Random reminder

Press, 14 April 1984, Page 28

Random reminder

KNIGHT OF THE ROAD

A party of nurses, including the husband of one, were holidaying at Hanmer. The nurses thought a sightseeing drive along the powerline road to the Rainbow Valley would be of interest so one morning they left the husband to his devices and set off.

The trip as far as the Wairau (not the Waiau) was pleasant but uneventful. The fun started when they tried to cross the Wairau, marking the start of the Rainbow Valley. The river was running higher than usual but the dauntless Nightingales decided to give it a go. They went but did not arrive and stuck in the shingle a few yards short, like Charon’s rejected souls, with a longing for the further bank. Came a deus ex machina, Sir Galahad, Robin Hood, Good Samaritan, call him what you will, in the form of a strongminded tractor-driver. He cheerfully agreed to tow them out but his strongmindedness took the form of a flat refusal to tow them back to the Hanmer side. This involved the party making a long detour back to Hanmer through Murchison etc., so that it only arrived in Hanmer in the larger small hours of the

morning. Meanwhile He had been tossing and turning at the non-retum of the party and chauvinistically decided that they must have had an accident or serious breakdown which females were not equipped to cope with. So off he went on a one-man rescue operation into the wilds above Hanmer. An hour or so after he set out, the “Breakdown” party arrived home to find that He was following their tracks, only 12 hours behind so to speak. The wife thought it best to trail her sometimes irascible spouse along the Rainbow Road and calm him down. History does not record whether the other rounds went like the first, with the Flying Dutchpersons still chasing each other between Hanmer and Murchison, but if you live by the highway and hear the same two cars roaring by at sixhour intervals each night of the year for decades and centuries, you will know that they too have incurred the wrath of the Almighty and are doomed to pursue each other till eternity.