A river runs through it by Norman Maclean is one of my favouriite books. Personal challenge, brothers leading different lives but with a few common bonds, glorious natural beauty… and that charming double-meaning title – a river runs through it, i.e. through Montana and through the characters’ lives. Wonderful book, not such a good movie though.
It was a significant life moment for me, flipping a coin between a job offer in Masterton and another in Hamilton. It was probably the overwhelming sadness of leaving Christchurch, but the person telling me about Hamilton said those words, ‘a river runs through it’ and that conjured up memories of that book but it should’ve been a reminder of the movie, but either way, it made me make ‘the big mistake’.
It was humid the day I arrived so of course I went for a cold beer. You know how it is, you walk into a bar and a few people look at you. In Hamilton they didn’t look, they glared. All of them. I was on their turf and I wasn’t welcome and that feeling lasted for two years.
I was excited to visit Hamilton Lake. I was thinking of Christchurch’s Lakes Coleridge and Ellesmere, but I should’ve been thinking of the Bromley Oxidation Ponds.
Of course Hamilton is in the North Island – a world and several decades away from Christchurch and Dunedin and a few more away from Invercargill. Hamilton was cosmopolitan – it had a club by that name so that certain people didn’t have to use public bars filled with undesirables. Frankton sounded promising in a Queenstown sort of a way, but like most of the promises made about my new job, Frankton was hollow and then broken. Hamilton had Big Macs and Whoppers and 3 piece boxes. ‘Best coffee in Hamilton’, a colleague explained as he told me McDs was his favourite Hamilton restaurant. I yearned for the Dux de Lux or even just Theos.
Today I asked the internet what’s good about Hamilton nowadays and it said Raglan, Cambridge, Pirongia, Hobbiton, Waitomo, Huntly and hot air balloons. All of these are ways out of Hamilton. Huntly? I guess it’s the way the sun reflects off the power station at sunset.
Hamilton’s OK really…, no, wait… it’s not. It wasn’t then and it seems only to have deteriorated because of stabbings, shootings, ram raids and the skatey park (aka The Meth Mall) in Dinsdale.
Oh and that river that ran through it? The Waikato? Too dangerous to swim in, too dodgy to run along the riverside pathways and it sucked golf balls out of the air when playing at the St Andrews Golf Course. Like the road to Raglan and the hot air balloons, the river runs through and then away from ‘it’.
eN-Zed 