There's a large park at the end of our road with many intersecting curved and straight paths. You can walk up hills and feel the wind, and walk in regenerating bush alongside a creek filled with tuna (the eel kind). You can walk to the sea, along paths of bracken, flax and pale grasses. You can bike to the next village north.
When I went walking there yesterday, I was thinking hard, took a wrong turn, and managed to get completely disoriented. Even though I was only a few hundred metres from the sea, I had no view of it, nor of the stream, the river nor the bike path that winds through the park. I listened for the sea but it sounded like it was all around me. I came to several junctures of sealed and unsealed paths and had no idea which way to turn. I just walked in a random direction and it took a few moments to orientate myself again. This used to happen to me sometimes cycling home from Hagley High School where I went in my last year, I would semi-deliberately get lost in the endless grid of Somerfield streets with their identical houses and tidy lawns, and other times cycling through the gigantic roundabouts of London and thinking I had found a shortcut. I think I find physical bewilderment thrilling. Even for a few moments, the utter loss of knowing where I sit in relation to my environment. Groundless, a weird euphoria, I don't know if it's the being lost or the finding myself again that is euphoric. I have, you see, never stayed lost. I am still thinking about the cruise ships, out at sea, unwanted by any country, how frightening it must be to be aboard a ship where you know there are infections. I started thinking about Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines and the other books in that series. In that universe, cities have become predatory and mobile. They range or hunt above the now toxic earth. They are strategic, devouring other cities to access their resources. I imagine some dystopia where ships of sick people are never able to dock, drifting interminably. Perhaps it would work the other way as well, ships setting sail where only healthy people have been allowed to board, leaving those on land to the fate of mass infection. Ships biding their time on the waves until it's safe to go home. I absorb from Reeve the idea that cities could be transient, roaming and self-interested. I think of the last scene of When worlds collide when the Earth's people escape via spaceship moments before another planet hits us. I think of the Utopia episode of Doctor Who, which we just watched with our kids (who have somehow developed fandom behind our backs). It's the end of the universe and a frustrated genius is trying to launch a rocket to rescue a population of humans from pointed teeth Futurekind and send them to a distant planet called Utopia. The people have been waiting for years and the Doctor fixes it all, the final engineering problem, the people board but nothing is at seems. 108 New Zealanders who were at sea for two weeks after a cruise was aborted did get to fly home today. A woman died in Greymouth Hospital, our first Coronavirus related death. We have 63 new cases, so we're sitting at 514 now. It's gone up ten times in the last eight days. But 63 new cases is fewer new cases than yesterday, and fewer than the day before. Which may be meaningless but is comforting none-the-less.
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