The Geography of Unhappiness

A few years ago I read this interesting and entertaining book called The Geography of Happiness.  The author, a journalist by trade, begged the question “what makes one place ‘happier’ than another?”  To research his oeuvre he visited a few of the countries that are recognized as being happiest places on Earth; Places where the population is, for the most part, and for most of the time, happy (how he must have suffered for his craft, eh?). He spent time in Bhutan, Thailand, Switzerland and Iceland – countries that obviously vary wildly in terms of climate, GDP, topography and culture, yet all report unusual levels of happiness.

In the end, what the author found was that each country attributed its general sense of wellbeing to internal forces within the people living there. To the mindsets they have adopted and perpetuated.  For example, Icelanders were happy since failure was not a shameful thing while Thais had an “ignorance is bliss” approach to life and didn’t think about, or sweat, the small stuff.

The reason I mention this book is that I’m currently living my own geography of unhappiness in crappy ol’ Middlemarch New Zealand.

I hate it here.  I hate the lack of a body of water. I hate the close-minded attitude of many of the people.  I hate how everyone seems to smoke. I hate the cavalier attitude I’ve seen towards dogs’ safety (sliding around in the back of pickup trucks like a barking toolbox).  I hate having to sidestep sheep dung while walking to town.  I hate not having a social life (I had thought I’d have some coworkers with whom to do things and hang out, but after a few people quit, I’m down to two coworkers, one who is 18 and the other who is 16).

I hate the lack of amenities and the difficulty in accessing….anything, really.  Middlemarch has barely anything to offer its inhabitants and visitors.  There’s our little over-priced store, another café that’s sometimes open, but often not, a pub/hotel that is pretty grungy and intimidating, a post office that’s open three hours a day and an unclean, unsupervised, unheated pool.  That’s it.  No garage, no hardware store, no pharmacy, no doctor, no hairdresser, no bank, no library, nothing.  I grew up in a place that I thought was small and remote, but this is a whole other isolated kettle of fish.  At least in Lafontaine you can go to the bank, get your hair cut, order a (delicious) pizza, go to the beach and have access to everything else you need within a 10-minute drive. Here, the nearest grocery store is a hair-raising 45-minute drive over some of the windiest, steepest roads I’ve seen on the South Island. 

And my job is killing my soul. Apart from the unkind work conditions (no breaks, lack of proper training, lack of communication from and with the bosses), there’s so much about my job that goes completely against my nature. I despise selling cigarettes and contributing to an unhealthy and addicted society.  I loath handing out plastic bags which will invariably end up in a landfill or floating in the ocean.  I abhor that the shop doesn’t recycle – every time I see someone tossing a bottle or can into the rubbish bin, I die a little.  I hate charging people 60% above the price they’d pay in a grocery store. Seriously, the mark up on products is 60%, which means that if the bosses go to the Countdown (a grocery chain) and buy a box of crackers for $2.99, they’ll turn around and sell it for $5.79. Robbery, I tell you.

And it’s not easy to get around without a car.  None of the big, affordable bus companies run through here, so I’ve had to use the overpriced shuttle services on occasion.  A one-hour trip from Dunedin to here costs me $35.  To put that in perspective, I took the bus from Wanaka to Christchurch in October, a seven-hour trip, for $40.  Despite the costs, whenever I get the chance, I take off.  I reckon I’ve spent close to $1000 on transportation over the past three months.  I consider it an investment into my mental and physical health.  Whenever I leave this place I almost immediately start to feel better, the reverse is true when I come back.  To whit, last week I was starting to get a cold, I had a day off and went to Wanaka for a quick visit, on the ride there, I started feeling much more alert, less achy and my sore throat and cough disappeared.  The day after I got back to Middlemarch, the cold returned with a vengeance and I’ve been a coughing, miserable mess.

This isn’t a life.  It’s purgatory.

Middlemarch has done what I had thought impossible: it’s seriously harmed my love affair with New Zealand. I’m meant to stay another three months, but we’ll see.

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.

Working in Wanaka

Treble Cone has been open and operational for nearly three weeks now, though it feels like I’ve been working there much longer.  Well, I guess technically I have been under TC’s employment for nearly two months, but have only really been actually employed (as in used…and paid) since mid-July.

So what do my days look like?  Well, for one thing they start off pretty dark.

I wake up at 6:30 or so and walk in the dark to the meeting spot about 400m down the road from my place.  At about 7:05, a convoy of vans of the mini and mega variety pull up and I and the other staffers living in the area pile in.  We finish off “the loop” of pick up points, then make our way along the side of Lake Wanaka to the base of the mountain some 15 minutes away. From there, it’s another 7 km of zig-zagging narrow dirt road with dizzying drops on one side up to the TC base building.

I’m not going to lie; the first few times I made the climb I was frankly terrified.  It’s amazing what can become everyday and commonplace after a while.

This view, however, has not become either of those things:

It goes a long way to helping wake me up when I stumble out of the warm van into the cold, mountain winter air at 7:45.  You see, in town, the temperature usually sits in the high-single digits and even sometimes the low double-digits.  On the mountain however, where the base building sits at some 1200 metres above sea level, it’s considerably colder.

