Water Monsters: A Wild Swimming Road Trip Across New Zealand

When I was a child, I was too neurotic to be a beach-baby, despite having been born and raised near the sea, on Australia’s East Coast. I was raised by city lovers, and their love of the cities transferred to me in physiological, biological, pathological ways. At the beach, the salt winds itched my dermatitis-prone skin and the sand was irritating, abrasive, hive-provoking. No matter how much zinc veneer I applied, the beach sun stained my pale membrane to a distinct lobster shell red. Far worse than my physiological intolerance was what I saw as the sea’s monstrous indifference, its ability to doom uncountable sacrifices to its indigo burial ground, heartless with fanged predators beneath the wrinkled waves.

At the time, my blood craved green—not sea-green but the exhaling, living green of the forest. I loved oak and conifer and moss and the green that comes with deep-soaking rains, not the bleached sandscape of the Australian coast. (Beach-green meant long hanks of kelp that crept along the seafloor, tangling around ankles, legs, toes. When I saw it, I’d run shrieking from the shores to the hot sand, babbling about jellyfish and stingrays.)

But on our road trip, while in this liminal space between breaking and healing, I was looking to re-wild, re-story myself. I wanted to break the back of my old assumptions and take a pilgrimage of sorts, in which I might exist in a different way. I thought of the road trip I planned as a teacher: it would show us how to be enough by ourselves and take on something harder than we were used to. And when the plane began its descent into Queenstown, and I saw the glittering water of Lake Wakatipu, which snaked its way between the wrinkled mountains, I felt a dizzy elation that had nothing to do with the altitude.

From the moment my daughter slipped into the glacial, cold water of the lake on our first day, elegant as a dolphin with not a beat of gooseflesh hesitation, I knew the trip would be a success. Her immediate delight and fluency in this landscape eased my maternal nerves, although I kept her within arm’s reach. The lake’s water was the teal of kingfishers, but a shift to blue just offshore signified treacherous currents and deep places where monsters lurk. I knew from my travel guide that longfin eels prowl here, using their whiskered snouts to hunt for slippery trout and galaxiids. They are truly huge, reaching sizes longer than my daughter’s body—large enough to prey on waterfowl but, thankfully, not on daughters. Local teens played like seal pups in the deeper waters, but we kept close to the pebble-lined shore, tethered to my childhood anxieties.

We paddled, then paused to examine the variety of pretty stones in the shallows. The lake’s waves crept up my calves, over my knees, to my thighs, and receded of their own accord. Lake Wakatipu is bent like a lightning bolt and has its own tides that are a consequence of its unusual shape. Every 25 minutes, the water rises nearly half a foot (10 centimeters) and then falls again.

Mythology has a more bewitching explanation for the tides than science does. In Māori legend, I read that night at the hotel, the lake is the tomb of a giant named Matau, and the rise and fall of the water is his heartbeat. Matau is a water monster, a taniwha in Māori language. Taniwha are diverse spirits, monsters that are not always monstrous—often guardians, sometimes messengers. They can be antagonists and enemies or allies and helpers. To me, Matau did not feel like the faceless predators I’d imagined in the ocean. With a name, he became familiar, a point of connection. I may never have liked seawater, but I’d always had a soft spot for water monsters in stories. I’d loved selkies and kelpies, nymphs and naiads, loquacious fish and frogs. The next day, we swam again in the same spot. Observing Matau’s heartbeat in the water turned my attention outward, away from my anxiety, and, paradoxically, anchored me in the real. As my entire body succumbed to the rhythm of his heart, I found myself curious to turn towards the water monsters beneath my paddling feet and find more names for them.

Next, we headed north. As my daughter and I rolled through the landscape in our little rented Mazda, sucking on jellybeans, souls soothed by river passes and wildflowers, I mused on the forgotten water monsters of my childhood. The skull-draped Sandy of kung-fu TV series Monkey, Morla the Aged One of the movie The NeverEnding Story, the Fish Folk of the classic Australian book Snugglepot and Cuddlepie. When we stopped for river paddles and swimming holes, I wondered about the local water monsters. I tuned in to the rhythms and voices of the water, the finer sensations of immersion. My skin was suddenly an instrument, prickling with the sensitivity of an anemone. I registered changes in temperature and texture, considered the character of different clays and minerals. I noticed what my body took in from the water, what had changed when I stepped out.

