This must be what college in Switzerland is like. Lots of foreign youngins living in close quarters creating drama in the midst of massive mountains. But less intelligent conversation. It’s astonishing to think of how far I’ve come (or fallen perhaps) in the circle of life. Amid the rolling farmland of Central PA, Etown College offered a nice place to learn about the world and the various ways individuals could be appalled at what they did the night before and continue to do it the night after. After years of donning the tie and button-down shirt, in my quest for the vibrancy and excitement of living in community again, I have found myself for the past few years among the hornballs and cornballs of the world who are putting off the American dream for a while to pursue the higher dreams of travel, the almighty experience, and occasionally, the American cigarette. As always, the other people I meet in my travels are the most exciting and interesting aspect of it all, and of course the most difficult to understand or explain (I heard that my current room was formerly inhabited by a transvestite who hosted the most wicked parties in town). Even surrounded by the purple mountains majesty of the Southern Alps every day, it’s still all about the people.
In the past I’ve turned down jobs that made me cut my hair. As much as I loved my long flowing hippy hair, I’ve become less discriminating about my employment opportunities (which may be why probably all the worst jobs I’ve ever had have all been in New Zealand). While I don’t chop off the old locks as frequently as many men, my biennial cut is perhaps more meaningful since I lose so much of my mass with each one. I feel like I’ve had just about every type of haircut experience possible. There’s the generic American strip mall salon (both with and without large smoking “beauticians” looming outside) in Ohio, the old school male barber who shaves your neck and doesn’t use a mirror in Pennsylvania, the occasional beauty school friend giving the gift of their talent, the one-off experience with an overpriced spa where a free shampoo is included in the supersized price, the local Spanish-speaking barber of the Galápagos giving me the $5 gringo price, and now the 2 hour marathon New Zealand beauty school cut with a girl just about to graduate who it seemed had never cut a male head before yet was charmingly interested in the size of American food. We’ll see where I end up for my next one in…September?
Nice, sensible, non-threatening haircut out of the way, I landed in the stunning little hamlet of Aoraki Mount Cook Village where I currently reside working a variety of jobs for the supposedly world-famous Hermitage hotel. The Hermitage museum in Mother Russia may be world famous, The Hermitage hotel in New Zealand has a tougher time making the claim, but no doubt makes up for it in gorgeous scenery. The hotel itself is the third in the location, the first being built in 1884 and flooded away in favor of the second in 1914, which itself burned to the ground in 1957. Today’s Hermitage is a bizarre mixture of 1950s motel, 1970s hotel, 2000s highrise, A-frame chalets, a hostel, and a random motor court down the road. The entire village lies within a national park (NZ parks are different o American parks in many ways, most notably the number of backpackers tramping around here), which itself is part of a larger World Heritage Area, so all of the 300 odd people living here must be employed by either the hotel, one of the three other accommodation options in town, the one other restaurant, or the New Zealand version of the National Park Service (0% unemployment!). We have a café, a buffet, and a fancy round restaurant (round restaurants are always the fanciest, especially if they’re on top of some tall building). One school with five kids, no church to speak of (in fact, the only overt religious experience most New Zealanders seem to have, as is so often the case, is with death…memorials are covered with verses from the Bible that many people seem so unconcerned with during life). Though my time here has not yet come to end, thus far it has been, bumpy moments and all, easily the most positive of my work experiences in New Zealand. My first boss was incredibly nice, and my current boss is pretty awesome. I spent the beginning of my time in a café, the first time since I’ve been here that I’ve landed one of the jobs I actually set out to obtain. This is far from a cozy, friendly local café, though, catering mostly to large groups of in-and-out one time visit tourists. I was, at least at the beginning, able to get lots and lots of work, putting in about 55 hours each week. The work has dropped off with the crowds following Christchurch’s second big earthquake of the year, but the relaxed pace is quite enjoyable after working so hard the first month. I spend most of my time now in the buffet restaurant, and occasionally I feel like a migrant worker showing up at the hostel day after day begging for any work they have for the day. Rent and food are given to us at a very reasonable price, and I’ve been able to eat like a king again, if the king was given the same food every week. We have a free gym where I can work on my killer abs and get all the activities (glacier lake trips, scenic flights) for free. The surroundings are gorgeous, there are tons of hikes to do, and every night the sunset on the mountain is enough to take your breath away. Perhaps just as importantly, the tiny village is strictly controlled by the park service, which means every new building has always been strictly watched to make sure it fits in with its surroundings and the rest of town. What results is the first architecturally-unified and verandah-free city in New Zealand. And almost every night, when the rest of the valley is dark, big old Mount Cook, New Zealand’s tallest, is still lit up in striking sunset mode in a way that is framed absolutely perfectly. The part of me that believes that somewhere in the world there is a woman who still believes in romance, still gets a little misty-eyed every time I see this sunset. I am enjoying this little alpine village very much. We also have keas, the world’s only alpine parrot, a massive green shimmering bird with orange highlights that squawks and caws in the early morning air and proves that the word “cheeky” can indeed be overused. They have made the list of my favorite animals ever.
