be in New Zealand January and February of next year. Can I come visit you?”

“Yeah sure! As long as it’s fine with Susi.”

And then there was an exchange of email addresses and a farewell saying, “See you in New Zealand hopefully!”

And soon after that there was a confirmation email with a GPS address and a closure saying,

“Susi and I are looking forward to having you at the end of January.”

And it was done. I was going to go to Hokitika, New Zealand to visit my new farmer friend Rob, because that’s just what you do when random connections like that happen.

You respond with a big fat yes.

So January 26th came, and after we got off the Copland Track we dragged our crumbling bodies into Beep Boop, and drove 3 hours to Hokitika, a sleepy little beach town on the West Coast of the South Island in New Zealand, and were suddenly driving down the driveway to Rob’s farm.

I used to worry about these things, following random connections, hanging out with people I barely know, but following my gut in these situations has created a family all over the world, and I knew Rob would be another one in that family.

We parked and Rob and Susi bounded out of the house to greet us with smiles and hugs and how are you’s and it’s so great to see you’s–the best way to make you feel welcome very quickly.

It was past 7pm and we had hiked 12-13 miles that day and had not had dinner yet, so we quickly all dove in to prepping vegetables and talking nonstop catching up, asking questions, getting to know Susi since I hadn’t met her yet.

I’m mincing garlic and prepping chicken, Susi is next to me making courgettes (zuchinni) and potato salad. We’re talking about her job as a high school teacher, the NZ education system vs. the American education system. I look across the room and see Rob on a passionate rant about something and Danielle and Lucas smiling and engaged.

Fast friends being made around the table, conversation about people, about the land, about sustainability, about community, pointing our eyes to a more wholistic, healthy, happy world. These moments are why I’m alive.

Dinner was so yum. I baked chicken with fresh rosemary and oregano that I picked from the garden in the middle of cooking (oh how I long for the day when I have heaps of my favorite herbs right outside of my door), topped with caramelized onions, that I glazed with local New Zealand raw organic honey. And we had steamed courgettes, potato salad, and fresh corn on the cob on the side, with a rich Merlot to top it off.

OH MAN A KITCHEN AND REAL FOOD AROUND A REAL TABLE WITH WINE IN A WINE GLASS.

It’s the little things.

We ate until we were stuffed, as backpackers do when they come off the trail, and then Rob mentions this secret recipe whole foods dessert concoction he is famous for.

It was about to be dark, past 9pm now, so we all walked off our food babies with a short tour around the property.

Rob walked us through his jungle-looking trail around a small pond in the front of the house, naming every tree we walked by, relying on Susi when his memory fell short. Some of the trees were native New Zealand trees, some were trees that he grew from clippings he had brought back from all over the world.

Then we walked through the greenhouse, where Rob’s dozens of kinds of garlic heads were laid out and labeled, drying on beds to be eaten. Then there was a station where he was drying out red rose hips for seed. He let me try one, and it tasted like sweet fruit leather.

He showed us his famous red capsicums growing on their little stalks, and we raised our eyebrows at the plump grapes that were ripening on the vine that wrapped around the string and cord above our heads. He was growing passionfruit inside becuase it was Susi’s favorite, and there was even a banana tree in the middle, because why not?

We left the greenhouse and took a walk through the vegetable garden, which Rob leaves fairly wild, planting where he wants, letting birds drop seeds that sprout into wild varieties of random vegetables and fruits spread throughout what he has planted. He uses ferns for ground-cover, which he prefers over comfrey. There was every vegetable you could want in that garden. And all of my favorites – beets and basil and kale and zucchini.

Then we went out to the back pastures where they keep their sheep. We fed them our corn cob scraps and laughed at their surprisingly loud bleating.

And then we wrapped up the tour with Rob pointing to the pine forest in the very back of the property that they might sell to be logged but haven’t decided yet, and he showed us the little fruit and nut orchard Rob is creating, only a couple years in so it’s not producing much fruit yet, but he has a row of chesnut trees, apple trees of all kinds of varieties, pears, kiwifruit, and a few other kinds of nuts.

I was thoroughly impressed and thoroughly geeking out.

He pulls out a big silver pan and reveals his creation he calls “Berry Cake.”

“OH MY GOSH ROB THIS IS THE CAKE STUFF I ATE SO MUCH OF AT THAT POTLUCK.”

I forgot all about it. Rob made a giant pan of his famous berry cake for the contra dance potluck, and we laughed when I confessed that Rob’s berry cake was my entire dinner that night becuase I couldn’t eat any of the beef or pork dishes that other people brought.

