Puns, mugs, and the open road.

Hometown, NZ.

It’s a tall order for any small town to attempt to fill, but along an unassuming road just over a hundred kilometers north of Wellington, a little place called Foxton, population 2,700, dares to make such a claim.

Maybe it was an instinctive desire to prove it wrong or just the obscurity of the attractions it offered – from a river cruise to a Dutch windmill, from museums devoted to such items as trolley buses, flax strippers, and dolls to New Zealand’s only clydesdale-drawn tram (presumably there to transport visitors from museum to museum) – but something drew me in, forcing me to turn off the state highway and venture closer to the town’s main street area.

Over the roof of a building whose art deco facade read “Municipal Chambers 1923” in burgundy and blue, the sails of a 17th-century style Dutch windmill turned slowly, deliberately. Three people gathered under the shade of a red domed awning hanging over the entrance to the building, whose municipal function has since been transformed into the town’s information center. I took a step back to the other side of Main Street, trying to capture the days-gone-by architecture of the Chambers and the unusual presence of such a windmill in a single shot.

It’d been a while since such latticed sails had floated across the frame of my camera and I was transported instantly to a visit two years earlier to Zaanse Schans, an open air heritage museum just outside of Amsterdam. There, friends and I had wandered along the banks of the Zaan River, stopping at each of the thirteen, centuries-old windmills, and taking pictures of each other standing in gimmicky, oversized clogs.

But today, instead, I found myself oceans away in Foxton, New Zealand, and I felt at once the sense of displacement that comes when any symbolic structure – be it the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, or a Dutch windmill – is removed from the place of its origins and replicated in a markedly different locale. For these structures carry with them certain associations linked specifically with their original homes. La Tour Eiffel is Paris, it is tied inextricably to the romance and wonder that is all things French, and I can only imagine the disjointed feeling of stumbling across its likeness in Las Vegas.

So, too, inside Foxton’s De Molen windmill – literally “the mill” in Dutch – I scratched my head and found myself asking, “Huh?” Rows of colorful magnets on a refrigerator spelled HOLLAND and were made in the shape of Amsterdam’s famous row houses or bunches of red and pink tulips stuffed into yellow clogs. I could’ve bought any number of Dutch delicacies on sale or sent a postcard as if from the Low Countries themselves, with only the postmark to betray me.

While I contemplated bottles of Maggi sauce and pancake mix, an aged volunteer running the gift shop explained that this is no mere tourist showpiece, but a working windmill since its grand opening in 2003. As if to prove his point, he motioned to a series of shelves displaying brown paper packages that contain the mill’s very own stone ground maizemeal.

I picked up a bright orange brochure that featured the outline of a tulip next to a silver fern – “Samen staan we sterk!” it read, “Let’s create a stronger community of Dutch Kiwis throughout New Zealand.” Having a friend from Christchurch currently living in London on a Dutch passport courtesy of his father’s lineage – with even the standard “van” prefix to prove it – I didn’t laugh off the endeavor as quickly as I might’ve otherwise.

There’s a lot of emphasis placed on Asian-Pacific groups now settled in New Zealand – Samoan, Fijian, Tongan, etc – but Kiwis of European descent are often lumped together under the umbrella term of pakeha, a Maori word that generally means white or non-Maori. So to learn of an individual European culture earnestly asking such questions as “Who are we?” and “Are we relevant?” was quite the unusual discovery.

I left Foxton perplexed yet thoroughly pleased that such an outpost of Dutchness exists and soon continued through the Manawatu District, where the motto is “Young Heart, Easy Living,” and a town named Sanson tempts passer-bys with its “Amazing Maze ‘n Maize.” Barely half an hour down the road, I passed quietly into Bulls, population 1,750. A black sign reading “Welcome to Bulls” featured a large white cut-out of a bull but did little to entice me off the road. New Zealand is full of towns with giant kiwis, giant sheep, and giant carrots, and as Joe Bennett writes in A Land of Two Halves, the humor behind these oversized landmarks is questionable:

“It’s a form of branding for the tourists, one that I would like to believe was tinged with irony, but I am not confident.”

But a life-size bull parading as a Dutchman does catch my attention. Painted on the side of a Dutch deli, he stands upright, sporting a blue peacoat and black pants, a red scarf tied around his neck, and of course, the unmistakable yellow clogs. He’s placed in front of that old familiar windmill and a trail of hearts drifts away from his head as if leading to a thought bubble, no doubt a result of the permanent position from which he gazes longingly at the saucy little heifer in a mural on the opposing wall.

I turned left at the next stoplight and parked along a side road. As I got out of the car, I was delighted to find an official rubbish bin shaped like an old-fashioned milk can. What’s more, the town’s logo had been painted on the side of the can with the words, Respons-I-Bull, printed underneath. I laughed to myself and congratulated the town on such a display of cleverness.

But it didn’t end there. I looked up to find the public restrooms directly in front of me. Obviously, not something incredibly noteworthy, except when a small white sign posted near the building read: Reliev-A-Bull.

It was like breaking a code, finding the legend to a treasure map, or the moment when after staring cross-eyed at an autostereogram, the hidden image finally pops out at you.

I knew not only how to look, but where, and soon spotted white sign after white sign, all filled with their shamelessly entertaining puns. Outside the New Zealand Fire Service of Bulls? Extinguish-A-Bull. The Bulls C.A.L.F. Playschool, short for Childcare and Learning Facility? Love-A-Bull. The Plunket Society, an organization that provides health services to babies and young children? Non-Return-A-Bull. It may not have been the finest display of verbal irony, but I ate it up nonetheless.

I walked back towards Main Street, passing by the Dairy Bull, where apparently a range of products is Avail-A-Bull, and came to a sports bar named, for whatever reason, the Rat Hole. There was no sign to be seen at first, so getting into the spirit of things, I thought “Drink-A-Bull” or even “Imbibe-A-Bull” might do. A second-hand bookstore was named Trash and Treasur-A-Bull, prices at the electronics store were Unbeat-A-Bull, and the Candy Cottage absolutely Irresist-A-Bull.

I browsed further through town, picking up momentum like you might in an Easter egg hunt after finding that one egg with paper money inside. A sign on the ATM at Westpac Bank read Bank-A-Bull and the Bulls Museum, with all its antique sewing machines and phonographs, was sure to be Memor-A-Bull. Although I found several establishments lacking in creativity – Mr. Sharp Sharpening Services could have certainly done better than Sharpen-A-Bull – many were quite original, with even the Anglican church taking part in the fun: Forgive-A-Bull.

After close to an hour of sign-chasing, from the Indispense-A-Bull Platt’s Pharmacy to the Cure-A-Bull medical center, from the List-A-Bull real estate agency to the Restock-A-Bull 4Square Market, I turned to the information center – Inform-A-Bull, of course – to help me trace the history of such an inimitable marketing campaign.

Inside, a man named Roger tells me the town itself wasn’t even named after its four-legged counterpart but James Bull, an English carpenter whose first job in New Zealand was to build a chair for the Parliamentary Speaker in Wellington. Roger calls on a coworker to remember exactly when the signs first appeared, sometime in 1991 it seems, and they were based off a book called A Load of Bull, naturally. To date, there are well over a hundred signs and ten alone have appeared in the last six months. All it took to get started was the support of local businesses…easily Achieve-A-Bull, no?

Bulls, a self-proclaimed “town like no udder,” proved truly “unforgettabull,” just like the brochures and websites profess. Even on the road leading out of the town, there was a banner to see me off:

“Bulls – Where anything is poss-a-bull.”