It’s not all roses of course. I continue to learn more and more why country songs like “Take This Job and Shove It” can continue to have such popularity. I have also learned a lot about myself. Primarily I have learned that I am simply not good at being fast. Maybe I once was. I don’t remember always being slow, though I always hated time limits in school. But I do recall beginning and continuing to put into place a few years ago the practice of mindfulness, the act of being engrossed in my surroundings and aware of what is happening around me, being fully immersed in and present in the moment. Mindfulness is the opposite of speed. It is the slow deliberateness of the sloth, the anti- fast food, the unitasking that flies in the face of all things modern. I have tried to cultivate slowness as a purposeful way of life and I am quite proud to have been moderately successful at maintaining quality over quantity. However, it’s safe to say that most managers of part-time food service jobs are not terribly in tune with their inner Buddhist. For me quality is paramount. (Thanks Dad, for that quality control influence.) I simply do not believe that quality and quantity can coexist. Something can be fast or it can be good, but it just can’t be both. Quality and speed have an inverse relationship for all you math folks. We don’t learn speed early on. It goes against everything we learn in school about focusing on quality. While tests and speeches may well be timed, school teaches us that the important thing is to be right. It’s the working world that teaches us the opposite. Why are most 16 year old high school students so miserable at work? Because for the first time in their lives, they are somewhere where they’re being encouraged to cut corners in quality to increase their speed. They’re taught that you must be fast if you want to succeed in life. And unfortunately, kids start to believe the so called pragmatist at work more than the educational idealists and throw quality out the window even at school. It’s easier to copy a paper from the Internet than write it yourself. The SATs encourage this pragmatic approach with a time limit that rules out the possibility of deep thought, people get caught up in 30 second news clips, and half hour TV shows, and we wonder why our college applicants write application essays that border on unintelligible. Speed kills, my friends. It would be a reasonable argument, yet one that I can’t get into here, to blame many of the pitfalls of our modern lives on our insatiable appetite for speed. But the revolution is coming. Slow food is becoming more than just trendy, American capitalism is taking a hit in the jaw, back roads are coming back, and I see less text messaging around than I have in ages. And there are bastions of civility out there. Good old Etown College reminds me that are genuinely friendly places in existence where people actually spend time thinking about doing the right thing, even if it takes longer. Slooooooooooooooooooooow dooooooooown. The roses smell nice.
