Hi Guys!!

This isn't really about a global issue, but I thought I would share my trip to Mt. Fuji with everyone. It was quite an experience!

Climbing Mt. Fuji

Being a teacher, I had all of last August off, which meant that I stayed home most of the time and my sleep patterns became so totally skewed that I ended up working on my “projects” at odd hours of the night, and then proceeded to sleep throughout the day in the various rooms of my apartment. Worried that at the age of 34 this is not a good way to live and that my entire holiday was going to slip by before I did anything worthwhile, I forced my friend Taka to attempt to climb Mt. Fuji with me. Fools that we were, we planned an overnight ascent to the top so that we would arrive in time to watch the sun majestically arise over the far horizon, as suggested by a well known travel guide. After all, we were in the land of the rising sun. This was something we had to do at least once in our lives.

Wanting to take the shinkansen as well for the excitement and adventure, we arrived at the Shin-Fuji Bullet Train station at about 3:30 that afternoon, and then took the special bus to the “Fifth Station” of Fujinomia. We were going to climb up the Fujinomia side, which is the most convenient way to climb to the top coming from Osaka on the shinkansen.

At first, everything was delightful. As we alighted from the bus at the Fifth Station, we were greeted by crisp mountain air, and a temperature of about 20 degrees Celsius. I was home! It felt like summer in Alberta. My entire body was budding in happiness to have escaped from the insufferable polluted mugginess of urban Japan. I charged ahead with Taka trailing behind me. This is the life, I exclaimed, feeling as if I were a strange mixture of 19th Century British Explorer and rugged 21st Century outdoorsy type. Stopping only long enough to purchase sacred Shinto walking sticks, mine festooned with red ribbons and silver bells, Taka’s adorned with yellow ribbons and silver bells, we started to ascend the mountain to the jingling of bells and the thudding of our hearts.

Within twenty minutes we had reached the sixth station. I was ecstatic. I loved climbing in the mountains. Why, if I lived in the area, I would probably climb Mt. Fuji every weekend just for the exercise. There was also a cheery kind of camaraderie on the trail. We met some Canadians at the sixth station, and joked about how warm it was. We were the only people wearing t-shirts, the majority of Japanese around us in gortex outfits that probably would cost me a month’s wages. Taka and I approached an old lady inside a hut who sat on a raised tatami mat platform beside a charcoal hearth. Taka asked if we could get our sticks branded. The trick to the sacred walking sticks is that you are supposed to get them branded at each station as you climb up the mountain, culminating at the tenth station at the top. I watched in fascination, as a young man was called from somewhere in the depths of the mountain hut to pull out the brand from the charcoal fire and burn the symbol of the sixth station into our sticks. Then a bubbly young girl carrying a tray of porcelain cups approached us. With a deferential bow, she asked us if we would like to try some free mountain mushroom tea. Wow, this was Japan at it’s best! I told Taka two or three times that this was the real Japan, thereby unconsciously nullifying his own daily suburban existence as something other than Japanese. I sipped the tea, salt and earth dancing on my tongue. I felt as if I were tasting the history of the mountain. Ancient mysteries were conveying themselves to me through this liquid distillation of Fuji.

“It’s good,” said Taka.

“It’s like ambrosia from the ancient gods of Japan,” I replied, tending towards hyperbole due to my exuberant spirits. We were politely invited to buy some tea to take home from the little shop attached to the mountain hut. We were told we could only buy this tea from this hut. None of the other huts on the mountain had this tea. I imagined Japanese maidens gathering mushrooms in the mist and then drying them in the high mountain sun to make this delicately flavoured tea. The very essence of Fuji being captured by the mushrooms. I verbalized my thoughts to Taka. He told me they probably bought the tea in bulk from Tokyo to sell as souvenirs to tourists and that there were no mushrooms on Fuji because they couldn’t grow on the barren volcanic rocks. I marched on up the mountain, thinking the only reason I didn’t purchase any tea was because I didn’t want to burden my backpack with any extra weight.

We were walking up the Fujinomiya trail, the black rocks of Fuji on either side of us gradually becoming more and more devoid of any vegetation. Bit by bit, as the landscape around us completed its transformation into a barren sloping moonscape, it got darker and darker and colder and colder. Taka and I broke open our backpacks to put on the long sleeve shirts and sweatshirts we had brought with us. Each step up the mountain was now getting more difficult, and we were traveling more and more slowly. The arrival at each mountain hut was a cause for great celebration, but it was now night time, and we found the huts closed to us in the darkness. We couldn’t get our sacred sticks branded. No problem, however, I figured Taka and I would make it to the top in good time, and then we could find a nice cozy spot to sleep until the rising of the sun. We could always stop at each hut on the way down, having bowls of hearty udon noodles, and get our sticks branded then. We ate the peanuts and raisins we had brought along with us to give us energy.