It’s not so bad on the days I work inside selling lift passes, lessons and rental gear – there I’m warm and protected from the elements. On the days I’m outside working the gates however, it’s less pleasant. For eight hours I stand in the cold armed with an iPad to make sure punters are making their way through our automatic gate OK, and to do crowd control.  It’s rather mind- and toe-numbing.  I’ve actually developed chilblains thanks to those shifts.  For the (lucky) uninitiated, chilblains are basically itchy, swollen, painful toe ulcers.  Yum!

At least on those days, I’m guaranteed a decent shift.  On ticketing days I often finish up at one or two in the afternoon, which usually means waiting around a few hours for staff transport down the mountain or hitchhiking down with some of the customers.

Naturally, on those days I can take advantage of the big snowy mountain and my free lift pass, but given that I’ve had exactly one lesson in my life some twenty years ago (man I’m old), and that the hills I’ve skied before were of the small, docile variety, I’m reluctant.

Treble Cone, you must understand, is a great mountain for the confident, skilled skier or boarder, but a daunting one for anyone learning.  It’s big.  It’s steep. Its only “green” run is narrow with hairpin turns and big drops running alongside it.  I overheard an instructor refer to it as the “beginner’s cliffs of doom.”  Charming.

I’ve been spending most of my time on the learners’ slope with the kids and the people who have never been on snow before.  Sigh.

But I’m happy to report that, thanks to the (uncharacteristically) patient tutelage of Dave, a ski instructor I’ve been seeing, I made it down the mountain without killing myself or even crying today! Huzzah!



Base building




Staff waiting for transport at the end of the day.





Dave by the lake.



Lake Wanaka at sunset

My main man, Scruff.

Finally! Snow on the mountains!

A full two and a half weeks after Treble Cone was set to open, we're still shut.

While at first the problem was a complete lack of snow, over the past few days we've been dumped on and there's a healthy 70cm of base on the mountain, 40cm of which fell in the past 24 hours.  This means that the road up the mountain was impassable this a.m. and there's an extreme risk of avalanche up there. 

So closed we remain.  Hopefully though, tomorrow will be better and we’ll be able to get up there and get working and skiing.

You'd think that having had so much time off would have inspired me to write tons.  Sadly, a lack of motivation and a surplus of lethargy kicked in and I've been woefully unproductive of late.

Here are a few pictures of some of the things I’ve been up to.

Snow as seen from town.

Went for a walk to a river by a sheep station near town.

Last week TC organized a walk to the Rob Roy Glacier which is an hour's drive and two hour hike from Wanaka.  There were 57 of us on the walk I believe.  Here's a suspended bridge along the track.

The Rob Roy Glacier -- at the bottom you can see an avalanche.  It was pretty cool.

This awesome fella is a kea, NZ's mountain parrot.  These guys are not shy and are super smart and curious.  They've been known to steal people's boots and bags and anything they can get their talons or beaks on.  There are even some that have learned how to open and close doors by watching people do it, and have locked trampers inside huts and outhouses for kicks. Cheeky buggers. 

My coworkers Aurora, Kirsten, Rick and me near the end of the track.

Pretty!

Sadly, I don't have any photos of my disastrous mountain biking expedition (Not only was I ridiculously slow, but I fell in some mud not 10 metres from the end of the track), the awesome banana cake I made last week, or of Scruff, the dog I've been taking on walks almost daily.

Waiting for the snow

I never thought I’d be complaining about a warmer-than-average winter, but here I am, doing just that.

It’s now nearly three weeks into this New Zealand winter and there is zero snow on the ground.  This usually wouldn’t bother me, but my (very modest) livelihood depends on the white stuff for the next few months.

Treble Cone is supposed to open on Thursday, but that’s looking extremely unlikely at this point, which is very disappointing for a few reasons.  For one thing, it means I am going to be very broke very soon L. For another, after a few days of training, and having met my excellent colleagues, I’ve been looking forward to getting to work.

And of course, it will be fun to get out on the slopes – though after seeing the steepness of the mountain, my lack of experience and skills is rather worrying. Luckily, I get discounted lessons, and I intend to take advantage of that.

Other than training, I haven’t been very busy since I got back to Wanaka.  Before moving into my new home, (woot!) I spent a lot of time hanging out at a hostel watching movies, doing crossword puzzles and crocheting. I also did a bit of walking, trolled the op shops (second hand shops) for much-needed warm clothing, and watched a friend jump out of a plane (I was almost tempted to join him…almost).

I also went on an impromptu trip to Queenstown where I played Frisbee golf, ate a Furgburger, attempted to climb the very steep hill near town (gave up about a third of the way up), and earned a $25 drinks tab at a bar just for having a tattoo (woo hoo!).

Now I have two more days of training then hopefully I’ll start work.  Fingers crossed!

My new room.

My new lounge.

Beau lands after his skydive.

My drinks voucher.

I just threw a frisbee...you just can't see it.