It has also come to my attention that the effort for speed fails to utilize employees to the best of their abilities. Efficiency becomes the name of the game, but in not taking the time to get to know each individual employee, what their strengths and desires are, there are huge wastes of resources. Maybe the company needs some photography done and they would know that one of their employees has considerable photography experience had they just read their resume in detail instead of giving it a tertiary glance. If someone is better at washing dishes than clearing tables, have them was dishes more often. I’ve seen many companies give lip service to this type of thing in interviews or regular assessments, but it’s very often never followed up on. Instead, most managers assume their minimum wage employees are bottom crawling deadbeats instead of the college-educated dreamers and world travelers many of them actually are. Along with identifying my slowness (which I would never call a weakness) I’ve also had to think about what I am good at. It seems to me that I have solid people skills, a big old brain in my head that’s able to capture information, think critically about it, and use it to solve problems, and a tendency to thoroughness. This does of course mean that I am not good at speed and unquestioning obedience, which, it could be argued, are far more practical in this mad mad mad mad world.
Working in food service after traveling through Central America has also given me a better look at what I truly believe is a food waste epidemic. Seeing the amount of food that gets thrown out, both by the restaurants and by customers is simply appalling. There is absolutely no reason for world hunger. Certainly the solution is not as simple as getting rich people to eat less. The problems of world hunger are largely related to distribution channels, lack of resources, and corrupt governments. Getting the food from the rich countries to the poor countries is a big problem. Still, cakes should never be thrown away. If you order a pizza, you should eat it. Clean that chicken bone people. I don’t doubt for a second that the amount of food that is thrown out each day here could feed all the employees happily. Anyone who has ever worked with food should be ticked off by this. It has really opened my eyes. In his novel, Galápagos, Vonnegut talks about a local Ecuadorian going mad during a hunger crisis when a visiting tourist feeds an expensive steak to his dog while people are starving. At least, there, some living thing benefited from the steak. Friends, people are starving, dying every day because they don’t have enough to eat. Can we even imagine actually dying from hunger? It’s so far from our realm of possibility we can’t even picture what it would look like. Even if your cooked pizza can’t make it across the ocean to Africa or down the street to the slums, no conscience should be able to live with throwing an ounce of food in the trash in a world where people are dying for as much. And in the end, it is all connected. Beef cattle graze on cleared rainforest land that robs the earth of oxygen and biodiversity. Sometimes it’s not cleared rainforest, sometimes land in poor countries that could be used for useful food production for that nation’s population is used to cultivate animal feed to send to rich countries to feed to their cattle because it can fetch a better price. Our insatiable appetite literally robs the planet of its oxygen pumps and the worlds’ poor of their dinners. Eat my friends, and enjoy every bite. That’s your privilege and your prerogative, but keep that food out of the trash. Waste not.
A lot of people here aren’t able to pick up my accent, which is very strange to me. I think it’s pretty clear that I’m American no matter how I shake it, but perhaps most people’s American stereotypes still have us all sounding like Garth Brooks. I think the bigger thing people here in my voice, though, is enthusiasm. People say I don’t sound like an American, and I’ve gotten everything from German (a good guess since every other backpacker in NZ is German) to Australian. (I learned as well there is at least one horse in Germany named Jeremy, belonging to one of the girls who worked here.) Listening to myself I don’t think I sound any different than I ever have, but I have realized that the distinguishing characteristic of most people’s voices is lack of enthusiasm; it’s boredom or anger or frustration or general unhappiness. I had a wonderful compliment the other week from a friend that I always seem so happy. All I said was “it’s a choice.” Lots of people are grumpy I think because they don’t get enough sleep. I may be the only person I know who sleeps between 7 and 8 hours a night. Lots of folks get a good 5 hours, and many others get a good 10. I know you can easily adjust to different levels of sleep after a period of time, but I can see such a huge difference in my own levels of alertness depending on how much sleep I got. It is also a fine testament, I hope, to the faith I have in Christ. I’ve always thought that the best way to show people that Christianity is not a faith of judgment and legalism but of love and peace is to live a life of love and peace. Frankly, most Christians don’t give of a very god vibe to the outside world. If you know nothing of Christianity except what the media gives you and you meet a Christian who fits the stereotype, you’re very likely not going to be terribly attracted to it. But if you meet someone who exudes love and peace and joy, it may actually make people want to know why you’re so happy. Many people express genuine shock when they find out I’m a Christian because their only experience with the faith has been negative. It’s a sad fact that it surprises people to know that Christians can be loving. More than a few people have told me that I’m the only good Christian they’ve met. Brothers and sisters, I’ve got the joy way down in the depths of my heart. Sometimes it gets a bit cloudy between my heart and my brain and I forget that the joy is down there, but the clouds always pass because they’re just not strong enough to block out the joy.
