Lone Kauri Road

Lone Kauri Road
By James Littlewood

Lone Kauri Road occupies a mythic place in our shared imagination. The poet Allen Curnow committed it to legend in his poem The Loop in Lone Kauri Road. As high school students we pored over these cryptic lines, trying to position it in space and in culture, and ourselves in it:

So difficult to concentrate! a powerful

breath to blow the sea back

and a powerful hand to haul it

in, without overbalancing.

Scolded for inattention

Depending on the wind, I know

a rowan from a rewarewa

by the leaf not ‘coarsely serrate’,

observant of the road roping**seaward in the rain-forest.

It’s strangely hidden from view. Literally, most people drive straight past it. But another of Curnow’s poems - Another Weekend at the Beach - gives casually prosaic directions:

Turn left at the sign. Lone Kauri Road

winds down to the coast. That’s a drop

of about five hundred feet. Look out

for the waterfall, the wooden bridge

the mown grass, the pohutukawa glade.

“That’s a drop …” sounds like one of the locals casually turned off his mower and leaned on a fencepost to spend a few relaxed minutes guiding you (you hapless urbanite, you) to the essentials of west coast weekending. He’s the salt of the earth. You’re eating out of the palm of his hand. Hang around any longer and you’ll have to start paying him.

Curnow had a bach on Lone Kauri Road, so he must have explained the directions to summer guests, ad nauseam. You had to in those days. Even now, there’s barely enough coverage for text messages, let alone maps.

Take the road all the way down, it’s all there. The waterfall, the bridge, the lawn, the glade. But that’s all at Karekare. Keep going, and you’ll be on Karekare road. Keep going back up the other side of the valley, you come back out on Piha Road. The loop’s in the road and road is a loop. For a long time, the roadside barrier at the turnoff had a legendary scrawl: “east coasters are children who just don’t understand.” It’s a turnoff, alright.

Yes, it’s strangely hidden from view. It looks like an obscure local track off Piha Rd. It’s signposted, fair and square. But at that point, you’re either going to Kare Kare or Piha. It’s a giant great cul de sac. Piha: dead ahead. Or take a left at the Kare Kare turnoff. That sounds like a clear navigation landmark. And it is. In contrast, Lone Kauri Road sounds like something out of a Stephen King novel.

And it looks like one too. To begin, the first few hundred metres are dramatically overgrown by regenerating kauri forest. Still, it’s less ghoulish than it was: they put some bitumen down a few years ago. Better to have left it all mud and rubble, some would say. But the really evil part of this loopy byway is that it’s populated. “Horse poo, $2” reads a hand-sketched sign. A pony of some stumpy, diminutive breed stands motionless in its foul pen.

“Do you want some horse poo?” asks a glamorous woman, striding forthright from house to Landrover. She’s in good riding gear. Not like a blazer and helmet, but a comfy looking jacket, jeans that fit, and boots that gleam in the mud. I’m embarrassed, and stupidly tell her no thanks, and even she gets it. Not of these parts. Not of these people. Ha ha.

A guy in a ute drives past, curiosity piqued by my car left oddly on the side of the narrow, winding road, apparently abandoned or maybe imperilled. I emerge before him from out of the fog (it’s foggy). “You right mate?” No worries. Seemed genuinely caring. They’re like that, round here. Apparently.

More letterboxes than I can count cluster around no particular point in the road. It’s an unfeasibly large number of letterboxes. More than all the houses I can see. A sign points to what looks like a road, or a private road, or a driveway: “lone kauri, 500 m”. I take a few steps, but it’s bullshit. There’s only a house or two. Besides, the tree in the name of the road was milled in the 1920s. Which is odd, because the road itself wasn’t built till the 60s. Since then, the kauri population’s exploded. And since then, the dieback’s come on.

As teenagers, my friends and I used to fly down this road in our cars. Turn off the motor, we’d hang out the open doors and feel the summer wind on our bare torsos. I always wondered which house was Curnow’s. Back then, nobody cared. Now, one of them owns the damn thing. He’s become one of them, like the lady in the jacket, or the guy in his ute, the pony in its den; like Curnow himself, I suppose. Every night, watching the sun set over the ocean, to the sound of ruru, of running water and exploding kauri pods, rife with phytophthora, on the loop of Lone Kauri Road.

Image Credits: The lone Kauri tree on the West Coast Road near Karekare, North Auckland. A horse-drawn wagonette is rounding a bend in front of the kauri tree. Albert Percy Godber circa 1915-16. Alexander Turnbull Library.
And James Littlewood.