What If You Could

1

What If You Could Listen

You 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, 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 for only 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 ranges. 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 gas 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 twisting road that gives way to the long stretch of blacktop, the gray mass of the mountains, rough trunks piercing the sky.

The first time I visited Murupara in 1985, I was four years old and sick with the flu in the back seat of my family’s Toyota Corona. In those days, I was also prone to car sickness, which was almost certainly made worse by my brown 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, each of us clutching our teddy bears. 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?

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 carboard 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 sticking out 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 just taken 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 guides. These Māori tribes had lived on this land for hundreds of years before any European even knew it existed. 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.

By the time my dad was born, the population of Te Aroha was majority pākehā, New Zealanders of European descent. My dad’s family ran the local drain-laying business, 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 Te Aroha to attend the Mormon boarding school. There he set his sights on doing something other than laying drains. He joined the New Zealand Police at age nineteen, serving first as a uniformed officer in Auckland and then as a detective in Hamilton.

Dad was endlessly 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. This isn’t to say he was soft. I doubt you could say that of anyone who investigated the brutal crimes my dad did: murder, robberies, and gang violence. He just looked at problems differently.

Policing is also different in New Zealand than in many countries. For one, officers don’t routinely carry guns. And while they have the power to make arrests, they use a British principle known as “policing by consent.” The idea is that police are essentially citizens in uniforms, and their authority stems from the approval and cooperation of the community. Although not everyone has always policed with this approach—and there have been examples of abuse of power in New Zealand’s police force—policing by consent is the model that officers are expected to follow, and it was what my dad believed in.

Dad was an excellent detective. He asked good questions, and people talked to him, sometimes sharing personal details. It wasn’t unusual for someone my father was questioning to pause and observe, “At least you’re listening to me.”

I remember as a young university student, sitting with Dad in a booth at Burger King in Hamilton. My back was to the counter when I looked up from my Whopper to see my dad lock eyes with someone he recognized. I flicked my head around in time to see a solidly built man lifting his eyebrows and nodding his head at Dad—a greeting in New Zealand we call the “east coast wave.” Dad did the same in return.

“Who’s that?” I asked, assuming it was likely someone he went to school with.

My dad started to unwrap his burger, and casually, he said, “Just a man I’ve arrested a few times.” Dad’s approach made an imprint on me, though I had no idea then that listening to people tell stories about their struggles and their lives would wind up being a big part of my own.

Dad enjoyed the work in Hamilton, 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 he 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.

But even when Dad passed all his exams, there was still the issue of finding a place that needed to hire a sergeant. Sergeant jobs were scarce and competitive, and without leadership experience, it would be near impossible for him to be promoted in Hamilton or a similar station elsewhere. That meant one thing: going somewhere almost no one else wanted to go.

***

So, there we were, arriving in Murupara as a family for the first time: my parents in the front seat, two queasy girls in the back, and a gray cat in a box desperate to be liberated.

The forest surrounding Murupara felt towering, but the small town itself was low and open, the buildings there flat and simple. And while many streets were named after trees—Kauri, Rimu, Pūriri—there were very few trees lining them. It was a forestry town with no forest of its own.

Our new home was on Kōwhai Avenue, named for a small, woody tree with bursts of bright yellow flowers in spring (the word kōwhai means yellow in Māori). The house was a solid rectangle of cream brick, plain and practical, with a small, corrugated iron garage on one side. There was no garden, just a concrete path that led to the front door. But from almost the moment the moving trucks arrived, my mother set out to make a home for us, hanging curtains and planting pansies in the yard. Every morning, Mum breezed into my and Louise’s bedroom, pulling back the curtains she’d hung, declaring “Wakey, wakey!” Mum was a “potterer,” constantly scrubbing, wiping, sorting, all the while narrating to herself what she was doing and what she planned to take on next.

The house was small, with two bedrooms. First was the small one that Louise and I shared, with barely enough room for two single beds and a small set of drawers (but still large enough for Louise to declare “her” side the tidy one). My parents’ bedroom was slightly larger, able to fit a queen-sized bed and a few pieces of furniture. Down the narrow hall was a third room where my mother hand-sewed clothes and folded endless piles of laundry. The living room had a simple fireplace that in winter stayed burning through the night to warm the house. The kitchen was purely functional, with pink wooden cabinets, metal handles, and a stainless steel counter.

In this modest space, my parents arranged their most cherished possessions: a pine-framed sofa with hard wooden arms and scratchy plaid cushions. Mum and Dad’s wedding photo, set in an ornate gold frame. A set of matte brown Crown Lynn dinnerware, a wedding present that Mum decreed could be used on only special occasions (and as a result mostly sat on display in a cabinet). An old-fashioned tube TV with a built-in speaker, woven and green. On top of that television, they placed our newest possession: a bulky silver Panasonic VCR, which had cost my parents the equivalent of a month’s salary. I knew this because we were reminded of its cost almost every time it was used.

