Moon over Martinborough

A group of six of our city friends helped us move out to the country. That was back in October 2006. It was a beautiful day, and it felt like a party.

Nobody wanted to drive a rented truck over the treacherous Rimutaka Hill Road, so Rick and I hired movers to move our big things like the bed, sofa, washer and dryer. The rest of our stuff we piled into everyone’s cars and drove over the Hill together, convoy style.

Our city friends were all people we’d met since arriving in New Zealand two years before. They were an odd mix perhaps, but went together well – Kiwis and Brits, straight and gay, Quakers and not religious at all. To them we were the gay Americans from Tokyo, city boys through and through. What were we doing, they wondered, moving out to 20 acres in the country?

House and the footbridge to the top paddock

When we pulled up the driveway, it was their first time seeing our new place. We stepped out of our cars and everyone took in the property – the long, low house that overlooks the olive grove, the two-bay hay shed, the raised vegetable beds overtaken with weeds, the old and abandoned chicken coop.

The hills on the other side of the Huangarua River were green from the spring rains. A lone hawk circled over the olive grove.

Immediately our friends understood why we were moving here.

After unloading the cars and bringing everything inside, we strolled down to the river together. We sat on the riverbank and talked. The willows swayed and the water sparkled. Eventually, slowly, we wandered back up to the house.

There was still a lot to do – boxes to unpack, furniture to move – but it didn’t matter. This property has a way of making you relax. It has a mind of its own and it soothes you, calms you, even as you do the chores necessary to maintain its 20 acres.

We talked about dinner. We were going to cook our first meal in the house together, the eight of us. Everyone was staying the night.

But then there was a knock on the door.

The first neighbor

One of the key concerns Rick and I had about moving to the country was how the rural neighbors would respond to a gay couple living down the road. We’d even asked the real estate agent about it when we were considering buying the property.

“Oh, people here are pretty good,” the agent told us. “I’m an ex-dairy farmer, and even I’ve come a long way.” He laughed and nodded.

Rick and I answered the door together on that first day. There stood a man about 5 foot 5, with a grey beard and glasses. He wore a baseball cap and looked as though he’d just come in from the fields.

He introduced himself as our neighbor John and said that he was having a ‘barbie.’

I knew he wasn’t talking about playing with dolls. ‘Barbie’ in Kiwiland means barbeque. Everything here is shortened. Sandwiches are ‘sammies,’ presents become ‘prezzies,’ relatives are ‘rellies’.

John said, “I heard you were moving in today. I thought you might like to join us.”

How did a total stranger know when we were moving in?

Metal drum in the middle paddock

This was my first lesson in how quickly news travels in a village. We later learned that the real estate agent had told John our moving date. People talk. Everyone in the neighborhood already knew about the gay Americans.

Rick and I thanked John for the invitation, but we explained we couldn’t join him since we had six house guests with us.

“No worries,” John said, smiling broadly. “Your friends are welcome too. I do my own home kills. I’ll just pull more meat out of the freezer.”

Home kills? It sounded creepy. Suddenly I pictured this man wrestling a cow to the ground, slitting its throat, and chopping it up into pieces with a bloody axe.

“No, that’s okay,” I said, not wanting to impose.

“Of course you’ll come,” John said. “All the neighbors will be there.”

I suggested that we just join them for a drink before dinner.

“That’s great. Come by around 5:30.” John told us where his house was down the road. Then off he went.

On the road to John’s

At 5:30 that evening Rick and I and our six city friends walked down the road towards John’s house, bottles of wine in hand. We’d already made plans for what we’d cook when we got back home.

As we walked along the gravel shoulder, we passed paddocks where some cattle and sheep grazed. I would learn later that those were John’s animals. I was looking at another night’s potential dinner.

I’ve never been so closely connected to my food source as I have been since living out here. I’m not used to meeting my dinner when it’s still breathing, seeing next month’s juicy meat grazing at the roadside as I wander by, and seeing it stare back at me. It’s a little disturbing.

John greeted us at the door. “Oh, good! You showed up for dinner.”

Lamb on the barbie - image by Sardinelly

“Just for drinks,” I reminded him.

He shook his head in a friendly way. “I already pulled the meat out of the freezer. I have to cook it now. Come in!”

It looked like we were staying for dinner.

John put us at ease right away. He made sure that we all had a glass of wine in our hands and that we knew where the ‘nibbles’ were. Hors d’oeuvres are almost never called hors d’oeuvres here.

