Sunday Papers: Toby Green

"It has become a dogma of recent times that only something that is scientifically proven or verifiable is justifiable as a channel of enquiry.  But this, like most dogmas, is a cultural fact and not an actual fact.  Scientific observation tells us what is happening to the tattered fabric of the world's environment, but not why it is happening.  In order to understand this, we must return to a study of culture, since culture has replaced selection as the defining force of evolution."

 --Saddled With Darwin: A Journey Through South America


On the turntable:  Madness, "Nutty Sounds"

(untitled)

Towering bamboo branches

Hang their

Depressed, sodden heads.

On the turntable:  Marty Robbins,"Gunfighter Ballads & Trail Songs"

Stuff from an Old Notebook #7

FIRST VISIT LONDON, WINTER 2005


-From the air, the Mongolian landscape can only be described as raw.  Low ridges look braided, like an Irish fisherman's sweater.

-On the bus, the song Henry the Eighth in my ears.  As soon as my feet hit pavement, I blare London Calling. 

-Sitting before St Martin-in-the-Fields, the sound of Mozart blending with traffic.  

-Playing dead poet hopscotch in Westminster Abbey.   The graves of lesser poets are less polished.  Other tombstones like graham crackers.  One reads, "Be of one mind.  Go in peace." In that spirit, someone leads a prayer for peace in Iraq. 

-Battersea Bridge people-watching; androgynous Euros, voices swapping consonants, buff camouflaged guy walking terrier, straight-laced looking girls with pierced noses.

-The Tube; quiet locals, noisy tourists;  sitting shelf at end of carriage; hot girl with an eye-patch; punk with a Scissor Sisters T-shirt reading Virginia Woolf.  


On the turntable:  Tino, "Tino's Breaks, Volume 5"

Sunday Papers: John M. Barry

"In 1918 fear moved ahead of the virus like the bow wave before a ship. Fear drove the people, and the government and the press could not control it. They could not control it because every true report had been diluted with lies. And the more the officials and newspapers reassured, the more they said, 'There is no cause for alarm if proper precautions are taken,' ... the more people believed themselves cast adrift, adrift with no one to trust, adrift on an ocean of death."

--"The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History"


On the turntable:  Medeski Martin and Wood, "Tonic"
 

(untitled)

The bus this morning

Smells of

Unbrushed teeth.

On the turntable:  Spearhead, "Home"
 

Peeks on Danger

While this website is littered with writings about walks of the old roads, I don’t write about my hikes very often. Mainly because a good number of my friends with links over there in the left column do it very well and are far better sources of information than I.  But I will make an exception for Minagoyama.

As the coronavirus has relieved me of the ability to work, I decided to drive out of town and do two hikes a week, on days with the best weather.  It felt like the right time to hike peaks listed on the Kansai Hyakumeizan, and the Kinki Hyakumeizan.  As there is a fair bit of overlap between the two, some friends have come to calling it the Kinkan 132.  Minagoyama is on both lists.

Like with many other peaks, I chose a circuitous route, parking near the end and walking up the road to the adjacent trailhead.  This usually adds a 20-30 minute slog up a road, so I try to get that out of the way first.  At any rate, traffic is pretty light these days.  

On this day,  I followed the same stretch of Route 367 as when I walked the Saba (Wakasa) Kaido, weaving along the older route to avoid tunnels.  Luckily this time was without slushy snow.  One family had set up a day camp beside the river, and a number of fisherman had staked for themselves large sections of water.  

When I reached the trailhead, I found it barricaded and closed off.  I just presumed as I usually do that's it's a bit of overreaction on the part of the local township, in response to one of the many storms we've had the past few years. Besides, an online resource showed that someone had done this exact route a few weeks before. It wasn't hard to get over the barrier, and up the old forestry road I went.    