You may wonder how I remember all these things that happen to me between journal sessions. I actually keep a notebook with me at almost all times and jot down quick notes any time something comes to my mind that I want to write about. Sometimes, however, I look back at my notes a month later and have no idea what I was talking about. Such is the case with my next topic, four things that do not bring me joy. If I recall, I was in the middle of clearing tables at the café at the usual breakneck speed and being generally frustrated with the constant push to be faster when I began thinking about things that make me mad and decided it would be a good idea to put them into list form. Ah, the human need to categorize everything. In an effort not to dwell on these things I’ll simply list what I determined summarize the banes of my existence, in no particular order: being wrongly accused of something I did not do; dishonesty, especially in the form of manipulation for profit; apathy; men or women in relationships who are ungrateful for their incredible blessing. People say I’m always so calm and relaxed. What does it take to make you mad, Jeremy? Now you know.
My days off have been spent enjoying the incredible scenery all around me. While exploring the village I ran across a spider part way through making its web in the corner of a gazebo at the local school and decided to watch the little guy complete his home. I can safely call it one of the most beautiful things I have ever witnessed. The precision and tact with which it made that web so architecturally stable and perfect is fascinating. How does it know about the structure of sound design? How does it know where to go next? Why can it make silk and I can’t? It’s rationale in choosing which strand to complete next baffled even me, but in the end, it came out with a gorgeous web. That same day I also saw a NZ falcon, another native species and a pretty rare find. They say they are the meanest birds in the world if you get near their babies, so thank goodness there were no kiddies around! I also did a tour of a glacier lake (made from meltwater on top of a glacier growing enough to create a lake). The ice that is now in the icebergs of the lake fell as snow onto the top of the glacier more than 300 years ago, meaning it is “pre-Industrial Revolution ice.” In other words, you’ve never seen anything so clean! This ice is unbelievable; it’s absolutely crystal clear and borders on rock solid from all the years of compacting in the glacier. It’s impossible to have ice like this anymore because the Industrial Revolution has so polluted the air that even if we eliminated pollution completely today it will still be a long time before the air would be as clean as it was before smog.
Women of course continue to boggle my mind. I know there are decent women in the world. As far as I know, all the women in my family are quite decent. Common sense would then tell me that there must be decent women elsewhere whose last name is not Ebersole. They seem to all be in hiding, however. It’s astounding that at 27 years old, after a good 13 odd years of playing this game, and all the cultural changes that society has wrought over the years, I still encounter the exact same situation with almost every girl I meet. Age, culture, background, none of it seems to make any difference. The planet is simply populated by women who seem to genuinely believe that friends and boyfriends should not be the same person. Women who in private, away from the conforming eyes of society, can enter into genuine meaningful conversation, but who once among other people continue to defy logic in ways that confound even themselves. Being happy, being good, giving and receiving love, these things are so simple and so elemental and fundamental to our beings and yet we continue to rob ourselves of them. But I’ve written about all this before.
