I have a friend called Matt. I don't really know much about him. I've never met him. At some point in time, I don't really remember when, Matt and I made contact with each other, and we struck up a pleasant friendship. I wish I'd made Matt's acquaintance when I was writing the book.
But I didn't.
You see, Matt is an ambergris collector. He's a good Kiwi bloke. He sends me photos of wild, remote parts of New Zealand's coastline, where he disappears with friends for days at a time in search of ambergris. A wet tent against a wild sea. A dead pilot whale. A well-tended fire. Wonderful photos. Once, he sent me a photo of his hand after he'd been bitten by a katipo, one of New Zealand's most poisonous spiders. He'd been hospitalized for a few days, he said. I struggled to even look at the photo for more than a second at a time. Next to Matt's thumb there was an enormous, shiny, red, ball-shaped swelling. The skin looked wet and stretched.
But Matt didn't seem to mind the experience.
And, once, after reading about my attempts to find ambergris on Doughboy Bay, on the west coast of Stewart Island, Matt sent me a beautiful piece of fine white ambergris that he'd found there, in the little bay, almost completely enclosed by steep rocky headlands. It is a special place. And now I have a piece of it.
It was his gift.
Now I live in the States, far away from New Zealand and its windswept coastline, I can just close my eyes at night, and the boom and crash of the ocean at high tide returns to me. But if I ever struggle to summon that sound, I just live vicariously through Matt's photos instead.
Here's a link both to Matt's photos -- consider it a doorway to his travels -- and also a catalog of the ambergris that he's selling. If you want to buy some ambergris from Matt, you'll know that he found it himself somewhere on New Zealand's wet shores, out there in the wilding.