But I should have taken a hint from all the tumbled hillsides, or from all the fallen trees.  The road eventually ended, and my path became a series of rock hops across slick boulders in lieu of where bridges once stood.   More serious were the land slips.  Where repaired trails have added ropes or alternate routes around these hazards, here I had little choice but to scramble around, grabbing footholds where I could.  Most of the time I wasn't that high above the river, but a few sections were pretty dicey.  Worst was the lack of trail markers, save for the odd piece of tape here and there.  Many of these were on the ground tied to a fallen tree, so I found myself facing a pop quiz on navigation skills.  

As I went, I pondered why there were so many fallen trees.  Through history, has this always been the case?  I don't recall this many alterations in hiking routes during the first twenty years of living in Japan.  Was it due to increasingly powerful storms?  Or perhaps that this neglected cedar monoculture had been allowed to grow to such a height that the soil could no longer support their weight, causing them to topple by the dozen in high winds.  

Not long after coming to a large Japanese horse chestnut tree, my path made an abrupt right angle  This trail is notoriously difficult, mainly because the final approach to the peak is literally straight up the gully at stream's end.  I grew weary of scrambling from rock to rock, and from treading over debris patches that would have made sound little nests for the vipers no doubt enjoying the same sunshine as I.  The slope to the left looked a bit kinder, so I diverted along what looked like the most user-friendly path.  This would subtley shift every dozen steps or so, as my eyes got a better sense of the lay-out.  Before long, I was literally hurling myself upward from tree to tree, in order to arrest gravity's pull back into the ravine.  

Then I was on the top.   For a few minutes, I was the highest thing in Kyoto prefecture.  Then I sat with my lunch and my guidebook, and rolled my eyes when I noted that today's hike was rated the most dangerous out of the 52 within.  And that was when the trail had been open.  

I began the descent, finding some relief in the fact that I was now on well-used trails.  But this mountain must be one of the most poorly marked in Japan.  I had a choice of three trails down, one of which I wanted to avoid since the map showed hazard marks.  It took some doing, but I found my intended trail, a steep drop that required me to use my trekking poles.

At some point the Yamap app that I was using showed that I had to make another 90 degree turn down into the next watershed.  There was no trail at all, and the pitch was so steep I could no longer remain on my feet.  I slid like a baseball player from tree to tree, leg extended in order to brake on the trunks.  

Finally I hit the stream, and in my growing fatigue was slightly annoyed that I'd have to rock hop again.  Here too storms had left sections in shambles, where I'd have to navigate over big drops down into the ravine.  At one point, I stopped cold.  Partly buried in the brush of a landslip were a pair of trekking poles with points facing up the hill, beside a hat and a half empty bottle of tea.  Somebody had taken a very hard fall here.  It looked like it had happened long before, but I called out, "Oi, Oi!" a few times just in case someone was still around.  I tried to peer down into the stream below, but I couldn't see too well from where I was precariously perched, and to get any closer would put myself at risk.  

I pushed on.  At some point the trail leveled off, near an old shack that was half collapsed back into the forest.  Finally, I reached the end of my descent, beside a wide, fast-moving river.  The bridge I had expected was gone, but I had one final water-crossing to make, moving through waters that pulled strongly at my calves.  

Climbing up the far bank, I sat awhile beside the logging road that would lead me easily back to my car.  There was joy in this final half hour, having come through what I considered an ordeal.  

But the hike was not finsihed with me.  Later that day I discussed with Wes my next intended hike of Minetoko-yama, who cautioned me about its beautiful meadow that was notorious for bears.  And as such, the night before going, I slept poorly, bullied by fear.  The high winds of morning gave me the excuse to put off the hike, which brought relief.  Then a week later, the same situation.  I'd awoken at 4:30, and while I'd decided not to go on this day either, over breakfast I essentially said, "Screw it," and just went.  And had an excellent day.

But I often ponder why I left Minagoyama feeling as I did.  I believe that the tracing of two watersheds, not to mention the tree scrambling on the slopes themselves, had triggered a PTSD of sorts, resuscitating the muscle memory of that near-fatal night on Jyatani-dake.  For the last decade, I've grown more and more afraid of the backcountry, with the ever-present possibility of peril.  I don't know if this is part of aging, or a subconscious concern about orphaning my daughter, or (most likely), a larger case of PTSD from the death of my son in the mountains.   But the fear is with me much more than before.  

