The Great Rift Valley, Africa. The cradle of you know who. Photo by samson tarimo on Unsplash
Moving house is always a pain in the arse. I forgot this six months ago when, in a rare moment of magnanimity, I agreed to my wife’s suggestion that we move closer to family. What ensued was a long and humiliating sales process (a word of warning: no one - least of all your real estate agent - thinks your property is worth nearly as much as you do), a tedious and costly house-hunting exercise (another word of warning: real estate photographers are liars), and, finally, weeks of packing every damn thing we own into flimsy boxes and carting it at great expense to our new home, followed by more weeks of unpacking and asking ourselves why in God’s name we hung on to half the things we did (a final word of warning: no one needs 5000 plastic plant pots).
That said, moving house also has its benefits. One of them in our case is being closer to family, which is, as my wife insisted, a fine thing indeed.
Another is the view. Our new home is perched on a ridge overlooking a wide plain to the east that stretches 40-odd kilometres before bumping into a line of deeply furrowed hills. Photobombing them are the taller, more distant Kaimai and Coromandel ranges, which appear from our house as blue-grey apparitions that occasionally merge with the sky, as distant objects tend to do.
Our new view, facing east. Almost worth the suffering it took to get here.
To our west lies the Te Auke coast, an area from Raglan to Port Waikato that Overland NZ euphemistically calls “rolling Waikato back country farmland”. Rolling it most definitely is not; it is a battered landscape, the victim of an angry and chaotic god. If you were a bird courageous enough to fly through it, you would be met on both sides by an expanse of vertigo-inducing hills with great lumps of basalt jutting out from them like pallisades about a high castle. It is hard to imagine anyone farming this land so much as clinging to it tenaciously with one hand while praying furiously with the other that at least a few plants and animals will survive on it.
Last weekend, my wife and I took a drive into this fearsomely beautiful terrain. Our destination, the isolated Nikau Café in the equally isolated valley of Waikaretu. Fourteen kilometres down a winding road that peels off a highway which itself knows a thing or two about hairpen bends, this is not a leisurely Sunday stroll from your city villa to your local café. But let me tell you, it’s a trip worth making. Owned by Anne and Phillip Woodward, who’ve lived in the area since the 1970s, Nikau Café does everything right, including the view.
The view from Nikau Café. See what I mean about great lumps of basalt?
Part of the charm of Nikau Café, aside from its wonderful hosts who get their own mention in Wikipedia’s entry on Waikaretu, is its location deep within a remote valley. I doubt that’s unique to me; valleys have a special place in human history and, I shouldn’t be surprised, in our very DNA.
Let’s start with Africa’s Great Rift Valley, often called the Cradle of Humanity. Then consider our earliest civilisations, many of which originated in valleys like the Nile, Tigris-Euphrates, Indus, Ganges, Yangtze, Yellow River, Mississippi and the Amazon. Of course they did. Valleys provide running water, plants and animals for food, fertile land, and a foundation for agriculture. Try finding any of those at the top of a windswept, basalt-riddled mountain.
For such an important element of our ancestors’ lives, it’s a surprise that the word valley can’t be traced back to Proto-Indo-European. It was a latecomer to English, too, arriving around 1300 from the Old French valee, which took it from Latin. Where the Romans got it from, no one knows.
What we do know is that English has a number of alternative words for valley, many hidden inside place names so the uninitiated won’t suspect anything. The glen (sometimes spelt glyn) in Scottish names like Glenlivet, Glenfiddich and our own new home, Glen Murray, means ‘narrow valley’ of the kind found between mountains, of which Scotland has an abundance. Dale, an Old English word, means ‘level or gently sloping ground between low hills with a stream flowing through it’, of which England likes to think it has an abundance, especially if period dramas are to be believed. You’ll find it in place names like Avondale, Glendale (a tautology, surely?) and Birkdale. Pant, the name of a town in Shropshire, England, simply means hollow. If your town’s name ends in comb or combe (cwm or cum in Wales) it’s named after a valley, as are towns with hope, nan, strath, dean or dene. Just to confuse matters, don and den can mean valley or hill. Either our ancestors were geographical nitwits or they trusted locals to possess sufficient wit to judge which meaning applied to their village.
Still the names keep coming. A dell is a grassy hollow, a dingle is a deep wooded valley and a swale is a marshy depression.
One word for valley that I was surprised to learn doesn’t exist in any English town’s name is vale. It comes from the same Latin word as valley and is little used these days. It has a special resonance for me that dates back to my childhood. Whenever our family went on a longish car journey, my mother would lead us in a decade of the Rosary. For the benighted heathens among my readers, that’s a cycle of prayers comprising one Our Father, ten Hail Marys, and a Hail Holy Queen (also known as the Salve Regina).
I found most of it a dreary slog, even as a believer. But that last prayer was something else. It had music and pathos to it - though I had no names for those things at the time. One line in particular seared itself into my memory, not least of all for that intriguing word vale: To thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this vale of tears. Here’s Salve Regina in full (the older version with great words like vale and clement in it, not the more recent “plain English” version with all the poetry bled from it):
Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy,
hail our life, our sweetness and our hope.
To thee do we cry,
poor banished children of Eve.
To thee do we send up our sighs,
mourning and weeping in this vale of tears.
Turn then, most gracious advocate,
thine eyes of mercy toward us,
and after this our exile
show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
O clement, O loving,
O sweet Virgin Mary.
Pray for us, O holy Mother of God that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.
One thing you have to say for Catholicism, it sure does come with some great prayers.
As it turns out, the musicality of Salve Regina is no accident. It was a hymn before it became a prayer. Composed in the Middle Ages, it’s since been set to alternative music by such greats as Vivaldi, Handel, Liszt and Schubert (the latter, seven times). Contemporary composer Arvo Pärt has written a sumptuous version for three choirs. Requiring just thirteen minutes of your life, not listening to it counts as a criminal act. Not as great a criminal act as transporting thousands of unneeded plant pots halfway down the country, but a crime nonetheless.
Bits and specious
Speaking of geographical nitwits, all the maps I’ve looked at place Glen Murray smack bang in the middle of a high ridge.
After last week’s post on feud, reader Chris Higgins kindly emailed: “Here's the complete list of [four letter] eu words according to my Scrabble word finder: deus, feus, jeux, leud, meus, neuk, neum, yeuk. No idea what most of them mean.” Me either, Chris!
Quote of the week
I love when you're moving apartments the difference between packing your first and last box like first ones all neat and labeled and thematic; box 16 is shampoo, a bag of rice, and a rug.
Twitter post (@delia_cal)
Looks beautiful.