Foothills Farmstead: Part One

I KNOW.

I'm so behind, it's not even laughable anymore--it's just sad.

My excuse is that I've been too busy living it to write about it. Well, here goes.

But first, I thought I'd give you a visual of my trip so far, not counting the flights across the US and the Pacific, of course. Three cheers for Microsoft Paint.

Image from Google Maps

I'm pretty sure Hamilton was where we stopped on the bus and I had my first meat pie, then over to New Plymouth, and finally the tip of the red bubble, Levin (luh-VIN), is where I am now. Tomorrow, I'm leaving for Sydney, Australia, and then I'll be back here for the better part of June. I'm hoping to get down to Wellington at some point, and then on my roundabout way back up to Auckland to fly out, I'll be hitting Matamata and Cathedral Cove, both of which I'm SO excited about. I don't know if I said this before, but I'm not going to even attempt the South Island this time around. There's too many things I want to see in the North Island alone.

Sunday, the 26th of April (yes, almost a month ago) was when I arrived in the tiny town of Levin on the InterCity bus. I spent some time at the Te Takere library/community center, and then finally got to meet Carolyn. She hugged me on sight.

Carolyn is essentially living in a secret paradise. You're driving in Levin and then you cross the rails and go down a road that looks like it dead ends, but it doesn't. You turn left, go a little deeper into the farmland, and then you're surrounded by mountains and foothills all the way around, with just one road leading out--only ten minutes from town, but you might as well be 100k away.


This is where I've been for the last month. Just opening the curtains in my bedroom every morning is a thrill, because I get to look straight out at the sun rising over the eastern mountains. There are horses, sheep, cattle, and ducks all around, and nothing but varying shades of green for as far as the eye can see.

Carolyn gave me the tour and I met all the animals:

• Logan, the black stallion
• Rosie, the bay mare
• Dannii ("as in Dannii Minogue"), Rosie's chestnut offspring
• Two sheep whose names I can't remember
• Kyra, the boxer
• Three cats: Poppy, Quentin, and Carly

All three horses are pure-bred Arabians. Carolyn brought Logan and Rosie home with her from the US after living in Virginia for thirteen years, and foaled Dannii herself here in New Zealand (edit: I misunderstood that bit--Dannii was born in the US). Logan looks most like the classic Arab, although apparently good quality black stallions like him are hard to find. He's absolutely stunning. I have a serious crush on him.

And here's Dannii, staying nice and dry.

And Rosie, the oldest and cutest of them all.

Here's Kyra, looking all sweet and calm. In reality, she will explode into ecstatic leaps and bounds as soon as I take another step.

And apparently I was too busy photographing the animals to think of getting a snap of Carolyn. Maybe in another post. 

My first night, some of Carolyn's oldest and closest friends (Judy, Neville, and their son, Jamie) joined us for the rugby match--Wellington Hurricanes vs. Brisbane Reds. I should just tell you right now that Kiwis care a little bit about their rugby. As Nev put it, "It's only our life."

We had chicken burgers, which were amazing, and Judy brought hot fruit crepes with plenty of fresh cream for dessert. I had only seen rugby in one or two movies and never on television, so I was in awe of how fast-paced it is, and rough. The stamina of the players is incredible. The sport is just as nonstop as soccer/European football, but has all the tackles and none of the helmets or padding of American football. Yet somehow their hair/beards stay perfect. I won't go into the finer details of how the game is played, but it was incredibly fascinating and impressive to watch. Suffice it to say that those men are more manly than you and their thighs are bigger, too.

Then it was Monday, my first day of work in New Zealand. I had watched Carolyn give the horses a feed Sunday evening, so Monday I started learning to care for them on my own. Carolyn is gone from around 11:45AM until after 9PM four days each week, and all the animals are my responsibility during that time. I learned pretty quickly that there are no "days off" on a farm.

Every morning. <3

Most of the mornings here either look like this:

Or like this:

They both hold their own beauty and magic. When I see the mist like that, my mind instantly begins singing, "Far over the misty mountains cold" and it makes me happy.

