Hokkaido Highway Blues

through a ghost town where the houses were boarded up and falling down.
    Sato followed the shore north to Rumoi. Flaccid, rancid, rusting Rumoi, spread out this way and that, a city filmed in sepia where the playgrounds were patches of brown grass and the ships bled rust into the harbor. Everything needed a new coat of paint. Even the sky. Especially the sky. I felt like grabbing a can of bright yellow latex and running around madly dabbing it onto surfaces. It was such a melancholy, beat-about place. If Hakodate was Russian in style, Rumoi was Russian in its soul. Even the name sounded Russian: Rumoi.
    The Russians were in town all right. They had graduated from bicycles and were now stealing cars. They would roll them onto ships in the night and whisk them away to Siberia, though how much truth there was in this was hard to say. If you ask me, it smacks of urban legend.
    Sato gave me an informal tour of Rumoi barbershops. We drove up one dusty road and down another, and every shop looked sad and wistful. More glimpses into strangers’ lives. A procession of faces and smiles from the roadside. Along the way I saw an old man delivering newspapers in a rickshaw. A rickshaw, mind you. In Rumoi, the question was not what city were you in, but what century.
    I got dropped off on the north side of town, across a flat muddy river that sloughed its way to the sea. Concrete seawalls created a backwater, brackish and sewer green, and a miasma of swamp gas lingered in the air. I couldn’t wait to get out of Rumoi.
    From where I stood, I counted five lighthouses at various points around the harbor entrance. This puzzled me. There was no way Rumoi needed five different lighthouses; the bay wasn’t that tricky. I couldn’t help but think there was more to it than mere navigation. It was a product of yearning, a way of signaling the world that we are still here on the far edge of a northern island, the lighthouse lights turning around and around like a prayer wheel. Please come. Please. Please come. Please.
     

14
     
    I’M NOT SURE why, but just outside of Shosanbetsu I ran out of steam.
    It was a small, nondescript village, just a cluster of homes really, but I felt the irrational urge to stop. To turn around. The cape was less than a day’s travel away; I knew I had made it, knew I could make it. So why go on?
    I had climbed my way up the coast, one rung at time, from one obscure town to the other, and here, north of Shosanbetsu, my momentum had finally faltered.
    The sea was throwing wild crashes of wave up across the side of the highway. They came in like cannonballs, again and again, and the trucks drove through with their wipers on. Above me, on a grassy hill, stood a lone Shinto shrine facing the sea. I walked up an overgrown path to offer a coin and a prayer. The torii was faded from salt water and time, and behind it, past the downward slope of a hill, was a small village. I sat down on the steps of the shrine.
    A crow had settled on the torii gate crossbeams. The wind was sweeping through the grass, carrying the smell of dust and straw. I could hear the sea, throwing itself against the highway, and it echoed, like the sound of a distant battle.
    Something moved, something just beneath the surface—like a vein under skin.
     
    * * *
     
    We chart our lives in graphs, in erratic heartbeats up and down. We live our lives in motion, trailing former selves behind us like the images in a strobe-light photograph. And yet, the nature of motion—that primary aspect of our existence—eludes us.
    Through a series of logical paradoxes, the pre-Socratic philosopher Zeno proved that motion was nothing more than an illusion. But it was Zeno’s logic that was the illusion, not motion. Motion remains a brute force— perhaps the brute force—of nature. The philosopher Heraclitus, in contrast, defined the very universe in terms of motion. “We never step into the same river twice. All is in flux.”
    We are in flux as well, and the same person never steps into the river twice either.
    In the Inuktitut language of the Far North, the Inuit make a key distinction between objects at rest and objects in motion. An object that is moving extends itself across a landscape. It is a different substance, a different thing when it stops moving. Motion does not describe the object, it defines it. When a bear moving across an ice floe stops, it becomes something else entirely, and a different word is used to describe it.
    When in motion,