Slides That Follow Your Voice: New Zealand Accent Podcast Opening

Slide 1: Track Notes, episode 112

0:17Kia ora, and welcome to Track Notes, the podcast about long walks and the people who build them. I'm Tessa, this is episode one hundred and twelve, and I'm recording this at six in the morning in a uh, a hut with no door, because the door is the subject of a different episode, and also because it blew away. [laughs]

0:39Here's the plan for today. In about ten minutes you're going to meet Dave, who is seventy-four and has spent the last nineteen years building a walking track over the Karewa Saddle with a wheelbarrow, a pick, sorry, a mattock, and a committee of eleven people who agree on nothing.

Slide 2: The Karewa saddle track: 19 years

0:58The track is fourteen kilometres long. It climbs nine hundred metres. It crosses two rivers, one of them twice, because the committee couldn't agree on which bank to stay on. It was supposed to take three summers and it took nineteen, it took nineteen, and Dave will tell you exactly whose fault that was, and it won't be his. [chuckles]

1:21Before Dave, housekeeping. The Track Notes field guide, the little waterproof one, is back in stock after the printer in Hamilton ran out of the right paper for four months. two thousand copies, forty-eight pages, and the map on page thirty-one is now the right way up, which several of you wrote in about with great patience and one of you with a diagram.

Slide 3: Housekeeping: the field guide

1:45Thank you, Barbara. The diagram is on my fridge. I don't have much else to say about that. It's a good diagram.

1:53Second thing. We did the listener survey, one thousand eight hundred and forty of you answered, and sixty-two percent said the episodes are too long. um, thirty-one percent said they're too short. seven percent said they only listen for the bird at the start, and, yeah, fair enough, it's a very good bird. [laughs] Hang on. That's a weka. Outside. It's, yeah, it's got my sock. Right. It's gone. I'm not going after it. Where was I.

Slide 4: The listener survey

2:25So we're changing nothing, and I hope that's all right.

2:29Now, a letter. This one came from Pieter in Dunedin, who walked the Karewa track in February with his daughter, who's nine. He says, we reached the saddle at two in the afternoon, in cloud, saw absolutely nothing, and sat down to eat our sandwiches in silence.

Slide 5: "It was there the whole time"

2:48Then the cloud lifted for about forty seconds, and my daughter said, oh, it was there the whole time.

2:58I think about that sentence more than I think about most things.

3:03I showed, I read it to, I read... I read that letter to Dave. He didn't say anything for a while. Then he said, that's why we put the bench there, and went back to talking about drainage, because Dave talks about drainage the way other people talk about their grandkids.

3:20There are seventy-one culverts on that track. He knows where every one of them is. He also keeps a notebook about them, and the notebook is older than I am. [sighs] I say ready. He showed me three kinds of gravel, in three jars, in the back of his ute, and asked me to pick the wrong one. I picked. I was wrong. He was kind, in that way that means you'll hear of it again. I have heard of it again. Anyway.

Slide 6: Dave and the drainage

3:50What I love about Dave's story, and the reason I wanted to open the season with it, is that nothing about it is efficient. A track built by a council would've taken two years and cost a number with a lot of zeros, and it would've been fine. This one took nineteen years, cost almost nothing, and has seventy-one culverts named after people. I don't know what to call that. It isn't fine. It's something else, and I haven't got the what's the, uh, word for it yet.

Slide 7: Efficient, or something else

4:23So. Pour yourself something, mind the hut door, which isn't there, and let's go up the hill. And if you're the person who only listens for the bird, it's coming, it's a tui, and it's about to do better than I did.

Slide 8: Pour yourself something

4:37This is Track Notes.