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By the time we reached Twizel, in the belly of South Island, the greens of the landscape had transformed to gold and the river waters had become thicker, more opaque. The uncanny blue of the waters in man-made Lake Ruataniwha—named after a Māori chief who drowned in the 12th century (or the water monster who took up residence there, depending on who you speak to)—comes from glacial flour, fine rock particles dissolved from bedrock and further refined on their journey from altitude. The particles are suspended in the water like chalk, creating an effect that makes the water turquoise and so soft that it feels like you’re swimming in milk. This is water that tempers the cold with its texture, water that lingers in your skin and hair leaving not the dry crunch of sea water but a silky blessing. I emerged from the lake half-fish, slippery with the lime clinging to the fine hairs on my arm, reminding me of my animal nature.

These freshwater dips were nothing like my childhood experiences at the beach. Instead of emerging from each encounter crustacean-red and angry, I emerged restored and alive, mineral-rich, magnesium-filled, with mud-warrior smears on my cheeks. The water spoke the sensuous language of what felt good and easy to my body, what was kind and right to the land. Immersing in these waterholes felt baptismal. The water monsters were re-membering me, integrating a fragmented self, bringing out an older, ancestral connection to water, re-storying that inner child afraid of the sea.

Our last scheduled stop on South Island was Akaroa, a township in the Banks Peninsula Volcano complex. I worried about my reunion with seawater as we neared the coast. As we drove over formations made by ancient eruptions, it began to rain, bringing in low-hanging mists that settled over the tops of the volcanic ridges and obscured the way ahead. As we slowly made our way through the mist, a hole occasionally opened up in the cloud, revealing a sheer drop at the edge of the road. The water monsters’ lesson to keep attention with my senses served me better than panic. We made our trek up and down the ridges at a slow and steady pace, but at the start of the road’s final descent, the mist cleared, revealing a clear and spectacular view of the water below us and the Ōnawe Peninsula, the “lava neck” or vent of the volcano.

The coastline around Akaroa boasts clean, sandy beaches, and clouds which roll over the skyline. The cloud cover offered me a gentle reunion with a beach unlike my abrasive past experiences, gifting me empty, cool sands with clear water. At low tide I meandered out a few hundred steps to see the sea snail inhabitants of the pearly paua shells nesting in the wet sand. I found these creatures monstrous at first, slimy and formless. But as I observed them, I found the perception needed correction, that these creatures had beautiful teachings, too: stillness, presence, soft-bellied vulnerability. Standing on a beach jeweled in paua shell, in mild weather and the sea at my feet, I felt held in the liminal space between what had been and what could be.

After unpacking at our guest house, my daughter and I spent the afternoon exploring the bays and coves, wrote messages to air-travelers in the sand, created larger-than-life mermaids from shells and seaweeds, and even had an intimate glimpse of a glorious pod of black-nosed Hector dolphins. In Māori stories, dolphins are messengers. I understood the message when I gave up on its translation and instead allowed my body to accept it, feeling the kinship between all things. A dolphin met my eye, and in that moment, I dissolved into the big blue.

On our last day in New Zealand, I did not fear or resent the thought of returning home to my real life and my problems. I had re-greened my bones, mossed and lichened my marrow, bathed my anxieties with freshwater. I felt I could re-appreciate the dry, parched earth of home with its gray gums and bleached grasses, that I would carry my world of green and blue inside. I would hold the body-memories of feet ankle-deep in white mud, toes buffed by pebble beaches, spirit fortified by water monsters and the stories of my childhood brought into visceral knowing.

My heart had needed these fresh, cold waters in shaded places, smelling of minerals and terpene-rich banks. I had needed to develop the current between inside and outside, let the stagnating ideas slide out through the pores of my skin, dilute in enormous lakes made of melted glaciers, be taken up by the breath of fish. And now that I have fallen in with water—and with its stories, its crumpled and glassed surfaces, its thousand shades of blue and gray, its temperatures and textures—I feel wet, irrigated, replenished. I could return to the parched, red landscape of home, carrying the waters in my bones, in my blood, like a water monster of lore.