Two Swathes across England.

 

 

Leaving the morning beach traffic of Sussex behind, crossing small rural towns and villages.  Brunch in Winchester with John and Charlotte before walking up to King Arthur's round table, which led to jokes about this, the knights' dart board, and Monty Python ditties in my head.  

 

 

Quiet days at the farm in Somerset, finding solace in reading on the bed beside the window, a cool breeze coming through the wooden frame.  The window stays open at night, allowing in the calls of an owl nesting somewhere on the property. 

 

 

The farm served as a base for exploration.  Wales Cathedral is perhaps the best I've seen, due mainly to its geometry.  The town gets bonus points for its olde sweet shop that feels more like a movie set, but is indeed patronized by lucky kids.  A short detour over to Wookey Hole, mainly to get a photo of the sign.

 

 

Glastonbury deserves at least a night or two.  Brighton's hipness has shifted with the times, where here it is still druids and star children both wizened and fresh.  A feel like Sedona, to the Mission district vibe of her cousin to the south.  The hippies are the majority here, the tourists the freaks.  The two sides are more evenly balanced across the lawns of the ruined Abbey, but it is all spirit in the visitors at the Chalice Well, sitting eyes-closed in circles as the waters trickle into the garden and down the slope. The tourists return on the short hike up the Tor.  The top is crowded, the summer afternoon hot.  Far better to do this on a sunny day in winter, the farms stretching away under what would surely be crisp skies.  We drive through this exact landscape as I look for a photo shot of a now distant Tor, passing very close to the site of the renowned eponymous music festival.  I find out later that my stepdaughter went to school with the granddaughter of the festival founder.    

 

 

Cheddar's two gorges, one walked in the early mist that eventualy burns off to reveal companions in sheep and cow.  One of the dogs scares up a rabbit from its burrow nustled between limestone slabs.  The larger gorge is deeper, more breathtaking.  We wander the cheese and toffee shops, marvelling at the variety, a great deal of the wares going on to debit our luggage allowance on the flight home.  
 

Bath now resonates as more than the hometown of a character in a Chaucer Tale.  The Royal Crescent is familiar from TV and film, the Roman Baths familiar from history and previous travel.  The town is small and charming and eminently walkable.

 

We break the journey again at the farm upon our return from Wales a week later. English evenings remind me of my youth in New Jersey, where the evenings hang on for hours. (Unlike Japan, where night falls like a curtain.)  Pizza is browned in the brick oven, as the dogs and chickens hunt belong the table for crusts dropped by toddler Roscoe. Afterward, I sit outside on a bench, reading short stories by Ian Fleming until the living daylight fades away.    

 

 

Multiple stops on the way back to Sussex.  Castle Combe is almost a hole in the floor of rural England, a warren of church, modest estate, and corresponding simple cottages.  Its quintessential English look seems more a film set, and it frequently is, most famously in Downton Abbey.  I definitively figured out that we;d gotten it wrong, this staying in cities.  Fine for a nightlife-seeking young man, but the quiet charm of the smaller villages has beckoned all throughout this roadtrip.  Cities will be busy regardless, but these smaller spots empty out at night, and a pre-breakfast stroll guarantees empty photos.

 

 

Malmesbury Abbey is itself surrounded by an attractive little town, with a central Market Cross topped by a crown of arched stone. The "newer" 16th century church behind is grafted upon its ancestor that preceded it by eight hundred years .  A lady minister walks briskly across the lawn, followed by a gaggle of kids, on the way to some summer hols activity.  And the hilltop upon which this all stands offers terrific views over toward the Cotswalds.  

 

 

Lacock too is a film set in its look, a charming series of narrow lanes running in right angles to one another.  The pub is perfect, the abbey perfect, the houses perfect.  But all is ruined by cars  parked all along the latter, around which large crowds of tourists weave.  Albeit incredibly picturesque, I give up on photography almost immediately, due to the visual clutter and overcrowding.  A victim of its own success as a filming location for Harry Potter, the town seems to doing everything wrong, but for making tourists park just outside town.  The parallels with Kyoto in its unthoughtful approach to tourism are too many to mention.  

 

 

A return to Avebury, specifically Windmill Hill, which I'd missed on my last visit here in 2016.  I shorten the hiking time by parking semi-illegally at a nearby Goat Farm (where Lai Yong opts to stay, for tea, cheese, and conversation), then power march up the hill, which is a very gentle incline, paralleling a fence and row of trees.  Goats approach me as I pass, expecting a treat.  The Hill itself has a few small raised circles, tombs of one of the oldest of the many Neolithic Avebury cultures that once lived and died here.  I sit awhile atop the most central tomb, listening to the quiet, and the wind.  I attempt to meditate, but the mind is too busy with thoughts of moving along.  Driving back through the town proper, I wish we were staying the night here, as we'd stayed last time in nearby Marlborough, and today's weather is far better.  I envy the people I see walking the stone circle, or merely sitting around town. 

