01 · The Empty Track
“Grassroots?”
I stood at the entrance and read the name again.
Grassroots Trust Velodrome.
I looked at Katherine.
“A national cycling centre — and they call it grassroots?”
The two ideas did not seem to belong together.
Katherine smiled and left the question alone.
A few hours earlier, I had asked her something similar.
“YOU’LL SEE”
We had just arrived in Cambridge.
For years, driving south from Auckland, we had passed through the town without really stopping. A sign, a few roundabouts, then the road carried us on. This time there was nowhere farther we needed to be. We were staying for a few days.
The first thing we did was find coffee.
Outside Paddock Café, I looked up at the sign.
“What does Paddock mean?”
Katherine smiled.
“You’ll see in a couple of days.”
Then she pushed open the door.
Inside, a blackboard covered most of the wall behind the counter. Breakfast, bagels, burgers, coffee — line after line in white chalk. A pink coffee machine worked in bursts. The display cabinet was crowded with cakes, bread and ready-made food; people waited to order.
Further in, the walls became busier.
A woman’s profile filled a mural. Her hair rolled out behind her in long layers, carrying houses, windows and fine lines through it.
A tūī sat among the hair.
Its head was black, the neck and wings catching blue-green, the small white tuft at its throat standing out against the darker feathers. Bare bulbs hung from the ceiling. One warm yellow light sat almost directly above the bird.
Two people were talking at a small table beneath the mural. One of the women held a child. They paid no attention to us.
On another white wall hung a black bicycle.
Not leaning there. Hung there, both wheels off the ground.
Beside it, a painted tap.
H₂O →
The arrow pointed towards a place to refill a bottle.
I stood there for a moment.
A woman.
A bird.
A bicycle.
Water.
None of it seemed random, though I could not have said why.
Then I followed Katherine outside.
A COFFEE LEFT TO COOL
The autumn sun was warm enough to sit out by the street.
Katherine had sunglasses on. Her coffee came in a pale green cup, with a small stainless-steel milk jug beside it. Sunlight struck the metal hard enough to make me squint.
Mine arrived in a white cup on a pale green saucer.
Then breakfast: eggs, sausage, bacon, mushrooms, toast.
What caught me first was the plate.
White enamel, a dark rim, chipped in several places.
I knew that kind of plate. When I was a child in China, enamel cups, bowls and washbasins were everywhere. At some point they began disappearing from ordinary life, so gradually that I never noticed when they were gone.
I took a sip of coffee.
Still too hot.
I put it down.
We talked for a while.
I picked it up again.
People came and went through the café door. Someone found a table. Someone finished and left. Cars moved past the street, none of them very fast.
We had no deadline for the next stop. No list open on a phone telling us how many places were still left to see.
The coffee cooled.
We kept sitting.
Sometimes we talked. Sometimes we watched the traffic go by.
The sun moved across the wooden table.
Hot became warm.
Eventually the cup was empty.
Katherine finished hers too. She did not head straight for the car park. Instead she looked back through the café.
The black bicycle was still hanging on the wall.
She pointed at it.
“Come on.”
I followed her finger.
“I’ll take you to see bikes.”
NO BIKES
That was how we ended up at Grassroots Trust Velodrome.
The name still bothered me.
Later I learned that Grassroots Trust was exactly what it sounded like: a trust that puts money back into local communities, including amateur sport, education and other community projects.
Katherine was less surprised.
Sport in New Zealand, she said, was not quite the system I had grown up knowing in China. There were elite programmes and national teams, of course, but athletes did not always live inside a world sealed off from everyone else.
“Some are still students,” she said. “Some have to find their own sponsors.”
Then, after a moment:
“But don’t underestimate New Zealand.”
“The Olympic results are pretty good.”
We walked further in.
Glass cabinets along the wall held trophies, shields and old competition memorabilia. Some of the silver had dulled; wooden bases had darkened with age.
When I stopped to take a photograph, the glass caught our reflections too.
Behind us was a vast, almost empty building.
A few steps later the track opened below.
I stopped.
