Progress; Little Bits of Progress

Over the past two weeks, I’ve made significant progress towards settling into the house where I’m living with a few friends in Wanaka for the New Zealand winter. It’s taken some doing, but the house will feel like home for several months. In contrast, in my eleventh winter here, the town of Wanaka feels like home immediately, in detail, and with far more jet-lag than settling-in time. “Welcome home,” each of my friends say when I arrive back. They mean it, I take it that way, and it definitely feels like it.

Eleven years isn’t really that long a period of time historically, but things have evolved substantially down here in that time. Wanaka is in the midst of a dizzyingly enormous boom – there are more than twice as many front doors here as when I arrived in 2007 and the town will double in size gain over the next few years. The pace of the development can be worrisome in the same way and with the same issues faced by American resort towns as they grow, though I do think the new development here is far greater, far faster, and far more fraught with risk than any that I’ve experienced.

On a personal level, my presence here as this development occurs reminds me of a specific moment from my childhood. I remember vividly being on a vacation on Nantucket Island, sitting on the beach that was a little crowded and a little rowdy for my family’s liking, and watching a New York Air jumbo jet fly overhead on its way to the island’s little airport. That jet was a bright, shiny, and strikingly emblematic icon of a similar dynamic for that once bucolic, middle-class hideaway. The thought dawned on me then as it does now: does my devotion to this place make me part of the problem? I don’t think so, but I do think that sensitivity to it, by all of us who come here, is an important component of helping Wanaka keep hold of its authenticity and remain true to the reasons that draw so many people here.

So, why the photo of the ancient mobile phone? It’s my beloved, eleven-year-old, pay-as-you-go, NZ cell phone. When I bought it, having a cell phone down here was a luxury. Its battery lasts a week, it never drops a call, it’s an incredibly reliable alarm clock, and it’s as hearty as any technological device has ever been. And, regrettably, it’s being replaced this winter. I’ve seriously considered replacing it with a smart phone filled with dazzling applications, fancy graphics, and the battery life of a flea that would connect me to the entirety of the digital world. Instead, like my hopes for Wanaka and all of the resort towns where I live, I’ll replace it with a functional, efficient and useful, slightly sleeker telephone that may have some broader capabilities and more advanced technology but ultimately will serve the purposes for which it is intended with the same vigor, albeit in a more modern and efficient form.

At the bottom it and the top of all of this, Wanaka is a wonderfully warm and welcoming Kiwi town in one of the most beautiful places that I’ve ever set foot. It’s no wonder so many people want to be here, I can’t blame them, and I definitely am one of them. Hopefully my new, non-smart cell phone will help me stay connected to my community here and in the USA with the simplicity that I prefer and without losing sight of its real purpose.