Other than women, much of my time is spent thinking about work, specifically, what exactly I’m going to do when I return to the land of baseball (which I have deemed to be essential to a productive and happy life) and Hershey’s chocolate in August. I think many people work more for the lifestyle afforded by work than the job. They love the money, the benefits, the security, and the schedule afforded by their jobs without regard to the actual work they are doing. I have been caught up in this as well. It was hard to leave admissions counseling because of all these things. In a way, this was the mindset that brought me to New Zealand. I didn’t care what I actually did (even if I had preferences), I just needed to make a little money to fund my exploration of an exotic country. The lure of the exotic for its own sake has thoroughly worn out its appeal, however. I have realized how critical it is to absolutely love the work you are doing, perhaps not without regard to the lifestyle afforded by it, but at least with less regard than is given to the actual work. For example, I love film and movies, but would I like working in a movie theater? Even though I love the content, what would I actually do in a movie theater? I’d sell tickets and food and clean carpets and bathrooms. I love architecture, but would I love being an architectural historian? What would I actually do? I love learning about so many things, but I’m still trying to figure out what I actually love doing. I remember loving performing, but it’s been so long since I’ve done it. And what does it actually mean? Acting, speaking, drumming, tour guiding? What happened to the days when there were two choices, farmer or intellectual?
It has become a regular fixture of these NZ journals to talk about the interesting cultural differences between my permanent and temporary homeland, so I won’t disappoint this time. I learned recently that there is no drinking age in New Zealand. This was quite a surprise to me since I had always thought that everywhere has a drinking age of some kind and that NZ’s was 18. Turns out 18 is a buying age, not a drinking age. In New Zealand, it is not at all illegal to drink alcohol at 6 years old if you want, you just can’t buy it until you’re 18. And it’s perfectly legal for parents to give their kids alcohol in any and all circumstances. I encourage anyone who thinks that lowering the drinking age in the US or encouraging people to drink responsibly at a younger age so that it become more normalized will solve our alcoholic culture to come to New Zealand. Alcohol creates an alcoholic culture, however you shake it. Also, in NZ, “fillet” is pronounced exactly how it looks, with the “t” and all, fill-it. (And a little bit of German humor too. We had a customer ask for mayonnaise the other day and I asked another German employee where it was kept. She had no idea what I was talking about. I figured the issue was pronunciation, so instead of man-aze I tried may-o-naze. Still nothing. I tried just mayo. Nothing. Then she said, “oh you mean my-o-naze!” It’s amazing how the slightest little difference can make the biggest difference in language comprehension.) NZ birds also don’t fly quite as much as our native species. Instead they hop just about everywhere. Little kangaroo birds hopping along picking random bits of who knows what from the ground. It’s pretty cute. Speaking of cute, I saw my first possum the other day. Possums are the devil to New Zealanders. They are native to Australia and completely different from North American possums. These guys look more like little tree bears than big rats. They’re quite adorable and were brought over to NZ so people would kill them for their fur and make money off of it. They multiplied too quickly, though, and started eating all the native birds and trees. The myriad ironies are apparent, but about half of the national park service’s job is trying to kill all the possums in New Zealand that they introduced decades ago so people would kill them and wear their fur. You can’t help but think the cute little buggers are the real victims of all this.
In my continued pondering of the glories of the United States, I at some point remembered all the uber-patriots and their rallying cry to love it or leave it. Many Americans are absolutely convinced, without ever having left America or knowing anything about the rest of the world, that America is the most incredible place in the world. Freedom. Liberty. You know, all those things terrorists are supposed to hate. And while I disagree with their method pretty vehemently, I don’t completely disagree with their conclusion. I think the great gift of America to the world, our strongest asset in making the claim to awesomeness, lies in the virtually endless possibilities we have to do anything. New Zealand has amazing landscapes and a thriving economy and all the necessities for a healthy population, but it doesn’t have the population necessary to provide opportunities for every dream that exists in the heads of its citizens. They do the best they can of course, but at a certain point, when you only have 4 million people, it simply makes sense to focus on certain things that you’re really good at and say to people who want to explore other opportunities, “go over to England if you want to do that.” New Zealand is still an incredible place, but its size is a necessary limiting factor. I can’t speak for many other countries, but I can say I am completely convinced that in America, if nothing else, we always have a possibility of a better tomorrow. Anyone anywhere can go into a library and learn to read. We have social programs set up to help people in any life circumstance you could think of. We have pretty good education, some of it even affordable. We have a range of health care options; and even if many of them are out of a reasonable price range, we have incredible holistic medicine systems in place to back it up. And just about any career that exists in the world, exists in the U.S. There are of course, all kinds of implicit barriers that block people from some of these resources, but the framework is well laid, and I think it’s easier to eliminate the subtle barriers to a resources than to develop the infrastructure to set up the resource in the first place. And it made me wonder, how on earth can anyone in the U.S. be a pessimist? Of course we have a critical mass of pessimists in the United States. I would wager that the majority of Americans are in fact rather pessimistic; many of these people have even travelled widely. Part of this I think is our cultural impotence at relationships, but I am still inclined to say that even the most pessimistic American, if given the opportunity to really live in another country without them would have to agree that we have something fairly unique on our hands. We do a lot of things wrong, but one thing we do right is give people the chance to set their own course. Let’s have a little thanksgiving.