The timber oval ran for 250 metres around the arena. At each end the banking climbed until it looked less like a road than a wooden wall tipped towards the centre.
Rows of grey-white seats stood empty.
Steelwork crossed the roof.
The lights were on.
No race.
No crowd.
No bikes.
Katherine leaned on the rail and looked down.
I stood beside her.
We waited.
Nothing came around the bend.
PARIS
An empty track makes it easier to imagine what is missing.
At the 2024 Paris Olympics, New Zealand’s track cyclists won two golds, two silvers and a bronze — the country’s best track-cycling result at a single Games.
One of the names most closely tied to Cambridge was Ellesse Andrews.
She had already won silver in the women’s keirin in Tokyo. In Paris, aged twenty-four, she rode with Rebecca Petch and Shaane Fulton to silver in the women’s team sprint.
Then she won the keirin.
Gold.
On the final day she reached the individual sprint final.
Gold again.
Two golds and a silver.
The images from an Olympic velodrome are all speed: wheels running high on the banking, the bell for the last lap, riders dropping down the track, a sprint that is over almost before the eye has caught up.
Paris felt very far from the silent timber in front of us.
DOWNSTAIRS
I was about to step away from the rail when I looked down.
There was another training area below the track.
A young woman was there.
No bicycle.
She was doing leg-strength work. Someone stood beside her who looked like her coach.
She finished a movement and stopped.
He came closer, said something, adjusted her position.
She set herself again.
Another repetition.
I stayed at the rail.
One.
Stop.
Again.
Another correction.
She adjusted.
Started again.
No spectators.
The seats stayed empty.
The track stayed empty.
She finished a set, rested, then began another.
And I thought of the wall at Paddock Café.
The woman.
The tūī.
The tap marked H₂O.
And the bicycle hanging in the air.
When we had left the café, Katherine had pointed at it.
“Come on. I’ll take you to see bikes.”
I had believed her.
There was not a single bike on the track.
I looked down once more.
The young woman was still there.
So was the coach.
One repetition.
Then another.
It occurred to me that perhaps bikes were not what Katherine had brought me to see.
02 · Inside the Fence
“Isn’t this basically a Great Wall for the forest?”
Katherine looked at the fence.
“What about the ones already inside?”
AFTER THE EMPTY TRACK
A few hours earlier we had been at Grassroots Trust Velodrome. When we left, the track was still empty.
We drove out of Cambridge.
Houses thinned. Farms returned. Green slopes ran out on both sides of the road, cattle and sheep scattered behind ordinary farm fences. The sky widened. The mountain drew closer.
Near Sanctuary Mountain Maungatautari, the road suddenly emptied.
No cars.
No people.
I looked at Katherine.
“You should stand in the middle. You don’t get many chances to do that.”
She went out happily, raised both hands in a wide V, and stood there with the road running away beneath her towards the mountain.
Not much farther on, we saw the fence.
It was nothing like the farm fences we had been passing.
The mesh was high and dense, following the edge of the forest in both directions until one end disappeared around the slope.
Large information boards stood near the entrance.
We stopped there before buying our tickets.
FORTY-SEVEN KILOMETRES
The first board was about the fence itself.
Up close, the details became almost obsessive.
The mesh ran down close to the ground, with protection against animals digging underneath. At the top, the fence did not simply stop; it curved outwards to stop climbers.
Anything that crossed the line — a gate, a road, a drain — had to be treated as a possible gap.
One number dominated the sign.
47 km.
Forty-seven kilometres.
I followed the fence with my eyes. From where we stood, we could see only a short section before it bent with the land and vanished behind trees.
But it went on like that around an entire mountain.
Inside were more than 3,000 hectares of forest.
“Why go this far?” I asked. “Isn’t nature already pretty well protected in New Zealand?”
Katherine was still looking at the board.
“They’re trying to get it as close as they can to what it used to be.”
“Used to be?”
She pointed at the animals shown there.
Rats. Possums. Mustelids. Cats. Deer. Goats. Pigs.
I had assumed the fence was mainly about the animals we easily call pests — predators that kill birds or take eggs.
