The first time I visited Oamaru, properly visited, instead of simply chuntering along the main road heading north, I was in a bad way. Scary skinny, all knee and knuckle, I cried at the drop of a hat and shivered constantly like one of those wee dogs you have to carry around in a handbag.
Spending my days in Port Chalmers, where the logging trucks taking the trees to China passed the Chinese who had come to see the trees, I had gone quiet: not living, just existing. Until the mountain man and I both swiped right, and I travelled up to where the boats bobbed in Friendly Bay and petticoats brushed the cobblestones of the Victorian precinct.
Walking around Cape Wanbrow in the gathering dusk, I never saw a single penguin, but I'd never seen Mt Cook either; both were probably tourist myths.
Strangers said "hello'' on the footpath, which freaked me out to begin with, and people left their muddy gumboots outside the supermarket, padding around in socks, respectful of floors and the floor-washer.
No-one knew me from a bar of soap, a circumstance ripe with the opportunity for reinvention. When the horizon stretches to forever, the possibilities are endless.
So began a 15-month love affair. During this blissful getting-to-know-you period, I've ridden the Alps to Ocean, past fields of rapeseed wind-swirled in Van Gough yellow, to Enfield, where the church looks over at the Gallipoli pine, on to Windsor, where I went to a hippie festival.
I've been regularly confused by the fact no-one in North Otago seems to have a real name, and I often don't get their jokes. (Oamaruvians are very dry; it's hard to know when they are kidding. You can leave a conversation only to suddenly realise, a couple of hours later, that they were taking the piss.)
I've climbed the Dasler Pinnacles, lain under the stars in a sleeping bag and woken to discover the Southern Cross wasn't where I left it; seen the braided and unbridled Waitaki from 1900m and followed it like a swooping bird all the way to the coast.
I've hiked in the Danseys, where the bullock carts once rattled and groaned, and slept in tussock with deer tiptoeing around me in the dark, sunrise warming my face like a kind hand.
I sort of learnt to snowboard at Awakino skifield, high in the St Marys range above Kurow, where mealtimes are a communal cure for standoffishness, and witnessed the hoar frost turn Omarama into a sculpture park of white.
I saw molar-shaped Mt Cook for the first time from the Hakataramea pass and toasted it with a glass of Champagne.
I even saw a penguin one night, while riding back from a pizza at Scotts. They're much littler than you think. You have to look low.
I couldn't help but fall in love with the Waitaki District, a big-sky place where the mythical is literal and folk are more likely to say "yes'' than "no''.
Unconventionality blooms here, lit by soft white stone; some dress like every day is a movie and the rest don't mind.
It's the best of New Zealand's past and future: second-hand before second-hand was cool, vintage as; a place that suffered terribly during the decade of drought and economic yearning known as the "mince and saveloy years'', which is why it now has more entrepreneurs, owner-operators and young families arriving to make a go of it than you can shake a stick at. Because you learn from hard times, from picking yourself up, drying your eyes. Struggle breeds success.
Once, I thought these 12 years of column writing would end with Austen's "Reader, I married him''.
Not any more.
My idea of a happily ever after has changed and I no longer need a man to see my own outline. Although I will say that if you want one, a mountain man is to be highly recommended.
Thanks to his boot-camp-style introduction to where he was born and raised, I found a new self in the Waitaki: she's a woman with muscles on her muscles who carries a heavy pack, wears snowshoes and uses a chainsaw.
As for the place that healed me body and soul: Reader, I moved there.
Come visit, you'll probably hear me before you see me.
• This is the last Tales from the Powder Room, Lisa Scott is taking up the role of communications specialist with the Waitaki District Council.
