End Times

By Rebecca Priestley

In the late 1980s, two teenage girls found refuge from a world of cosy conformity, sexism and the nuclear arms race in protest and punk. Then, drawn in by a promise of meaning and purpose, they cast off their punk outfits and became born-again Christians. Unsure which fate would come first – nuclear annihilation or the Second Coming of Jesus – they sought answers from end-times evangelists, scrutinising friends and family for signs of demon possession and identifying EFTPOS and barcodes as signs of a looming apocalypse.Fast forward to 2021, and Rebecca and Maz – now a science historian and an engineer – are on a road trip to the West Coast. Their journey, though full of laughter and conversation and hot pies, is haunted by the threats of climate change, conspiracy theories, and a massive overdue earthquake.End Times interweaves the stories of these two periods in Rebecca' s life, both of which have at heart a sleepless fear of the end of the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Victoria University Press
• Release date: Nov 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9781776921713

Book preview

1

Faultline

‘Where’s the Alpine Fault from here?’ asks Maz, a finger hovering over the map.

Glacier Country – untamed natural wilderness it says at the top. There’s a key for restaurants, shops, hotels and walking tracks. Franz Josef has two main streets, one being the state highway we drove in on, with a few side streets connecting the two. For our last night on the road, we’re staying at an ‘eco retreat’ – a scattering of cabins and tree-houses – and we’ve chosen a single-storey, bush-surrounded cabin.

The host points to a junction between the highway and one of the side streets. ‘Just up here,’ she says in a lovely Irish accent, ‘through the Mobil station.’

Adrenaline floods my body. ‘What?’ I say. ‘What?’

Alpine Fault is a game my best friend Maz and I have been playing all the way down State Highway 6. How fast can we drive over the plate boundary to minimise the risk of being swallowed by an Alpine Fault rupture? What would happen if the Alpine Fault moved right now, while we’re crossing this bridge? Whose house would we crash at if an Alpine Fault earthquake cut the West Coast off from the rest of the country? It’s been fun, tapping into a deep-seated survivalist tendency we both have.

But now, without thinking it through, I’ve paid for a night in a cabin 300 metres from the Alpine Fault trace. What the fuck? How have I missed this? It’s an unnecessary risk. An Alpine Fault movement while we’re here wouldn’t just mean being cut off from the rest of the country; it would mean an immediate risk to life. I feel like an idiot. I’m okay if I have a plan, but if we’re going to be swallowed by a plate boundary rupture, I don’t have an escape strategy.

Maz is looking at me and laughing. She says that everyone on the West Coast knows the Alpine Fault runs through Franz Josef. Surely I knew this? Aren’t I the one with the geology degree? The host, smiling but looking perplexed, locks eyes with Maz and hands her the key.

I’m mute with anxiety. I rethink our plan. Should I insist we leave town or move to a hotel further away from the fault? I start thinking about statistics, and how likely it is that the Alpine Fault will rupture tonight. It’s a low-probability event but extremely high stakes. While I’m thinking, we get back in the car and Maz drives us to our cabin.

The cabin is cute – a modern wood-and-corrugated-iron box with a sliding front door and a single-pitch roof over a front porch. We talk about what would happen in an Alpine Fault earthquake. From a quick literature review on my phone, I’ve ascertained that we’re not in the town’s 130-metre-wide fault rupture avoidance zone, a high hazard area in which there’s a chance of bending, folding and rupture of up to two metres vertically and eight metres horizontally, but we’re fucking close to it. Where we are, we could expect intense shaking for up to four minutes. We would likely be thrown to the floor, but our cabin – made of ductile materials – would move with the motion rather than collapse. So, as long as we duck and cover, and nothing falls on us, we should be okay.

Once we’ve checked out the cabin construction, I stand on the front porch and look up at the bush-clad slopes just a few hundred metres away. Shaking of the intensity you’d get from an Alpine Fault rupture causes widespread landslides, rockfalls, liquefaction. The hill slopes to the east of Franz Josef are characterised by steep range front topography and weak fault-crushed rock mass that when combined with high rates of rainfall and seismicity equate to high landslide susceptibility, says a report I find online.

‘Are you wondering if those hills are going to come down?’ says Maz.

‘Yep.’

‘Hmmm,’ she says. ‘I clocked that bulge as we were driving into town.’