But the list kept going.
Deer do not hunt birds. Goats do not steal eggs. They browse. They trample. A seedling can disappear before it has had much chance to become a tree.
I turned and looked back outside the fence.
The farms we had just driven through were still there, ordinary Waikato country.
Then I looked at the animals on the board again.
The aim, Katherine said, was to exclude introduced land mammals as far as possible and give the forest a chance to move towards an earlier ecological state.
My first reaction was not admiration.
It sounded naive.
The mountain had been changed for a long time. Could anyone really turn it backwards? Forty-seven kilometres of specialised fence. Animals already inside that still had to be removed. Monitoring. Maintenance. Then doing it all again next year.
For a moment, I wondered whether the effort could possibly be worth it.
But Katherine’s question was still there.
What about the ones already inside?
Closing the fence was only the beginning.
The animals already living beyond it did not vanish when the last section of mesh was joined. People still had to go in: clear, check, monitor.
Lines and marked points spread across the diagrams on the board, one after another, into the forest.
None of it looked grand.
We bought our tickets.
The first gate opened.
Katherine went through and I followed. It shut behind us, but we were not in the forest yet.
There was another gate ahead.
For a moment we stood between two walls of mesh.
A sign asked visitors to check footwear, bags and belongings. I looked down at my shoes. Mud, seeds, tiny hitchhikers — the sorts of things I would normally ignore — mattered here.
Only when the gate behind us had closed did we open the one in front.
A few steps later, the fence disappeared behind trees.
The light changed.
Outside had been open sky and sunlit pasture. Here the canopy closed overhead. Ferns reached in from the track. Trunks climbed straight up, some wrapped in vines and moss.
Underfoot, hard ground gave way to soil and leaves.
The air smelled of damp earth, bark and leaf litter.
We kept talking, but more quietly.
THE BIRD FROM THE WALL
A bird called somewhere above us.
Katherine stopped first.
“Look.”
She pointed into the canopy.
At first I saw nothing.
The bird called again. Leaves moved. A black shape appeared behind them.
Light caught blue-green in the feathers. The small white tuft at the throat stood out.
“Tūī,” Katherine said.
I laughed.
“Isn’t that the one from the wall at Paddock Café?”
It called twice, hopped to another branch, then disappeared into the leaves.
I kept looking up for a while.
The canopy closed over it.
The information boards inside the forest came one at a time. Walk for a while, find one. Walk again, another.
One was about rimu.
Beside it was a cross-section of timber. The tree grows slowly; the rings sat close together.
I leaned in.
“Is this a bit like Chinese rosewood?” I said to Katherine. “Rosewood furniture is incredibly expensive.”
She smiled.
“Do you know why?”
“Why?”
“Because there’s less and less of the wood left.”
I looked again at the tight rings.
They reminded me of the Kauri Museum at Matakohe, where enormous cross-sections of kauri trunks sit indoors now, their rings preserving the years of trees that once stood in great numbers across the north.
Sunlight slipped through the canopy in patches.
Sometimes there was birdsong.
Sometimes only our shoes in the leaves.
THE BIRD THAT WAS GONE
Not far ahead, another bird appeared between the trees.
A very large one.
Not alive.
Wood.
A long neck. A heavy body. Katherine stood beside it and looked small.
It was a moa.
Once, birds like this walked through New Zealand forests.
Now there was a carving.
I took a photograph of Katherine beside it, then lowered the phone.
A little farther on, a tower began to appear through the trees.
TO BE A TREE HERE
First I saw the stairs.
Then I looked higher.
More stairs.
Higher again, and they were still climbing into the canopy.
A sign beside the structure gave the height.
Sixteen metres.
I had assumed it was simply another visitor lookout.
The board told a different story. Specialists had put up the main structure; local people and volunteers had helped with much of what followed.
I read the names again.
At the entrance, I had thought the whole project a little naive.
I still did, in a way.
But there was something about taking an idea that improbable and continuing with it year after year that was harder to dismiss.
Katherine had already started climbing.
