Fourth time's a charm

IV: Rest

“Turn around, turn around, turn around / And you may come full circle and be new here again” — Bill Callahan, “I’m New Here”

“It’s through re-walking that I’ve come to realize the only true walk is the re-walk.” — Craig Mod, Things Become Other Things

For the fourth time this year, I put one foot in front of the other and crossed the Tanzawa Mountains. What had started as a vague and ambitious idea had become, as many of my self-projects do, a burden and a bore. 

In January, I decided this year I would hike the same mountain and send this newsletter in each of the four seasons. It was now eleven months later and nearing the shortest day of the year, and somehow I was sweating. It was 20 C and clear as I set out again from Yabitsu Tōge and step, step, step, headed northwest.

I’m not much for a re-walk. Re-heat? Certainly. Re-read? Often. But the idea of a re-walk bothers the insatiable novelty seeker inside, endlessly critical and consuming. With that in mind, I thought there might be value in irritating her by walking the same path over and over.

In January, a small heartbreak was followed by a medium concussion which was followed by a big tragedy. We suddenly lost Alex, a sort of collective younger brother to our college friend group, the sardonic moon to his real brother’s terrifying sun. The days were bright and short and cold; I wandered around the temple looking at pre-spring buds, thinking about how all that potential energy could be wasted by calamitous weather. In late February, I started to feel a tightness, a familiar anxiety uniquely triggered by Japanese bureaucracy, which causes me to question my choices and geography. I panicked. On a Friday, I bought a plane ticket to Vietnam for the following Tuesday. My third day in Hanoi the noise of motorbikes was so loud that in my sleep I bit one front tooth loose, leading to a relaxing visit to a Vietnamese dentist office. I came home. The sakura started to blossom. 

At the spring equinox, it was still cold. I was on my first hike in Tanzawa for the year. The supposed highlight of the hike is a view of Fuji-san, and even though the way up was partly clear, where the mountain was supposed to be was just a wall of cloud. No Fuji-san this time. I came home, and I wrote to you about credit cards, four bureaucracies, the crag of keigo, a “‘borderless garden’ of ‘thusness,’” and moving. 

And that was just the warm up.

Spring is the busiest time of year for the heart. All that promise, all that pollen. The Olympics of FOMO brings with it thick programming, and in April I had two work trips back to back, lost my phone in between, romantic butterflies and coincidences flitted across trains planes phones and dance floors, and then people came to visit back to back to back to back, before I left for the US, where I ate and ate and drove upstate to chase frogs. Sometimes thinking about the void seems like a very evenly matched, glacially paced staring contest; other times the void is very good at filling itself, like a google calendar endlessly regenerating.

At the summer solstice, the mountain was as thick as the day was long. Beetles crawling, spider webs glittering with moisture. Grass and trees swallowed the path. Even the soil seemed pregnant. No Fuji-san again. Instead I watched the clouds roll and lift and fly over the mountains. I came home, and I wrote to you about so much movement, trips to the rave, up mountains and down into the ocean, about my family gathering for the first time in four years, about playing way too much Zelda, about the sham of collecting experiences, the falseness of novelty seeking. 

Move, move, move.

It was July, and I had learned no lessons. The city was sweltering. I hiked in Chiba and felt like garbage; I flew to Fukuoka the next day and immediately realized I had covid. I wandered the steamy streets and thought about how lonely a time it had been in the year and a half I lived there. Now, with friends, symbols of impermanence slapped me across the cheeks as we delighted our way across the miraculously cooler Kyushu summer nights. I went to Miyazaki and we ate ¥4000 mangoes and talked on the beach and flipped over in our beds, unable to resolve the battle of the night’s heat against the shuddering chill of the AC. I arrived back in Tokyo, and so did my sister and her family and then D. Sweat, sweat, sweat, up mountains and down again. I turned a new age on a boat in Indonesia. I came home, left again.

At the autumn equinox, life was still going strong, but had paled slightly. Mushrooms and moss, shaggy pillows of fallen wet leaves. Summer pushes later and later, and September is still thick with humidity, so for the third time I saw clouds where there should have been a volcano. Pity, no Fuji-san. I came home, and I wrote to you about diving for a week, strategic stillness, competitive chillness, bright plumes of fish and manta rays, the audacity of wanting to be a human instead of a mermaid, the will to be a stone. 