And here we see in the distance my dream author abode:

The first week was definitely an adventure, because all three horses knew I was new and tried to pull tricks on me daily--a bit like every kid I've ever babysat. ("Oh yeah, we always sleep with the lights on," and "No, we don't go to bed until 10".) The tricks are much less frequent now, though, so I guess we're progressing into an actual, functional relationship.

I've learned that working with horses requires a lot of thought, as well as patience. You have to think through and be aware of possible scenarios, and when something goes wrong, you figure out a way to prevent it from ever happening again.

For example, since Logan is a full-on stallion, he's never allowed near the girls. He's also not allowed to have less than two fences or gates between him and the girls at any given time, because if he is close enough to touch them, he will very likely hurt himself or them or break the fence/gate in trying to get to them. You have to be aware of this fact in everything that you do with and around them. At feeding times, the girls have to go into the barn first, because his path to the barn leads right past their paddock. Then, he has to be the first back out every time.

And when you're, say, bringing a wheelbarrow full of weeds out through the gate to his paddock, you have to make sure that there is zero chance of him getting through and getting next to the girls, because he is absolutely incapable of keeping it in his pants. And you can't count on the gate to remain at the small amount that you opened it, because it WILL blow open all the way, and he WILL go cantering right past you, and the girls WILL be standing there waiting for him. You will get no help from the girls. Ever.

That (totally hypothetical) scenario leaves you dropping your wheelbarrow and sprinting around the perimeter of the barn, your heart pounding as you jump multiple fences to get to the girls and get them away without having to go near him while he's rearing up in full stallion mode. All while you're the only human on the farm. All in your first week.  

So next time, you stand fast at the gate in the pouring rain, with your plastic baseball bat pointed at a restless and defiant Logan, saying, "Back!" and "Stand!" until he listens. No matter how long it takes. Because if you let a horse get away with something, you are training it to do whatever it pleases. So you stick it out and you finish what you started, and you feel absolutely triumphant when you are finally successful.

A quick note on the aforementioned plastic baseball bat: It is not a weapon. It is an extension of your arm for those times when you don't want to put a bare arm or hand within biting reach of a stallion. Stallions are also unpredictable and sometimes aggressive, so we always carry it with us when we're handling him, just in case. But it is not a weapon.

On an entirely unrelated note, I have developed quite a love for crumpets, especially when lightly toasted with butter and NZ honey (which is so thick that it looks like beeswax) or strawberry jam. Thankfully, six-packs of them are often on special at the Countdown. And what else is sometimes on special at the Countdown? FRESH CREAM DOUGHNUTS. Oh my goodness. America seriously needs to catch onto the less-sugar-more-cream mindset.

A part of me feels like I'm supposed to be jumping all around the whole country, seeing more things and meeting more people, but this is what I wanted and I like it--a chance to really settle into a way of life over here, to unload my suitcase and stay a while. I can simply stand outside and look at the mountains or lean up against Dannii's stall door with my hand caressing her face and be perfectly content.

Dirty boots are happy boots.

I've settled into a routine here with Carolyn. Get up somewhere between 6:30 and 9, with varying amounts of snooze bar presses; tea, breakfast, and morning feed for the horses; four hours of work out in the pastures or inside cleaning; late lunch and settle down to write/Facebook/Youtube/blog for a few hours; dinner for me and all the animals; write more until time to scramble and clean up the piles of dishes before Carolyn gets home (heh). Then we settle down in front of the telly for a couple hours, usually with some kind of cake or ice cream, and generally lose track of how many episodes of Banshee we've watched. Then it's rugby on the weekends and I go to church with Devany, Carolyn's nine-year-old-and-better-singer-than-me granddaughter. We get along capitally.

I do occasionally start to feel a little weary when I've been pulling poisonous ragwort and brambles out of the horses paddocks for hours, and the sun/rain (depending on the day) is beating down, and the sand flies are ignoring the fly spray I so faithfully applied. It's in those moments that I stand up and think, "Hang on. I am on a FARM in NEW ZEALAND," and everything else fades out.