Middlemarch: Where the "middle" is short for "middle of nowhere"

So here I am in Middlemarch.  Never heard of it?  Not surprising.  Few have.

It’s in the Otago region on New Zealand’s South Island, which means this summer it’s one of the few dry places in the country.  As the rest of New Zealand is mucking about in incredibly wet conditions, Otago is living through a drought. 

The village is pretty remote – it’s a 45-minute drive to the nearest “real” grocery store and gas station in Mosgiel (itself a small town), and an hour to the city of Dunedin.



Mainstreet of bustling downtown Middlemarch facing north...




...and facing south.



It’s a place where people wander around town on horseback and pigs occasionally roam the streets.  Where rubber boots are “de rigueur,” and mullets are unironic.

It’s somewhere famers remove their mud- (and other matter-) encrusted boots at the door of shops and wander in their stocking feet (this act of decorum is greatly appreciated by those of us who clean the floors). Where the library is open an hour a week and to use the pool, you rent a key at the pub and let yourself in as you wish.

Middlemarch has a shabby, run-down feel to it, like a dust storm rolled through a few decades ago and nobody has quite managed, or bothered, to shake off all the residue.  Some of the locals even have a visible layer of dust on their person at the end of the day that gives them a sort of washed out, blurry look.

Most buildings could use a good paint job; quite a few of them obviously once housed businesses that are no more.  Many a yard is riddled with disused farming equipment and the only landscaping some lawns see is at the hands (or more precisely, mouths) of the sheep, cows or horses that live there. 

The aforementionned disused farming equipment and the poor horse who lives among it.  I give him carrots sometimes.

And, yes, there are a good many animals about. I have to watch my step while walking through town lest I trod on the sheep pellets, horse dung piles or dog poo that pepper the sidewalk in places.  It’s at once disgusting and charming.

As in small towns the world over, there is an incestuous air about the place. Not the literal “I’m my own grandpa” kind of incest, you understand (though you can never count it out) but more the “everyone’s linked to everyone else” kind.

It’s a little claustrophobic.

Since I’m here without a car, and bus service out of Middlemarch is both inconvenient and expensive, I’ve been feeling a little “landlocked,” if you will.  For a few glorious days I did have access to a “company car” but unfortunately, a coworker took it out on her first week and crashed it (this was especially gutting as the car itself was in the company’s possession for all of two weeks).

The town owes its existence mainly to the gold rush of the late 19^th century when a railway line was built to connect the gold fields to Dunedin.  As the rush slowed to a crawl a few decades later, trains became more and more disused. In the 1980s the line the Otago Central Branch Railway went the way of so many other lines around the world, and 150km of it was ripped up and converted into a cycling and walking track.

Near the end of the line.

The end of the line: Middlemarch station.

Nowadays, it is this track and the remaining bit of the railway line to Dunedin which is the bread and butter of Middlemarch. Every year thousands of tourists travel the Taieri Gorge railway between Dunedin and Middlemarch and cycle the Otago Central Rail Trail.

At the end of these unused tracks is the start (or end, if you do it from the other direction) of the Otago Central Rail Trail.  Pretty funky arch sculptures, eh?  And how about that cloud?  There are often cool cloud formations -- I think it has something to do with the Rock and Pillar range of mountains to the west.

I’m working for a combo café/info centre/bike rental business.  Basically, I’m a short-order cook and barista. It’s hardly mentally stimulating, to say the least.  To be honest, I have been questioning my decision to stay – why am I working for little more than minimum wage doing a menial job in a small town hundreds and thousands of km away from anyone I really care about?

My situation does have its strong points though. The cost of living is decidedly low.  I’m paying $100  of rent a week (for some inconvenient reason, rent is paid weekly, not monthly, in New Zealand), for a which includes all bills. 

My home in Middlemarch.  I'm sharing it for the moment with my coworker Adam, which is pretty cool.  He's a 25-year-old American dude who wishes he were Canadian (I told him he could be a South Canadian like my Californian friend Ben).  We also worked together at Treble Cone over the winter, and I hooked him up with this job.  It was nice having a friendly and familiar face when I first arrived. 

I often get food from the café – savoury pies, sandwiches and the like that are past their prime – and even when I get the urge to spend money, there’s really nowhere to do so;  Other than “my” shop, the only places of business are the post office/farm shop and a dairy down the road. Not much in the way of tempting shopping, in other words.

For another thing, it’s really pretty (it’s in New Zealand, of course it’s freaking pretty). The landscape is riddled with really arresting rock formations that jut out of the earth.  The (simplistic) explanation I've been given for their existence is that the whole area used to be kilometres below the ocean, and the softer rock was eroded away.  What remains is the the denser rock on which grass and other plants can't grow.  There's also a cool inland salt lake (more of a pond,really) nearby, which obviously is a bit of the ocean that never disappeared.  Pretty cool.

One of the thousands of rocky bits that define the Middlemarch landscape.

The Sutton Salt Lake.  Evidently, it's got nothing on Lake Huron. On the day I went to the lake it was teaming with millions of small flies.  Luckily they were happy siphoning salt off the lake and surrounding eart and left me and my sweaty skin alone. Each step would send a swarm of them airborn and they'd quickly jostle for space on the already crowded ground.  It was kinda gross, but also kinda satisfying.





Me in some of said rocks near the lake.

Also, I’ve been interacting with animals more than I ever have before.  The paddock (what I would call a “field” back home) next to my place is home to two real horses and a sheep called Rammy who believes he’s a horse.  I regularly go feed them bits of carrot and handfuls of grass from the other side of the fence (it’s always greener, you see). I’ve also been privy to the delightful scene of be-mulleted men and women chasing a pig down main street, and used to be greeted daily by lambs on my way to work (until they disappeared two weeks ago, presumably they were someone’s Christmas dinner…sad).

I'm sorry you were eaten cute little lambs.  You'll live on in my blog though.

So, yeah.  Here I am in Middlemarch, and I’m meant to be here until early May. Afterwards, who knows…again.

Cool bridge.

Possibly the saddest park in the world.  It's literally a patch of grass, a few trees and two concrete pipe things that I presume kids are supposed to crawl through.  Don't worry, there's a better park by the rugby field and at the school.

An artsy shot of my neighbour's windvane (windvane? weathervane? whatevervane) at sunset.  That's the Rock and Pillar ranges in the distance, and it was about 10:00 at night.  The sun sets late in these parts this time of year.

Me at the old sheep yards.