     

 

Our slow pace means we still face a close to three hour drive home, much of it after dark.  We decide to take lodging in an old manor house, beside which has been built a small spa resort. On approach up the long meandering driveway we follow a fast moving Tesla, whose driver complains later to the front desk that none of the hotel's four charging stations are free. As he roars off again in a huff, I think that this is perhaps the most post-modern thing I've ever seen.  The spa hotel is busy for a weekday, due mainly to a wedding being held in the old thatch farmhouse on the grounds.  Luckily the noise of the reception that follows stays in the newer wing, and all is quiet in our 16th century digs.  Before setting off in the morning, we read awhile in the conservatory, soaking up the peace.  This would unfortunately wear off all to soon amongst beach traffic once we got to the coast, due mainly to clogged roundabouts. Some creative but frenetic navigation got us around most blockages, but that day too, grew long...    

 

On the turntable: The Scorpions, "Comeblack"

Sunday Papers: Robert M. Pirsig

 

"The whole Renaissance is supposed to have resulted from the topsy-turvy feeling caused by Columbus’ discovery of a new world. It just shook people up. The topsy-turviness of that time is recorded everywhere. There was nothing in the flat-earth views of the Old and New Testaments that predicted it. Yet people couldn’t deny it. The only way they could assimilate it was to abandon the entire medieval outlook and enter into a new expansion of reason.”

 

On the turntable:  Henry Rollins:  "Live at McCabe's"

 

Ballad of a Thin Road

 

Before I even got close to the lake I found myself bobbing along the current.  This was mighty peculiar in that this current flowed uphill.  Or more precisely, up the stairs of Hikone station.  I had purposely left early so as to avoid rush hour, and I was successful for the first part of the journey.  But eventually, rush hour found me, and the train filled up with businessmen and schoolchildren, all of them kitted out in the dark attire appropriate to the season.  I eventually left the flow upon arriving once again at the castle.  I paid quick respects to the adjacent shrine, my mouth down-turned at the sight of a stele marking aikoku, patriotism, a concept I've never really understood, or accepted. 

I traced the narrow trails along the old castle moat, passing fishermen, elderly walkers, and a man sitting in the bleachers above a tennis court, ready to launch a basket full of balls, atop which a racquet was laid.  Workers were hard at work on extensions to the soccer stadium.  These grounds on the castle's far canal were surprising in the their scale, an efficient use of ample land which had already existed.  

I moved to where I had last left the Umi no Be, but along the canal I was surprised to see an elbow bend marking the path. Before long I was led back to the bicycle course I'd followed last time.  As that had been a pretty uneventful walk, I had chosen a few Bob Dylan bootlegs to distract me from the steady and ever present flow of traffic hissing past to my left.  For the most part I kept my eyes turned right, out over the waters of the lake.  The peaks across were clear and well-detailed, and over my shoulder, the unmistakable shape of Ibuki loomed far to the north.       

Luckily, a path led me down into a another lakeside park, as I'd found to Hikone's north.  It was much more pleasant going, along a welcome promenade of trampled grass, and beneath sakura and pine.  They'd obviously had some pretty severe weather recently, with a tremendous amount of flotsam as far as three meters from the now quietly lapping shore.  The ground itself was sodden.  Must've been a hell of a storm

And there were signs; warning of kamikaze crows, warning off the playing of ground golf (although one area must've been okay, either that or this city had some pretty rebellious seniors).  I'd rejoin the road at river crossings, on one occasion startling a bicyclist zipping along.  I popped into a convenience store to stock up on lunch.  It was due to close in two days, though the remaining stock looked like it wouldn't last even that long.  Had it been an hour later in the day I would've instead stopped at a  tasty looking deli about fifty steps away.  As I stood in front perusing the menu, an elderly woman caught me in the act of singing Dylan lyrics out loud, something about a tax-deductible charity organization.  

I rejoined the grassy promenade.  Further on, I noted that the Umi no Be signs were oriented toward the shore.  Was the shale beach there the actual trail?  I walked along it awhile, but it slowed my momentum, as my shoes found resistance in the stones.  As feared, it ended abruptly at the next river inlet, forcing me to do a high-wire act along some sodden concrete wall slippery with moss.  

The main highway moved away to the east, and my road was all quiet suburb now, except for a small factory where large and powerful pleasure craft spent their winters.  My trail led me behind the houses, moving just above the beach, here too strewn with debris.  There were many vegetable gardens here, and a friendly old man greeted me from his.  Behind was a lovely deck with some comfy looking chairs.  In one of them he would surely reward the day's labors with a brew and a view.  He moved toward the shore, to rake the driftwood and detritus that had built up., telling me that this line of debris was about two meters further inland than usual.  He then bid me take care, and we both returned to the work ahead of us.     