The stairs turned upwards through the trees. After a while her breathing became noticeably heavier.
Halfway up, I stopped and looked down. The track we had just walked had shrunk beneath us.
We kept going.
At ground level we had spent the whole walk looking up at trees. Now the trunks seemed to fall away below us, and the canopy rose to meet us.
The wind was stronger at the top.
The fence was gone from view.
So were the entrance boards and the gates.
There was only forest: one layer of canopy behind another, running out towards the distance.
Katherine held the rail and looked across it for a while.
Then she said:
“I think it would be so nice to be a tree here.”
I stood beside her.
Wind moved over the treetops.
Somewhere below, a bird called.
03 · The Lake Below
“Why is the lake so far down?”
Katherine turned and looked back up the slope we had just walked.
“Then this is basically a catchment, isn’t it? If everything drains down here and can’t get out, wouldn’t it stink?”
“Not in the middle of town, surely.”
We kept going.
The Church in the Last Light
We had come back into Cambridge from Sanctuary Mountain late in the afternoon and parked near Lake Te Koo Utu.
A few minutes later, St Andrew’s Church appeared through the autumn trees.
The building was white timber, the steeple dark against the sky. The sun was already low enough to strike it from the side. Gold leaves, deep red leaves, green leaves that had not quite turned yet — all of them seemed to gather around the church and hold the light there.
Katherine stopped.
She stayed where she was for so long that I walked on, then turned and found her still looking.
Across the road, several interpretation panels stood beside the trees. We wandered over.
There was the lake. Soldiers. Old photographs. A court. Maps. Names I did not remember.
We gave them only a quick look.
The sun was going down, and the lake was still somewhere below us.
History could wait.
Still Down There
The path kept falling away.
I had expected a short descent. Instead we walked down one stretch, then another. The lake remained below.
That was when I asked why it sat so low.
Katherine looked back up the hill.
“Then this is basically a catchment, isn’t it? If everything drains down here and can’t get out, wouldn’t it stink?”
“Not in the middle of town, surely.”
By the time we reached the water, the light had gone.
A short while earlier the church had been almost luminous. Down here, cloud had closed over the sun. The far bank was dark. The lake carried a thin, colourless light, and the autumn trees seemed to have lost the distinctions between them.
I had arrived with my own picture of a Cambridge autumn in mind.
This was not it.
Katherine walked to the edge of the water and stopped beside a dense patch of reeds and wetland plants.
“Why don’t they clear some of this out?” I asked.
She looked at it too.
At the time, it seemed obvious to us. A lake in the middle of town, somewhere people came to walk and look at the view, ought to be tidier than this.
Further on, a man stood beside a drain outlet.
I could not tell whether he worked there or had simply come down to help. He had a long rake. Fallen leaves had gathered against the opening.
He reached out, hooked the rake into them and pulled.
A sodden clump came up onto the bank.
More leaves drifted in.
He reached out again.
We watched for a while.
One rakeful.
Then another.
Nothing about him suggested urgency. The leaves came because that was where the water brought them. He pulled them out because they were there.
The slope behind us suddenly made more sense.
Everything around the lake was higher.
Water finds the low ground.
When the Sun Came Back
We walked on.
Somewhere above the far bank, the cloud began to thin.
At first there was only a pale opening. Then sunlight touched the tops of the trees.
The trees changed before the lake did.
Colours that had been pressed together in the grey light began to come apart. Yellow turned gold. A red tree showed itself among the green.
Then the sun reached the water.
The dull surface took on colour. Trees dropped into it. Houses appeared upside down. The sky settled beneath them.
There was hardly any wind.
Autumn seemed to have found a second life under the surface.
A ripple moved out from the bank, loosened the reflections and carried them away for a moment. Then the water settled and they gathered again.
Katherine stopped.
“This is what it should look like.”
I knew what she meant.
A few words from the panels above came back to me.
“The town’s drainage used to run into this lake,” I said. “They dumped rubbish around it too.”
She turned towards me.
Then back to the water.
The two things did not seem to belong to the same place.
