Ontake
I’ve never been good with money. My father is impulsive—he can rarely afford the things he wants, but he still buys them. This is something I’ve carried over into my own life and mindless interaction with consumer capitalism. The monthly doling out of my salary plays into this perfectly, it is a lump sum; I can buy a big ticket item at the beginning of the month and then spend thirty odd days scrimping to afford the basics.
My first salary payment comes the day before my twenty-seventh birthday and I use it to buy the full array of hiking gear: pack; tent; sleeping bag; stove; head-torch; and sleeping mat. I spread the gear out on my bedroom floor like insects pinned inside a display case. Tomorrow, I will climb to the peak of Ontake San.
Mt Ontake, or the more reverential Ontake San, is the second highest volcano in Japan and is located two prefectures north, in Nagano. I catch my first glimpse of Ontake from the window of my eighth floor classroom. During this lesson I struggle to stay focused on the textbook and the politely framed questions of my students; I’m compelled to space out on the jagged, decapitated peaks in the far distance. It’s about a hundred miles away and all the more imposing for the vast stretch of land between us — the further away you are from a mountain’s base, the greater the sense of its height above sea level. At 3,063 metres — middling by international standards but formidable to an Australian — Ontake looms over the lesser ranges in the mid distance.
This first sighting is in early spring, the summit still entirely snow-capped and often obscured by clouds that stretch unbroken across the horizon. Over the next few months I watch the snow recede until the peak is striped with just a few narrow streaks. Though I have no experience to go on, I decide that at this coming weekend, my birthday, the conditions will be auspicious enough for climbing.
I take three connecting trains, each more antiquated than the last, to Kiso-Fukushima, a post town in the Kiso valley. Here I wait for a bus to ferry me to the sparsely treed highlands at the base of Ontake’s summit. Though I’m puritanical by nature (how can you say you’ve climbed a mountain if you don’t start at the very bottom?), hauling twenty kilos of camping gear up a sealed road feels like cheating, too. The trek must begin and end on a narrow gravel track. The bus arrives at precisely eight am. It’s not the luxurious model outlined in the guidebook, but a minibus shuttling the elderly to the next village over, whose quaint thatched-roof houses are nestled into the lower slopes of Ontake.
Japan’s social calendar runs on a series of contiguous seasons: rainy season; cherry-blossom season; hiking season. I’m a month early for the hiking season and, naturally, no bus is running to the highlands. I have to settle for a lift to the start of the alpine road, which is a twenty kilometre walk from the highlands, and from there, another two hours to the peak.
The sealed alpine road, though not the precipitous mountain ridge of my imagination, gives panoramic views of Japan’s Central Alps and, beyond those, glimpses of Mt. Fuji. Being early spring, the road is virtually deserted; the ski season has finished and the hiking season has not yet begun.
The only cars on the road belong to the relatives of the dead buried into Ontake’s volcanic humus. From base to summit, Ontake is a sprawling cemetery. At first, I only notice the most ostentatious plots, those nearby the road. Regal town-cars cruise past and pull up at towering, marble phalluses. Whole families genuflect at the feet of O-Yama-tsu-mi, the Shinto god of mountains. Rising up from a pit of flames, he brandishes two swords and a psychotic grimace—completely unhinged, ready to crack, and not someone you’d want lording over your ancestors’ bones.
After a few hours of pretty but monotonous terrain, I stop at one of the bigger plots and take off my hiking pack. I open a packet of trail mix: peanuts that have been salted, deep fried, and encased in hardened butter; black, petrified soybeans; stringy lengths of squid jerky; and Niboshi, the dried baby sardines that seem to insinuate their way into most pre-packaged Japanese food. You’d be hard pressed being a vegetarian. I stare up at O-Yama-tsu-mi’s terrifying visage. He has a paunched Buddha either side of him. I’m compelled, in the quiet loneliness of a place caught in its off season, to play out some kind of ritual myself. So, in the intuitive spirit of new age paganism, itself a mindless hodge-podge of any number of revered Eastern traditions, I assume the pose of the child. It’s about as prone and deferential as you can get, and I figure if any contortion is a plea to be ushered along in peace, it’s this one. Like the Japanese, I am deeply superstitious. As I lift my forehead off the ground, I see it: a narrow trail hidden from the road.
