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Mountains are to climb, not to carry around.
Yeah gidday and welcome to 2021.
Blimey. Those numbers sound like a sci-fi movie set way into the future. Moondome 2021. I checked my space helmet had fully pressurised before leaving the gravity pod. In actual fact, I checked the window was slightly down on Whitevan so Plumless Walker could get some air and not overheat while I met up with Shaz outside Brian’s carport at 34a/112 Kikuyu Grove.
Brian was a distant brother to Shaz, on her mother’s side, of the Lands clan. Before becoming Shaz Lizard, she was Sharon Lands. Her great, great, great grandfather on her sister’s side was Abdulaziz Lands, who eventually made his fortune strip-felling the forests west of Konini. Hence the original name, Kauriless Lands, now Kaurilands. He was only 11 when he boarded the coalpowered steamer and waved goodbye to his father and his home town of KynaHAbl. With only six Uzbekistani so’m in his pocket, a jaunty sea shanty on his lips and the skipper’s promise of all the seal he could eat, he headed off on the three-year voyage to New Zealand.
When he first stepped off the steamer and sank up to his knees in Laingholm mud, he immediately felt at home. However, as he and a travelling companion named Walter ‘Waitakere’ Akbar tramped ever further inland, they became horrified by the complete saturation of trees. How they missed the wide open barren lands of home. Thousands of square miles with only sand and humus shrubs.
Fortunately, Walter was returning to his family land near Titirangi and they hatched a plan to transform the lands back to a more natural, picturesque state.
After years of backbreaking logging, they had finally achieved hectares of cleared dirt. Many ground covering plants were trialled and failed until they had the good luck to swap a breeding pair of possums for a sack of ‘dew’ bulbs. These immediately flourished and spread throughout the land, eventually being immortalised in that great folk song, As free to roam as Wandering-Dew by Howard Hickleberry.
Now, over a century on, we are helping Brian clear out his carport. The last remaining land of the Lands: sold to a developer who is going to demolish the carport and erect a stack of nine bedsit apartments. The southfacing, subdivided section is worth a fortune because it gets absolutely no sun, so there are huge savings on window tinting and air-conditioning.
As I watch Shaz let Plumless out to go the toilet and roll on the kikuyu I spotted a tear in the corner of her eye. There was no need for words. I took her hand and she smiled.
“What’s so funny?”’ I asked.
“Oh, nothing,” she said. I then noticed she had pulled a packet of Yakka seeds from her apron.
At least there will be a few wonderful plants still here in Abdulaziz’s memory.
As he so wisely said, “Mountains are to climb, not to carry around.”
So true. So true.
Later, Lizard.
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