We can rely on each other, and our national character, even as disasters mount

Joel Maxwell is a senior Stuff journalist.

OPINION: There’s no escape from the insistent shock of flood water on your skin – cold, filthy, threatening – as it rises up over your thighs, fills the hip pockets of your jeans. No matter where you happen to be wading, it’s always the same dirt-brown soup swirling where streets and footpaths and kerbs and everyday life used to be.

Yesterday you didn’t have to think about higher ground – now it’s an exhausting set of destinations, each gradually submerging before your eyes as you scramble to the next.

I wish we didn’t have to deal with uncertainty and the violent disruption to normal life of a natural disaster, again.

If you’ve been a journalist in Aotearoa for the last decade or so then you will likely have covered floods, an eruption, earthquakes – a pandemic. I’m eagerly awaiting locusts in a couple of years: we can eat them like post-apocalypse scroggin, while we wind up the rubber bands of Aotearoa’s last remaining car, a battered Nissan Leaf.

READ MORE:
* What is slash and why is it so dangerous in bad weather?
* State of emergency in Tairāwhiti, Cyclone Gabrielle forces evacuations, road closures
* Cyclone Gabrielle: How it’s playing out across the North Island
* Auckland flood victims anxious as Cyclone Gabrielle barrels towards NZ

My one abiding memory of covering a flood a few years ago (apart from the oily feel of the current around my hips), was the sight of a man leaving his flooded home, a modest but well-tended place of cream weatherboard, black trim, a garage, carport; and the look of miserable determination on his face after he had waded back inside to retrieve a meal.

He had a Tupperware container of, I think, curry in one hand; his side dishes thrown into a plastic shopping bag in the other: As water poured through his house, he had decided he was not leaving his dinner behind.

As far as Cyclone Gabrielle goes, we can look ahead to the clean-up bill and quantify it as so many billions of dollars. We can quantify how much rain fell, during certain times; graph the contours of the wind gusts, the path of the cyclone, the depth of the water.

But most importantly we can talk to people, hear their experiences as they faced the danger, and the aftermath. We can and should record the event, write the first draft of this part of our history.

I know it’s important and necessary, but personally my appetite for stories has been overwhelmed. I’ve had enough. I want to go back to when we were bored and had long periods where nothing much happened; when natural events were isolated, not the latest in a global chain of species-jumping diseases or a glitching climate.

I’ve had enough, and I’m not even directly affected by the cyclone.

As you read this you might have lost your whare for a bed in an auditorium and an uncertain immediate future.

As you read this you might be waiting for a helicopter to carry you to life-preserving medical treatment that last week was a simple hospital shuttle trip away.

I know, for some of us, our houses used to be somewhere we just stayed for a while. For others, they really were our homes. Those places where we kissed each other, wasted hours on stupid stuff, cleaned, entertained, or just sat doing nothing, and now all those things have been washed away in a surge of mud and water.

Even worse than that, some of us are grappling with the most horrifying news of all.

I think that guy I saw in that flood, grasping hold of his last bit of normalcy sealed in Tupperware had the right idea.

I can’t do much from where I am, except send my thoughts, and my trust in our astonishing natural capacity as a nation to look after each other, love each other and cling to our motto: She’ll be right. For some of us, things might never be the same again. For the rest, she will be right, I hope.