Later, I discover that this narrow trail is the start of Ontake’s ascetic highway. For centuries, a particular sect of Zen devotees would hike this trail at night in a ritual of self discipline and sensory deprivation. The key lesson, for the monks, was this: one cultivates an abiding stoicism in the face of physical trial. In inducing holistic exhaustion, they discovered a reservoir of fortitude and acceptance inaccessible to the layman. Not transcendence, but precisely the reverse: a realisation that every moment, without qualification, is just a constellation of sense impressions, not beautiful or tragic or sublime, but just right there. In other words, the thing in itself: silent and devoid of meaning. The choice to undertake such a mission at night wasn’t just to make the whole ordeal all the more gruelling, either. Rather, it was a matter of hiding the destination. At night, you can’t see a mountain’s peak; in depriving themselves of an ostensible goal, an object upon which to set their sights, the monks unburdened themselves of expectation and longing. They groped at the dirt and gouged weeping blisters into their feet until the peak was suddenly upon them. I suspect the whole thing is an extended metaphor for the Zen model of enlightenment: one dedicates a life to spiritual practice but receives no intermittent rewards; enlightenment comes on like woozy head rush or the first view from a mountain’s peak, a flash of irrevocable insight called Satori. I can’t be sure of any of this—I’ve only heard a vague rumour about Ontake’s resident monks—but these are the stories I tell myself as I set out on the trail.
The trail cuts a direct line towards the peak, whereas the road doubles back over itself continuously, traversing the slope in long, sweeping curves. The trail crosses the road at intervals, and with every crossing I feel a guilty rush of relief for being back in contact with twentieth century industry. There’s a perverse and symbolic comfort in the road: it’s expansive; I can see what’s coming; and the occasional car rolling past relieves me of the narcissistic fantasy that I am alone in the world, hiking through another culture’s desolate and beautiful landscape. The trail, in contrast, is profoundly other. It feels accidental and piecemeal, the result of countless walks, like mine, overlaying each other in a sprawling, unreadable palimpsest. It takes me through unforseen terrain. Vast seasonal cafeterias jut out from the ski slopes, rusted signs creaking in the breeze. Vending machines, humming with power, work their way into the most unlikely and bizarre locations. They stand in as day-glo sentinels at a wealthy family’s mausoleum. They find themselves buried in thickets of sharp-edged bamboo grass or standing inside the shrine rooms of forgotten Shinto temples. I come to a village of palatial ski lodges. I imagine breaking into one of the homes, lighting a fire, and amusing myself with a collection of weird Japanese board games. At points, the trail is so overgrown I struggle to follow it. When this happens, I look for the marble headstones that act as beacons towards the highlands.
The weight of a hiking pack is nothing compared to the burden of heavy thoughts. I try, in earnest, to just be there, with the scenery, with the breeze on my face, and with each step. To not will anything into existence, but experience it as it is. My mind, jacked up on sugar and caffeine, is bent on sabotaging this commune with nature. It draws out long-winded and untenable hypotheses. (What if you were suddenly mowed down by a pack of wild boars? You know they can eviscerate a human in a single charge? Do you even know how to tend to a gushing stomach wound?) It recalls, for no apparent reason, long forgotten moments of when I’ve betrayed people or spoken of them harshly. It plays grating, looped snippets of pop hits such as Meatloaf’s Total Eclipse of the Heart and Dire Straights’ Money for Nothing. Out of the whole brilliant history of popular song, my mind spins the tunes that make me feel like the world is terribly out of step with reality. I give it a mountain view and it turns it into an internal discourse that if confessed would reveal me as borderline schizoid. I give it gold and it turns it to shit.
Disappointed at not having cultivated the sublime temperament of Ontake’s monks, I hitch a ride to the top of the alpine road. Here, buzzing electricity pylons tower over a shopping mall sized car park. The one o’clock sun casts weak beams of spring light. The air, at 2200m, is chill and alpine. A few charter buses, commissioned by especially keen hikers, are packing up and getting ready to head back down the mountain. The mostly elderly hikers are kitted out with an essential item I’m missing: crampons. Dirty slabs of perennial snow, invisible from my classroom, reveal the necessity of having boots with sharp cleats attached.
Adjoining the car park is a trail that cuts through the flatlands for a mile or so before beginning its steep ascent up Ontake’s rocky summit. At this point, where the grade gets steep and the track narrow, it’s covered in snow. My idea was to set up camp on the summit. This, however, was based on having another six hours up my sleeve and a trail clear of snow. The dwindling afternoon light and the thought of sliding into a dark crevice, subsisting off snow thaw for a few days and then dying a pointless but at least poignant death, puts me off the idea. I cut through the flatlands on a disintegrating boardwalk, looking for a patch of dirt where I can set up my tent.
I set up and eat lunch. It is two o’clock and the chances of getting up and down the peak in daylight are slim. My mother is optimistic about time. If she says she’s getting to you in an hour, it will be two, at least. This is something I’ve carried over into my own skewed relationship with time and space. I set out.