A black robed priest bicycled past, wearing a construction helmet.  Obviously heeding the new helmet laws, or perhaps concerned by the crows the signs warned about.  The stretch of beach beyond him was lined by a meter-high concrete wall that apparently protected the houses within.  More of the land here had been converted to fields, and in one an old man in a conical hat squatted to pull weeds.  A few houses also had basketball hoops, in most cases the rims bent thirty degrees toward the ground.  These were obviously the homes of bigger, stronger kids.  

The houses began to get further from the shore, and my path was once again shaded by pines, much welcome as this early May day grew warm.  Summer wouldn't be so far away. Finally the houses themselves disappeared altogether.  I now walked through the grass just above the shore, amazed at the various shapes and sizes of detritus, at the forms trees and branches and twigs could take. Then it occurred to me that the patterns in which they lay were the actual shapes of the waves, which mimicked the shape of the underwater line further out where the deep becomes the shallow.   

Ano benchi was listed on my map as a historical landmark.  I imagine this is tongue in cheek, this lone bench sitting at the side of a carpark, denoted by bicyclists and bikers, and people out driving on a Sunday.  The parks continued, broken now and again by inlets and bridges.  Thus went the day.

 

 

I finally left these altogether, tracing the peninsulas covered by farm houses and their corresponding plots of land.  I began to hate these, as they offered little by way of scenery, or variety, and simply meant more kilos walked under the hot sun.  Most of the fields now surrounding me were wheat, and a couple of combines were making the rounds.  Adjacent fields held green onions.  Two workers sat pulling bulbs on overturned milk crates, faces unseen due to conical hats and unhealthy postures.  I assumed from the tough physical work involved that they weren't Japanese.

I moved back along the beachfront now.  Cars were parked in the intermittent pullouts, men lazed behind their vehicles in folding camp chairs or even hammocks, shirtless in the sun.  One small section of shoreline had been cleared of debris, forming a clean sandy approach shaded by a table atop which were drinks.  A trio of vehicles were parked above, filled with paddles, lifejackets, SUPs.  One of the drivers was reclining along the length of one board, his own hammock of sorts.  This stretch of the Umi no Be certainly was bucolic.   

The beachfront was eventually replaced by a grove of trees that lined the shore.  Through one break in the foliage I saw a half dozen people on SUPs, slowly paddling along the coast.  Which explained the trucks, and their sleepy drivers.  

I followed this frontage road to where sand hit rock, and finding no trail into the forest, I moved along the face of the small mount now looming above.  There was a gate, which contrary to similar gates that break most country paths, was impossible to open, fixed as it was with three sets of thick, Gordian-knotted wire, the whole works smothered in cobwebs.  Luckily someone had knocked down a small section of adjacent fence, which solved the problem of getting through.     

In the carpark ahead I found a marker for the Umi no Be, the first I'd seen in awhile.  It pointed me up a forested path toward Isaki-ji temple, which I was assured was 900 meters away.  The trail was broad, lined with railway ties and covered with gravel which made for easy walking.  But the slow steady incline gradually brought the rhythm of my breath into pace with that of my footfalls. 

The temple hondo was an attractive wooden structure perched atop rock. A smaller Fudō hall further down by the shoreline was a mix of wood and concrete, which though less aesthetically pleasing, made sense I suppose, considering its position on the windward side of the lake.  

Doubling back to rejoin my trail, I met the temple priest in the garden, the color of his work clothes matching that of the weeds he was pulling. He confirmed for me that people once traveled here strictly by boat, a fact made evident by the stones steps descending through an elaborate gate and to the water's edge.  

But I moved away from these, up a path steep and overgrown and pointed due south.  I kept my eyes lowered, ever aware of snakes.  More active were the wild boar, who'd torn up sections here and there.  I moved along, climbing and puffing into the dappled sunshine, quite pleased that, after days of trudging on tarmac, the Umi no Be would draw to a close in the hills. 

Or nearly.  There was a final short meander along a shoreline road, which terminated on the beach of the Kyukamura resort.  All was quiet, but for a guy whacking weeds somewhere, and the occasional car drifting by above.  I was able to thumb a lift from one, which brought me into Omi-hachiman proper, to celebrate with a pint (or two) at the local Two Rabbits brewery, an activity made more auspicious in this year corresponding to the same animal of the Chinese zodiac.    

 

On the turntable:  Grateful Dead, "1995-04-05, Jefferson Civic Center Coliseum"

Wherever you Roam

 

 

I should've called a taxi.  I'd arrived at Kawake, granted a small country station, but as it displayed within a regional museum, I'd somehow assumed there'd be taxis waiting to meet arriving trains.   I know better than to assume such things.

Hitching a ride saved me from repeating the dull 90 minute slog I'd undertaken in late 2021 when I climbed the ridgeline south from Shizu-ga-take.  I'd followed the Umi no Be on that day, yet descended from the castle ruins at Yamamotoyama east toward the station, rather than west along the actual route.  Ever the purist, I raced back up the mountain in three-fourths the map time, tapped the summit marker, snapped a couple of pics, then shot back down the other side along a very steep trail. The electrified fence at the bottom was hung with a drawing of a ferocious looking bear of the type that doesn't exist on these islands. 

