I remember sitting at the kitchen table of our house in Thorndon, feeling the carpet move underneath me. I only became aware of the tremors that shook us often when I was about ten. Growing up, the threat felt vague, distant. My whole life, people have said Wellington was long overdue for ‘the big one’. The 8.1–8.2 magnitude earthquake was so powerful it generated a tsunami and raised part of the seabed, forming the shoreline as it is today. The last big earthquake to hit Wellington was in 1855, almost twenty years after the beginning of European colonisation. The fault line map looks like part of the human nervous system, as if the islands were made of nerves splitting off into intricate connected branches. These split off into a chain of smaller but equally active faults that carve lines down the eastern side of the South Island. The Wellington Fault traces the western curve of the harbour, intersecting the main motorway in and out of the city, while the Ohariu Fault and Wairarapa Fault run parallel. Wellington sits atop a delicate web of active faults. Active volcanoes are dotted along the country’s ridged spine, and several long fault lines run the whole length of both islands. I wake up sweaty, my jaw tingling from clenching it.Īotearoa New Zealand straddles two shifting tectonic plates. Sometimes I’m on an island, and sometimes the sea empties out to reveal a sandbank littered with thumb-sized crabs and small whales. Sometimes the clouds are black and red at the horizon, glowing with distant fire, the source of which I can’t quite make out. Now, this dream comes more often than ever. My dreams intensified when I left Wellington. I don’t know when I first had this recurring dream, only that it’s been with me for most of my adult life. It begins to take shape: a column of black water so tall it touches the sky, coming closer to me, and I can’t move. I can just make out a black wave on the horizon rising up out of the sea. The tide begins pulling at my ankles, peeling back towards the island, all the way out. The sky is darkening, clouds circling towards something in the distance.
It is so flat and still that if I touched my palm to the surface it might feel like solid glass.
The sea is an opalescent grey, the colour of the thickest part of a rain cloud.