On the slope above us is a distinctive bulge. Maz starts muttering about angle of repose, and we talk it all through. Eventually we decide that, given the Alpine Fault goes every 300 years or so, there’s not a lot of regolith there to come down in the inevitable landslides that a massive quake would cause. So, as long as the hill doesn’t totally come down on us in a massive rock avalanche, we should survive. I’m somewhat reassured, but I need to feel more prepared, so I head back into town to stock up on emergency supplies.

I drive to the Four Square – avoiding the bump in the road near the Mobil station – and get water, tuna, crackers, cheese, dried fruit and chocolate. Back at the cabin, I empty the books, knitting and kids’ presents from my backpack and refill it with food, bottled water and a roll of loo paper. I put our sleeping bags and parkas near the door. There’s no point having them in the car if it gets crushed by a tree or the road is blocked.

It starts raining. I have a folkloric sense of earthquake weather being hot, humid and still, so the rain feels comforting – slightly more cosy and safe. But this is flawed reasoning, because wet ground increases the risk of earthquake-triggered landslides.

In the square cabin there’s a double bed, a single bed, a coffee table with a couch and comfortable chairs, and a bathroom. I throw my things onto the single and let Maz, the restless sleeper, take the big bed. My go bag prepared, and committed to being here now, I try to settle into our digs.

But I’m still anxious. Maz checks out the drinks in the fridge. It’s good news: there are local beers and wines and they’re all complimentary. We’ve paid a lot for this place so we make a commitment to drink them all. We start with a West Coast Red IPA; we’ll have the wine after dinner.

On the shelf above the bench is a ceramic jar full of incense sticks. Maz takes an electric fire-lighter from the bench and tries to light one. It won’t take, so she goes to sit on the porch with her beer. We try to settle into a mellow mood, though I’m still on edge. While I’m drinking a beer, I roll a big fat spliff to help me relax. I haven’t done this for decades but I have a body memory of what to do.

We can’t smoke it yet, though, because Maz has a Zoom meeting and I need to scarper.

In the dusk, I drive out of town, far enough out to feel safe. I look at the proximity of the hills, the river, the floodplain, and check between the map and what I can see out the window. I drive over Tartare Stream, then panic when I realise the road is taking me closer to the mountains. I go over Stony Creek to a spot where the road curves north around a gentle hillock, away from the mountains. Flat land is ahead. I decide this is a ‘safe’ spot we could drive to if we were hit by a quake and the roads out of town were open. Part of the plan.

~

When I was at primary school, and spent most lunchtimes inside reading, one of my fears was spontaneous human combustion. Funny how the things you worry about change as you get older. But I realise that, in one way or another, I’ve been poised for disaster, catastrophe, apocalypse even, my entire life. The End Times have always seemed imminent, and I’ve been perpetually alert for tectonic ruptures, Biblical raptures, nuclear blasts, the metaphorical ticks of the Doomsday Clock’s second hand. Through the decades, the End Times have travelled along with me, taking on new forms, gathering in new fears.

Lately, it feels as though the End Times have arrived. That adrenaline-fuelled night on the Alpine Fault I was kept awake by a fear of being swallowed by the earth, by my disbelief that no one else seemed to be taking the danger seriously. But most nights, when I’m not sleeping over a plate boundary, or checking my symptoms for signs of a deadly virus, the thing that keeps me awake is climate change.

2

Methane seep

Maz’s mother says that when we first met, as a pair of two-year-olds, we looked directly into each other’s eyes. It was a look of recognition, she says. Then we toddled into each other’s arms. We’ve been friends ever since. Our fathers worked together, as engineers; our mothers were primary school teachers; our grandfathers taught at the same high school; our great- and great-great-grandfathers were gold miners. But we think there’s something deeper. We’ve followed different paths and have sometimes gone years without seeing each other, but we always come back to each other.

At the start of our road trip, about a week before my sleepless night at Franz Josef, Maz and I met up in Nelson after flying in from Auckland and Wellington. Our decades-long friendship has endured different career paths, different home lives, many years spent in different cities and countries. Now, we were having a moment of synchronicity. Maz, a mining engineer turned civil engineer, was recently separated from her husband, and I was disillusioned with my job. Maz needed a holiday, and I needed a new focus, a writing project. I was eight years into an academic career after twenty years of self-employment and study, and I was under instruction from my coach, who had been supporting me through some work issues, to ‘fucking enjoy yourself’. Maz and I thought a week-long roadie would meet both of our needs.

A few months earlier, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists had set the Doomsday Clock, which measures how close we are to destroying the world with dangerous technologies of our own making, sat at 100 seconds to midnight – the closest since 1953. Their announcement headlined the COVID-19 pandemic, pointing out how ‘unprepared and unwilling’ the international community was to deal with a global emergency, and naming nuclear weapons and climate change as posing ‘existential threats to humanity’.

After a career spent interviewing scientists about these issues, along with other horrors, I was keen to hear from other folk. Including those who were literally at the coal face, working in mines. I knew there were people on the West Coast with beliefs and worldviews wildly different from those of my middle-class, liberal, Wellington community, and I wanted to talk to them – I wanted to listen to them – and hear what they thought about the scientific issues that are sometimes described as controversial but to me are no-brainers.

The rekindling of my friendship with Maz started early that year too, at a writing retreat during which Maz wrote about her time as a mining engineer in Australia and I scoured my teenage journals to help me into an experimental piece of writing. I’d wanted to ‘be a writer’ since I was a teenager, and my journals were detailed and voluminous. I trawled through entries from 1983 to 1985, halfway through sixth form to the end of my gap year. In the evenings we drank wine in my room and I read aloud and we laughed and connected over the dark intensity of those years, marvelling at our righteous and judgemental teenage selves.

Now we were on the road, equipped with sleeping bags, books, sturdy walking boots. I was uncertain which clothes to bring and decided to go for a bit of a Lumberjane look – jeans, checked shirts, boots. While I like black clothes, big sunglasses and elegant coats, I’m also inclined to scruffiness. Maz has a definite style. Her dark hair is bleached blond and cut into a short choppy bob, she has the smooth forehead and plump lips of a high-salaried Aucklander, and she favours expensively ripped designer jeans and skull T-shirts. When she told me she was packing ‘Normcore’ for this trip, I went to my local Farmers to buy a black merino hoodie and a pair of stretchy, dark green, slim-leg pants. But was any of this really me?

When Maz and I were teenagers, we were always getting dressed up. Our costumes included Auntie Maudie’s Victorian lace underwear, Uncle Jack’s oversized army jackets, 1940s floral dresses, New Romantics pirate layers, punk garb and even flouncy peach-coloured choir dresses. Sometimes we dressed like the singers we liked from Split Enz, Ultravox, Adam and the Ants, the Sex Pistols. Sometimes we would hold hands as we walked down the main street of Petone or Whakatāne to try and fuck with any homophobic locals. Back then, you didn’t need to do much to turn heads.

During lockdown, I let the grey streaks grow through my hair, stopped wearing the little makeup I usually applied, spent most days in gardening clothes. I wondered if my academic career was a kind of performance too – one that I felt too tired to keep doing. But without it, without my costume, I felt untethered. When I looked in the mirror, I didn’t know what to make of my reflection.

~

Day one. Late autumn. In Wakefield we park on the gravel verge, across the highway from the Wakefield pie shop, behind a heavily laden white ute. On the back tray is an enormous, black, three-headed beast, foul and Biblical, defying all laws of nature. I put on my glasses, take a closer look. Through a small window in a plywood dog box hang three black and tan heads, grinning mouths open, teeth showing, tongues dripping. Draped over the top of the box is an enormous wild pig, a hairy old Captain Cooker. Welcome to rural Aotearoa.

Inside the shop we inspect a double-sized warmer filled with hot pies – mince and cheese, steak and kidney, steak and mushroom, bacon and egg, and more. I ask about the vegetarian options – there are two – then choose the vegetable pie.

‘Leek, celery, broccoli, cauliflower bound in a cheese sauce with a slice of kūmara and mashed potato on top. I really rate it,’ says the woman behind the counter.

Maz – who knows the shop, used to come here regularly – chooses a steak, stout and mushroom pie.

‘These are the best fucking pies,’ she says, then takes a bite from the paper-bagged pastry.

From Wakefield we take our hybrid rental east along State Highway 6, through pine forests misty with layers of cloud and over swollen brown rivers. Maz drives fast while I sit in the passenger seat, operating the sound system and taking notes. She’s driven this road dozens of times, from Westport to Nelson for lunches, shopping, visits with friends.

