Near the northern tip of New Zealand’s North Island is the so-called Ninety Mile Beach”.
It is no less magnificent for its actual length – “only” 88 kilometres.
Musically, today offers a sublime, spacious, shore-inspired instrumental solo, plus an also-spare song which depicts a lovely state of mind:
lost in a seagull’s flight
(photo copyright Doug Spencer, taken at 3.15 pm, 27 March 2017)
Alas, much of the land behind Ninety Mile Beach is in a sorry, degraded state.
Seemingly- endless pine plantation monoculture provided the pseudo-solution to the chronic erosion which had followed the removal of almost all of the Aupouri Peninsula’s native forest.
Serious conservation/restoration effort has, so far, been limited to The Aupouri Peninsula’s northern (Cape Reinga) end.
Similar comments apply to many North Island shores.
Almost invariably, if you stand on a beach or cliff top and look out to/across the ocean, you will enjoy a magnificent sight.
However, if you turn around, more often than not, your eyes will “enjoy” a “feast” of fenced paddocks, soil erosion, and non-native, very inappropriate vegetation.
Said “feast” may well start not many metres away from where your feet are planted…and then extend to the landward horizon.
The North Island’s Northland is a region of much great beauty, but also of much devastation.
The fact that Northland is generally so very green, and generally looks so “picture postcard” blinds many tourists to the reality of what their eyes are gazing on.
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Neither of today’s musical selections had New Zealand in mind, but each captures the pleasure of being by the ocean on a benign day.
Sometimes, when I again hear something that delighted me a half a century or so ago, I cringe, now embarrassed that I ever could have thought so highly of it.
When I first heard Tom Rush’s Rockport Sunday my teenaged self could scarcely believe how beautiful was this open-tuned acoustic guitar solo.
Happily, in this instance, I still love Tom’s evocation of a day when seagulls wheeled over the shoreline at Rockport, Massachusetts.
Tom Rush (born 1941) still performs it, usually as the second part of a medley with No Regrets, his best-known original song.
This is the original version, from the 1968 Tom Rush album The Circle Game, but as remixed in 2008.
Again, after almost as many years, I still love Bruce Cockburn’s Never So Free.
This is from the Canadian songster and guitar ace’s 1974 album Salt, Sun and Time:
And a bonus…
Bruce Cockburn’s current release is Crowing Ignites – an excellent, all-instrumental set: