Background Check

Te Reinga is a small community. There are about twenty houses, a school and a Maori Meeting House or Marae; there are no shops, no churches and no pubs. It sits where the wide and tranquil Hangaroa River joins the equally peaceful Ruakaturi River and both spill over the bluffs and cliffs that form the angry Te Reinga Falls. I was brought up in Te Reinga. I left there as a High School senior to spend a second senior year at Thorp High School in Wisconsin.

Te Reinga is where I learned to shoot. My weekly chore was to hunt and kill two wild goats to feed our dogs. Te Reinga is where I learned to read, do math, ride a horse, play rugby and grow up. Te Reinga is where I learned to swim.

The pool was a short section of the Hangaroa River below our house. We called it the Hapua. It was thirty meters wide and was equipped with a long and steep mud slide that ended with a two meter drop into the water, a wooden diving board and a shallow learner’s pool made from a wide limestone shelf that ran along the river’s edge. My elementary school swimming sports were swum in the Hapua. Most of the school had no swim suits and swam, as they called it, “bare-naked”. I’m sure that would be against some law or another these days. I wore a suit and usually won.

At High School I realized that to keep winning, some training was going to be needed. I was competing against the Wairoa town kids who had a pool and a professional coach. They even used things like hand paddles and had green warm-ups with their Club name on the back. My mother bought me “The Science of Swimming” by Dr. Councilman. I copied his schedules and, religiously swam every yard across and back in the Hapua. In the three coldest winter months I could not swim because the river was flooded, cold and muddy. Instead I ran four miles most days waiting for the Hapua to clear.

The training was good enough though. I beat the town kids and won the School freshman Championship. Two of the swims were even school records. The breaststroke record lasted thirty years to the early 1990s. Before my second year at High School I got Arthur Lydiard’s book “Run to the Top for a Christmas present. His ideas were a revelation. Instead of math and science homework I converted his running schedules to swimming by dividing the running distances by four and determined that my training through to the next Provincial (State) Championships would follow Lydiard’s teachings to the letter. Lydiard’s 100 miles per week became 25 miles of swimming, 40,000 meters, 1334 widths per week of the Hangaroa River.

The training almost worked. I ended up second in the Provincial Championships; behind a guy called Robert Powell. I think I could have beaten him if my turns had been better. Standing and turning around in the mud at each side of the Hapua was not the best way to learn slick racing turns. The first four kicks of each width were spent clearing the clinging mud off my legs and feet.

I did however win the School Championship. The next three years of Lydiard training in the Hapua proved more successful. By that time I’d added weight training using a Lancewood pole and two of my mother’s cake tins filled with concrete. I won both Wellington and Auckland Provincial Championships. The Auckland one was really pleasing. That was beating the really big city kids from a muddy river in Hawke Bay. Many years later when I was coaching some of New Zealand’s fastest swimmers, people like Jeffs, Chellingworth and Copland, it still pleased me to go back to Auckland and beat those guys. There was still an element of the river kid beating the snot out of the white suits and pink socks who live in New Zealand’s largest city.

No one swims in Te Reinga’s Hapua anymore. It’s tapu, sacred and not to be used. About two miles upstream from the Hapua there is a crossing that is shallow enough to ride across. Four weeks before I left Te Reinga for the last time a school mate of mine called “Skipper” King was fording the river on his horse Tere. The water was high and he was washed off and drowned. The river was declared tapu until his body was found. Two weeks later Skipper still had not been discovered. I began swimming in the Ruakaturi River which was not as wide or as close to my home.

The third weekend after Skippers death I was riding to the new swimming spot on my horse Nehawe. I had my old Diana .22 rifle with me as I still had to find and kill the weekend’s two wild goats. I noticed a herd of goats across the Hangaroa River just at the ford where Skipper had been washed away. Dare I cross the ford? Why not? After all I was European; surely a Maori tapu would not affect my Presbyterian soul. I turned Nehawe down the path towards the ford. As I rounded the bend before the river, there in front of me, on the path leading to the ford was Skipper Kings old grandmother, kneeling beside the water, beating it with a Willow frond. She was wailing a haunting, tormented cry of grief. Presbyterian or not, it scared the crap out of me. I rounded the horse and set off for home as fast as Nehawe could gallop. Training and goats would have to wait for another day.

A week later I was on a Pan American Boeing 707 heading for Wisconsin and towns and pools and asphalt roads. I was about to become one of those city kids.