‘Pegasus? I’m not happy about it,’ said Annette Finlay. She was riding a bike in a fetching pair of black gumboot slippers – $12 from The Warehouse – while her dog Boss, a blue heeler cross, ran beside her along a country road that bordered Pegasus. She’d planned on a holiday in the Cook Islands but her husband couldn’t wangle enough leave from work. It didn’t seem too great a hardship. Boss chased a pine cone. All you could hear were sparrows.
‘It’s lovely here,’ she said. ‘We moved from Christchurch for the peace and quiet but along comes Pegasus. The people I know – none of us are keen on it. We go past and just cringe.’ She rode away, possibly cringing.
There was a red-brick cottage set back on the road. It belonged to Alan Nordmeyer. I said, ‘Nordmeyer?’ He said, ‘Yes. Arnold Nordmeyer was my father.’ Sir Arnold Nordmeyer, Labour MP under Savage, later minister of finance, eulogised by left-wing political commentator Chris Trotter in his book No Left Turn as ‘the political leader the New Zealand working class had been waiting for’, and here was the revolutionary’s son in Woodend, in a house built from red brick shipped over from Norfolk in 1865.
He was really quite benign about Pegasus. He said, ‘I’m neutral now. Originally I was against it. How to put it that seems fair? I always considered it wasn’t a good place to build a township. Too prone to flooding. The other thing I was never too sure of was the logic of starting up a new town from scratch instead of expanding an established town like Woodend, but I can see the sense in starting something new and not inheriting roading and sewage.’
On the wall there was a striking black and white photograph of a tussock range. He said it was a 1960 National Publicity Studios’ picture, taken in the Mackenzie Country. ‘It’s the transition where the pale yellow festuca tussock grass meets the brownish chionochloa snowgrass, so it must be at about 3,000 feet.’ He talked about his work as an agricultural and forestry scientist in Bhutan, Vietnam, Turkey and Pakistan, and then about his involvement in a gas exchange laboratory that measured CO2 levels in trees. He was warming to a subject: global warming.
He said, ‘I don’t mean to rave but sea levels will rise and coastal communities are going to be hammered. Woodend has been there for 140 years but will Pegasus still be there in another 140 years?’ He had his doubts. His own future? He was going to cultivate his cornfield any day soon and plant potatoes that afternoon.
The planting of spuds, the bright weekend in spring, the fresh air. For sale: alpacas, fennel bulbs, organic eggs, horse manure. Cherry blossom floated on the side of the road. The plains were low and the sky high and wide: north Canterbury was like a ranch with riverbeds and a coast. Idyllic little villages, each with their quality of silence, were tucked behind windbreaks of macrocarpa and pine. There was sand on the pavements. There were cribs called Briar Cottage and Driftwood Cottage. No one was doing anything more stressful than waiting for the burger van to open at Leithfield Beach.
All this now feels quaint and faraway, like something dating back to a long-lost past, an age of innocence. It was an age of innocence: it was before the Christchurch earthquakes. Kaiapoi and Kairaki were among the worst hit settlements in north Canterbury. Damage was extensive in the first quake, on September 2010. An aftershock on June 2011 caused further destruction. Only one town was left entirely and absolutely unscathed: Pegasus. Planners had wisely invested an estimated $20 million engineering and compacting the earth. They had brought out specialised equipment from Dubai and employed a method known as vibrocompaction – loose sand densified to create stable foundation soils. There were no instances of liquefaction, no rising sickly gloop.
The town wooed quake refugees wanting a safe harbour. According to National Business Review, Infinity had been able to assist buyers with deposits of just one percent.
Vibrocompaction, the end of chaos, deposits of just one percent – but what about the life force of Pegasus, of any town, of any place? I tried to hate Pegasus but failed: people got in the way. When I went there in that innocent spring I paid a visit to the household at 172 Infinity Drive. Retired couple James and Biddy Gardner – the first Pegasus homeowners, the town’s early settlers – were wiping builder’s marks off the windows and hosing down the outdoor tiles.
What sort of name was Biddy? ‘My parents nicknamed me that and it just stuck,’ she said. ‘My real name? It’s heinous! And it doesn’t bring out the best in me. Maxine Juanita. Yuk! No, it’s Biddy, thank you.’
How did she and James meet? She said, ‘I was flatting with nurses, and he took everyone else out and then he got to me.’ James said, ‘It wasn’t like that.’ She said, ‘Oh yes it was.’
They were full of life, giggly and giddy, brimming with a sense of adventure. James said his builder had got the bit between his teeth in the last few weeks of construction to make sure they would be the first to move into Pegasus.
It was their fourth day in their new home. The night before they’d had family and friends over for a drink. ‘Oh, it was ripper,’ said Biddy. ‘I’ve felt better,’ said James, through a hangover fog. They were a retired farming couple – sheep, beef, barley – from up the line in Waiau. ‘We were there 47 years,’ said Biddy. ‘Seventy-three for me,’ said James. ‘I was on the same farm all my life. I said I’d retire at 60 if I was ready, but I was still enjoying it. I was still pretty fit at sixty-five.
