A Hill With A View

It was another one of those beautiful days, gleaming with the merciless summer sun shining down onto Akaroa Bay. For me, that meant another day of shoveling a dozen wheelbarrows full of horse s*#& before taking guests on horseback over the property, telling them the history and stories of the land, and making sure they don’t fall off the (walking) horses. As the sun crept over the mountain ridge, the morning cool was almost immediately quenched by New Zealand’s Pacific summer heat. The scenery of the green and blue bay, the palm trees, the flowers and the sunlight glistening in the bay sure were all pretty – but oh my was it hot and hard work!

The horses probably thought the same as they dragged their hooves up yet another one of the farm’s hills, and their chestnut coats shone with sweat from their steadily working muscles under the heavy creaking Western saddles and the thick woolen pads. “This looks amazing!” we’d hear the guests say. “The view is awesome!” they would gasp as they took their holiday pictures, and we were trying our best to keep their horses on the track and their bums in the saddle. Once the guests had taken their last pictures and sighed their last “wonderful”, the horses would plod back into the pastures and spend the rest of the day feeding on the long culms that wind and sun had baked into a crisp and coarse yellow.

But this one day, there was no slow clomping of hooves through the grass. No gentle chomping, no lethargic attempts to rid themselves of the myriads of bugs the evening brought in. The horses were prancing, snorting, running restlessly from one side of the paddock to the other, not knowing where to be. We tried to calm them down until we saw what put them in such a flurry: while on our side everything seemed normal, over the bay’s opening, a squall line was rising. The clouds seemed to reach from the sky all the way down to the water, and came rolling ashore like an unfathomably huge bulk of candy cotton, set afire in all shades of orange, pink and purple by the setting sun. “Steady, old boy” I mumbled, as one of the horses came closer. He rested his muzzle on my arm, I ran my hand through his now blazing-red coat, and we gazed at the spectacle together. “Pretty heavy weather!” my boss yelled up from the farm house. “Yeah, saw it!” I tried to shout over the increasing rumble in the skies. “Saw it” I whispered, still holding onto my companion’s mane which was now flying in the flaring up breeze. “Looks pretty amazing.”