Berry Cake is moist, gooey, slightly sweet, nutty, fruity heaven in a dense cake form, made with 100% whole ingredients, mostly oats and assorted berries, with some dried fruit, hazelnuts and sunflower seeds thrown in too. This batch was made with berries in season, raspberries and chilean cranberries, a new one for me. It’s basically all of the best parts about granola but in cake form. And having that after coming off the trail that day made it even more amazing.

We ate a lot. With vanilla ice cream on the side. Because I mean, you have to.

I have not been honoring my mild dairy allergy thus far in New Zealand. Whoops. Too much good cheese and ice cream.

Maybe this is one acceptable case where the phrase YOLO doesn’t make you cringe because it’s sorta valid, or at least maybe not quite so much? Whatever. I’m eating cheese and ice cream occasionally because cheese and cream is the culture here, so it’s in spirit of experiencing New Zealand in the most authentic way possible. RIght? Okay I’ll stop with the excuses.

We could have talked forever, but the stench still radiating from our armpits and clothes beckoned us to shower, so we said goodnight at a whopping 11:30pm, which is extremely late for us these days, and took turns in that glorious act that humans get to do to smell good, using real shampoo and conditioner and a RAG. Mine was brown when I was done. Yikes.

I have been reaching whole new levels of grime this trip, and I’m pretty proud of it.

I fell asleep within seconds of hitting the pillow, like I do almost every night here. My body hasn’t been so consistently exhausted in my life.

We slept in until 8:30am, again, late for us, but were lazy in bed for a while, slow to actually get up. I eventually did get up though, and the first thing I did was walk out to the garden.

Because,

kale.

I had been craving kale like a pregnant woman, and I wanted to sautee some with some eggs that morning–a classic breakfast of mine in normal life that I had not had in over a month now.

I walked slow through the garden, trying to identify plants as I walked past them on my way to the kale in the back left corner.

Rosemary, green onion, tomato, potatoes, beets, chard, sugar snap peas, green beans, oregano, broccoli, zuchhini, unidentified mass of green I didn’t recognize, corn,

and then finally,

The beautiful, tender arms of dinosaur kale, or lacinato kale as you will sometimes see in markets, sticking straight up just begging to be eaten. I plucked five or six stalks and walked giddy into the kitchen.

And then I sat down with my go-to breakfast of scrambled eggs with sauteed onions, garlic, and kale, with a sprinkle of smoked paprika on the top.

Yummo.

Rob and Susi left around 9:30 to go to a local farm gathering in town, and we stayed back to finally wash the pile of clothes that smelled so bad we thought they might be fermenting.

You know that scene in the grinch where he takes his socks off and they crawl away? I think every item of clothing would have done that if we had not trapped them in a plastic bag.

A funny piece of important information about the way that Rob does laundry at his house that just shows how committed to sustainability he is:

Rob hijacked the plumbing system that takes the wastewater from his laundry room sink and laundry machine and took part of the piping off of the drain pipe, leaving it exposed to where the wastewater will just drip right out onto the ground outside the side of the house.

But Rob doesn’t let it drip to the ground.

He has 6 giant buckets sitting outside that pipe, and when he does laundry, he stands there to collect the wastewater from the laundry cycle (which fills up 6 buckets exactly), and runs and waters his plants with the water, just in time to collect 6 more buckets from the draining after the rinse cycle, watering more plants with that water.

No waste. Energy efficiency. The permaculture way.

I have seen permaculture fanatics commit to many things, but this might be the most impressive, and something I have never thought about before.

And his laundry detergent is a very mild organic soap, so it doesn’t harm the plants, and is actually a good organic insect repellent when it is diluted in all of that water.

So everybody wins.

However, Rob was gone during our laundry cycle, so we got to play save the planet and collect the water ourselves.

And dang was that water NASTY. I knew our clothes were dirty, but the water that came out was somewhere between black and brown. Gross.

So we did Rob’s plants a favor and just collected the rinse cycle water, which was still way more dark than you would expect it to be. I guess that’s what happens when there are days and days of sweat and dirt and sunscreen and grime built up in the fibers.

We hung our laundry to dry in the greenhouse (not just a Rob and Susi thing–no one electrically dries laundry in New Zealand), and then hung around the house the rest of the afternoon until Rob and Susi got back.