It was time for a cool down.

After Indonesia, I decided to stop moving until December. I sat and thought about sitting. I studied. I tidied. I readied the house for winter using sorcery that once again pushed the very limits of what storage can do. I said yes to things in Tokyo I normally couldn’t make it to, house parties, art events, DJ sets, festivals, pop-ups, dinner. At first I enjoyed it, and then it started to feel like New York, triple bookings a day, hangovers bleeding into the first drink of the early dark of evening. Wedged between two social events, I made the final ascent of Tanzawa.

Two weeks until the winter solstice, and I was shedding layers like a snake. The bright blue of the sky lit up the space between the limbs of the bare trees, the grasses tall and dry, shifting with the wind, their friction making a soft ambient rustle. The sun cast black shadows on this high contrast day, the weather good enough to draw the hikers out in numbers, causing little traffic jams on the path. I thought about the year, all that had happened and hadn’t. 

To say you had a good year or a bad year usually means skimming through and tallying the big headlines: Got a raise; lost a job; got a girlfriend; lost a brother; made a person; made a book. Those aren’t usually the things I think about at the end of a year. Months are clusters of funny and moving things that got sketched into memory. And within the arbitrary bookends of a year I merely hope that I did something new, unusual, or difficult.

I remember being on a bus at age 24, stuck for what seemed like hours in traffic on the way from an expensive conference to the after party, next to a man who was on several boards of several things that sounded vaguely important. He said he had been diving all over the world, to the most stunning spots in Belize, Thailand, six, seven times, and maybe he was getting a bit jaded. With what? Everything. As the bus chugged forward, I listened to the faceless voice in the dark. What he was describing was so removed from my life that I didn’t take it for the warning that it was. I felt pity for this rich bored white man. That could never happen to me.

A decade of moving and being moved later, and some qualms have snuck in. I sometimes wonder if beauty runs out. It’s not a void-sized concern, but it is void-adjacent, like furniture. Does all this get old at some point?

Over the last two years I have attempted through this newsletter to use nature and seasons to give some structure to the blur and splatter of experience. If there is meaning to be gleaned from the project of walking the same path four times in a year — and I’m not convinced there has to be; some things simply are — it might be about being a viewer of art, and more broadly, beauty. Nature and its creatures both randomly and deliberately generate beauty in abundance. It occurs in small, component parts of incidental beauty, like light hitting the side of a glass filled with amber colored beer, and compounded, “designed” beauty, like site-specific art installations the size of buildings that interact with their natural surroundings. But there is neither meaning “in” the sight nor “in” the individual viewer, as Louise Rosenblatt might have said. The walker, reader, viewer, with their biases, moods, little dramas, losses and gains, grow and shrink over the sweep of time, and this gives endless generation of new, overwhelming impressions.

The supposedly must-see view falls flat as the clouds come in; a gallery of mediocre art shifts completely because you’re standing with someone you love. Beauty, after all, depends on weather. And because the weather outside and the weather inside us combine in ways we can’t foresee, the possibilities are continuous. Novelty in sameness; because in fact, sameness itself is an illusion.

I have seen the view of Fuji-san from Tonodake twice. The first time was December 31, 2021, at the end of arguably two of the worst years I’d been through so far (if you’re into those sorts of assessments). I spent the night in a mountain hut at the summit and woke up to see the sun rise over the nation’s mountain, its snowy peak shaded pink. I didn’t have gloves, and my fingers stung from the cold. I was thinking about how people meet, and then stop meeting. It was sunny then snowy then cloudy then sunny again within a few seconds. 

The second time was a few weeks ago. I stepped up onto the summit. The hikers were gathered in dense clusters on the crappy wooden planks, all facing the same way, like in a theater, with Fuji-san as the stage. The hills rolled away in little fuzzy waves, blanketed by a layer of mist, while Fuji looked out on it all, singular and towering and still. I heard a man and a woman of an unclear relationship having a spat. The woman had wanted udon and the hut had run out. “They only had soba,” she said bitterly, and pulled out her phone in a petulant defiance of the man’s presence. Then the man disappeared into the crowd of chatting lunchers. The woman looked up, realized she was alone, and in a voice laced with fear, began calling his name.