However, it was now the middle of the night, and it was cold. We started up the path again, and I could hear Taka’s laboured breathing behind me. We stumbled over rocks and volcanic debris. Taka had taken out his flashlight and was trying to light up the way in front of me while maintaining his own balance on the trail. My sweat soaked cotton undershirt was chilled and clinging to my body. The path to the top of the mountain had now deteriorated from being a proper trail to being indistinguishable from the surrounding volcanic surface. A thin rope had been strung up erratically to guide people in folding switchbacks ever upwards up the side of the mountain, and from time to time I steadied myself using the rope, the rope sagging and dipping dangerously with my weight as I pulled myself up. We were moving much more slowly now with ever smaller footsteps towards our goal. Gradually, the minor ache I had begun to experience around my temples at the Eighth Station was turning into a splitting headache that thundered and blotted out rational thought. Any slight movement to my head started a pounding drum chorus in my brain accompanied by an irresistible urge to throw up all over the black porous rocks at the side of the trail. I stopped to turn around and look dizzily at Taka who was suffering from the exact same symptoms as me, only to have them exacerbated by my now moaning on about the book “Into Thin Air” and how all those people died on Mt. Everest because they foolishly pushed their way to the top when they should have just gone back down the mountain.

Stopping and looking at each other, we swayed amongst the rocks. What were we going to do? I looked up to see if I could see the top and suddenly I felt as if I were in Tibet. I had achieved a moment of clarity in which I could see my past lives. I had once been a monk. That is the only explanation for my ability to recognize what I had never seen. A Tibetan Buddhist monastery was perched on a cliff above us, looming in the darkness. “Look,” I said to Taka grasping his shoulder for balance and pointing reverently to the sky and the mountain. “It looks like a Buddhist monastery.” I gasped out a choked whisper between heavy breaths. “If we can get there, we’re saved.” Through the deep purple of the night, I could made out a wooden deck that had been adorned with prayer flags.

With renewed strength and determination we soldiered on until we made it to what turned out not to be a Tibetan Monastery, but the “Ninth Station”: a mountain hut for branding sticks and serving instant noodles. There were no prayer flags. However, it still felt like salvation. It was around one o’clock in the morning and according to a tourist pamphlet I had stuffed into my backpack, we were only an hour away from the top. Nonetheless, I had to stop and rest. Even slight movement made me feel as if I was about to puke out my guts. Waves of nausea racked my body, and memories of the worst hangovers in my past resurfaced in my consciousness as jugs of cheap Italian wine quaffed in college danced about in my head getting a belated revenge.

We decided to try and sleep a little bit before making the final agonizing decision to go up or down the mountain. However, the quaint mountain hut at the ninth station was barricaded and silent against our entreaties to enter at that late hour. Our salvation melted into a false promise of rest and comfort. Turning dejectedly from this mountain fortress, I thought of Joseph, Mary and the Baby Jesus, as we looked for somewhere sheltered from the wind. We ended up collapsing beside a oddly shaped boulder onto some lumpy volcanic rock off to the side of the trail, huddled together like two hobbits about to descend into Mordor. I started shivering uncontrollably. I had never shivered like that before in my life. It started with an uncontrollable vibration in my right leg, and then spread to my torso and chest before shaking my head and dissipating into a brief moment of calm before traveling up my body once again. I tried to huddle closer to Taka, but succeeded only in causing his body to vibrate from the cold in harmony with mine. In addition to the extreme altitude sickness both Taka and I were suffering from, it was also about 7 degrees Celsius. Seven degrees, you scoff. Yeah, well try seven degrees 3,400 meters above sea level when you are gasping and wheezing for oxygen like an emphysema patient smoking a cigar. We were cold. Naturally, we were woefully unprepared for the cold, because I had ripped the extra sweaters out from our back packs back in the 34 degree heat of Osaka, telling Taka that I was “Canadian” and didn’t need no sissy extra sweaters for any temperature above freezing. I thought I was so smart, making our back packs lighter and easier to carry. Taka, bless him, never did throw my foolish actions back into my face, and just shivered and suffered silently beside me acting as Samwise to my Frodo.

