Extract— A Spirit Companion: Celebrating the first 50 years of the Spirit of Adventure Trust
Author:
Roger McDonald
Publisher:
Oratia Books
ISBN:
9781990042515
Date published:
14 November 2023
Pages:
344
Format:
Hardback
RRP:
$60
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Extracted with permission from A Spirit Companion: Celebrating the first 50 years of the Spirit of Adventure Trust by Roger McDonald, published by Oratia Books for the Spirit of Adventure Trust.
For 50 years, people from all walks of life have stepped aboard first the Spirit of Adventure, and today the Spirit of New Zealand Te Waka Herenga Tangata ō Aotearoa, for a voyage of personal discovery. They’ve had fun, made friends, and been given a taste of expanded possibility.
Chapter Four: ROUNDING THE NEXT CORNER
The girl came aboard the Spirit of New Zealand reluctantly, a few months after she came home from a special school. She had been sent to the school to overcome problems. The difficulties were serious. They were absolutely not her fault but they’d affected her attitude and behaviour.
At that school she had shone. She’d kept to the rules and made the very best of it until her eighteenth birthday, when she could leave. It was ‘a crazy cult school’ but she’d been nominated dorm parent for most of her stay. She was given an award for showing immense growth. She had done a team bicycle ride covering thousands of kilometres in total. She counted the school as playing a big part in the self-improvement she had achieved.
She had no compulsion to go on the Spirit but her family still wanted it. She felt the pressure to get it over and done with. Relatives had been through the experience and spoke about what it had done for them. It had changed their lives, they said.
‘I’d better get this over with,’ she said of the Spirit experience, because it was easier than kicking up a fuss. It wasn’t worth the effort of getting exhausted over it.
Jas was shy and aware that something about her was not the standard teenage hand-out version of perfection. It made no difference to her that some of the others felt as she did, as they filed on board the Spirit. Everyone felt a long way from perfect. It was almost the definition of being who you were at the age you were. If only at the time you knew what you might become later, if only you could see a way ahead. Well, in some way the Spirit was there to overcome that obstacle or answer that question.
What Jas had that was imperfect stuck out in her mind and so dominated her idea of herself that she glared back at anyone who even glanced at her. They were all of them strangers to each other, but every single one of them filing on board had something to overcome. Jas had an understanding of that, at least a bit of understanding, but not enough to give her a jolt in anyone else’s direction into what you’d call friendship.
When a boy made a comment about what it was in Jas’s looks that bothered her, it felt to her like an attack, a teasing jab, and she shrank back in defiance and shame. Other boys made comments and some girls. Years later Jas remembered it as bullying and it still burned.
The other trainees teamed up with each other in twos, fours, eights and tens, more or less, until the entire forty-person trainee group, except Jas, was part of an apparently happy unit. When the watch assistants led them around the deck introducing them to the ropes and pulleys and shackles that all had names and purposes it was as though Jas was numb to taking anything in while watching the others get the hang of it.
The most famous activity aboard the Spirit was the morning swim — every morning at 6.30 everyone went for a swim wherever the ship was anchored, summer or winter. Out of her bunk, into her swimmers went Jas, grabbing her towel, determined to get the next thing over and done with, as she would for the whole ten-day voyage. She said that the reason she was fast was that she wasn’t fond of cold water and got it over quickly because of that.
While the others stood around huddled, shivering, backing off going in, Jas was down and into the water and along the ship getting out again, throwing water off like a sea creature arisen from the depths. Not that she was aware in any way of the possibly wondrous point of view she was seen from. It was just good to be in and out and getting rinsed down under the fresh-water hose.
The next big challenge was a rope strung up between two masts. In Jas’s recollection everybody had to walk it, there were no excuses allowed, and there was a safety harness to stop anyone from crashing to the deck if they slipped. A great deal of care was taken around the safety of every activity on the ship and no one had ever been injured or killed, but there was still that feeling of ‘what if?’ Before anyone could say ‘Who’s first?’ Jas was up and along that strung rope like a tightrope walker in a circus. It was fabulous. Was there applause? If so she did not hear it.
Jas was shy and defensive, troubled in dealing with others, disinclined to risk opening herself to others. She had an ingrained habit, she admitted, of looking for a sympathetic adult and clinging to them. Something had happened to her, making her trust the feeling of being a small child in preference to the feeling of being a teenager. The skipper was helpful in that way. He accepted Jas as a friendly mate or offsider. Nearly everyone needed just that extra bit of coaxing now and again.
Jas didn’t think she’d really ever understand how sailing worked, so she just copied other people and did her bit. That she was experiencing how most people learn new things didn’t strike her. She just felt out of place. She did pick up the odd thing, like coiling and tying-off ropes. It made her grin when she took the ship’s wheel while they were under full sail and she was able to hold to a compass heading along with the best of them. Expeditions away from the Spirit in heavy rowing dinghies followed by long tramps into the bush and up inlets and creeks took up most of whole days. The rowing dinghies were clinkers, big heavy black ships’ boats, like something from the movie Bounty. Jas loved the rowing, the tramping.
Above all she loved the experience the Spirit gave her of going to new places. From the top of a high green hill where she arrived before anyone else by galloping ahead, she came to one of those places where hazy islands, headlands, shimmering stretches of sea all swapped places with each other into a sight of what seemed like forever. Another day, in the deep shade of a forest, the trainees came to old remnants of a kauri dam and came away with a feeling that they had stepped a long way into the past. Jas, more than any other, loved that day.
Author Roger McDonald
She had good natural stamina. She was a good rower, a good tramper. She really could swim. She liked the food. She slept without bother in a cabin-space with twenty girls. By doing something well she underrated it, seeing it as not counting in the context of the negative range of her life experience. She hated being told what to do, but on the Spirit what a trainee did was opened by their own reactions, and she had those, and was able to turn them over in her mind. In some ways it was all the Spirit experience asked. Inside her shell Jas was a hard nut to crack, though. While no doubt every attempt was made to loosen her self-protectiveness with tact and personal sympathy, there was barely anything in Jas’s memory to suggest that anyone did. Yet there she was, in a space opened up by the Spirit despite everything, where she swam, walked a rope, tramped and rowed, and expressed what was to remain a 31 life-long love affair with the Hauraki Gulf.
On the second-to-last day the Spirit drifted along — ghosted was the seafarers’ word. Trainees hung on the yards like seabirds calling to each other as, that day, the entirety of ship control was in their hands. The trainees themselves had taken over. It was their day. They’d elected their own skipper, mates, crew members; they themselves sailed and navigated the Spirit and the professional crew hung back. Tomorrow they would return to port, say their farewells, disperse and travel home. Now they drifted past a special spot in Bon Accord Harbour, Kawau Island — special to one of them. Jas hung on the rails. Her feeling radiated out. She had known and loved this place all her life. That particular bach on its concrete pad. It was her heart-place, and she would return over the years looking out and sometimes see the Spirit ghosting past.
