Excerpt
A Different Kind of Power
OneYou could drive for thirty miles in the Kāingaroa Forest and wonder if there’s anything left on earth besides trees. That’s the view: radiata pines, each standing one hundred feet tall, in tidy gridlines that extend as far as the eye can see. The forest is as vast as it is dense: tree upon tree, row upon row, mile upon mile. The sameness is broken by only two things. First, the road carving through the shadowy landscape, and then the radiata shoots, popping up sporadically and defiantly. These smaller, wilding pines look like the Christmas trees of my childhood—joyful but a bit pathetic, each with just a few sparse branches, enough only for a single string of tinsel that will never quite hide the exposed trunk.
Although Kāingaroa is man-made—it’s the second-largest timber plantation in the Southern Hemisphere—it is easy to feel isolated there. It’s a forest that has been known to swallow up hunters and hikers who get lost among the pines. Damp mists are common, and light struggles to break through, especially after the sun dips behind the green peaks of the distant Te Urewera mountain range. Needles and cones collect on the forest floor, and the air is thick with the scent of resin and pine.
But an hour into the journey, just as you become certain you’ve reached the middle of nowhere, there is a break in the trees, and signs of human life return: A run-down forestry building with a rusted sign. A timber motel with small, neat rooms. Then, around the corner, a service station with three petrol pumps that marks the entry to a town called Murupara.
As a young girl, I made that trip through the forest countless times. Today, when I close my eyes, I can still take myself there: the long solitary stretch of tar seal, the gray mass of the ranges, rough trunks piercing the sky.
The first time I visited Murupara, I was four years old and unwell with the flu in the backseat of my family’s beige 1979 Toyota Corona. In those days, I was also prone to car sickness, which was almost certainly made worse by my corduroy booster seat, little more than a wedge of dense foam covered in fabric. It gave me height, but it also exaggerated every turn in the road. Next to me sat my sister Louise, just eighteen months older than me. She was also in a booster, and queasy, but not so much that she would stop asking questions of my parents: How much longer? Why can’t we stop? What if I need the toilet? We each held our stuffed bears, which, uncannily, we resembled. Mine, with a round friendly face, a squat body, and short limbs, was simply called Teddy. My sister’s bear, Cookie, was almost twice the length of mine with a lean body and long legs.
The windows were rolled down just enough that I could hang my fingers over the top and wiggle them in the open air. Beneath my dangling feet were the items that my mum made sure accompanied us on every long car trip: an old towel and an empty, half-gallon plastic ice cream container, in case we needed to throw up. She never threw anything away, and even this container would likely later be repurposed to store home-baked blueberry muffins. Between me and Louise, trapped inside a cardboard box with small holes at the top, sat the most uncomfortable passenger of all: our gray rescue cat, Norm. The sedative from the vet was wearing off as he pressed his face up against the top of the box, whiskers protruding through the holes.
It was moving day. We had left behind friends and family in the city of Hamilton, more than two hours to the northwest, because my dad had a new job, as the police sergeant in Murupara, a place I’d never seen.
Dad had grown up in a large family in Te Aroha, a farming community in the shadow of mountains along the Waihou River. Like every region in New Zealand, Te Aroha was settled first by Māori, who’d navigated their way from Polynesia in waka (canoes) using stars, ocean swells, and sea life as their guide. Māori tribes had lived on this land for hundreds of years. Legend had it that the great chief Kahu climbed to the peak of a mountain to orient himself and was so moved to see his home from this vantage point that he named it Te Muri-aroha-o-Kahu, te aroha-tai, te aroha-uta, meaning “the love of Kahu for those on the coasts and those on the land.” Now it’s known simply as Mount Te Aroha, the mountain of love.
My dad’s family ran a drain-laying business in Te Aroha, and Ardern and Sons had dug most of the drains in the area. As a boy, my dad had helped out, but when his family converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or what many know as Mormonism, Dad left home to attend the Mormon boarding school in Temple View. After a short stint working at a lead and zinc mine, he joined the New Zealand Police at age nineteen, serving first as a uniformed constable in Auckland and then in the Criminal Investigation Branch in Hamilton.
Dad stands five feet ten and has always looked young for his age, with thick, dark hair, which in those days he wore shaggy in the back with a cowlick at his forehead so he resembled Fonzie from Happy Days. He’s outgoing, but thoughtful, with a calm voice that I rarely heard raised. Even when New Zealand’s beloved rugby team, the All Blacks, was on television, Dad watched with a quiet intensity, leaping to his feet when he could no longer contain either his elation or disappointment.
Throughout my childhood, he took 10K runs. When he came home, he’d trade his running shoes for worn-out sheepskin slippers and settle into his La-Z-Boy chair to read the newspaper. Dad is happiest when he’s reading—especially about world history, Antarctic exploration, and the great explorer Ernest Shackleton.
Most of all, Dad was interested in people; he always wanted to know about their lives. As a police officer, he didn’t simply want to know what crimes had been committed; he also wanted to know why. I would often hear him say that the police can’t arrest their way out of everything. He believed if you wanted to fix crime, you had to understand why it was happening in the first place. He asked good questions, and people talked to him. It wasn’t unusual for someone my father was questioning to pause and observe, “At least you’re listening to me.” This isn’t to say he was soft. I doubt you could say that of anyone who investigated the sorts of crimes my dad did: homicides, rapes, robberies, and gang activities. He just looked at problems differently.
Policing in New Zealand is also different from that in many countries. For one, officers don’t routinely carry guns. And while they have the power to make arrests, they use a U.K. principle known as policing by consent. The idea that police are essentially citizens in uniforms, and their authority stems from the approval and cooperation of the community. Although there have been examples of abuse of power in New Zealand’s police force, policing by consent is the benchmark, the model that officers are expected to follow, and it was what my dad believed in.
In 1980, four years before our first family drive to Murupara, Dad began studying for the exam to become a detective constable. By then, he’d been married for several years, and my mum—a small-framed, high-energy woman with the practicality of someone raised on a dairy farm—was nine months into her second pregnancy. Mum vomited day in, day out. Being around food became such a chore that she began placing a plastic mat down on the kitchen floor, rolling my sister’s high chair over the top of it, setting the food on the tray of the chair, and leaving my sister to feed herself. Mum would peer around the doorframe, watching Louise from a far enough distance that she couldn’t smell the food but within reach if Louise needed her.
On the morning of Dad’s three-hour detective constable exam, a cold but sunny winter day, Mum wished him luck as he walked out the door. Dad wasn’t long gone when the urge to throw up hit Mum yet again. She rushed down the hall of their small weatherboard home to the bathroom. And that’s when it happened: Her water broke. There were no cell phones in those days and no way of contacting my dad quickly. Even if there were, I doubt my mother would have called him. She was determined that he finish his exam without “distraction,” which is a fairly understated way to refer to birth. Instead, she dialed my grandmother, asking her to come and get Louise; then she rang a neighbor with a large flatbed truck. When that vintage red truck pulled in to the driveway, my mother hauled herself up into it and asked the neighbor to drop her off at the hospital door. She’d be fine, she insisted.
That’s Mum: low fuss, straightforward, ready to get on with things—a classic Kiwi woman.
That day, when Dad finished his exam, there was a message waiting: Come to the hospital. He made it in time to welcome me into the world.
Dad enjoyed the work in Hamilton, and became a detective constable, but he wanted to run a station rather than just work in one. So, when I was a toddler, he began studying for his sergeant’s exams, which was no small effort. He already had a full-time job and a young family and was active in the Mormon church. To prepare, he rose before dawn, getting in an hour or two of study before the rest of us woke up. Then he would study again after dark.
