The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can.
— J. R. R. Tolkien
OPEN ROAD
I live in a city perched on hills around a harbour, locked within ridgelines of steep hills at the bottom of New Zealand’s North Island. It’s a wild place to build a city – wedged into the meeting point of tectonic plates and battered by Antarctic southerlies or westerly gales that howl across Cook Strait. Everything green grows everywhere.
There are essentially only two roads in and out, and they funnel you inexorably north-east or north-west. One road takes you up, up, up Remutaka Hill, and down the other side – not too far as the crow flies, but somewhat further by human terms, as 60,000 new recruits discovered as they marched to their training camp between 1915 and 1919. The other takes you north up the coast, where landslides routinely disrupt commuter trains. Everyone else is trying to get out of town alongside you. It’s beautiful, but constrained.
I used to live in a dry city that sprawls on the flat edge of a sleeping volcano. The Southern Alps stretch out in the distance, across the plains, forming a spine up the back of Te Waipounamu (the South Island). Cold in winter and warm in summer, it’s famous for the arch that forms in the sky after clouds from the nor’west have struggled over the alps, and for the braided rivers that dominate the plains.
There are so many ways to get out of that city. It’s like you’re in the middle of a spiderweb. I used to get in my car on a Saturday morning and simply drive towards the mountains – you could take pretty much any road and it would get you to a different place. Who knows where you would end up, or what you would meet? I was brought up to be unable to resist the mildly dangerous or dodgy, whether that’s:
clattering along under-maintained gravel tracks in the middle of nowhere, your teeth shuddering in your head – consequences to your suspension be damned
winding around blind corners on narrow tracks steep up a hill, hugging the wrong side of the road and hoping you’re not going to meet someone coming the other way and have to figure out how to let them past
taking off down an unmarked road because it looks intriguing and like you might not meet any other humans, unsure whether you’re really allowed to be there
I can’t be out in these stunningly lonely places as often as I would like, anymore. But when I get the chance, I hit the road. And the thrill slowly rises in my heart just the same. How can it be that I feel most at home when I’m literally driving away from it?
There is nothing like the open road. In this issue of Halfway Down the Stairs, we celebrate the feelings of freedom and risk that come with it. We’re grateful to all our authors for sharing their experiences and imagination with us.
Submissions are now open for our next issue, which will be themed Fairytale & Folklore. We look forward to seeing how this inspires you. Submissions guidelines are available here.
Alison Stedman is a fiction editor at Halfway Down the Stairs.
© 2024, Alison Stedman
Halfway Down the Stairs 