What our new house lacked in space it made up for in an enormous, wide-open backyard. The yard was large enough for a trampoline, as well as a rotary clothesline that my sister and I circled as we learned to ride our bikes. If Louise and I jumped on the trampoline high enough, we could just see the blue roof of the police station come in and out of view.

Next door to us lived my dad’s co-worker Hamish with his wife, Joan. I have almost no memory of Joan, other than her warmth. Hamish was roughly the same age as my dad, lean with a thinning crop of golden hair. There was one other officer posted to the station, and between him, Hamish and my father, they made up the entirety of the Murupara police force. These three officers covered not only the town of Murupara, but also the large, rural, and remote surrounding areas. Backup reinforcements, if needed, were almost an hour away.


On the face of it, Murupara was a hard town. And there were reasons for this, some dating back hundreds of years.

In the years before our arrival in Murupara, more than half of the town’s forestry workforce had lost their jobs due to government reforms that had changed New Zealand’s economy dramatically. Many of those who could leave, did. Businesses shuttered, and many families fell further into poverty.

This wasn’t the first blow to this small town. Māori, who made up most of the town, were already carrying the scars of colonization. In 1642, Dutch explorer Abel Tasman first laid eyes on the land we now know as Aotearoa, New Zealand—the land of the long white cloud. Next came James Cook, followed by whalers, traders, Christian missionaries, and settlers. These waves of newcomers had often brutal results for tangata whenua, the people of the land, including land confiscation, warfare, and loss of lives, income, and mana—dignity. The economic changes intensified this history.

By the time we arrived in Murupara, it seemed that some of the most well-off people in town were members of local gangs: the Mongrel Mob or the Tribesmen. One gang was headquartered in a nearby town, the other in Murupara with a large, corrugated iron fence surrounding the gang “pad,” high enough that you couldn’t see the house behind it.

I often heard the gang members in town well before I saw them, the roar of their high-handled motorbikes so loud that Louise sometimes stopped walking to cover her ears. If the bikes passed by school, kids ran to the window to watch. After all, no one had motorbikes like the gang members.


It was in Murupara that I went to school for the first time. I wasn’t quite five years old, but the school suggested that there was little point in waiting for my birthday, that I might as well begin kindergarten as Louise entered second grade. It was deep in winter the day we started, and the two of us held hands as we set off walking together.

That first morning, the teacher called out the roll alphabetically. My last name put me at the top of the list, and as my name was called, I sat up on the mat, legs crossed in front of me, and yelled back “Yes!” enthusiastically. As the teacher continued to call the roll, other kids offered a different reply: “āe,” the Māori word for yes. I noted this, that’s all. I had grown up with Māori words used interchangeably with English—words like European, stomach, family, and love were frequently switched out with pākehā, puku, whānau, and aroha.

I had Māori relatives on both sides of my family, and we were Mormon, and in New Zealand Māori made up much of the membership of Mormon churches. But this was the first time I was surrounded by children who spoke te reo, the Māori language, so freely and openly.

Today, I know that I was on the land of the Ngāti Manawa people, the Māori tribe of the area. In decades past, there had been repeated conflict on their land leading to the loss of crops, the government had broken lease agreements, and disease had taken the lives of many.

At five, I knew none of this. I simply noticed the words, the same way I noted other things: That the school grounds were enormous, big enough to play large games of tag. That we had mat time and stories. That on Fridays, we were allowed to order fish and chips, which came in tightly wrapped newspaper that we’d rip the top off of to dig into the steaming fries. That the other kids liked to go barefoot in summer like I did—sometimes even to school.

Not long after we started school, Louise and I were walking home together when we heard crying. It was a small boy—smaller even than I was. He was just across the street, his back to us. He was alone. It was cold by now, the kind of cold when snow settled on the mountain ranges and ice hardened on the tops of puddles. It was the kind of cold that gets into your bones, but this boy was wearing shorts, and his feet were bare. He carried a giant backpack, which dwarfed him completely. From beneath his shorts, brown streaks, diarrhea, ran down the backs of his legs.

My sister and I slowed down. The boy’s sobs were loud and sounded a bit like choking. I was still so young, but I was old enough to have a persistent thought. He shouldn’t be alone. My sister and I held hands and watched him silently. I think we both believed it was better if he didn’t know we’d seen him. We watched him move farther from us, and all the while I willed, as hard as I could, but silently: Please. Someone come and find him.


