Gimly of the Waitingi Holiday Park
The bearded Kiwi man was going through his list of injuries: “And this broken knuckle I got from hitting a Samoan while playing basketball. He took my legs from under me so I hit him. I broke my knuckle but he did worse - he had to go to the hospital for a few days” A proud grin lit up Ray’s face. “And where did you play basketball?”, Brent asked. Lowering his voice, Ray whispered: “At the yard in Mt Eaden”. As I was to find out from Brent later, Mt Eaden is one of New Zealand’s penitentiaries.
Despite his checkered and by all signs, difficult, past, Ray struck me as a gentle and caring soul. He was one of the few New Zealanders in our communal kitchen at the Waitangi Holiday Park on the Bay of Islands in Paihia. The others being young families or couples from the Netherlands, France, Germany and Denmark - some with kids as young as toddlers who seemed to be in their element chasing the ducks and seagulls on the campground. There were doctors, students, office workers, hotel managers and all kinds of other backgrounds. The kitchen was a true democratizer - a melting pot of social backgrounds where people were distinguished by their pots and pans and whether they cooked pasta, vegetarian or meat. There was also the older Northern California hippie woman who ate by herself and talked about the government spraying zinc dioxide into the atmosphere to make the ozone hall bigger. I guess that’s what make her feel better during the three-day rain slog that set in and turned the campground into a soggy bog.
Unlike most transitory one- and two-night campers, Ray had settled in for a longer stretch of camping and fishing. He had his cornucopia of kitchen equipment under a green tarp with his name written on it, tucked away neatly in the kitchen. His tent matched his veteran status. It was an old patched-up A-frame that he had proudly fixed up after it got flooded and washed up on a prior trip (he showed us photos). His camping spot was humble - right by the men’s bathroom, behind the back fence. When Ray first spoke to me, he asked me the usual question - where I was from. My explanation elicited a smile and a declaration that I was a “bitsa” - a “bit of something and bit of something else”. Yep, that’s me, a mutt.
When he was not giving me a hard time for cooking vegetarian (he would say that a “vegetarian” was the Maori word for a bad hunter), Ray would talk about his past. He would cry when he would tell us about his ex-wife who divorced him, his love for the Maori culture and people, his renunciation of alcohol, and how he is living in a Christian community and using his builder craft to rebuild the homes of families who were going through tough times. I felt bad for Ray - he was obviously still reliving the family drama, especially with his addict son whom he had unsuccessfully tried to help.
This year he’ll turn 70, so Ray explained that the wild bush look he sported was part of a pre-birthday plan. They’ll have a big party for him at the Christian community that is going to be Lord of the Rings - themed. Ray was a big fan of the books, not so much of the movies. He was getting ready by letting his beard grow. Judging by the impressive bush on his face in mid-January, it was obvious that the beard was going to reach massive proportions by the mid-June birth date. “Are you going to be Gandalf then?”, I inquired. “No. Too short for that”, he smiled. “I’m going as Gimli”. Makes sense - even with his limp, Ray was a beefy guy who prided himself on single-handedly reeling in record-braking Mackerel and other fish which, according to him, had once ended up on the cover of a fishing magazine.
On our last day at the Waitangi campground, I went to the kitchen to say goodbye to Ray. The sun had broken through the clouds and people, like little lizards after a few days of rain, were crawling outside to soak in the sun’s rays. “Bye Ray, be well and have fun at your birthday party!”. His cheerful reply came with a smile flashed under his beard: “Bye bitsa! Take care!”
