On what it takes (to drive, skip, and shine—or pull a beer)
Look at all those stars
Look at how goddamn ugly the stars are
[from “Trouble Breathing” by Alkaline Trio]
I.
My alarm goes off at 11:54 p.m.
I reach over to turn it off and lie there for a moment. Hard Boiled is cold, but from under my duvet, I’m quite warm. Braving the cold, I raise myself from bed. It takes a few minutes to layer up: thermals, jeans, and wool socks on bottom and thermal shirt, three or four sweatshirts, windbreaker, and Buff on top. Then I slip my feet into hiking boots and lace up.
Grabbing my sleeping bag, a blanket, and the hot water bottle I’d filled a couple hours earlier, I exit Hard Boil, quietly sliding the side door open and shut. I toss the bag, blanket, and bottle up onto the van’s roof. Then, stepping my foot onto Hard Boiled’s front tire, I hoist myself up onto the roof as well. I lie down on top of the sleeping bag and drape the blanket over my already layered-up body.
All in place and ready, I look up.
II.
In the brief time I’ve had Hard Boiled, I’ve managed to accomplish quite a lot. I got pulled over for going 17 kilometers per hour over the local speed limit in Westport and got off with just a warning. At a tiny petrol station in a nothing town, I misjudged Hard Boiled’s girth and hit my huge front bumper guard into the metal barrier at the pump, partially dislodging it from the concrete. Did nothing to the van. In Lake Tekapo, trying to angle park coming from the opposite direction, I scraped the front left edge of someone’s rental car, again with that huge front bumper guard. Again, not a scratch to my van. I left a note on the rental car, of course. Haven’t heard anything, though (it was days ago).
All of which prompts me to ask: if you’re just really bad at driving, not for lack of effort, attention, or care, at what point do you decide to just pull yourself off the road and out from behind the wheel?
III.
When I look up, I do so from an ideal vantage point within the South Island’s International Dark Sky Reserve, just outside Lake Tekapo. The views of the Milky Way and the starry sky are reputed to be spectacular here. Moreover, I’ve timed it just right so I’m here two days shy of a new moon—and on a virtually cloudless night.
Thus the alarm shortly before midnight. Thus my perch upon Hard Boiled in the middle of a cold, cold night. Thus I look up.
And am completely underwhelmed.
IV.
Were I a documentarian shooting a film with the thesis “Brennan Jernigan is sort of an awful human being,” I don’t think I’d come up short on footage.
Like when a Kiwi woman offers me a seat at her table outside a Japanese dumpling restaurant and I take it. Only to discover that she is a painfully weird, albeit friendly, chatterbox. Rather than engage with this fellow human who has offered me nothing but a seat and conversation, I quickly find an excuse to b-line it out of there, sure that it’s abundantly clear what I’m doing.
Or when, driving along at a good clip, I come upon another campervan inexplicably stopped within the flow of traffic. Making sure it’s safe to pass, I change to the right lane and move around it. It occurs to me that I can stop to see if they need help. I keep driving.
Just a recent sampling — and only of the cuts I’m willing to share pre-production.
I tell you, no shortage.
V.
No doubt, the sky is magnificent. It’s filled with twinkling stars, many of them shining quite brightly and brilliantly. And toward the horizon, the hazy belt of the Milky Way is clear, can’t be missed.
But that’s it. No special nebulae-reminiscent colors. No dramatic rending of the sky by a brightly painted Milky Way galaxy. Just bright, twinkling stars and a hazy Milky Way, all cast in a pale and mostly white palette.
Of course, I did grow up in Sedona, Arizona, itself designated a Dark Sky Community. Could be, then, that my standard for stargazing is already set pretty high. But I had gotten pretty excited that there might still be heavenly views out there that would blow my mind.
Instead, there is this indisputably beautiful, far from mind-blowing view of the cosmos. And me—trying to figure out which is more of a let down: the sky up above or the guy down below who can’t muster awe in the face of thousands of stars sending their light across the universe for him to see.
VI.
It was a Monday night in shoulder season, and I was sitting at a bar in Wanaka. It was understandably quiet, which presented a chance to chat up the bartender. I took it.
“You wouldn’t happen to hire inexperienced seasonal help, would you?” I asked (with my most winning, employable smile).
He kept focused on drying the inside of the pint glass in his hand but smirked like he had a joke he wasn’t going to tell me. “Yes, I do happen to hire inexperienced seasonal help,” he said. Then he cocked back his head to look at me over his nose and beard. Sizing me up maybe.
There was a pause, which I took to mean it was my turn to speak. But before I could, his eyes lit up as he rushed in to add, laughing, “Of course, I do hire experienced permanent bar staff as well!”
Just to be clear that I hadn’t just been served up by an itinerant novice like me, I suppose. I took a sip of my IPA and chuckled with him.
VII.
No, it’s not that you’re a terrible person. It’s just that the best you requires certain parameters to be met — and then you shine.
[undated entry from notebook]
VIII.
It was the perfect skipping stone lake. No large waves. Beautiful mountain reflections. Stones flat and circular just littering the shore. They’d easily sail out ten, eleven, twelve skips before sputtering out in a stream of bounces too quick and short to count.
Only one thing to be improved: the weight of the stones. They were a little on the light side (I felt as I hefted one before sending it off), so that, if you weren’t precise in your throw, or if the wind picked up suddenly, your stone would fly off at a tilt, destined to slice its way into the water on only the second or third bounce, cutting its once promising skip to a premature end.
Almost the perfect skipping stone lake is what I said.
IX.
I decide to stay up a little longer, till 2:00 at least. Just to be sure it isn’t a time of night thing.
Slowly, as the night (or morning?) progresses, I watch the Milky Way move toward the middle of the sky. And, sure enough, its brightness and clarity continue to increase incrementally. But not dramatically.
And so it is that 2:00 a.m. passes and I continue to lie there, waiting for god knows what. I fall in and out of a chilly sleep, and each time I awaken, it’s to a ceiling of stars twinkling.
But it’s so very cold. So cold that I try to move as minimally as possible, to avoid contact with new air particles that haven’t yet stolen a bit of my limited heat. I really want to be back inside the van, under my warm duvet. But I don’t want to do what it takes to get there—to move from where I am, to get myself to the ground, to get my gear stowed, to de-layer myself in preparation for bed.
Eventually eternity passes and the balance tips. Mustering my remaining energy, I sit up, slide to the edge of Hard Boiled’s roof, and drop myself to the ground. I pull down my gear and throw it in the van. I almost climb back in myself. But I don’t. I stand for a moment and lean back my head. I take a final look up.
My eyes dart from star to star, then rest on the expanse, then dart from light to light again. I turn in a circle, adjust my view.
After a few moments, all let-down swallowed up in cold and tired, I lower my eyes. I climb into Hard Boiled and curl into sleepful oblivion.
In Place explores what it’s like to be in this place, Aotearoa New Zealand — and what it means to be in place more generally, what it means to belong. For more posts, visit https://medium.com/in-place.
