Franz Josef

FJ is a funny little town. Someone whose research skills I trust (google / wiki) advises me the town's total population is 330 people. And the bar man, who I have no reason to distrust advises me it's nearer 350 these days but 700 during the peak tourist seasons. On my travels other people have talked to me about the place, and told me there's Nothing To Do if it rains or other than the glacier. As it's such a small town, somehow with growth not aligned to the big noise which is made about it at tourist info places across the country, they do indeed appear to be right. If of course your standards of entertainment are high. Mine aren't. There are at least four places selling coffee, I reckon three selling beer, two selling T-shirts and post cards, a small but perfectly formed supermarket, and a Kiwi wildlife centre. There's also lots of ways of leaving town, such as helicopters or minibuses towing kayaks. But somehow, yes, it does remind me a little of Bannister Green where my Nan used to live in Essex. Except BG had clear industry. Fields and fields of it, and my sister's nose and eyes ran with regularity as the pollen count soared during school holidays.

But what would Franz Josef be without the Glacier, we ask? And it is a relevant question because the glacier is retreating faster than its recorded history tells us has happened before. It's diminished visibly to the eyes of those who live here in their memory span. I've met people out walking (sorry tramping) today who have been here twenty years ago and remembered seeing the glacier at a distance in the areas we now walk along. Opinion seems to converge on the view that it will be gone in twenty years time. The neighbouring one at Fox Glacier perhaps in 10 – 15 years. Will people take the time to come to this town then, I wonder?

So, Glacial retreat, I am reliably informed is something which over history happens. It's part of a cycle, it ebbs and it flows. Because it's receding now doesn't mean it won't return. Although not in my lifetime, perhaps it would be generations or maybe not at all. The point is, that this isn't a signal of panic and global warning and a time to berate ourselves for our misdoings over generations of man creating his own habitat at the cost of another. It may be meaningful, it may not, and we simply don't know.

I do confess, however, when I saw Franz Joseph today in the prescribed walkers fashion, I was sad to see what is clearly a diminished object. I thought hard about this word and wondered if I was disappointed or if indeed sad was the appropriate term. Settled on sad. It's clearly a shadow of its former self. There's a sense of loss when some of nature's great landmarks are lost, and when somehow the most challenging environments move towards benign, that sanitised version of adventure we're so accustomed to now.

It was also sad to see how it no longer glistens, glows, no long smooth slopes. It's cracked, pock marked, scarred, areas are slipping and sliding in the melt. And maybe I am disappointed too, for me, to not have seen it in its glory, to not have experienced it in its youth. Although, I'm led to believe its heyday was 1790 and even I'm not that old. It's an odd wistful thinking thing when we look back to the past and believe it better than the present and one hell of a lot better than the future. Sometimes find myself looking at the people I know and have known and regret not having had the chance to meet them at their most youthful, vibrant and optimistic, but history cannot be changed, neither what mankind as a whole have done, nor indeed, the path I have travelled.