Murupara was small enough that Louise and I were allowed to walk by ourselves to the small set of shops in the center of town, less than a five-minute walk if we cut through the back of the police station. The local security guard assigned to keep watch over the shops would sometimes be parked in the middle of the parking lot, dozing in his car. Other times flatbed pickup trucks with the large carcass of a wild pig or a deer would be idling nearby, ready to do another victory lap of town before being taken home to be skinned and carved up.

Among the stores was a pharmacy, a post office, a butcher, Four Square (a miniature supermarket), just one fish-and-chip shop, and a corner dairy. Dairies are like very small convenience stores with a little bit of everything, including candy. There, we’d approach the counter with coins. For twenty cents, we could buy a white paper bag twisted at the top full of chewy Milk Bottles, fizzy candies, and gummies in the shape of jet planes.

Getting to and from the dairy took you past the Murupara Hotel, which wasn’t a hotel at all but a pub. It was a plain white building with a faded green roof and slatted windows that revealed nothing of the inside. Anyone and everyone went to the Hotel. When it closed for the evening, the hardier patrons often didn’t go home. Instead, they gathered out back, where they continued drinking long into the night.

When our family needed groceries, we’d climb into the Toyota Corona to make an hour-long journey to the Pak ’n Save in Rotorua. Back we’d head, through that deep, dark forest, until the fragrance of pine gave way to the sulfuric smell of Rotorua’s hot springs. One Saturday, my car sickness got the better of me, and I threw up on my clothes. The remainder of that drive was spent with the windows down while my mum cursed not bringing an ice cream container. When we arrived in Rotorua, my father drove me to the police station, where he hosed me off—literally—as my mum picked up a brand-new outfit. I remember it exactly: a pale green floral skirt with an embroidered trim, and a matching blouse with a round collar. It was one of the few outfits I owned in those days that was neither hand-sewn nor a hand-me-down. After that bonus outfit, I dreaded the feeling of car sickness a little less.


Despite the winding roads, Louise and I looked forward to our Saturday trips to Rotorua, especially in the early days when we didn’t have many friends. The other kids in school were understandably wary of us. We weren’t just the new kids, the outsiders, we were the daughters of the police sergeant, the man who locked people up. Louise bore the brunt of this suspicion. She was called names and teased, so I began following her around at lunchtime like a self-appointed protector.

It would be years before I’d understand that in Murupara, there was long-standing distrust of the state in all sorts of ways. But even as a child, I had some sense that the police were especially mistrusted, and I suppose I could even understand why. Police didn’t just arrest criminals—nameless, faceless bad guys. They arrested people in the community: dads, brothers, sisters, aunties, and mums. If a child’s parent was arrested, there was a very good chance my dad would have had something to do with it. I tried to imagine how that must feel: Someone in a uniform shows up at the door and then your family member is taken away. But they don’t know my dad, I’d tell myself. I was convinced that if they did, things would get better.

Perhaps that’s why Dad had wanted to run his own station in the first place. Since becoming a police officer, he’d noticed many moments when a parent, upon seeing him in uniform, would lean down to a child and whisper a warning of some sort. See that police officer over there? If you’re naughty, he’s going to come and arrest you. Dad would tell me how much he hated hearing kids be told that. He wanted people to believe that their lives were better because the police were there. But that kind of policing takes trust, and trust takes time.


One day, I headed into town, cutting from the backyard into the police station parking lot. There, I saw a group of men in leather pants and jackets gathered around a figure in a blue uniform: my dad. He was shorter than the men who surrounded him, and he was alone. The men moved around him slowly, menacingly, kicking up loose gravel as they moved. Even from a distance I could see Dad’s body was tense; he held up one arm in front of himself, as if trying to both keep the men calm and keep them at a distance. Even though I was too small to understand all that was happening, I knew the situation wasn’t good.

I didn’t want my dad to see me, but turning around and going back seemed just as likely to catch Dad’s eye as trying to skirt past. So I kept going, approaching in a near-tiptoe, placing one bare foot in front of the other, trying to make myself as small as possible. But I couldn’t keep my eyes off what was happening. Dad’s eyes locked onto mine. I froze.

When my father spoke, his voice was slow and calm.

“Keep walking, Jacinda,” he said.

I did, moving as quickly as my bare feet allowed on the painful gravel scattered over the driveway. When I reached the concrete sidewalk, I broke into a run. But I worried about my dad, so much that I risked his annoyance and took the same route to return home. By now, the parking lot was empty.

That night, when Dad came home, I asked him how he got out of the situation. I couldn’t imagine an exit other than force. I must have said something like this, because he furrowed his brow, his expression making it clear that he was disappointed in me.

“Jacinda,” he said. “My words will always be the greatest tool I have.”

Words as a tool—for talking and for listening, for reasoning and for understanding, for building trust. Dad’s explanation stuck with me for the rest of my life.