Day 64: From the Earthquake, Flowers

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I've settled comfortably in to YHA Napier, as I did into Tailor-Made Tekapo and YHA Te Anau and the Kiwi's Nest. I still have moments of acute distress when I think ahead to Rotorua and Gisborne, but overall I'm a lot calmer. I really like this YHA; it's been quiet well before midnight, and the staff is friendly.

They've also, as I found this morning, got a really great laundry room. I've said so much about laundry disasters in this blog that I think I ought to mention that YHA Napier's washers and dryers are clean, fully functional, and effective. I breezed through my wash with no trouble at all.

When the laundry was finished, I went out for a walk along the path beside the beach. (Walking on the beach itself is not practical; it is not sandy but pebbly, and there's a slope.) It was a warm day (finally) and the sun was very bright. I decided to go to the post office, which was several blocks away and a block inland, to see about mailing home that book and the gifts the lady from the cathedral had given me.

When I found that the book would have to go as a parcel, I decided to put in the pamphlet I'd been given as a part of the Art Deco Tour. (I read both the pamphlet and the book first, just in case they go astray in the mail.) That meant buying an envelope and going back to get the pamphlet, but that was okay.

As I walked back to the hostel, I stopped to admire the Sunken Garden, a park with huge, circular, raised flowerbeds, made to be looked down upon from the higher elevation of the Marine Parade, the seafront road. The central bed, which was chiefly planted with yellow flowers, had orange ones interspersed with it, and when I looked at them closely I saw that the orange ones spelled "Merry Christmas." They must be a long-blooming variety.

I had lunch, and headed back to the post office at 2 p.m., having waited until the sun was a little lower in the sky. As I neared my turn inland, I met an elderly local who stopped to speak with me. He encouraged me to walk a little further on to see the old seawall, built when all the land we were walking upon was Napier's Inner Harbor.

When I took his advice, I found myself in a lovely formal garden. There was an elaborate sundial, with lines radiating from its base indicating distance and direction to major cities worldwide. The lines were measured in miles; evidently the sundial predated New Zealand's switch to metric. The closest to home was Ottawa, 8500 miles. I peered in that direction, wistfully. There was also a fine Floral Clock.

In the center of the garden was a fountain. I remembered having seen it in the film shown as a part of the Art Deco walk. It was not particularly impressive in daylight, being a simple, round fountain in a round pool, but apparently it lights up in neon colors at night.

Seeing the fountain reminded me of what I had heard about these gardens. When the rubble left by the earthquake was cleared away, it was dumped onto the new land, the land that had been the Inner Harbor. As soon as the city had time to think of landscaping, however, the rubble was all plowed under, and these gardens were planted above it. The fountain bore a date of 1935, so it didn't take them long.

It occurs to me that one could do much worse than to take the shattered remnants of everything one has ever known, and use them to make a garden. The people of Napier were resilient.

Yesterday I was glad that I was avoiding the commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the earthquake on Thursday, as I generally dislike crowds. Now, I'm sorry I won't be there. I will, in fact, still be in Napier, but I'll be sitting at the bus station, waiting to catch my 11 a.m. bus. I shall try to observe two minutes' silence at 10:46.

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Photos

Sunken Garden
The orange flowers spell out "Merry Christmas."

Shining armor
Display at "King of Swords" knife and gun store. I window-shopped.

Comments

[Teresa]

Napier earthquake
A friend of mine was born in Napier in 1931, a couple of days after the earthquake. She used to love it when people said, "Shut the door! Were you born in a tent?" so she could say, "Well I was, actually."