Te Araroa Trail
High Achiever
Unlikely couple meet and live their dream
F
By Alex Myall
or more than 10 years, Miriam Lancewood and Peter Raine lived free from society as hunters and gatherers in New Zealand’s remote mountains. They survived happily without timepieces or timetables, but now the couple have to adapt to the changes wrought by time. Their story is almost unbelievable. They grew up more than 18,000km apart, Raine in rural New Zealand, the son of a sheep farmer. Lance-
wood (her pen name) was born three decades later in the Netherlands, the middle of three siblings born within three years. Lancewood’s home was lovingly filled with music and theatre. In adolescence, her athletic career took off. For six years, she represented her country in pole vaulting and competed in the youth Olympics. She established a fitness acumen that helped her for years, and not just in sport. At the same time, she learned early the perils of a full
24 Walking New Zealand, issue no 284 - 2021
schedule. Revolt against scheduling “My life in the Netherlands was based on time, running around the clock, jamming my studies and training and seeing friends, all in one day. It was stressful,” Lancewood told ExplorersWeb. “But because it is so normal in modern society, I never questioned it.” Her parents introduced her to the joys of nature. Sometimes they camped wild near a river, sleeping under the stars. “That, I loved,” Lancewood recalls. “I always dreaded going back to my flat and crowded home country.” By contrast, Raine spent much of the 1970s living in the forest, protesting against commercial logging operations, which were a national concern in New Zealand back then. He bought land on the West Coast, preparing for a nuclear apocalypse which never came. He married and studied for a Ph.D. in environmental studies. Shaped by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, Raine believed that people didn’t need government or authority for survival. When Raine encountered Raimon Panikkar’s Cosmotheandric Intuition (a theory that dissolves the idea of separate realities between man, God, and world), his view on reality transformed. He quit his job as a university professor in New Zealand and moved to
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