Later, when Katherine talked about Cambridge, she kept returning to two pictures: the white church in the slanting sun, and the lake after the light came back.
We finished the circuit and climbed the long slope to the street.
The panels opposite the church were still there.
This time, we stopped.
A Thousand Trees
The boards had not changed.
We had.
Now the long descent had a shape. So did the reeds, the drain, the man with the rake.
The pieces began to fit.
Lake Te Koo Utu had always occupied low ground. As Cambridge grew around it, rubbish accumulated at the edge and town drainage was directed towards the lake.
More than a century ago, people were already warning about what that might do to the water.
A short while earlier, Katherine had asked whether a place like this would begin to stink.
It was not such an unreasonable question after all.
By the 1950s, local people were trying to improve the lake.
They cleared weeds and fallen timber. They worked on tracks. They brought stone. Trucks and tractors were lent. Money was raised.
And they planted trees.
More than a thousand.
Most of them died.
That stopped me.
Planting, it turned out, was only the beginning.
The account on the panel spoke of what had gone wrong afterwards — too little follow-up care, and lessons learned the hard way.
I looked back towards the lake.
The plants we had wanted tidied away now looked different. The wetland edge was not simply something that had been left alone. It slowed water. It caught sediment. It took some of what washed down from the streets above before it could move further into the lake.
Other measures had followed over time, including ways of slowing and filtering stormwater before it reached the water.
I thought again of the man with the rake.
Leaves arrived.
He pulled them out.
More arrived.
He reached out again.
The Word We Missed
We kept reading.
There was another phrase on the panel I had barely noticed the first time.
Camp Cambridge.
In 1864, a military settlement was established here.
Soldiers came. Families followed. Then roads, houses and farms.
A town took shape.
Across the road, St Andrew’s stood where we had left it, white against the autumn trees.
Below us was the lake.
For a moment, three other images sat together in my mind.
The young woman in the empty velodrome, repeating the same movement until the body learned it.
The fence around Sanctuary Mountain — forty-seven kilometres of it — holding a line around an impossible ambition.
And the man beside the drain, pulling out leaves that would keep coming.
Perhaps that was all it was: three unrelated things seen in the same town.
Still, the words Camp Cambridge stayed with me.
Can a place inherit habits the way a family does?
A taste for order. The patience to repeat something. The instinct to correct what has gone wrong and keep going.
Perhaps some trace of the old military settlement lingered.
Perhaps none of it did.
Perhaps those habits came later, made slowly by the people who chose to stay here and keep working on the place in front of them.
The sun was lower now.
Below us, the lake held the last of the light.
From up there, the reflection was clear.
04 · Why Here?
A young man came towards me carrying breakfast, bare-chested, broad across the shoulders. He smiled and said hello; on his plate was a piece of meat that looked very much like steak. I had not seen the lake yet.
Someone Was Already There
Katherine was still asleep when I left.
I closed the door quietly and drove alone to Lake Karāpiro. We had been there before, but this time the day had barely begun.
A film of moisture covered the windscreen. Cambridge was almost empty. Streetlights glowed through the mist, each one surrounded by a pale halo. The shops were shut. Now and then a car passed in the other direction, and then the road was mine again.
It was a public holiday. I assumed there would be nobody around that early.
Outside the rowing centre, there almost wasn't.
Inside, a line of young men was already on the rowing machines.
Beyond the squat racks and weight plates, they moved back and forward in rhythm. Knees folded. Legs drove out. Bodies opened. The handles came into their chests and went away again.
Then again.
The machines made a steady mechanical sound in the otherwise empty room.
I had always thought of rowing as something done with shoulders and arms. Standing there, what I noticed first were the legs.
Fold.
Drive.
Return.
The day before, at the Grassroots Trust Velodrome, we had gone to see bicycles and ended up watching a young woman training below the track.
This morning I had come looking for boats.
I had not seen one yet.
I walked farther inside. Photographs and racing memorabilia hung near a meeting room. That was where the young man came towards me with his breakfast.
He was bare from the waist up, his shoulders wide, his arms thick. He saw me and smiled.
