Candice Gaukel Andrews

   When you first start exploring beyond your home ground, you tend to see everything in relationship to where you live. I suppose it's a way to get a grip on a new world and have it make sense. And so it was for me when I went to New Zealand.
    New Zealand is a lot like Wisconsin — only with mountains and an ocean. I felt right at home with all the green meadows, cows, and sheep. I have to admit that I assumed going to New Zealand would be the easy choice for a foray away from home — at least I was going to a country where I spoke the language.
    I began to think I might have been mistaken the minute I landed. Fresh off the plane and going through customs, I had a communications breakdown. The man at the desk asked me if I had a "tint."
    "S'cuse me?," I said in my best American Midwest accent.
    "Do you have a tint?," he repeated. Asking me about my hair would be bold of him, I thought, so I asked one more time if he would restate his question.
    "DO YOU HAVE A TINT?," he said again rather loudly. Getting nowhere, I finally just shrugged my shoulders, shook my head "no," and slowly started to back away. It wasn't until the next day when I met two travelers from Michigan that I received some illumination on my bizarre first encounter in a new land. He was asking if I had a "tent."
    My fellow Midwesterners were able to interpret for me because they had had a similar experience shortly after they arrived in New Zealand. At their hotel, the concierge gave them cryptic directions to their room. They were told to walk down the hall, look for the "nine geese," and turn left. They thought that meant they would pass a painting or a wall mural with nine geese in it. It wasn't until several hours later that they realized they were supposed to pass the "main desk."
    Despite this initial language barrier, the New Zealand forests spoke to me in a way I understood. Dripping green and spongy, they reminded me of Wisconsin's Northwoods after a rainstorm. But there was one big difference: there is nothing in New Zealand's woods that can hurt you; no bears or wolves, no poisonous snakes or spiders. Because I come from America, I suppose, I kept missing a danger in the woods, the heartbeat of a nation, a wild icon. The wolf. The bear.
    What New Zealand lacks in woodland creatures it makes up for in its bird life. The country is rich with avian songs, and I wondered what the poets of New Zealand had to say about their tuneful land. I looked for their works in bookstores, but couldn't find any. Then I met an actual poet. A 90-year-old sheep rancher named Donald.
    Donald's family had lived on his ranch in the Hector Mountains for 125 years. One day in a van, I was privileged to accompany him up the foothills surrounding his land, so we could get a sweeping look at his holdings and hear the stories of the area.
    Up and up on a narrow, gravel road we went, as Donald talked of his grandfather who came to New Zealand from Scotland.
    "Mustering was good work as long as you had good dogs," he stated, as if it were a long-remembered, natural law.
    Higher and higher we climbed. At five thousand feet, Donald said, "This is a young man's country. I would have to get in a chopper to see all this land now. Mostly, I just stand down below and look up."
    Here, standing on this mountain in New Zealand, next to a sheep rancher almost as old as the country itself, I heard the wistfulness for what was that comes to speak to us all eventually, a common language that spreads across oceans, across nations, across human minds and spirits.
    On the way back down, Donald talked more about the region's history. As we pulled into his driveway, he commented quietly, "As William Cullen Bryant said, 'It is the spot I came to seek. My father's ancient burial place.' "
    Wanting an excuse to linger, I watched his sheep dogs work for a time, driving a small herd in circles around us. The dogs could stop the sheep on a dime and sometimes did so right in front of me. It was an amazing feat they performed.
    It occurred to me then that the heartbeat of New Zealand I wanted and missed was there in the beating chests of those smart, little sheep dogs, and its poets are the old musterers who still stop to look up.