The ocean is vast, hypnotic and terrifying in equal measure. We see plenty of it whilst travelling in New Zealand. The country has 15,000 kilometres of coastline, hemmed in by the Tasman Sea and the Pacific Ocean.
That’s a lot of water.
But thunderous and massive as the waves are, they’re not what captures our imagination. It’s the rock beneath our feet that warrants a closer look.
Slate grey and strewn with all manner of seaweeds and sea plants at low tide, and the tiny shells of sea snails, what is rock now wasn’t rock before.
This was a forest, alive back when New Zealand was part of the Gondwana supercontinent. That’s about 170 million years ago; dinosaur time, yes?
What happened?
Volcanic floods happened. Scorching debris laid waste to the forest. Time happened. The remnants suffused with silica; fossilising wood into rock.
We are standing on the skeletons of trees. We are walking in the memory of a forest. The ghost of what came before and the promise that this, too, shall fade some day.
But not today.
Today there is the sea and there is stone and there are the two of us, clambering gingerly over the slippery shadows of trees that were alive, as we are now alive, once upon a time.