After a gate is permanently sealed, it becomes just another piece of fence. Another barrier keeping you from solitude, from introspection, from your reason to travel. I had only seen the treetops on Google Earth beforehand, stretching from Kerikeri to Waitangi, the pines dense as lawngrass. Tall enough to obscure all, to obscure even myself. The image clung to my eyelids after I saw it, reminiscent of a miniature Pacific Northwest, the land I’ve dreamed of visiting since only six. I couldn’t turn back if the fence was once a gate. A signpost explained the alternate route: an uninspired, longer journey following the state highway while overlooking flat paddocks. The sign read 2012, the trail having been closed four years prior. Using the warning signs as footholds, I climbed that fence and approached the logging trail, caged and imposing. Atop a gravel road wide and footprint-free, I walked onwards, away from civilisation. Abandoned beehives lined each side of the road only metres from the entrance, stormclouds of bees and honeycomb dripping. Terrified, I crawled down the centre of the road like a baby, sweet smell in my nose and deafening buzz in my ears. Aside from the road and signposts made illegible with lichen, humanity’s touch disappeared after the hives. No engine noise, no planes overhead, no litter underfoot. A land entirely unpopulated but mere kilometres between major townships. Dust rose from my footsteps and hung in the air, rising past the treeline to alert even the sky of my presence. Passing mildewed lakes and overgrown biking trails, I noticed dark shapes flashing through the air. Dragonflies surrounded me, their simple slender bodies zipping past like a platoon of thrown pencils. Any direction I looked carried dozens of dragonflies in its frame, fascinated by me. Some landed on me, sharp legs tickling, kissing me with their raggedy mouths and tasting the sweat on my forearms. Maybe I was the first human they had ever seen, unaware of the threat posed by my ilk. Birds also seemed curious and unafraid of my presence, circling my head and sitting with me as I ate a supermarket-bought apple. At this point, I was the most alone I’ve ever been. Someone who hasn’t experienced open ocean or outer space. Yet I never felt loneliness while on the trail, only an overwhelming sense of my connection to earth, my role as another animal, another grain of silt in an infinite delta. I apologised instinctively when pissing on a tree, speaking to some transcendental unifier who monitored my space in the sandbox. Ironically, the feeling inverted after a while. A rumbling sound akin to a raging waterfall seemed to follow me, ebbing and flowing and spitting at my heels. I grew fearful of being watched, of boars bristling among the pines, of my presence ruining the human-free ambience. My species brought too much baggage into this simple land, too much questioning. Perhaps there was a Māori pā here many generations before, utterly razed for the planting of these pines, these migrant trees symbolising the coloniser. By the time the trail reopened, many would be gone, cut down to build housing for white people like myself, for those who fetishise the Northern Hemisphere like myself. Within minutes, the feeling lessened and the forest turned to farmland. Long and bald, European. An odd bestial yell echoed from the distance, haunting and ever-repeating. Eventually I recognised it as the sound of cattle being slaughtered in a faraway abbatoir. The greeting wrenches at the soul. I scaled another fence and landed in Waitangi, where the treaty was signed back in 1840. The nation’s most important document, cementing the subjugation of the indigenous and the success of colonialism. For the remaining three days of travel, I did not see a single Māori face in this historical area. Only golf clubs and modernist mansions and $30 fish and chips. The logging trail removed me from these thoughts, these sights. It made me a blissful infant again, aware of my animal beginnings without the human conclusions. No landscape I have visited since has left me feeling so overwhelmed, so guilty. I finally understand why it was caged.