After fifteen minutes of violent shaking that likes of which I had never experienced in my life, it was no good, we were too cold. We couldn’t sleep. We were going to die. We had to keep moving. We stood up. We sat back down. We narrowly avoided puking. We stoop up again, clutching each other and our ceremonial walking sticks outfitted with the ribbons and Shinto bells. I swayed with dizziness. Grabbing Taka with both hands, my stick digging into him, I asked him if he felt well enough to continue to the top, praying that he would say he felt too sick to go on. His answer was that if I wanted to keep going, he would follow me. Damn, the responsibility was mine. The image of money flashed through my throbbing brain. It wouldn’t have been so bad if it didn’t cost us a total of $500 CND in train tickets to get to the bloody mountain in the first place. Then I thought, money pales in comparison to the importance of being able to live to tell the tale about this sad attempt on Mt. Fuji. I could warn others to bring extra sweaters, and therefore do something good in this world. But it was almost $500. I already told everyone I knew I was going to climb Mt. Fuji. I had even scoffed at one of my fellow teachers from Australia who didn’t make it to the top, subtly mocking her weakness and lack of will while humbly giving out the impression that I was a paragon of steadfast mountaineering manhood having had the experience of living beside the Canadian Rocky Mountains. I would never give up. That was the impression I was sure everyone had of me. Trying to get the better of the pounding in my head, and suppressing the dancing fantasies of letting my guts spill out in vomit at the side of the trail, I started to trudge as pathetically as I could up the 45 degree incline that made its jagged way to the top. Taka staggered forward and grabbed my arm. I swayed. “No, no, I’m okay” I said, holding my sacred Shinto climbing stick as if it were a crucifix. “We will regret it if we don’t make it to the top,” and pushing aside his arm, I turned once more to the summit.

“Let’s go back down Scott. I’m worried about you. I also feel sick.”

I wobbled and hesitated. “Well, if you feel sick . . .” I peered through the darkness at Taka’s face, raising my Shinto staff and half pointing it at him. “How sick do you feel?”

“Sick”

Little red demons danced a jig in beat with the pounding of my headache. Here was a reprieve. My agonized brain told me we were merely going back down because Taka felt sick. I couldn’t let Taka feel sick now, could I? I had to help him down the mountain. The unwritten rules of friendship demanded it. “Okay, let’s go down,” I replied with alacrity, impressing myself with my ability to make split second decisions like a true leader. I teetered briefly on one foot and then turned and began to stumble downwards through the darkness with Taka. We had started climbing that evening at about 5:30 pm, it was now past 1:30 in the morning. We were nauseous. We were exhausted. We were in pain from climbing. Down, down, down, we went back down the mountain, the tiny beam of light from Taka’s flashlight leading the way, lighting up the moonscape in front of us, the beam stopping now and then to warn me of particularly tricky pitfalls in the trail. Going down was interminable. I felt so sick, and the sickness was mixed with a rising and falling humiliation that wrenched at my soul. Stumbling through the darkness, seeing nothing except the sharp rocks lit up by the tiny circle of light that surrounded our feet, I was attempting to convince myself the that trip had been worth it. I was failing, but agony, exhaustion and pain were enough to rise up to blot out the failure and compel me to continue towards a lower elevation. Every once and a while, overcome by fatigue, we would go off the path to try and sleep, huddled amongst the rocks and primordial volcanic boulders, but the cold made it impossible, and we would get up once again, stiff and sore to begin once more our defeated descent to safety.

After going down about a thousand meters, we started to feel better. It was a bit warmer outside. My head had stopped pounding, and the overwhelming urge to throw up had settled into a slight nausea and regret for eating so many peanuts on the way up. I burped loudly into the night and could taste mushroom tea. We shuffled once more off the path tripping over rocks and sliding through the sand, looking for somewhere relatively smooth to rest. We lay down, and I took a plastic raincoat out of my backpack and spread it over my body to retain some heat. We fell asleep. It must have been about three am.

Suddenly I heard a scream. A blood curdling banshee of a scream. Had we somehow offended the female deity said to live in the volcano? My eyes opened and in the purple light of the darkness I could just make out the figure of a woman or a girl a stone’s throw away on the path.

“Who’s there?” she asked in English, her voice cracking with fear. I was surprised, I remained lying where I was, my head turned towards her, and answered back “two people”.

“You scared me,” she said accusingly. Her accent was odd, but not Japanese.

“You scared me,” I retorted.

“Do you know how far it is to the top?” She asked.

“About four hours.” I responded, though in reality I had no idea. My eyes strained to see her in the darkness. She didn’t have a flashlight, and was making her way up the mountain by the light of the half moon that gleamed in the far night sky.

“Okay, thanks,” and she continued her solitary climb.