The Umi no Be led through some quiet farm villages, then out to Biwa's eastern shoreline.  Here, near the waterfowl park, trees rose from the waters themselves, as well as along long, pencil-thin islets.  Tiny waves gently made their way to the shore,  and dotted here and there were the top-heavy white figures of cranes.  I stood on a bridge, watching cormorants fish, seemingly unbothered by the trucks roaring overhead, shaking the entire structure. 

My ex-wife used to often ask me what I am looking for on these walks.  I guess today it hit me that I'm seeking melancholy. And melancholy is everywhere in the Japanese countryside.  Its in the gradual physical decay and loss of memories that accompany population decline, perhaps Japan's greatest manifestation of mono no aware, the pathos of things. It is during these moments, particularly in autumn, when I am most happy while out on the road.  I don't know, maybe it is that I'm looking not for the ghost of my late son, but for the ghost of the melancholia that accompanied the deep mourning from that time.  

Again and again, I spied caterpillars crossing the tarmac.  With the bicycle lanes it is basically a four-lane road, so they have a long way to go.  It is almost like a scaled down version of what I'm doing.  I too simply keep my head forward, seeing nothing but grayish blue tarmac stretching out before me.  

I took a short snack break beside a small lake into which retired men fish, then its back to my long, straight trudge.  The land jutted out at one point, and my feet were finally able to move along a softer surface, the path now connecting a series of waterfront parks and campsites.  These led me into Nagahama.  

I did a quick round of the city, up the castle for the view, into shrines and temples for the history.  I'd twice visited here while walking the Hokkoku Kaidō, but warily passed through rather than visit.  And again that was more of my focus here, admiring the old architecture and the well-preserved streets.  I couldn't help but feel that tourist sites I paid to enter didn't quite live up to expectations.  The best highlights were the last two: the railway station (where I spent a fair bit of time admiring the old photographs), and the Keiunkan villa across the road with its vast garden.  The view from the second floor revealed a little too much of the borrowed scenery of Showa and Heisei Japan.  As I left, I passed a group of quite elderly women admiring the azalea bonsai exhibition. I was reminded of Dylan, "your old road is rapidly aging."    

 

 

I took a long rest with lunch and beer at Nagahama Roman Beer, to fortify myself for the final 12 km to Hikone Castle.  Perhaps I'd waited too long, as the weather grew heavy, with dark, dark, overcast skies.  Gone now was the beautiful blue waters upon which the sunshine danced.  A set change had replaced it with the slate gray lake surface which mirrored the colors above. I preyed that this was merely a staring contest, and that the clouds wouldn't blink first.    

When the rains did find me, about halfway along, I swore a bit. Not at the sky or the weather but at the meteorological team who seemed to have grown far less precise after the very expensive technological upgrade that the government had been so proud to announce not long ago.  All remained a mere drizzle, mercifully. I was occasionally led into more of those little lakeside parks, but for the most part I was up on the main road, devoid even of a bicycle path.  As such, it was a walk to get through, rather than enjoy.  The rains slowly increased, and when I finally pulled out my umbrella, they ceased.  I guess it was I who blinked first.  

Slightly higher waves now brushed the shoreline, here and there decorated with a surprisingly large number of dead fish. Large brown kites feasted on the more fresh, showing that they too have an affinity for sashimi. Further out, what must have been one hundred cormorants, flying and diving, flying and diving, stalking a massive school of fish unseen beneath the water. 

The final section in town was down a smaller, quieter road that hugged the shoreline.  I remembered swimming here two summers back to wash off the sweat, after climbing some peak further north.  I liked then the look of this little lane, the tidy little vacation houses across whose frontages leaned the toys of summer: kayaks, inflatable rings, SUPs, and small boats.  A few sailboards lay along the water's edge, and a handful of people were taking advantage of the winds that the rain had brung.     

A short walk away, I turned the corner to find myself face to face with Hikone Castle.  

 

On the nighttable:  Ian Buruma, "China Lover"

On the turntable:  Bob Dylan, "Rundown Rehearsals"     

 

The Nature of Kyoto

 

 

Quite pleased to be a part of the fifth Writer's in Kyoto Anthology. 

On the turntable:  Grateful Dead, "1993-05-26,  Cal Expo Amphitheatre"

Sunday Papers: Ernest Hemingway

 

“Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing." 

 

On the turntable:  Bob Dylan,  "Park It Where The Sun Don't Shine"

Sakura Zuihitsu

 

 

Thanks to Writers in Kyoto for publishing my look back at the flurry that was last spring...

https://www.writersinkyoto.com/2023/05/sakura-zuihitsu/

 

On the turntable:  Bob Dylan, "Oh Mercy Outtakes"

 

Sunday Papers: Thu-Huong Ha

 

"There is something to be said for shaking up Kyoto, which year after year draws crowds to the same set of predetermined temples and attractions. It surely takes courage to try something different in a place celebrated for its ossified immutability."

