Bessekai
“It had been a hard, embattled year and we were simply holding our breath, waiting for it to end. We hoped, with that apprehension refugees must feel when they are approaching a border, that the passage would be unnoticeable and that no further disasters would whiten the bleaching year.” — James Baldwin, No Name in the Street
“It is yet another day, weather, time, news, stuff happening all across the country/countries, etc.” — Ali Smith, Autumn
One day in spring I woke up before 6 and spent four hours on a train, the shinkansen, and a bus to arrive at the foot of Yatsugadake in Nagano. It was a bright early May day, and the trails had just opened for the season. My plan was to hike to the first peak, stay the night in a mountain hut, ridge walk to the second two peaks, hike down, and catch the bus back.
I got off the bus and glanced at the packs of the other hikers. Other people seemed to have helmets. Hmm. I popped my head into the gear shop by the trail registry and asked if they sold helmets, and they said I could borrow one if I was coming back the same way. Feeling pleased and prepared, I headed back out. Two men stood guarding the registry box, and eager to get going, I quickly scanned the unusually long form and scribbled my information, then shoved it into the box.
Half an hour later, still on a driving road, I heard a car coming up behind me and made room for it to pass. It drove past, stopped, backed up. “Excuse me. Is this yours?” said the man inside, holding up my incomplete form. He cast an extremely dubious glance at my gear and asked if I had been winter hiking before. “Sure,” I said, not bothering to clarify whether that was different from going on a hike in winter. He asked me if I had aizen, the word for crampons, a loan word from German apparently meaning iron. I nodded enthusiastically, having ordered a set in the final hour before my trip. He asked me how many spikes it had. I stared at him. “…Eleven?” His eyes popped. He asked if I had an ice axe. A what now?
I waved off his questions, confident for absolutely no reason, and went on my way.
An hour later I stopped at a mountain hut to use the bathroom. I asked the guy running it which part of the trail he thought I might need a helmet. He looked at my boots and burst out laughing.
“Those are summer hiking boots,” he said. “Yes,” I said. “Summer, also spring, fall. It’s May,” I pointed out. He asked if I had aizen, or an ice axe. Yes, and no, I said. He told me to change my plan. I reassured him. He gave a jovial, “Good luck!” And I started up the mountain.
It was a beautiful day. There was still snow on the ground, but it was melting, and the river was a rush of sound and life. Everything was great!
After another two hours, I was on a narrow snow-covered hump of trail when three men approached going the opposite way. One seemed to address me, so I stepped to the side to let them pass. “Somethingsomething!” the man in front then said, pointing at my feet. Used to the contrast between Japan’s never-address-strangers city etiquette and its gregarious mountain culture, I said “Yep!” and waited for them to pass. They didn’t. I looked up.
The first man pointed at the symbol on his jacket. “We’re the police,” he said. “We’ve been looking for you.”
A concerned party had apparently seen my summer boots and placed a call to the mountain authorities. We spent the next few minutes examining my gear and discussing what one even does with an ice axe. My outfit didn’t help; when I hike I look like Dora the Explorer crossed with the little boy from the Pixar movie Up. I was told in no uncertain terms that I couldn’t continue to hike all three peaks, and was strongly warned against attempting even the first one.
The police described having to pick hikers off the side of the mountain. The fact that there was no signal should I fall and need to call for help. The fluffy snowdrifts that actually occluded deep drops in the trail. Bad Satsu more or less told me to turn around and go home. Good Satsu said, “Down here, it’s spring. But just another 50 minutes,” he said, gesturing up the trail, “And it’s winter. Over there it’s somethingsomething.” “What’s that?” I asked. “Bessekai,” he said. 別世界. Another world.
I had traveled so far to be moved, and I was not interested in turning back. But I was also not interested in leaving the mountain in a helicopter. I told them I would consider everything they said, and headed to make lunch.
One week ago I was 60 feet under water. Just a few minutes from the surface of the ocean, and all the rules of this other world were new. Breathing was different, speaking was impossible, sneezing was a nightmare scenario.
The number one rule of scuba diving is to never stop breathing. That had sounded simple enough two days earlier when I read it in a book on land, but now in the open waters of the Gulf of Mexico it was proving remarkably easy to forget, lose focus, and hold my breath.
To avoid rupturing your lungs later, in order to not break your eardrum, to prevent an excess of gas bubbles in your blood, and most importantly, to avoid a helicopter as an exit strategy, you need to be intensely aware of the now. It was quickly obvious that meta narration, self-mythologizing, and gathering material for jokes were all perilous here. Even looking over at my friends, feeling the power of 15 years of affection and annoyance and amusement, was too big a distraction from the important task of breathing. To move forward, and to prevent unspeakable pain in the future, there could only be now.
As we swam deeper, my mind instinctually fought against the descent. It didn’t want to keep putting more distance between the air and my lungs. But closer to the bottom of the ocean floor, a new distraction, the reason we’d all come, came into view. Huge bursts of coral, sculptures like mountains, claws and hands and long fingers and suction cups, purples and oranges and reds, reaching and waving. Cities of fish, brightly striped in highlighter colors, a barracuda, a stingray, a moray eel, an entire civilization about which to contemplate and narrate.
Absorbed in steady breathing and fish romances, I started to swim ahead of the group. After a minute I realized that the buoyant blond hair of the guy I was about to follow into a tunnel of coral was not the hair of my instructor. I knew if I started to panic that my breath would become short, and I knew if I moved my head too quickly to the side it would feel like water was coming into my mask, which would contribute to panic. At the same time I knew it was unlikely I could really stray too far, I just wanted to swim free into this extremely cool-looking area. I edged my head slightly to the side and looked behind me. My friends and instructor were gesturing animatedly for me to follow them away from my path. Another world, just out of reach.
I don’t consider myself an explorer type, nor do I think of travel as one of my hobbies. (Though this may have more to do with my inability to grasp personality, also hobbies.) Still, I get around. In 2018, London, Mexico City, the Norwegian fjords, La Paz. In 2019 I moved out of the US and first to Hanoi then Fukuoka, and in between I went to Taipei, Hong Kong, and Busan. I had grand visions of life in Asia. But of course between December 2019 and August 2021, I didn’t leave the borders of Japan. I could intimately feel the weeks passing, nearly two years of uninterrupted seasonal cycles.
Last week in Cozumel I felt almost rusty, forgot how to behave when visiting another world, how to avoid ATM fees, roaming charges, tap water, airport swindles. And so we missed ferries, lost hotel keys, miscalculated the exchange rate. We strapped tanks to our backs and swam to the ocean floor. We passed the winter solstice in our bathing suits. Weightless in the pool, we ordered endless Ojo Rojos, and stared up at Mars, the red eye in the sky winking at the red eyes down below.
All things considered, I got quite a lot out of being stuck in one place, of being forced into tune with the particular changes in weather in Japan, with its particular cultural consciousness of seasons. At the same time that this was an unwitting exercise in stillness, the nowness also dissolved into a forever, the hope of past and future springs indistinguishable from the darkness of past and future winters. Still, I’m glad to be able to look beyond again, to seek, to move and be moved. To hop a time zone to a different timeline; to walk up a mountain into a different season; to sink down into the ocean to a different planet: There’s always another world waiting somewhere. But really, it’s not so much moving forward as moving sideways. Because things, places, time, questions: They have a way of returning.
P.S. This is the last of the (bi)weekly griefs. Stay tuned for the newsletter in a new form next year! Thank you so much for subscribing and reading. I’m incredibly grateful.