by Rachel Stewart

Unrequited love is a bitch, and you are the queen of it.

Your curves, your canyons, your low gulches and high, pert peaks are a slow-burning yearning that never goes away.

I can be in you, or out of you. I can be 12,000 Pacific Ocean miles away from you, hungry for your smell, your muted California light, worshipping you from afar and all to my lonesome heart’s content.

When I’m in you I try to get your attention sometimes. I Dodge Ram my way down your backroads all noise and spiralling dust, or overload on Jack Daniels in a roadside bar before morphing leglessly into K.D. Lang doing her best shoe-less Karaoke. I even shoot the shit out of a star-studded midnight desert sky, with only wolves witness to my howling at the moon. Still, you are unmoved.

Because, goddam it, why would you care? You are the Greatest Country in the World. A shining city on a hill. A beacon to the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. One Nation under God with liberty and justice for all. Plus, you have great bagels.

My love for you began during an unremarkable rural NZ childhood, chock full of hay paddocks and stands of native bush. Or, as I pictured it, open Wyoming prairies and Yosemite pine forests, all traversed atop my trusty steed. The horse was real, as was my Vaseline’d bum crack that needed regular smearing by the hand of my mother from riding bareback.

Inside the farmhouse, a 1960s black and white box flickered Bonanza, The High Chaparral, Gunsmoke, The Virginian – all hardening me up for Injuns hiding around every pass, rattlesnakes under every rock, cougars poised to pounce off every boulder. Things that could kill you. Not endless grazing Romneys and Friesians as far as the eye could see.

I was 11 when mum announced to gumbooted dad that she was vamoosing, with his youngest child. Me. There was another man. An American man. My soul up and soared out the window like a bald eagle; my body up and flew on a DC10 bound for destiny fulfilled.

But you know all of this, America. You were there in 74’. My, how you were there. San Francisco, Haight-Ashbury, The Castro – I mean, lezzie cops all guns and handcuffs. It was the centre of the universe, and I was in the bullseye.

Back seat Cadillac cruising the Golden Gate with the top down. Balmy California nights, weekends in Reno, winter trips to the Sierras, Big Mac and fries – I’d never eaten a dill pickle until that moment. No McDonalds yet where I came from.

History was being made. Nixon resigned rather than be impeached. I got out my new portable tape deck, loaded the cassette and held the microphone up to the TV. A colour TV, with 30-plus channels. My eyes were perpetually popping out with pleasure, and your weather was always warm and your breezes always gentle.

I pledged allegiance to you every morning, hand on heart, under the flag, more American than my classmates in my corduroy Levis flares that were pressed and ironed to an inch of their seriously pleated lives.

Fleetwood Mac, The Steve Miller Band, Peter Frampton Live, Santana – the soundtrack to my perpetually sunny life. Palm trees waved, warm seas beckoned, distant shimmering mountains – and I mean mountains – loomed.

Around 1000 sleeps later I was back in Godzone. Mum and American man decided living in NZ would be a better lifestyle choice for them, and for my education. I went back to gumbooted dad and staring at cows and sheep again. It was OK, but it wasn’t you.

Life carried as it is wont to do. In between times, I ached, I pined, I thirsted for you.

I wanted those sunny days back, but more than that, I craved the sensation that I was on the precipice of promise. 1970s NZ was not that place. I was lost in a tsunami of rugby, rural masculinity, and cow’s udders.

I grew up, I got on with it, and I carried you inside me everywhere. When I hit my thirties the realisation struck that you were not some long-lost love who was never to be seen again. I could simply hand over money, jump on a 747, and be back in your bosom again. Home.

As an adult, one’s past is organically redefined. I now had less interest in dill pickles, and much more interest in beef ragu accompanied by a full-bodied Napa Valley red. No longer did I just look at the lezzie cops. You know the drill.

Later came the birds. The beautiful, wondrous, North American raptors. Peregrine falcons, redtail hawks, merlins, snowy owls. Working with them to catch their dinner and/or mine is about as close to the heart of you one can get. Like gardening in NZ means you’re closer to God, falconry ensured I was closer to you.

In the here and now, you and I find ourselves at an awkward intersection. I am getting older and I do not feel the draw to travel so much. I stay closer to home, and besides I have a ’66 Mustang in the garage perpetually waiting all shiny and blue and ready to rumble across NZ’s prolific potholes and loose tarseal. No, it’s not exactly Route 66. But it’s at least something to keep you close.

I now have to invent some intellectual reason to justify backing away from you. How about the rise of your rancid political divide between the coastal elites and the manufactured and cruel caricature of everybody in between two shores? As if your fellow countrymen don’t matter.

All of which only serves to remind me that ours is, at heart, essentially a physical relationship. I fell for your magnificent landscapes first, and while they continue to carnally captivate, I must heed my head. I am nothing if all I amount to is a bag of homesick hormones.

Please know I will not forsake, or ever give up on, you. It would be like giving up on myself, since I carry you with me. But you must understand, you are for me becoming harder to unconditionally love. I know you do not care if I am dead or alive. Patriotism is nothing if not a one-sided affair.

It’s time now to turn my mind to my other long-term relationship. Better prospects but less passion. Familiarity versus fever. Comfort minus craving.

Love, in any form, hurts when it changes but I am, at last, ready to try and commit to my birthplace. To be more present. More grounded.

Afterall, I will die here, and that stand of bush has never looked more like a final resting place.

But I know your face will be the last thing I see. Your serene, full of promise face. A place where everything was possible, and oh so beautiful for spacious skies.

Listen to the full episode of Riding Shotgun here.