 

On the turntable:  The Hollies, "Live Hits"

 

The Tensile Strength of Oak

 

 

It was another Oeno-archaeological mystery, the label on the bottle so faded and worn that it took awhile to determine its identity. Finally from a small readable section of what had been an import stamp, a date appeared, 2000, though the actual purchase had been made eight years later in Taiwan. Uncorking one of these grand old dames is a true exercise in zen, mindfulness in every twist of the wrist. It demands calm and patient work, an attempt at coaxing this old piece of bark from the narrow neck that had long been its home. There was promise in a definitive resistance at the start, but all at once there was a slip where the curled metal tip met decayed center. After a steady and gradual climb upwards, the cork suddenly broke off, as if impatient for freedom. 

 

Resetting the corkscrew, I began yet again to pull, micrometre by micrometre. As the cork rose, what came with it was a small hiss, as if the contents of the bottle itself were longing for freedom. It struck me that what I was hearing was the sound of vintage air, twenty-three years old.

  

On the turntable:  Nina Simone, "The Montreaux Years"

On the nighttable:  Gary Snyder, "Back on the Fire"

    

Drag on Peace

It was the Zen that I stumbled across during my university days that led to a deep reading on the subject after graduation, which culminated in my coming to live in Japan. Ryoan-ji was a name that appeared again and again in those old books. Naturally I made an immediate beeline to the place the first time I went to Kyoto.

 

That initial visit was a disappointment, as it was crowded and noisy. I took in the famous garden for a little bit and wandered around to the back of the temple in a dark mood. There I discovered the tsukubai sitting mossy and green and alone by itself.  And there I found the stillness that I had sought. It was only later that I learned, with great irony, that the characters on this famous stone basin can be read as “I am content with what I have.”

 

Since then I have returned dozens of times, most often as a guide. It never fails in being crowded and noisy. Like most of the iconic sites of Kyoto, I vowed I would never go as a paying civilian, except in times of great snow.

 

But the feeling still nagged me. I wanted to see the garden in the same way as the great Zenmen of old. And so it was that I woke with the sun and I arrived at the front gates not long before they opened. 

 

And I finally got the garden to myself. For seven glorious minutes…

 

 

On the turntable: Levon Helm, "Levon Helm"

Sunday Papers: Terry Gilliam

 

"In Europe you get the feeling of belonging to a very, very long history. In America you are taught to believe that the world began when you were born."

On the turntable:  "The Man Who Fell to Earth." (Sdtk)

Scenes beneath the Pink

 

 

Blame it on the low yen, revenge travel, wherever, but our city found itself quite quickly under siege.  After three lean but pleasantly restful years, it was startling to encounter this many people in town, and to do so many consecutive days of guiding. 

I've always had a love/hate relationship with this city, have always questioned the amount of hype that it gets. But I'm happy to take on the work, and quite honestly it never bores me, even when returning for the nth time to sites that sit atop umpteen bucket lists.  I can easily put on the game face, introduce my guests to parts of the city that their friends back home will never see, those that never collect thumbs on social media platforms. Yet naturally I never share those places that I call my own.    

Since the autumn, I'd said yes to nearly every offer I got, disregarding the big picture, until I found I had allowed myself a mere five days off in six weeks. There were multiple trips to Tokyo, Kumano, Naoshima, the Nakasendo.  But mainly it was Kyoto, and its insane crowds. For the first time in this career, I found myself leading the same itinerary two days running. And the beer I needed, and I mean NEEDED, at the back end of every day, was inevitably followed by a shower to wash away the crowds.  As the weeks wore on, I was growing weary of the same meet and greet every few days, of telling the same stories and forgetting what I'd already told.

The days and the highlights are all jumbled up. The punters staking out party spots early Sunday morning. The foreign joggers reducing last night's Michelin caloritic intake with every heavy footfall.  The flattened-light effect of the yellow Gobi sand. Rubbish towering above metal trash bins along the river.  Drive times and queues doubled, tripled, exponentially lengthened.  The lousy boy band under Shijo bridge, two nights running.  Seeing, or being sighted by other guide friends, out on their own respective missions.  Photographers striking their own yoga poses to frame out all the others doing the exact same thing.  A western couple sipping wine on the narrow back balcony of a Pontocho eatery, who give me a wave as zip smiling past on my bicycle. 

What saved me were the calm of the mornings before going into combat.  I'd leave early to sit quietly by myself on the river.  It reminded me of that summer after I'd finished university, the calm stillness of a morning after a heavy mushroom trip, sitting in a children's playground, squeezing cool sand between my toes and not quite sure if the mental turbulence was finally past.  

I passed these quiet mornings of spring reading a book or simply listening to Bob Dylan through the iPod and watching the early risers go by, framed by the curtain of pink.  In fact this is the only recollection I have of my even acknowledging  the petals, even though they, and the eyes and the cameras pointed toward them, were everywhere. 

