What do John Key and Talking Heads have in common? Well, I've no idea really, but it's funny how the mind works and pedalling home on Monday evening, a brisk southerly powering me down the peninsula, I found myself contemplating first the one and then the other. Such strange bedfellows you might think; but then again, perhaps not.
Even now I can recite snatches of the lyrics on Talking Heads' great album, Remain in Light. And I can do that because in the summer of 1980, returning to this fair land after three or four years away, I rode down a good part of the North Island by 10-speed with those songs ringing in my ears: Born Under Punches, The Great Curve, Once in a Lifetime, Listening Wind. That was some kind of blast.
I'd left the bike in the South Island some years previously and had it shipped up to Auckland. A friend drove me down over the Bombay Hills and dropped me at the Thames turn-off.
In Los Angeles I'd picked up one of those new-fangled portable sound-boxes, about twice the size of a cigarette packet, called a "Walkman". Throwing all caution and the sounds of approaching traffic to the wind - which naturally enough assailed me from all directions - I plugged it in and set off.
I had Dexy's Midnight Runners for company, too, Devo and the Pretenders, to whose sounds I cruised around the Coromandel, down the Bay of Plenty, and up around the East Cape, but it was the unlikely Talking Heads and its eerie contrapuntal electronica that, weirdly, seemed to meld with the pohutakawa and the white sands, the sweet and sour scent of fermenting silage, the ripe odour of cow manure, the salt-lick and smell of the sea, the hot melting juiciness of a feed of "greasies" at the end of a long day's ride.
Those were carefree times, riding as the mood or the wind direction dictated, pitching a tent as and where I landed, surrendering to the deep unencumbered sleep of the truly weary, drunk on the freshness of the air and the clarity of the water in roadside streams.
After the years in Asia and Africa, in Europe and London - and for years to come, as it turned out - this experience reattached me to the land: told me in no uncertain terms, "This is where you belong."
So while many people have been quick to rubbish the idea of a cycle track from Cape Reinga to Bluff, canvassed as part of John Key's job summit, I am temperamentally predisposed towards it. And while I might quarrel with what appears to be the proposed route, I also happen to think it is the sort of left-field leap that among the rest of the worthy suggestions - one or two of which might actually come to something - lifted the event, at least symbolically, out of the mire of mundanity so often attendant upon such jamborees. It gave it some imaginative traction.
Its status remains unclear. It is not one of the formal top 20 ideas of the summit. Mr Key raised it at a pre-summit meeting in concert with a proposal to complete the Te Araroa walkway the length of New Zealand. A mountain-bikeway would match it, employing 4000 people and costing in the region of $50 million. Frankly, if it could be done for that, it would be a steal.
If the world does not actually go to hell in a handcart (as the arch-pessimists insist it will, thus spelling the end of streams of overseas visitors), it will be a fabulous boon to tourism. If it does, it will still be a socially useful asset. Amid the post-peak-oil era and the strangled death throes of hi-octane capitalism, we will all be on our bikes. Besides, there is something comforting, earthy and of this country about a cycle-track traversing the length of it. It carries the imprint of the dreamer about it, of the romantic and the adventurer. It paints Mr Key in an intriguing new light.
It is too much to hope it might actually happen, but here's hoping anyway. It would be built with the sweat of many; it would be a labour of love, a route over which a slowed-down society would eventually commute, ensuring - even in such dark and straitened times - that the voluptuous beauty of this land remains in light.
Note to self: must dig out that old Walkman.
- Simon Cunliffe is assistant editor at the Otago Daily Times.