I had quite a beautiful day last week, so I walked about 7km through our valley to the neighboring one before I was picked up by a Swiss couple who took me a little ways farther to the intersection with an underground river leading to the base a mountain waterfall. There was an old path leading up to the falls, but the bridge over the river was completely gone and the trail dead ended into some matagouri (Maori for “face slasher”) bushes. I eventually just decided to follow the dry riverbed up over boulders that became increasingly slippery the closer I go to the mist of the waterfall. I was able to get to get just about right next to the base of this, the highest permanent waterfall in the park, before turning back when the current and power of the water became more than I was willing to risk. The place was teeming with grasshoppers and I became really intrigued by one that let me get real close without hopping away. As I watched it I saw its body begin to shake and this long thin object come out of its backside. I have no idea if what I saw was a potty break or the miracle of life. Either way, I may be the only person I know who has seen either one, which makes me feel pretty darn lucky. I walked back through the valley, which was carved by a glacier many many years ago. The ground isn’t even the true bedrock but rather 600 meters of rubble deposited by the glacier during its retreat back up the mountainside. I found an old dirt road to walk along, but at certain points it had been overtaken by the riverbed that provides a waterway from the current glacial lake to the big old one. I took a nap under the clouds and woke up to see a car face first in a tree of the side of the main dirt road in the valley (no injuries). With no one anywhere around, I couldn’t help but sing a song as I walked. It was a good day.
So I have about a month left in the mountains before heading back to Napier for a bit. I decided I needed to head back to maintain my integrity as a man of my word. When I took the hostel job in Napier I promised them 3 months. I failed to deliver in my effort to get out to Mount Cook, but the part of me that recognizes that my ancestors in the Brethren church were persecuted vigorously for their right to such beliefs as not being bound by oaths, contracts, or swearing on anything. The idea is that a Christian does not need such things and that in genuine Christian community they are not necessary because a Christian’s word is as good as gold. I have always tried to live my life in such a way that I am blameless in my own conscience, and it struck me that in order to maintain that integrity I had to honor my commitment. So I am looking forward to returning to the deco city for a relaxing month without the expectation of perfection that accompanied my first visit. It struck me that my interest in Napier and in historic architecture in general is not so much a search for aesthetics but for the way of life they represent, a way of life romanticized by popular culture but one that if it ever existed before, certainly does not exist now outside of little pockets. In Napier, I was hoping to find a city so proud of its architectural integrity that it embraced the simpler way of life of that time period. Instead of jazz clubs and flappers and classic cars, I found thoroughly modern people in a thoroughly modern city putting on a play of sorts for tourists. It is a town that recognizes and celebrates its heritage but does so as a show rather than a reality. At the end of the day, there is still a KFC just beyond the square and the old buildings are filled with trendy coffee shops and designer clothing stores. But there are pockets in the world – neighborhoods, communities, families – where values of community and love and fun and technology-free companionship do exist. And the hunt shall continue. Meanwhile, Napier is a nice place to enjoy the pretty buildings.
Jeremy
