Kumano Kōdō XXII: Hongudō revisited

 I'm unable to sleep, so despite the early hour, rouse myself and head down toward the train station.  It's the first train of the day, the carriage shared only by a still-drunk hoodlum sleeping across the seats, shoes off, and a some boys in baseball uniforms.  With each stop, their numbers grow, until they eventually become a full team.    

I am happy for the early start, but hadn't counted on not having any place to store my shoulder bag.  I'd remembered coin lockers to the left of the station doors, but there are none.  Nor is anything open.  I spy a flashing light in front of a small eatery across the street, and ask the young woman running the place if I can keep my bags here for a few hours.  Happily she agrees, but tells me that no one will here after 9:00, but that she'll leave the door unlocked.  I'm not especially worried about theft (even with my computer inside), but throughout the morning I carry a small bit of anxiety that I won't be able to enter when I return. 

I board the lone taxi in front of the station for the drive out to the trailhead to Yokogaki-tōge.  I'd already hiked this with Daniel back in March, but as I mentioned in that post, we had missed a good deal of the true trail.  To miss a section here or there doesn't bother me, but I felt we'd missed too much of it.  So I return to hike it in the opposite direction, since all the signs seem to orient from this side anyway.  

The countryside appears to get more and more decrepit the further out we drive.  Even the banks here have been abandoned. I suppose I'd been too tired to notice the last time.  From the train a few days ago I'd seen that the rice was early this year, and ready to harvest.  Sadly, most of the fields we pass are flattened, laying down, beyond the work of machines. The people of this area have a couple of hard weeks of work ahead.  And if the typhoon gave the rest of western Japan similar treatment, there may be rice shortages this winter.

I hit the trail, picking my way over a trail strewn with thin branches, each one a possible viper.  I finally enter a small orchard.  The storm has disheveled some of the walls, the large stones having rolled across the trail due to rushing water.  Crates are knocked here and there, and more snakes colonize the trail, in the form of small sections of hose.  
    
I follow one unbroken sections of black hose that runs down the center of the path.  Spiders have begun their own cleanup after the typhoon, but my face continually undoes their hard labor.  My hair is quickly streaked with cobwebs, like a character in a Tim Burton film.  The white skull of a deer washed off the hillside above adds a great deal to the scene.  

I come to a small detour around an old landslide, then along a quiet stretch of forest that is a boulder field, more a feature of my home New Mexico than Japan. I come to the little shelter where we had lunch last spring, only today the sun is still too low and strong to allow views of the sea.  After a quick chocolate recharge, I move on, passing the spur trail that we'd come along, literally stumbling upon the actual trail.  From here, I'll be moving along unknown territory, along the true Kumano Kōdō...

...which within minutes pitches into space.  The entire hillside here had been wiped away in a 2007 storm, then closed again in another slip last December.  I can find no apparent detours, so backtrack to the trail Daniel and I had mistakenly followed, which I now see had been correct after all.  That day we'd bushwhacked across a thin deer trail along a hillside covered with ferns, but I assume that if I take the old car road over the pass, I'll come to the other side of that washed away section.  

When I finally do, I see it is one of the backward pointing paths that we'd missed.  When it drops into the next hamlet, I am forced to open and pass through a couple of electrified fences, but one gate on a small bridge has been attached so strongly that I have to swing myself around the side and out over empty space, which doesn't appeal to my fear of heights.  

The hamlet here is defined by a great number of rice paddies. Today it is a scene from Van Gogh, crows dining on a golden platter of fallen rice. I am faced with a cluster of parallel tracks both paved and dirt, and at the obvious landmark of the stone Kameshima lamp I spend a long time trying to guess which one is right.   A couple of listless dogs watch me pass by, as I move down a dirt track that I'd seen from above. Partway down a farmer tells me that the track I'd originally been on is the true one, so I head back up.  

I come to a rare trail marker which tells me that I'd been right after all.  While I'm happy to see it and its affirmation of things, it further confuses in that it, and both of my maps, all contradict one another.  I follow the sign anyway, presuming it'll lead me right.  Along the way I see the other trail signs that we'd seen too late last time, and today they lead over small hills, or through thin sections of forest.

I rejoin the main road here, following more signs down into the village where we'd officially lost the trail.  All is quiet, people out of the heat.  A stream has jumped its bed, and now floods and pools in someone's garden.  A massive pair of cedar stand behind a school, their great height and weight held up by steel cables.  

Then finally I come to the center of the village, and my goal.  As I walk through the heat back up to the main highway, I ponder whether or not I feel good about getting things right.  I again come to the Farmer's Market where I'd had a bizarre encounter with one of the workers.  Today too, the woman here may as well be speaking a different language.  Not only is she completely ignorant about bus times, she insists on not being particularly helpful, despite this being a sort of aid station for walkers of the Kumano Kodo.  Hot and tired, I bruskly suggest that if they really want to help people, they could at least post the bus times.  

I walk another half kilometer to the bus stop itself, but I already know the answer.  The morning bus left two hours ago, the next departs in three.  So I go sit a little while in a cafe there, less for a comforting glass of iced coffee, and more to allow the air-con dry the sweat from my clothes.  

Back outside, the very first car stops at the sight of my extended thumb.  The driver's brother-in-law lives in San Francisco.  (This is a commonality with almost all who stop for foreign hitchers, a family member abroad.) So I try to keep up an entertaining patter all the way back to town, comfortable with the fact that I will have two hours before my train, and optimistic that I will be able to fetch my bag.  Inside it is a clean set of clothes for the homeward train, but I wish I had them now, for my nervous chatter is fueled by the anxiety of how bad I must smell. 


On the turntable:  David Bowie, "The Deram Anthology, 1966-1968"
On the nighttable:  Tim Severin "In Search of Genghis Khan"