So it is that I'll leave the house in the morning, with a furrowed brow.  Yet I inevitably seem to return with a broad smile.  

On the turntable:  Miles Davis, "The Complete Miles Davis at Montreux 1973-1991"    

Stuff from an Old Notebook #6

THOUGHTS ON A KYOTO-BOUND BUS

- The operatic swelling at the end of Damien Rice's "Eskimo Friend" are the shrieks of Valkyries swirling amidst the clouds lingering from last night's storm.

- The way the Japanese close curtains on trains, on the bus, seems a metaphor for hiding, ala tatemae, sakoku... 


On the turntable: Moby, "Go (Remixes)"

Sunday papers: Friedrich Nietzsche

“Madness is rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, nations and ages it is the rule.”

On the turntable: Miles Davis, "Milestones"
 

(untitled)

Discussing the film “Babel” 

To the echoes of a funk band,

On the banks of the Kamogawa.

On the turntable:  My Morning Jacket, "Chapter 1: The Sandworm Cometh"

Stuff from an Old Notebook #5

ULPOLTHA, SRI LANKA,  2004

Birds with the zigzag coloring of Charlie Brown's T-shirt.  Along the temple walk: centipedes, ants, butterflies.  Elephant shrine built at edge of village, on the spot where a herd of marauding elephants stopped suddenly and turned back.  Breathing beneath the banyan trees, as monkeys chatter overhead. Startled by a large monitor lizard while swimming in the tank, thinking it a crocodile.  The fear at night, of large cats, snakes;  five species of deadly snakes live in the surrounding jungles, which has me in constant fear for the first few days until I realize that millions of people have live beside deadly snakes for thousands of years.  By the end of my time here, I'm walking barefoot at night.  

(Photo courtesy Upoltha website.)


On the turntable:  Mark Lanegan, "Whiskey for the Holy Ghost"

Sunday Papers: Paul Valéry

"We civilizations now know ourselves mortal.” 


On the turntable:  Gene Loves Jezebel, "Desire" (EP)

Random Travel Shorts

KLM flight to Amsterdam. Midwest summer clouds throw great shadows on the plains, intercut by the grey blotches of Russian cities.  Spoken Dutch sounds like a record played backwards.  Europeans tend to stand up and look around a lot while in flight.  The veritable forest of wind turbines in the North Sea, both onshore and off…

Belize City.  Hurricane bars on the windows.  Armed guards.  Politically British but Catholic schools.  Lots of Chinese food.  "Home is where the food is..." 

Aix en Provence.  A mime in white never stops moving.  A busker playing The Godfather theme on his accordion.  Cappucino served up in a 18th century cafe by a waiter with a 19th century moustache.

Myanmar.  The pecking order on begging rounds, monks up front, then the child monklets.  I'd like to see their bowls on conveyor belts, like in sushi chain shops.  The roads lined with bougainvillea, wide and open  and traversed more by bicycles an motorbikes than cars. The Buddhist University in Yangon, with an unusual blend of Gothic and spiky temple architecture.  Ubiquitous banana and mango trees.  The Jade Temple has a single donor, all the jewels controlled now by China, as are 75% of businesses in Myanmar. A cameraman hangs off the back of a jeep, snapping pics.  I pee under a waterfall, beneath the gaze of a green gecko...  


On the turntable, Howlin' Wolf, "Muddy and the Wolf"

(untitled)

Darkened rooms

Lit by the glow of joints,

In the days before MTV.

 
On the turntable:  Mason Williams, "Mason Williams Phonograph Record"

Stuff from an Old Notebook #4

Watching a kite circling over a river, looking for fish.  A group of others was a little further off, whistling.  These whistles seemed to draw the single kite back to the group.   

On the turntable:  Maria Callas, "The Legend"

Sunday Papers: George Orwell

"All our food springs ultimately from dung and dead bodies, the two things which of all others seem to us the most horrible.”

On the turntable:  Dire Straits, "Sultans of Swing"