I’ve made a playlist, 41 songs that cover the formative years of our friendship between the ages of 13 – when we found ourselves in the same class at high school – and 18, when Maz went to Auckland to study engineering. It starts with the Topp Twins ‘Untouchable Girls’, with our favourite line: We’re stroppy, we’re aggressive, we’ll take over the world. Then there are the Bob Marley, Michael Jackson and Pink Floyd songs that dominated our school radio station in 1980, the year we started high school. Also on the playlist are songs from bands we saw play live in the years that followed – Split Enz, Ultravox, Unrestful Movements, Siouxsie and the Banshees – and songs from the albums we played over and over, by Duran Duran, the Cure and Joy Division.

Then there’s Bob Dylan, Amy Grant and the Resurrection Band, with their lyrics about angels, ‘the Lord’, ‘the blood of Jesus’. Music from that intense two-year period we shared. The time when evangelists were preaching about the End Times, and we were convinced the Pope was the Antichrist and that EFTPOS cards were the beginning of the 666 system. The time when churches were starting petitions against homosexual law reform and the ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. The time when we didn’t know which would come first – nuclear annihilation or the Second Coming of Jesus.

Sometimes Maz and I refer to those two years with a quiet ‘Faaaaark’ or a shake of our heads, but we’ve never talked much about it. Now, decades later, I want to talk about it, to see if we can understand our born-again Christian phase from the safety of nearly 40 years’ perspective. Things that are happening in the world now – the conspiracy theories about COVID-19, the rise of the alt-right, the eroding of women’s rights in the United States – make it suddenly feel very relevant. And I’ve noticed that the people most likely to believe conspiracy theories are often disillusioned, disenfranchised, disadvantaged in some way. So what was it that made me and Maz – two smart, middle-class girls in 1980s New Zealand – so vulnerable to those born-again beliefs? Why did we have such a need to belong to something?

~

The road between Nelson and Westport is not bad, Maz says. ‘For the population density, roads in New Zealand are incredible. We spend a lot of money on roads per capita.’ I’m not particularly interested but listen as she continues. Maz has been working on roads a few years now. She’s currently project manager for the Auckland Skypath Project, which as we’re driving seems to have hit a blip after the plan to add a cycle lane to the Harbour Bridge was reported as being unfeasible. The news was met with outrage from cyclists. As we drive through a series of small settlements – Belgrove, Motupiko, Korere – the radio delivers updates on the ‘Liberate the Lane’ activists, who are staging a mass cycle ride across the Harbour Bridge. There’s also news of wild weather hitting the east coast of the South Island, where prolonged heavy rain and king tides are causing flooding around Christchurch and Banks Peninsula.

When she’s finished lecturing me about roads, Maz tells me about the people we’re going to stay with in Westport. Emily makes gourmet pies and sells them to businesses along the coast. Tom works for Stockton Mine, the biggest employer in the region. West Coast people have a reputation for being rugged, self-reliant, individualistic – and hospitable. I’ve never lived on the West Coast but I’m descended from coasters. Three generations of them lived here – my great-great-grandparents, my great-grandparents, and my maternal grandmother – before dispersing to other parts of the country. For me, ‘the Coast’ feels like the closest thing to an ancestral home that I have, with family stories referencing Hokitika, Māori Creek, Lake Kaniere, Kokatahi. Maz has Coast connections too. Her gold miner great-grandfather, who was born in England, went to the School of Mines in Reefton, and started a family on the coast.

Across the Hope Saddle we see snowy mountains shrouded in mist and we start to head southwest. This is Ngāi Tahu country, and the road follows the Kawatiri Trail, an old pounamu route that runs beside what the English settlers named the Buller River. It’s cold – seven degrees – and wet. Little waterfalls flow out of the bush, down the road-cutting and onto the verge.

‘The G-forces were getting a bit strong on that corner,’ I say, clutching the grab handle above my seat. I’m determined not to let anxiety get in the way of our trip, but Maz is driving like an F1 driver.

She’s talking about heading back to Westport, where she lived for four years, and is feeling nostalgic. ‘I always fantasise about living in these small towns, but you know that within five minutes everyone’s going to know your business. And it’s a hotbed of bed-hopping.’ Before Westport, Maz was in Australia for 19 years, spending time in Mudgee, Mt Isa, Kalgoorlie.

The Buller River is brown and fast, in full flood. As we drive, Maz tells me about outdoor antics from her Australian mining days, like