Ashburton’s new walkway delights
17th October 2009

I have been unkind to the Ashburton River in the past. I have dismissed it. “Scungy” I believe was my favoured expression.

Imagine, then, my delight last Sunday when I discovered the District Council’s new walking/cycling trail that connects Ashburton to Lake Hood, winding along the south bank of the river. Sylvia and I had heard the rumour of this new jewel in Ashburton’s crown so we set out to find it.

The track begins a very short walk from our home on Carters Terrace, at the southern end of the bridge, but finding it is unnerving. Dropping down off the road we followed the cycleway past picnic tables alongside the railway embankment, skirted a large, evil-smelling puddle and negotiated the underbelly of the bridge, where the entrails of the town are strung across steel girders and all hope is lost. The concrete abutments of the bridge scream with graffiti, most of it eye-wateringly desperate. Our spirits rose immeasurably at the most prominent slogan, “**** you bicth.” Bicth? Where was the putative graffiti artist when ‘tch’ was the sound of the week? Perhaps he was asleep in the Wendy house, or kicking a can down Chalmers Ave.

Emerging from Dante’s Purgatorio and dodging a dad and daughter mountain-bike tag team we clambered onto the embankment and there, unassumingly, was the beginning of the new trail, marked with a large white-washed boulder.

The track plunged immediately into the tall grove of trees that spreads out from the eastern edge of the main road. I’ve often admired this stand of trees. I’ve no idea what kind of tree they are: neither willow nor poplar, but something akin to both and at this time of year glorious in the first blush of spring. Their trunks reared up around us and gathered, cathedral-like, far above our heads.

The track, a fine river silt with patches of gravel, meandered among the trees, marked by more white painted boulders scattered heedlessly like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs.

Emerging from the grove we drew near the riverbank where the newly bulldozed track carved an alley through scrub and willows. In the hot afternoon sun the air was rich with the jasmine smell of willows and wildflowers.

From here the walk quickly established itself as a Cook’s tour of New Zealand noxious weeds. I don’t mean just a few tendrils of hieracium or the occasional ragwort. Here were all the big guns: blackberry, broom and gorse. Here were draperies of old man’s beard scrambling 10 or 20 metres up the trees. In some places the bush was so entangled with creepers it became the adventure land of every small boy’s imagination: a place of writhing anacondas and lost tribes, of sunken temples and scowling statuary.

My ridicule of the Ashburton River tends from the irony of finding myself living beside the least attractive strip of nature in this stunningly beautiful country. What possible pleasure can be found in walking on a bulldozer track through thickets of gorse and blackberry? And yet, on a bright spring day, with the warm sun on my shoulders, surrounded by a carnival of yellow broom flowers, this track was pleasurable: and all the more at those places where it closed to the riverbank and we could admire the sunlight on bright water and the long reaches of shingle.

There are a few disappointments. We encountered too many heaps of broken glass and rusting whiteware, reminding us how often the riverbank is a convenient rubbish dump, and a couple of places where the concrete-block barriers designed to restrict the track to walkers and cyclists had already been breached by joy-riders.

Hidden deep in the undergrowth, lost to all landmarks, we had no idea how far we had walked until, unexpectedly, we found ourselves at the intake to Lake Hood. We strolled down the water race and picnicked with the boats and biscuits at the lake’s edge before retracing our steps to Tinwald.

I take a lesson from this. I am guilty of overlooking my place, of equating pleasure with ‘away.’ I forget that a landscape can still satisfy even if it is less picturesque, and that the familiar can still surprise. If I cannot find virtue in my own backyard I am a poor customer indeed. I cramp my spirit and risk my life becoming, like the man said, a bicth.