I said hello.
Then I looked at his plate.
A large piece of meat. Steak, or something close to it.
He walked past.
Behind me, the rowing machines kept going.
Boats into Mist
The lake appeared only when I went outside.
Mist sat low over the water. Sky and lake had almost the same grey-white colour, with no clear line between them. The grass along the bank was wet. Each step pressed it flat and darkened it.
People were moving around the boat sheds.
Several of them came out carrying a long shell on their shoulders. The boat stretched so far beyond them that the people beneath it looked oddly small.
They walked towards the water.
Nearby, someone checked an oar. Someone adjusted shoes. Someone crouched over the inside of a boat.
There was very little talking.
The shell was lowered onto the lake.
The rowers climbed in and spread their oars. The first stroke was almost silent. On the second, the boat moved. A few strokes later, their bodies were coming forward together and opening together.
Blades entered the water.
The boat went on.
The blades lifted.
The surface closed behind them.
Soon the shell was a thin line in the mist.
Then it was gone.
Another crew came out carrying another boat.
A man passed close to me. His shoes made almost no sound on the wet grass.
I did not stop anyone.
I had been to Karāpiro before. This time I stood on the wet bank and watched one boat after another come down from people's shoulders and enter the lake.
This was not a morning arranged for visitors.
I had simply walked into somebody else's day.
The hull entered the water.
The blades cut in.
The lake closed again.
Home of Champions
Katherine was up when I got back.
“I thought there'd be nobody there on a public holiday,” I told her. “I went inside and there was a whole row of them training.”
I told her about the young man with no shirt and the breakfast that looked like steak.
She laughed.
“You know New Zealand rowing is famous, don't you?”
“A bit.”
“Do you remember the twins at the Beijing Olympics?”
As soon as she said Beijing, I did.
Caroline and Georgina Evers-Swindell. They had won Olympic gold in Athens four years earlier and defended it in Beijing.
We had watched a lot of those Olympics. Two almost identical New Zealand women in the same boat: that image had stayed with me.
Then Katherine said, “Do you know Cambridge has another name?”
“What?”
“Home of Champions.”
There is a sporting Walk of Fame in the centre of town. Plaques carry the names of athletes connected with Cambridge.
I thought of the empty cycling track the day before.
Then of the boat disappearing into the mist.
“Why does a town this small have so many champions?”
Katherine did not answer.
I sat for a moment.
“I want to see one of the schools.”
“Let's go to St Peter's.”
The Map
That afternoon we drove to St Peter's School.
It was still the public holiday.
At Karāpiro I had expected an empty place and found people training. Here the quiet was real.
The road into the school ran between trees. Autumn had deepened their colours—red, yellow and the last of the green. Afternoon light came through the branches and broke across the road in patches.
We parked and walked in.
The school did not look like the schools I remembered. The buildings were low and spread among grass and trees. After one block there might be a wide open space before the next. With no students and no bell, the campus seemed larger than it probably did on an ordinary day.
We stopped at an information board.
There was a map of the school.
I looked first for the classrooms. The academic and everyday school buildings sat mainly in the middle.
Then my eyes moved outwards.
Athletics. Football. Rugby. Cricket. Hockey. Swimming pools. Sports halls.
Field after field around the centre.
“Have you noticed?” I said. “The classrooms are all in the middle.”
Katherine leaned closer.
“And everything around them is sport.”
We stood there looking at the map for a little longer.
Then we walked on.
The coloured shapes on the board became real grass. Some fields lay close to the road; others ran away towards the trees. With nobody playing on them, it was easier to see how much ground they occupied.
Katherine stopped beside one of them.
“When you're young, you really should do more sport.”
She had been the kind of student teachers liked: good marks, obedient, good at doing what was expected. She kept studying and eventually went on to postgraduate work.
I had been a rather different student. In my first years at university, higher mathematics and organic chemistry gave me plenty of trouble. I was more at ease on a football field.
Katherine has sometimes said she envies something about that.
Not the marks.
I have simply tended to try things because I wanted to see where they went. Often I did not know where a road led until I was already on it.
