Creature of the Shade

Christchurch: start with the map ...

As always, I start with the map.

It's a relaxed city, Christchurch.  It stretches out casually on the coastal plain, facing northeast toward the tropics as though sunning itself, toes in the water but head and heart safe on dry ground.  Its beach is that gentle, mathematical arc that speaks of flat land and flat water hanging out peacefully together.  To the south, source of the nastiest storms, a bank of hills guards the city. 

But the hills are just the edge of an explosion of rock, known as the Banks Peninsula.  You can see the violence on the map, a burst of ragged young land hurled out of the Pacific and the plains.

The explosion created hills, but it also created troughs.  Head southeast from Christchurch, under those protecting hills, and you're in Lyttelton, one of the first settlements. 

Now you're inside the explosion, the outer shockwave of hills behind you, the next shockwave visible in front, and between them, a spectacular natural harbor. Another Sydney could have been built here, among these promontories and sheltered coves, and it would have been one of the most beautiful cities on earth.  Instead, we have a string of old towns, some quaintly expensive, some not even all that expensive for being so close to the city ...

(And yes, North Americans, the landscape looks just like coastal hills of California.  Even more so from up close ...)

Finally, can we praise what Jane Jacobs called "gradual money" as opposed to "catastrophic money"?  Christchurch is no paradise, but it's grown with a steadiness that will make it last.  This is a fine young conifer of a city, not a gushing aspen or eucalypt; it's built to function well through many unforseen twists and turns of history.  There's no sign of "catastrophic money" -- the out-of-scale public works and land-wasting sprawl that ravage cities closer to the centers of power.  The hills are parks.  The affluent suburbs in the southeast -- where the hills first meet the sea -- still feel like towns rather than the masses of sprawl that America, or even Auckland, would have built here by now.  Even Taylor's Mistake, as the last of these suburbs is called, feels a little, well, accidental, maybe even mistaken, as the most genuine places always do.

cold tranquility interlude

This afternoon, I had a window seat on the flight out of El Paso.  There were the familiar shapes: the eleven types of squiggled street that define suburbia, and then the regular grid of small, evenly spaced homes that define the city.  Then there was a railroad and a drainage channel, and then more of the same grid, solid, reliable. 

Then, inside each block, visual riots broke out.  Now I wasn't seeing evenly spaced houses, but a mash of structures crammed together any which way, a mosaic of roofs composed by an anarchist.  Seeking order, my eye found a big building: stately, symmetrical, courthouse-like.  But it sat at an odd angle in the middle of its block, with the same small structure-stuff packed in tightly around it.  It was almost as though the city had happened first, and the gridded streets had been added with bulldozers later. 

It was Juarez, of course, El Paso's neighbor in Mexico.  The drainage canal was the Rio Grande.  I've never set foot in Juarez, but my family's lore would lead me to think of as violent, corrupt, seething.  And yet that wasn't in my mind at the time, nor in my eye.   The metaphors of violence that came to me above -- riot, bulldozers, and arguably anarchist -- were just tools to pry open my visual dazzlement.  It may have been an anarchist's mosaic -- just as nature is -- but it was a glorious one.  Its sheer randomness, in tension with the rigidgrid of streets, yielded an eye-consuming richness that few "first world" cities display to the air.  I'd get on a plane just to fly slowly over Juarez again, until I found the right words to capture the cold tranquility of the view.

Christchurch ... a warm-up

The line on Christchurch, pop not quite 500k:  Founded by stern, humorless Anglicans, Christchurch is now mellow, laid-back, artsy.  Its Anglicisms -- stone-walled colleges, a beach district called New Brighton, punters on the small and placid river -- are all quotations now, with no desire to repress. 

Christchurch has long had that serenity that comes from being a couple of plane connections away from history.   Now that it's on the map, if it is, Chrstichurch wants to register its presence as a good citizen of the Lonely Planet globe. With its application, it has obediently submitted a photo of (a) its history and (b) its modernity, posed side by side in the main square.

Well, actually, I took the photo.  (Their postcards show slightly better resolution and omit that little red structure which probably sells those very postcards.)  Normally, I don't photograph postcard-ready moments, but this was one of those spots where I thought:  "Nice, but not as nice as its photo would be."  And sure enough.

But there is no water ...

So often, hiking in Australia, I look down and think I see water.

But there is no water.  This is just rock remembering water.

And here, there's nothing else for the land to remember.  No quakes or eruptions.  Volcanic NZ has islands that are only 600 years old, but Australia is the same old block that's been drifting along for millions of years.  The drama of the Great Dividing Range is not about uplift, but rather an immensely gradual wearing away, by water rarely seen, and everywhere remembered.