They say angels talk to a man when he walks

I have been travelling across the tail end of the night, crossing from west to east, under a sky littered with stars and the untidy splash of the Milky Way. To left and right, the mountains loom up, ghostly and sepulchral, immobile stone trolls, noting my passage but making no comment.

I left the West Coast shortly before midnight, driven by a requirement to be back in time for a meeting in Ranfurly. Travelling in the dark can be a very personal and surreal experience. They say angels talk to a man when he walks, and I have come to realise that they do the same thing when he drives. It is a time to reflect and review. Perhaps it is something to do with being alone in a space that only extends to the limits of the headlights.

The truck and I know each other well, and we are attuned to the rhythm of this particular piece of road, but somewhere above Lake Hawea I know it is time to take a break. The road is becoming a little bit difficult to control, wrestling to get away from me.. I'm worried about the potential for having an accident, although I haven't seen a single car in two hours. So I pull up at a photo opportunity lay-by high above the lake, and sleep for a couple of hours.

I awake and push on. The road slips and slides and winds its way down to Alexandra. The needle has slid to near- empty and there are no gas stations until I get to Ranfurly, so I pull over again on the main street, and wait for the pumps to open. It's five o'clock now, and my best guess is they'll open around 6 a.m. There will probably be workers, contractors and farm people wanting to fill up. I drift off again, and wake just as the signs come on at the Caltex station across the road. Sure enough, as I pull on to the diesel pump, a guy in a Mitsubishi ute stops on the other side, and fills first his truck and then the petrol cans for the collection of chainsaws in the back. His pointed comments on the frost explain the sullen muttering of the helicopter I've been hearing in the distance since I got here. Frost on the vines. Of course.

The first glimmer of daybreak is throwing the hills to the east into relief as I head up the road towards Omakau. Off to the left, the brush of snow swept across the hills by the weekend southerly storm is beginning to light, pink and blue, as the light strengthens to the east and the sun begins to appear above the horizon. The contented murmur of the diesel plays almost a counterpoint to it. As I wind my way up a road I'm beginning to know well and which is beginning to know me well, I begin to reflect on the road my life has and is taking. There have been some hard lessons to learn, and some hard lessons I'm still learning.

They say angels talk to a man when he walks.

There has been a heavy frost (hardly unusual round here), and the semi-frozen water races and streams of water on the rocky ground squirm and shimmer in the early morning light. I pass an irrigator, one of those black circular ones like an oversized cowpat which has been left on all night. Around it a circle of white frost has built up in layers, ice upon ice upon ice like thick icing. A lone weed inside the circle has multiple coatings of hoar frost, and now points an ice-gloved bony finger towards the sky.

Then, as I climb up the past Becks onto the plateau by St. Bathans, I see the fog bank ahead of me. Oh great. It does nothing to lift my spirits, which have been hovering on the fine line between reflective and dour. It writhes and slithers and fidgets its way over the hill, picking at the landscape, pouring into the hills and gullies, shrouding the trees and buildings in a grey mystery. The just-out-of-reach sun, maybe a valley or two further east, has turned the upper edge of the fog bank a wild pink-magenta colour, which provides a line of contrast between the sullen grey beneath, and the dharmic yellow-blue gradation above. It makes me think of that Stephen King novella, the one where the people are locked in the supermarket while prehistoric creatures roam outside. As I drop down into the murk, I can almost imagine dinosaurs roaming, indistinct and shadowy in the fields to either side.

Passing the Wedderburn hotel and the railway goods shed brought back and restored after Grahame Sydney had painted it and made it famous, I see the old stone shearing shed off to my left, sitting solemn and somehow forlorn in the mist. The power pole beside it is adorned with birds, socialising along a single wire. There is a composition here, so I climb down from the artificial warmth of the truck. I zip my jacket up to my chin (wish I'd remember to bring that beanie) and break out my camera. By the time, I've made for or five exposures, the mist is starting to lift and the hills in the background are moving into the frame like uninvited guests. So I pack up, and drive further up the hill.

Then, as I am almost at the top of the hill, the light explodes in my face. Ahead of me, on the ridge line, a stand of old man pine. The mist is beginning to thin, breaking up into shreds, beginning to drift apart like friendships beyond their use-by date. The rising sun, much more confident now, is sitting just behind the trees and pouring light through them. Great shafts of light and shadow are spilling out of the trees, and from where I am parked, it’s as if they have exposed their heart for all to see. It is so dramatic that it blows away the goblins of melancholy and self-doubt that have been picking at me all night.

This time I manage somewhere between 20 and 30 exposures before the moment has gone.

Following the long curve of the road down into Ranfurly, I can feel the fire lit inside me again, the itching expectation of what will appear on my computer screen. I give thanks to my travelling companions.

What I have seen is, in a way I have yet to understand, an affirmation.