Then that peace would be broken by the phone call of my driver for the day, seeking confirmation to appease his or her own insecurities.  This was my signal to saddle up and rejoin the fray.  

Yet it was on one of these mornings, the very first, that I saw something that brought this all into perspective.  At the Kamogawa confluence, I am briefly puzzled by the sight of a guy slaloming down the slope on an odd-looking bicycle, until I spot his paramedic partner frantically giving CPR.  He kneels beside a man who can't be more than thirty.  I wonder if he overdrank himself into this state and was found here this morning.  Or if he took a hard fall from the bicycle spilled atop the grass beside him.  But it is his expressionless face, and the furious pumping of the paramedic's arms, and the raised hands framing the horror stricken face of the foreign tourist straddling her rental bike, that hint that this has been going on awhile, and nothing is going to get his heart started again.  

It is this image that stands out most from what had been a very long tour season, which somehow neutralizes all the joy and wonder and frustration I saw on other, uncountable faces over numerous weeks, faces drawn to this city in pursuit of metaphors for the ephemeral, as if this pursuit can somehow stave off the real thing.

 

On the turntable:  Norah Jones, "The Lost Notebooks"

 

Sunday Papers: Terrence Malick

 

"This great evil, where does it come from? How did it steal into the world? What seed, what root did it grow from? Who’s doin’ this? What’s killin’ us? Robbin’ us of life and light? Mockin’ us with the sight of what we might have known? Does our ruin benefit the earth? Does it help the grass to grow or the sun to shine? Is this darkness in you, too? Have you passed through this night?" 

 

 

On the turntable:  Bob Dylan, "The Live Aid Hotel Rehearsals Tape"  

(untitled)

 

Changes; 

Petals fall

In delicate symmetry,

In a garden

Not my own. 

 

 On the turntable:  The Hollies, "Greatest Hits...Live!"  

On the nighttable:  Agatha Christie, "Murder on the Orient Express"

Sunday Papers: Francis Spufford

 

"Ideas lose their form when they decay, yet do not necessarily lose their place in the mentality of an age.  They turn to imaginative compost."   

On the turntable:  Grateful Dead, "1987-09-18, Madison Square Garden"

 

Happy New Year!

 

A year in reads: 2022

  

On the turntable: Tomaso Albinoni, "Adagio in G minor"

 

The Top of the Top of the Lake

 

 

It had been a pretty uneventful morning.  I tried to hitch, but only three cars passed, none of them going all the way anyway.  My reward was a long beautiful walk, pointed toward the rising sun.  I was freezing when I got off the train, but my temperature was rising in the sunshine, though dropping quickly under the odd patches of shade. A few fisherman were standing up in those mini one-man boats I noted on my last walk up here.  

Having hitched along this section on my walk the month before, I felt guilty that I hadn't taken in this section on foot, as lovely as it was.  And the weather was far better today.  After returning to Tsukide village, the plan was to backtrack, then follow the Umi no Be across the top of the lake and up to Shizu-ga-take to meet the section that I'd walked (though not written about) last year.  Online info was sparse and not terribly accurate, so I'd be relying mainly on signposts.  I recognized the futility of this, being in inconsistent Shiga after all, but signage for the route had been pretty good elsewhere in the prefecture.  Fingers crossed.  

I fell in behind another walker who was about 50 meters ahead of me.  He stayed along the water's edge, I cut through the center of Tsukide proper, but we eventually met at the base of the steps of Hiyoshi shrine.  I thought that he was looking for the trailhead that I too had sought out last time, relying on the same incorrect maps as I had.  It turned out he was on a different mission altogether, walking the countryside to connect the area's shrines.  In cases where the distances between were too great he would drive, ditch the car somewhere, then loop around on foot, as he was doing today.  

As we were both returning the way we came, we fell in step to chat.  He too was a seasoned walker, having successfully summited the Hyakumeizan, albeit stretched over 25 years of weekends. (A pace not unlike my own, though I've not been actively seeking out the goal.). Since retirement, he went on to climb the 300 peaks of the Sanbyakumeizan, and now was aiming even higher to pay house calls on the gods.       

His car was parked along some rice fields, so I bid him farewell, heading across and through Shiotsu, a small post town along the Shiotsu Kaidō, a spur route off the Hōkkoku Kaidō.  Jizo that had once lined this route had been unceremoniously clustered together at the edge of the concrete walls meant to prevent erosion.  But what protects against the erosion of tradition?  

Good new signage contradicted the older weathered signage. The newer was aimed at the bicyclists attempting a loop of the entire lake.  One sign at the far end of town made little sense, the arrow pointed in the wrong direction, and the accompanying text completely bleached away by the sun.  So I continued to follow my online map.  I decided to pop in and pay my respects at a large shrine, and climbed the leaf-strewn steps behind up to some smaller shrines higher up.  From there I noted a small clearing with a sacred tree and a stone marker, the latter perhaps indicating trail, had that odd arrow earlier been correct.  But the path between had been rubbed away by the crash of a pair of tall trees felled by storm.  I tried to make my way there anyway, moving up steep slopes slick with mud, into which I dug my fingertips, seeking a better grip. Finally at the stone marker, it revealed nothing. 