The Bronwyns

As John had promised, all the neighbors were there. We met Bronwyn, John’s wife. We also met Bronwyn, Jim’s wife. They do not share a wife. There are two Bronwyns.

John and Bronwyn and Jim and Bronwyn are our nearest neighbors. While John and Bronwyn live on the opposite side of the road and down a ways, Jim and Bronwyn live in the red house whose roof we can see beyond our hay shed.

Later on, Rick and I would begin differentiating between the two Bronwyns by referring to John’s wife as ‘Aussie Bronwyn,’ since she’s originally from a farm a couple hours outside Sydney, and Jim’s wife as ‘Kiwi Bronwyn.’

The distinction still comes in handy when, for example, one of us says “Bronwyn called” or “Bronwyn stopped by.”

“Aussie or Kiwi?” the other will ask. It does the trick.

People of the land

In talking to our neighbors that night, we learned just how closely everyone was connected to the land. John and Bronwyn have cattle, pigs, chickens, an enormous vegetable garden, an olive grove, an orchard with nut and fruit trees, and in their backyard they have the classic Kiwi lemon tree.

Our friend Dee says, “Every Kiwi house should have a cabbage tree in front and a lemon tree in back.”

Jim and Bronwyn run cattle and have a hazel nut orchard of around 1,000 trees. Other neighbors, further afield, have similar situations. Suzanne’s husband Dougal, for example, drives a tractor for a living, cutting hay and harvesting wheat.

The country neighbors were incredibly nice to the city friends. You would have thought all eight of us had moved in. Everyone talked and laughed and John stood over the barbecue, cooking the beef and lamb that until recently had grazed in his paddocks, just beyond the deck.

My first lesson in country life

At one point I was talking to Suzanne, who lived further down the road from John and Bronwyn, and she said, “I understand you don’t have a tractor.”

How did she know we didn’t have a tractor?

“You’ll need one,” she continued. She was immaculately dressed from head to toe, and didn’t look like a woman from the country at all. “You need a tractor to keep the grass down in your paddocks. Unless you’re going to run cattle. They’ll keep the grass down for you. But you can’t run cattle in the olive grove. They’ll destroy the trees. You can graze sheep in the grove, though.”

Number 8 wire fence and long grass

Run cattle? Graze sheep? It was all Rick and I could do to learn how to care for our 500 olive trees – about which we knew absolutely nothing at that moment.

“Priscilla had a trailer mower,” Suzanne said. Priscilla was the woman we’d bought the house from. “She mowed the olive grove herself.”

The fact was that Rick and I had had the opportunity to buy Priscilla’s tractor along with the house, but at the time we honestly didn’t think we’d need a tractor. After all, we weren’t planning to sow any crops, or till the ground. Isn’t that all one needs a tractor for?

This shows how little we understood about what we were getting ourselves into. It was only that evening, talking to the immaculately dressed Suzanne, that I finally understood we needed a tractor to mow the olive grove.

“And what happens if we don’t keep the grass down?” I asked her. It was just a field, I figured. Let the grass grow.

She looked horrified. “Well, fire hazard for one. When the grass goes dry in the summer, it’ll be a risk to us all. And you’ll loose your paddocks to the bush. They won’t be any use.”

Oh. Got it. Must. Keep. Grass. Down.

I realized that if our neighbors were going to have a problem with us, it wasn’t because we were gay. It was because we didn’t have a tractor.

So it was that the importance of keeping the grass down became the first lesson of many that the rural Kiwi neighbors would teach the gay American city boys.

God bless those neighbors. Without them we would have never survived out here as long as we have. We owe them so much.

Walking home that night

After an incredible dinner – deliciously tender meat, fresh garden vegetables, good stories told around the outdoor table as the last of the sun faded – Rick and I walked home with our city friends in the dark. Aussie Bronwyn let us borrow flashlights, or ‘torches’ I should say, since they are not flashlights here.

Halfway home we stepped off the road and clicked those torches off.

Up above us there were thousands and thousands of stars. You don’t see stars like that in the suburbs of Detroit, or in Chicago, or in Tokyo. My old friend the moon was out too – just a small white sliver, a bright smile turned sideways.

I looked up at that gorgeous sky, which marked our first night in our new house, at my city friends around me in the dark, at John and Bronwyn’s house across the paddocks behind us, their porch light still on.

With every cell of my being I felt that I was in a good place, and I knew I was going to like it here.

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Read the next post: Preparing for the olive harvest