Wind came across the empty fields. A few leaves rolled along the ground.
These days Katherine notices things her younger body never asked her to think about. A movement takes a little longer. Something once automatic now occasionally requires a moment's hesitation.
Much of what we once memorised for examinations has gone somewhere else.
She looked across the empty fields.
The YOU on the Wall
Ahead of us was a white building.
We could read the words before we reached it.
BE THE BEST YOU CAN BE
Large black letters across a white wall.
We stopped.
“Be the best you can be,” I read.
For a while we just looked at it.
“Do you think this means something different when you read it at our age?”
Katherine said nothing at first.
I read the words again.
“Actually, I don't think best is the most important word.”
She looked at the wall.
“It's the YOU.”
I nodded.
“Exactly. You are the starting point. And the starting point can be new every day.”
She smiled.
The campus was still quiet. There was nobody on the distant fields. Afternoon sun caught the red leaves of a tree beside the building and lit them almost through.
Some distance farther on, I turned back.
The white wall was smaller now.
The black letters were still easy to read.
BE THE BEST YOU CAN BE.
05 · Back on the Bike
The bike wobbled. Katherine put one foot down at once and laughed.
Both hands were still tight around the handlebars, her shoulders held stiff. One foot had found the pedal; the other seemed reluctant to leave the ground.
She tried again. The bike rolled forward a few metres. Her foot went straight back down.
She had not properly ridden a bicycle in more than thirty years.
Behind the Town Hall
That morning, the plan was to try part of the Te Awa River Ride. I had looked at the route beforehand. It followed the Waikato River towards Karāpiro, and it was long enough to make cycling a better proposition than walking.
Cycling, however, had not been part of our plan.
Cambridge was already bright when we reached the Cambridge Town Hall. A few horse sculptures stood nearby.
Katherine stopped to look at them, then wandered off on her own.
Behind the town hall was a small wooden hut I had barely noticed. Several bicycles stood outside. Helmets hung nearby.
I followed her.
“You want to ride?”
She did not answer straight away.
The young man at the hire hut wheeled out a black mountain bike, adjusted the saddle and showed her the brakes and gears. He did not hurry her. He simply stood back and waited.
Katherine listened carefully.
She got on.
The bike wobbled again.
Her foot hit the ground.
She laughed.
The young man laughed.
So did I.
Again.
One foot on the pedal, one push from the ground. A short roll forward. Stop.
Again.
A little farther this time.
We gathered enough courage to hire two bikes for two hours.
We told ourselves we would see how far we got. If it did not feel right, we could come back.
Before attempting the trail, we went to the large field opposite the town hall.
Katherine rode round and round. At first every turn was slow. The moment the bike leaned, one foot was already preparing to meet the ground. She would steady herself on the straight, try another corner, then carry on.
After more than ten laps, she rode back towards me and stopped cleanly.
She looked up at me.
I looked back.
We nodded.
Neither of us said a word.
Off we go.
Wrong Way
Te Awa was the target.
We saw a green River Ride sign and followed it.
The path ran beneath old trees. One enormous silver maple reached over the trail, its leaves already taking on the first colours of autumn. Sunlight came through the canopy in broken patches, bright and dark across the asphalt.
Then came the sculptures.
Beside the wetland, a huge tūī spread its wings.
Farther on, an iron pūkeko sat at one end of a wooden bench with a basket in its lap. Katherine sat down beside it and raised a hand against the sun.
There was an iron dog farther along.
We kept riding.
After a while, something began to feel wrong.
I stopped and opened the map on my phone.
Wrong direction.
The signs made sense now. We had ridden towards the Art Trail.
I showed Katherine the screen.
She looked at it.
We both laughed.
Turn around.
By the time we found the way towards Karāpiro again, more than an hour had gone.
We had hired the bikes for two.
I checked the time, then looked at Katherine.
She held the handlebars and looked down the trail ahead.
She did not suggest going back.
“Is this okay?”
Katherine was still riding slowly, hands firm on the grips, shoulders tight, eyes fixed on the path.