I watched her for a moment pick her way up slowly in the darkness, sending showers of small rocks and debris behind her, and then fell back asleep and dreamed of fairies and demons.

Taka poked me. “Are you sleeping?”

“No”

“Who were you talking to before?”

“I don’t know. Weird eh?” I looked up at the sky. An alien array of stars covered the vast profusion above me.

“The stars are different in Japan,” I told Taka. He looked up.

“Look a falling star, did you see it? Did you see it?” He cried, suddenly animated.

“Where?” I asked, my head moving back and forth scanning the sky.

“There’s another one!” Taka’s arm pointed up from where we were lying.

“Where? Where?”

“Ah, look!”

“Ah!”

We both saw one. We lay in silence looking up at the night sky, a bright half moon in the east.

After a moment contemplating all this beauty, Taka said, “I’m cold.”

I told Taka about Leonard Bast and the book Howard’s End and how this character went walking in the woods to see the sunrise in the morning mist just like he had read in a poem. He was a working class fellow who was a clerk in an insurance firm, and two upper class sisters who had befriended him had asked him if it was marvelous, but he had replied that it had just been cold. Taka didn’t really get what I was talking about and looked at me quizzically in the same way a Labrador retriever might look at an old granny had she stopped to have a conversation with him about the political situation in India.

“Okay, let’s keep moving,” I sighed, and once more I felt like we were Frodo and Samwise as we got our aching bodies off the ground, my hands moving one above the other up my sacred stick to help me. We stood for a moment to get our bearings, and looked for the path. Taka’s flashlight made a wandering lonely yellow dot on the black rock around us. It all looked the same. I knew it had to be close, but we just couldn’t find it. We risked falling into a ravine or something worse, but downwards we continued, Taka tripping and staggering before me, the muscles in my legs crying out in silent protest with each step as I promised myself to be nicer to Taka after this trip. We had been hiking now for over 10 hours. Taka’s flashlight was beginning to scan the moon like surface of Fuji in a panicked dance across the rocks, but still we tripped and stumbled. But as we tripped and stumbled, with each step I felt less sick and the headache became no more than a memory. I was half tempted to turn around and go back towards the summit, but I knew that my legs would never carry me another step upwards.

Predawn was now coming to the mountain, the sky to the left of us gradually becoming a lighter shade of purple, that shadowless time of the night when we no longer needed the flashlight. Taka turned it off and stopped to get me to put it into his backpack as he stood there and contemplated the diminishing night sky and fading stars. Soon we found a side trail leading off from where we were scrambling down the mountain. We took it and hiked on the mountain side trail towards the east, my legs grateful to be walking on relatively flat ground. We were now marching towards the dawn, at least we would still see the rising sun of Japan! We walked with renewed vigour, Taka’s sacred Shino bells ringing each time he thrust his wooden walking stick into the ground. My sacred stick was silent. I had lost my bells somewhere on the side of the mountain when I had fallen and used it to stop me from being lacerated by the razor sharp volcanic rock. Now my red ribbons hung limp and frayed against the wood surface of my stick. Nevertheless, after about ten minutes we came across a likely hillock that we could sit upon and wait for the rising sun. We faced the direction that we felt was east. Gradually it got lighter. I heard birds. It got still lighter. My heart thumped in anticipation watching the deep purple of the night turn into the pale blue of the dawn, the stars disappearing from the sky. This must be the moment, the horizon was now turning white. I heard more birds. And then it was really, really light, high wisps of white cloud above us in the sky. It was day. Hey, where was the sun? We realized that it had already risen around the curve of the mountain. We missed it! All that hiking, and well, there we were sitting in a big shadow, we had just watched the sky get light because we were on the wrong side of the mountain. I looked at Taka, he looked at me. We struggled to hide the disappointment in our faces. We uncrossed our aching legs to get up and continue down the mountain, but just as we got up and turned to take the side trail to where we could go back down, Taka said,

“Look!”

“What?” I saw nothing. I was exhausted and semi-delirious with fatigue.

“Look, it is the shadow of Fuji!” and he was right. There, etched on the hazy blue sky, whispering clouds and mist in front of us was a perfect cone. It was the dark shadow of Mt. Fuji appearing in front of us, suspended in space, a spirit twin to the solid mountain on which we found ourselves so early that morning. For two seconds I said nothing, drinking in this amazing sight. I reached to pull the camera out from the front pocket of my backpack. I took a picture. Taka took a picture with the same camera. Putting our heads together we compared pictures in the screen of the green digital camera we had brought along. And then we continued on to find the trail to the bottom.

Scott Roy Douglas
Hirakata City, August 20, 2004