Brian Hutton, Balclutha

At 85 years old, Brian Hutton is still sharp as a tack. I meet him at the yacht club in Owaka at the edge of the Catlins where he sails and where I spent the night. I am making my signature breakfast of coffee and oatmeal and he comes to share the picnic table with me to make himself a cup of tea from a Thermos. He is pleased when I tell him I am from Arkansas. Not only has he heard of Arkansas, he knows that the capital is Little Rock, one of its borders is the Mississippi River, and that we have both the mountains and the Delta. He laughs heartily when I tell him that we grow so much rice in the Delta that we export to China. Brian reminds me a bit of myself, with his love for the land and brain stuffed full of facts. We talk about my travels and I mention that I’m interested in doing a farmstay picking fruit.

“Well,” he says, “it’s not fruit but I’ve got a dairy farm you could come help on.”

“Hmm,” I say, not expecting this. “I don’t know anything about dairy farming.”

“I tell you what. Come on over and I’ll give you a bed for the night and in the morning, we’ll milk the cows and I’ll teach you everything you need to know.”

Well, what the hell. It’s only one day and this old man is sweet as pie. Why not learn a bit about dairy farming?

He gives me directions to his farm along with some recommendations for things to do in the area and we agree to meet after 4 when he’s done sailing.

Brian has tried his hand at many different types of farming during his long life. Salmon farming is his true love but it is difficult work so he’s returned to dairy farming in his twilight years. At first I feel like I’m being tested. Brian asks me if I know what Chinook are and he looks like he doesn’t expect an answer. I feel satisfied by his surprise when I answer that they are a Native American tribe but that I have a feeling that’s not the answer he’s looking for.

He laughs, delighted. “Why yes, they are,” he says. “But they’re also a type of salmon.”

When I arrive at his farm, I see his boat in the yard, name emblazoned on the side: Chinook.

Brian has surprisingly liberal views for an 85 year old farmer who has lived in rural areas his entire life. He condemns the war in Ukraine, has had both Covid vaccines, and laments the treatment of Maori in New Zealand. He is, however, a steadfast Christian. His face is sad when he says that a few of his several grandchildren are unbelievers.

“But it would be wrong to try to force someone to believe what I believe,” he says.

I cry over this later. How much different could my family have been if this gentle man was my grandfather and our family were not wrapped so tightly in chains of hatred and ignorance?

Brian tells me that when the town of Twizel on Lake Pukake was built to provide hydroelectric power to New Zealand, the government decided to save resources by building only one church that the Protestants and Catholics had to share. This is how Brian met his first Catholics and he realized that they weren’t the evil people that he had been led to believe. They were the same as him—people trying to live their lives, only with different ideas of how to worship God. What makes someone able to change their mind when presented with new information? Why did my family never critically examine their prejudices like I did when I started to meet people from different backgrounds, like Brian did when he met Catholics? Where does the arrogance of believing that they know the one acceptable way to live life come from? Why is there such a sharp separation between those they perceive as being like them and those who are other? Maybe it’s because they have never loved anyone they disagree with, never had to admit that the others are still just people. In my family, the adults and elders have the power and they use their influence to bully, exclude, and press into shape the younger generation. Disagreement is just not done, not if you want to be loved and showered with pride. It’s difficult to hold a relationship with family while eschewing this toxic premise of love and it’s a balance I’ve been trying to maintain with my mother over the past several months. I don’t know if there’s hope for her to change attitudes that are so deeply rooted or if I am just masochistically picking at old wounds but I have hope that her love for me will win and she will soften to seeing the world from a different perspective.

Brian’s gift to me was the ability to envision a different direction for my family. Sometimes the hardest part of problem solving is conceptualizing what the end result will be and without that framework, it’s hard to know whether the steps being taken are the correct ones. Brian showed me what faith might look like when not defined by the hatred of others and instead by a love for fellow man. I hope Brian Hutton lives another 85 years—it would be a gift to the world if he did.