On February 12th 2023, the upper North Island of New Zealand was hit by Cyclone Gabrielle. It was a major event, causing widespread damage and destruction throughout the upper North Island. Bridges and roads were washed away, power and communications infrastructure was destroyed and people were rescued from the roofs of their houses by helicopter as whole towns and suburbs were inundated with floodwaters. Eleven people lost their lives, thousands were displaced and in some areas, the recovery will take years.
Locally, the damage, although significant, was not as extensive as further south. A large slip took out one lane of the main road through the village where I live and, due to flooding, the surrounding roads in every direction became impassable for a couple of days to anyone driving a people mover.
Hundreds of trees blew over; the power was out for a day at my house and for several days in places nearby where the fix wasn’t quite so simple.
On our property, we have an old, two-bay, corrugated iron shed that is mostly used for storage. It’s located at a low point and floods on an intermittent basis. As a result, everything stored in there is raised off the ground and last year, after a couple of significant inundations, I constructed a shelving unit along the back wall to lift everything up even higher.
It was lucky I did because, in the cyclone, the water level in the shed rose higher than I’d ever seen it before.
I had some nervous moments as the rain continued to bucket down throughout the night and I set alarms every couple of hours to get up and check the water level. Beyond the fields next to our property, the land drops away into a river gorge. During the cyclone, the run-off from surrounding farms sent water rushing across these fields. The flooding around our house rose to a point where it also fed into this flow, so that it reached its maximum level early in the night and thankfully, never got to the point where it threatened our house.
While the extreme winds continued for another couple of days, the rain had eased off and the water level had dropped a little by the following morning. When I ventured out to inspect the damage in our shed, I discovered the water had, at its highest point, got to within an inch of the bottom shelf of the unit I’d built. As you can see in the image above, the one thing that wasn’t lifted high enough was my cherished beer fridge. In the night, the water had risen above the bottom of the freezer door and into the space where the electric motor is located. By the next day, the water level had dropped enough for me to drag her out of the shed. I suspected she had probably cooled her last beer and that my next job would be to dig a big hole in the backyard and prepare a eulogy, but after leaving her in the sun all day to dry out and with the local power supply finally back on, I plugged her in to see if she still worked, standing back in case there were any sparks and/or explosions. There weren’t. Instead, my trusty girl gave a little shudder as her electric motor kicked in and then began purring away like a happy kitten. I was so excited to hear that sweet hum that I cracked open a lukewarm beer on the spot and chugged it down in celebration.
Now, six weeks later, I’ve got a fridge full of cold beer and, after cutting down the trees that blew over in the backyard, enough firewood to last at least the next two winters. While surviving Cyclone Gabrielle required my wife and I to endure the horror of our kids complaining for twenty-four hours straight about not having a wifi connection, aside from that, we came through almost completely unscathed. Many others were not so lucky. We’re feeling very thankful as a result.
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A gritty and engaging story of human faults, fears, and frailty, What Friends Are For is the prequel short story to my tragicomic novel, Taking the Plunge. Introduce yourself to the characters from the novel and find out where it all begins for Kate, Tracy, Evan and Lawrence.
Last month, I was lucky enough to join a group of students and teachers from my school for the schools programme of the 2016 Auckland Writers Festival, at the Aotea Centre in central Auckland. It’s always entertaining to spend a day out of class with a bunch of high-schoolers. There were thirty or so on this expedition, a mix of ages and personalities, all ostensibly interested in writing—though I suspect a number of them just wanted a day off school, and who could blame ’em. It’s a three hour bus ride, more or less, from our school, in the rural backwaters of Northland, to the big smoke. Three hours of singing, dancing and gossiping.