Death, humongous and gross; a suspicion of bats and poison; meanwhile, tourists driven inside, puzzling over the contents of motel and hotel libraries, with their ancient paperbacks by Catherine Cookson, their never-opened volumes of Reader’s Digest condensed novels (‘Call me Ishmael. The end.’). The heavy overnight downpour uprooted trees, raised the river, and spilled dishwater out of the lake. Playing fields were flooded. Already desolate playgrounds were deserted.
But rain never stops the giddy, happy play of mist, steam and warm thermal smoke. Everywhere, the lovely sleepy scent of sulphur escaped from the earth. Money is well spent at Te Puia cultural centre to gape at the famous Pōhutu geyser fizzing at the bung, but it’s just as bizarre and astounding to be simply walking along a road and noticing a drain smoking its head off. There was a drain smoking its head off in the lakeside village of Ōhinemutu.
Much about Ōhinemutu is bizarre and astounding, including the fact that people live there. It’s one of only two so-called ‘living villages’ in New Zealand, open for tourists to wander around and gawk and point and photograph while locals go about their business. The other living village, Whakarewarewa – duly astounding and bizarre, and smoking its head off on the raised banks of Puarenga Stream – was at the opposite end of town. As in Ōhinemutu, the silica looked as though it were melting.
I traipsed from one village to another. In places, the mist was as thick as a scrub fire, as slippery as fog, sliding along the street, lingering upon the pools that stand in drains. And then the mist parted and I stepped into another, stranger underworld. Heriata – Ata for short – opened the door to her caravan.
She took off her hat. The caravan had a view of the lagoon, the lake, the island. The storm began to build; unsuspecting sparrows were on their last legs; big fat raindrops sizzled on the pavements. Ata said, ‘I’m a chronic alcoholic. We drink every day, bro, that’s the truth. We do 36 cans between us. But it doesn’t kick for me no more. I don’t get no buzzes no more like the younger days, eh. It’s just a bad habit now. To wake up to a drink – it’s just a bad habit. And that’s what I do. As soon as I wake up I grab me a can, and then I go for my bath with my can of beer. No, two cans of beer.’
At six every morning she went for a bath in a shallow, steaming pool in a dark bathhouse behind the caravan. ‘I live in it,’ she said. ‘Go in four times a day. I’m the cleanest Māori in town.’ She was funny and vivid, brash and shrewd, drunk and tidy.
Outside, where the garden table and chairs pretended to be in a garden, there wasn’t a single discarded cigarette butt. I didn’t notice that: Ike Mitchell pointed it out. He gave Ata high marks. To Ike, cleanliness was possibly above godliness.
Jandalled and singleted, no spring chicken but as agile as a boxer, Ike moved at great speeds and with serious purpose around Ōhinemutu in his role as caretaker. He said he got by on four or five hours’ sleep every night. The marvel is that he managed to sleep that long. He talked quickly, non-stop, cursing and laughing, adamant. ‘I love history,’ he said, ‘and I hate bullshit.’
Most people lose their voice when they’re quoted in a newspaper – they don’t sound like themselves – but I instantly heard Ike’s voice when I googled him later and found a Daily Post story from 2004. He was responding to a thin-lipped little government booklet that presumed to instruct Māori how to prepare and cook hāngī hygienically. Ike was asked to comment. He was insulted by the booklet. He said: ‘You show me a bastard who has died from eating hāngī.’
He spoke exactly like that. He mentioned the funeral of former Ōhinemutu resident Sir Howard Morrison, and how a female journalist had wandered over and asked him an impertinent question. ‘I said to her, “Lady,” I said, “if you had a pair of balls I’d put you on your arse.”’
He was standing on the forecourt in front of the meeting house. He decided to give a quick tour of the kitchen. ‘Spotless,’ he said. ‘You could eat off every inch of the floor.’ He banged the side of the three enormous metal steam cookers. ‘Can do 1,790 meals in an hour and a half.’ He turned on a tap. A roar of hot thermal water squirted out, and then he turned it off and sped towards Ata’s caravan. On the way, he was moved to give a speech about a civic official who lived in Ōhinemutu. ‘There was a sewage leak here last year and it was going straight into the lake. Well, he walks up and down and he sees it but pretends not to notice. Too much like hard work to try and fix it. He doesn’t give a shit. He’s just in it for himself and his overseas trips. Fucken arsehole.’
As Ike passed by in a whirl of passion and oaths, Ōhinemutu hissed and bubbled, steamed and blew smoke. Daylight packed it in and the colour of Lake Rotorua turned to dishwater. A few limp and disappointed tourists wandered around. They were cheered by Ōhinemutu’s picturesque Anglican church St Faith’s, built in 1910. Inside, they saw the frosted figure of a handsome, daintily bearded Māori Christ on a window overlooking the lake – when they parked their bums on pews they could see Christ’s brown feet walking on the water. They photographed the church and the cemetery. ‘When we die,’ Princess Te Puea once said, ‘the Earth folds us in its arms.’ But it doesn’t do that at Ōhinemutu: the bodies are put in whitewashed tombs above ground.
Ike briefly directed his wrath towards the city