The sign posts continued to fail, any lettering long ago faded.  I followed the map along a course that looked right, which crossed a river and a highway, then a bit of wasteland.  I knew I had to enter the forest at the far end, between the two buildings of a concrete factory. I hurried through, not wanting to get told off by the workmen zooming around on heavy machinery.  Then I found my signage again, having been more or less on course all along.  

The entrance to the forest lay in the shadow of two slag heaps.  And for the first few minutes, the hike reeked of old oil.  Not many did this route any more, to judge from the fallen bridge, and the trail overlaid with debris of stick and stone.  I reached a junction, my map splitting into two routes.  The followed the one to the left, until it became less trail and more stream bed.  In some sections it felt more like I was canyoning than hiking. I was grateful for the cold temperatures, which ensured the absence of leech and viper. Felled trees proved an obnoxious obstacle, making for a lot of up and over, or ducking beneath on weary legs.     

Midway up, I again checked my map, and realized that the trail I'd forsaken below had actually been correct.  The junction wasn't that far back, but I didn't fancy navigating all those downed trees again.  I knew the trail was above and to the right, and the hillside didn't look that steep.  It turned out that my scrambling at the shrine was a dress rehearsal for what was to come next.  I stretched and lurched upward, a few steps at a time, testing and grasping at roots, or throwing an arm around medium sized trunks.  To miss would have meant a slide rather than a fall, but the risk of injury was always there.  And yet again, I found myself wondering when I was going stop doing such stupid stunts. 

Safe at the top, I found my trail, which eventually joined a junction with a better marked trail, and the rest of the day was an easy stroll along the ridge line.  One col had been sheared away to construct massive electrical towers, which opened up the view of Oku-biwa and the north end of the lake.  I lunched here with the view, then met the ridge line which ringed Lake Yogo on the other side.  I plunged down to another saddle before making the final and ascent to the familiar clearing of Shizu-ga-take. 

I'd originally intended to do this entire hike in reverse, until train delays and the threat of missed connections made me come up with a better Plan B.  My initial route had me cheating with the chairlift up to this very spot, so imagine my delight in seeing that the lift wasn't running at all. Closed for the winter, a fact neglected by their website.  So, with brand-new trekking poles in hand, I raced down the switchbacks like a skier, into the village below.

It was a 30 minute walk from here to the station.  I considered hitching, as I always do in these situations, but the day was still bright and warm.  So I walked happily, feeling the sun on my face, a sensation that is at a premium in this month when the days continue to grow shorter, and cold. 

 

On the turntable:  Grateful Dead, "1983-04-17, Meadowlands Arena"

 

Western Front Redux

 

 

 

When I set out to walk the Umi no Be no Michi in August 2009, I hadn't realized that it extended along the Katsuraka-go-ozaki peninsula.  My mistake became clear last year while driving the high Oku-biwako Parkway which parallels the trail, with signage for the latter popping up now and again along the way.   So it was that I returned on an overcast morning at the beginning of November.  

It was a less than auspicious start. I made the rookie maneuver of not checking my return train times until on the outbound ride, and was horrified at how early this line shut down.  I'd have to race all day to catch the last one at just before 5 o'clock, leaving me just under six hours to do an eight to nine hour walk.  Hitching would be crucial, and it was in my favor that it was a national holiday, meaning more people on the road, many devoid of any solid plan.  Picking up a foreign hitchhiker made for a pleasant diversion.

Unfortunately the road itself conspired against me.  The long stretch running south from Ōmi-Shiotsu station was lined with a guardrail, offering no place to pull over, thus no chance of a pickup. For the first half and hour, my thoughts were as dark as the fog that enshrouded me, made even worse in noting that there were no busses along here after about 8 a.m.  But I kept the faith, spinning frequently with thumb out.  And in doing so summoned up a miracle ride somehow, the driver stopping just in front of the village police box, prompting me to jokingly ask if this was legal.  A woman who I'd been keeping pace with during the last ten minutes was standing nearby, and laughed. 

The ride was a short one, along a quiet road that traced the shoreline before terminating at the tiny fishing village of Tsukide.  I dutifully followed a directional sign pointing up toward the hills,  pleased with both my good luck and with a gorgeous thatched roof house whose surroundings were decorated with items of a long ago age.  Within a minute the smile left my face, as the trail halted below a massive dam.  I scanned for any trace of trail, but all was overgrown.  I was further puzzled that my online map showed the route to be on the complete opposite side of the village.  I retreated back to to the sign I'd seen earlier.  

Besides being a national holiday, it also appeared to be a day when the entire hamlet was out for their village cleaning.  A man and woman were busy pulling debris out of the rocks at the water's edge.  I asked them if they knew about the Umi no Be, and in broken English, the man beckoned me to follow. 