After a while:
“Is this okay?”
A little later:
“Am I going too slowly?”
At a small rise:
“Should I get off and push here?”
I rode beside her.
Whenever the bike gave a small wobble, I found myself drifting closer. When someone approached from the other direction, I checked the width of the path before she did.
Dry leaves lay across the trail. The tyres made a soft, brittle sound as they passed over them.
Cyclists kept coming towards us. Some were in full kit and were gone almost as soon as they appeared. A family came by more slowly, children in front, adults following.
Others looked about our age.
A nod.
A smile.
One rider passed Katherine and called out:
“You’re doing great!”
For a moment she looked surprised.
Then she smiled.
Later another cyclist gave her a thumbs-up. This time she lifted her head and smiled back.
On the next downhill she feathered the brake herself. Where the surface changed, she steered around it. Every now and then she looked down and changed gear.
At some point, I stopped hearing:
“Is this okay?”
Then she was riding in front of me.
The bright green helmet moved steadily along the trail. Her shadow and the bike’s shadow fell at an angle across the path.
She did not turn around to ask me anything.
“That’s a Paddock”
The houses thinned out and the country opened.
Black timber fences ran along the road, turned at right angles and disappeared into broad green fields. Horses grazed behind them. A few stood in the shade.
We stopped to watch.
Katherine pointed.
“See? That’s a paddock.”
I followed her finger and immediately thought of two days earlier, when we had just arrived in Cambridge.
We had been standing outside Paddock Café.
I had looked up at the sign.
“What does ‘paddock’ mean?”
She smiled.
“You’ll know in a couple of days.”
Now we rode on.
I looked back once at the field.
I had nothing else to ask.
The Green Helmet
Te Awa carried on beneath more old trees, their branches reaching across the track until, for a while, they almost met overhead.
Then the trees fell away.
The sky opened.
Low hills sat in the distance. Closer to us were farms, timber fences and trees beginning to turn.
A gap slowly opened between Katherine and me.
She was ahead now, still wearing the same bright green helmet.
I noticed that her shoulders were no longer held as tightly as they had been in the field. When the track was clear, she sometimes lifted her head and looked beyond it.
I did not catch up.
Watching that green helmet move steadily along the trail, I could not help smiling.
The Same Lake
Later, we reached Lake Karāpiro.
I had been there alone the previous morning.
Then, the lake had been buried in mist. Water and sky were almost the same grey-white. Young rowers carried long boats down from their shoulders, lowered them onto the water and disappeared, stroke by stroke, into the fog.
Now it was close to midday.
The mist was gone.
Sunlight lay across the lake. The pale concrete of the dam appeared between the trees, with tall poplars rising beside it.
The water was bright. Autumn trees and large white clouds shared the reflection.
Katherine stopped her bike, the green helmet still on.
Behind her were the lake, the dam and those tall poplars.
Looking across the water, I thought of the rowers I had watched there the morning before.
Wind came up from below.
The surface flashed in the sun.
We stood there for a while.
“Not Bad”
On the way back, our legs began to ache.
The saddles felt harder too.
Katherine said the bike had knocked her legs several times and she would probably have more than one bruise by the time we got home.
A little later, she announced that the saddle was hurting her backside.
I laughed.
She laughed too.
We kept riding.
By then the sun was high and the coolness of the morning had gone.
When the little wooden hire hut came back into view, it was already after midday.
The young man saw us returning.
“How was it?”
Katherine handed the bike back.
“Not bad.”
I checked my phone.
22.20 kilometres.
3 hours, 52 minutes, 56 seconds.
Started 8:46.
Finished 12:39.
We had paid for two hours.
I went to settle the difference.
Afterwards, Katherine and the young man stood outside the hut for a photo, the two bikes resting nearby.
Fine beads of sweat still showed on her forehead, but her shoulders had relaxed. When she smiled, the corners of her eyes curved with it.
The young man stood beside her, smiling rather shyly.
He looked at Katherine, then at the bike she had just returned.
“Katherine might end up buying herself a bike.”