The snowy trail is smeared with dirt and two parallel boot ruts, carved into the snow by pre-season hikers, give firm purchase and allow me to climb easily. The snow, softened by the day’s sun, becomes sticky and crystalline as the temperature drops. As I get higher the air thins out and gets colder, the snow thicker and more winter-like in its coverage. A lone Japanese hiker, fully kitted out, eyes me dubiously on his way down. He tells me in broken English that I’ve got about another half an hour before the snow becomes impossible without crampons. On top of this, the horizon has got a purple twilight glow about it that seems to threaten hasty, ill-conceived plans. I keep climbing until good sense kicks in.
I sit down where the track flattens out. Looking east, I see the flatlands, the grey speck that is my tent, and the car park with its now diminutive pylons. Beyond that, the slope drops away suddenly, revealing the low-lying farmlands of rural Nagano. Above me ghostly drifts of cloud swarm and obscure the peak, threatening rain. At a guess, I’ve made it halfway.
Thoreau’s greatest revelation came halfway up Mount Katahdin, in Maine. He’d spent most of his adulthood cultivating a life of ascetic simplicity. He was an unapologetic Luddite and by most accounts, a bit of a grumpy bastard. He advocated a return to living in harmony with nature and like some rabid backwoods preacher he denounced city-folk for believing in the ills of industrialisation. I always got the feeling, though, that nature didn’t come naturally to Thoreau. In Walden, he always seemed to be over-describing nature and desperately trying to invest it with meaning. I never doubted, with Hemingway for example, that he had grown up in the wild. But Thoreau, it seemed to me, struggled to shake off the intellectual project that had spurred his retreat into the woods. This changed atop Katahdin. After a climb that revealed nature at its most inimical, Thoreau realised that to continue to the peak was certain death. He gave up halfway, defeated. And in this defeat, he gave himself over to the world as it was: matter, and nothing else. Language, at least for a moment, was entirely useless, a form of sacrilege. Or, as Thoreau described it plainly: Contact!
Sitting halfway up Ontake, I will for this to happen, for the world to open up. And maybe it does, for a moment.
I head back down, using the shoe ruts as a slide. Upon returning to camp I busy myself with the pleasant worldly distractions of making dinner and building a fire. The alpine wind blows the flames beyond the firebreak I’ve made out of rocks; embers bust apart into sparks that skip across the leaf litter and settle in the dry, nest-like shrubbery that define Ontake’s highlands. In spite of the damp chill on the air, the shrubs are surprisingly combustible. A few spot fires take hold and I hastily put out the campfire with my boot. The furious reproach of a thousand local residents, heartbroken at the decimation of their spiritual heartland, terrifies me more than a rapidly escalating forest fire.
The sun is setting and the last of the day-trippers have left. I am now alone at the foot of a volcano. I read Hemingway’s Big Two-Hearted River in the remaining light. In this story, Hemingway’s alter-ego, Nick Adams, sets out on a fishing trip in the forest surrounding the deserted and burnt-out town of Seney. You get the sense that Nick is familiar with the terrain. Somehow, though, he doesn’t quite connect with the landscape; he just goes through the old motions. It is a quietly elegiac and beautiful tale and, at this moment, it depresses the hell out me.
The setting sun seems to take the entire world’s sound with it. Unless I’m so numbed out by the low frequency of dread buzzing in my gut like the disavowed thing that comes back redoubled—there is no ambient sound. No bugs, no wind, no comforting hum. Even the pylons are silent, as if someone has cut the power for the night. As I lie down in my sleeping bag I realise that I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. I swallow painfully. At long intervals, Ontake belches volcanic thunderclaps into the air like a drunk stirring in his sleep. Waiting for these punctures in the otherwise perfect silence is tense. Though the earth doesn’t shift, I feel as if it does. My hearing becomes acute, my awareness latching onto sounds near and far. The stirring of leaves in a nearby bush spurs a string of lacerating thoughts. (Bears! Shinto spirits! Nameless dread!) I clench my teeth and internally recite a mantra against the world closing in around me. This feels like going up against a wall of flames with a garden hose. Slight reprieve arrives with heavy sheets of rain.
The members of the Sierra Club—a turn of the century mountain climbing guild—imagined nature as one giant female orifice; for these men, nature was there for the fucking. This night, for me, was the opposite.
I launch out of my tent at the first hint of light. In Japan, this is at about four am. I had vague plans last night to climb to the peak this morning as recompense for yesterday’s failure. This does not even enter my mind. I run along the frosted boardwalk to a point that looks east to an expanse of low-lying farmlands—a vast, yawning valley. The rain has stopped and the sky behind me is clear. The clouds lie corralled in the valley. They are monolithic and move as one surging mass, a lulling glacial drift. I stand there stupefied, nerves frazzled in the afterglow of last night’s experience. Based upon the few times I’ve been up at this hour, I invent a ludicrous first principle: before sunrise, clouds will always descend to the lowest possible point. And the pre-dawn calm brings no idea of how the day will be.