I followed him into the house that I'd be admiring minutes before.  Both he and I were unmasked (mine in my pocket), but he seemed little concerned as he sat just beside me, and spread a paper map across our laps.  Local knowledge once again trumped technology, but he talked incredibly slowly, in what seemed to my deadline-obsessed mind to be like one syllable every three seconds.  Finally armed with the right directions, I moved quickly up some steep switchbacks, finding myself out of breath on the ridge a mere hour after leaving the train.  There was a decrepit little park there, so I stopped to de-layer before moving on.  

This was the time that I most feared the risk of bears, and I was walking a trail pockmarked with spiky horse chestnuts, most of them already cracked open.  The trail led over a little rickety bridge, offering me a Sorcerer moment in every step.  The opposite side had recently been torn apart by wild boar, probably the night before.  From here the path was carpeted with magnolia leaves, under any of which could be a viper a-coil. I wanted to believe that they were already in hibernation, as the cool fog chilled the sweat of my earlier climb.  

The paved parkway road below twisted and turned with the contours of the ridge.  But I followed a roller coaster that rose and fell, in keeping with the actual ridge line. I was still hoping for the fog to burn off, not only for the views that weren't too far in front of me, but also so I wouldn't surprise any bears that might also be.  I probably had nothing to fear from animals, giving fair warning with my huffing and puffing, this being my first real hike in almost three months.  And the moment I thought this, from the forest below me I heard a strange kind of yelp which wasn't a deer or any other bird I'd ever heard before.  It repeated a few times, followed then by a low roar. Shit!, a mother and her cub.  Their cries repeated a couple of times:  the yelp, the roar.  The squeal. The roar. It took the mind a second to parse out the motorcyclist on the road just below, firing up his bike with a squeaky kickstarter.

My route wasn't on either of my trusty go-to hiking apps, so I was flying blind, putting my trust in the signage.  It had been pretty good so far, but of the worn, 1990s vintage. Inevitably three decades of storms coming off the lake will have brought rot to the base of the post of one, and an arrow that I might eventually need to rely on will be lying in the overgrowth of weeds a half step off-trail.  Fingers crossed, I came over the peak that served as the ridge's high point, and continued my undulations south.  

And the fog lingered on, past the lunch hour.  Every time I came to a view point, I could do nothing but smile.  When I solo hike I'm generally pretty good with the weather, and I could have easily chosen the following day, though the forecast for the current day had looked better.  I could write an entire post on how poor the meteorological system has become in Japan over the last decade.  Not surprising, right on the heels of their investing massive amounts of money in new technology.  

I stopped for a moment to confirm my course from my digital map, which did at least include the southern half of my course.  And as I did, a venomous yamakagashi drifted across the trail two meters in front of me.  Some steps led down to the road proper, and then lo and behold I saw through the trees the lake opening up below me.  With the lifting of the fog, thus did my spirits.  

The trail began to drop steadily toward the fishing village of Sugaura.  I played peek a boo with views, the structures getting bigger each time.  The final descent to a lower section of trail was hazardous even with trekking poles, but it was through a gentle pitch of cedar forest that I returned to the water's edge.  I had flown over my hike today, and found that I had ample time to make my train.  It would be a two hour road walk to the station, but the course was flat, the skies now blue, and the lake's surface shimmered in the warm sunshine.

There were no signs here to speak of, but I knew that I was supposed to hug the lake's edge.  I detoured to follw a now closed trail that led directly along a long beach, before returning to the road again.  A quick glimpse of the map brought me to a halt, as it was possible that the trail might have returned to the hills above.  I backtracked on the road proper, looking for signs or any indications that it actually did, arriving yet again back where I'd popped out of the forest.  I scanned what little online info I could get on the trail, and finally came to the conclusion that I'd been correct all along.  

I thought I'd hitch to make up for my backtracking.  There were only a couple of features between here and the next town, so I walked to the first, a small cluster of Buddhist statues, before throwing out my thumb.  There very very few cars, but the second one did stop, driven by a middle aged woman on her way to work.  We were only together for five minutes or so before I hopped out again at a campsite, to walk the rest of the way to the station.  The town began to slowly build up not far along from here, past sorghum fields, run-down shacks, and the odd fishing business whose small stature betrayed a fleet of high powered boats. One beautiful and stately home looked recently abandoned, now overrun by a troupe of playful monkeys.  

Nagahara had the look of a feudal town, its narrow main street lined with houses mainly of wood.  I detoured to a shrine or two, then arrived early at the train station, to sit and read and sip from an iced coffee.  I watched some schoolkids play in a park just down the hill from my platform perch, and thought how we had all gotten the day right, had capitalized on the holiday and the weather, and the spirit of play that should be a mainstay of all of us, yet is too regularly obscured by the grey gloom of fog that rolls in from time to time, often of our own making.    

On the turntable:  Grateful Dead, "Community War Memorial Auditorium, 09-02-1980"