Rob and Susi wanted to show us a few of their favorite places around Hokitika, so we loaded up in their car (I forgot what it was called, but it was a close cousin of a prius, duh, sustainability), and drove first to the Hokitika Gorge.

The Hokitika river is a deep turquoise blue river that runs through a big glacier carved valley, and you can hike down into the gorge to jump in the river, which of course we had to do.

Rob and Susi stood by and took pictures while the K’s and I took the frigid plunge, which was a lot less frigid than some other cold water plunges we have made these past couple weeks.

On our way back toward Hokitika we stopped by Lake Kaniere (pronounced Canary), a lake that reminded me of Watauga lake, just with taller mountains. We hung out for a while wading in the clear water and skipping rocks on the smooth surface, but were super tired and hungry for dinner, so it didn’t take much to make us ready to head back once the sand flies started biting.

Our last pitstop before going back to the farm was at the Hokitika beach, where the annual Driftwood and Sand competition was at its peak. Driftwood and Sand is a competition where people make these crazy contraptions out of collected driftwood from the beach, some professional level, built over weeks or months in someone’s garage, and some built that day, by families who brought a picnic and attempted to make something just for fun. We walked up and down the beach, gawking at the creativity that was put into making some of these sculptures, the most impressive being a driftwood leopard and a windmill contraption.

And of course one of my favorite life themes, finding beauty in death (melancholy Enneagram 4), was running through my head the whole time.

Then before getting in the car I had to snag a photo of the classic “Hokitika” made out of driftwood letters, that someone made randomly years ago and has stayed around to be one of Hokitika’s icons.

We headed back to the house to share one final meal with our kind hosts, including brie and crackers and kumara hummus, and a chicken and beans and rice combo that was glorious.

We sat on the deck and talked and talked and talked, and I became aware of the sadness that came with knowing that it would be a long long time before I was around the table with Rob and Susi again, since Rob is only in the states 4 months out of the year, and Susi is in New Zealand all year. But I sat with it, and soaked up our last evening, which turned into more berry cake, and this time mocha ice cream on the side, while Rob and Susi pulled out their dozens of maps, scrawling down itineraries if the weather is good, if the weather is bad, with arrows and underlines and bullet points, my favorite kind of itinerary,  to give us all of their favorite recommendations for where to go before we left the South Island, mainly in Arthur’s Pass National Park and Abel Tasman National Park area, where we were planning on splitting our last week of time on the South Island.

We folded our clean clothes, organized Beep Boop to be ready to head out in the morning, and went to bed with our stomachs and hearts full.

Our time at Rob and Susi’s poked and prodded at the tender part in me that really wants to invest and commit to a piece of land, till the soil, go through the hard labor it takes to create beauty and life, my hands in the dirt, sweat in my eyes, maybe this New Zealand wide brimmed hat I bought being my first farmer’s hat. It’s a life I am drawn to so much. Everything about it fascinates me and wraps me up in comfort and metaphor.

Though traveling is everything I have dreamed of, there are still significant moments where I am homesick to the core for a home in an undetermined place that has not yet been created, wondering what life will look like after all of this floating, what it will be like to be planted, to start growing roots of seedlings in the soil, and roots of my own.

I mean just imagine,

Giant basil plant

New breed of sweet red capsicum

Courgettes the size of my face

Sheep yelling

Bees buzzing

Ferns decaying around new seedlings in the sun

Their death providing a blanket of shade

giving life in their going back to the earth from which they came.

Experimental onions

Potatoes mounding

Beets bulging at their bases

Broccoli plant plucked of its final head

Monarchs laying eggs

Checking on their baby caterpillars every morning

To see if it’s time for transformation

Birds singing their songs

Sugar snap peas wrapping around and around forever

Roses and tomatoes so red they might explode

Passionfruit and lemons

Berries of every kind

A bananna tree

Because why not

And cilantro

Because it goes with everything.

And of course looking over all of it

Tucked away  in the back left corner,

That glorious, lush explosion

of kale.

And then there is you

In the middle of all of it.

Digging

Weeding

Watering

Sweating

Plucking

Pruning

Planting

Living

Loving

Giving

Receiving

Life.

Sustainable farming speaks to my soul holistically in a way that I have not found anywhere else. And it was a joy being able to learn from Rob and Susi, even though it was such a short time.

Rob will be back at his farm in Boone, NC when I return to the states. And we said goodbye, looking forward to picking blueberries together in the hot Appalachian summer, in the tiny little community where we met, our tiny little piece of home that is 8,651 miles away from us right now, but will be a little more connected when we get back.