Hokkaido Highway Blues

though that were the formula he had been looking for to sum himself up. “A wise fool,” he said, and smiled to himself with that special affection eccentric people often have for their own foibles. “I have climbed every mountain in Japan,” he boomed. “Every mountain!”
    “Every mountain?” I said, offering him a chance at abridging this bald statement.
    “Every mountain,” he said and proceeded to list them. It was a long list.
    “Mountains put us closer to the gods,” he said. “Japan is a land of thirty thousand million gods! Atop the mountains, the sky and the land meet. The gods are there. I have met the gods.”
    He actually said that: I have met the gods. He was either flamboyant, passionate, or mad. “Really?” I said. “The gods? What did they, ah, look like? Were they like ghosts or could you touch them?“
    He gave me a look of sorrow and exasperation, and said—in one extended sigh, “The gods are the mountains. They aren’t real in the way you say. The gods exist in the act of climbing a mountain, a sacred mountain.” He shook his head and gave up. We drove awhile, surrounded by the scent of flowers no longer present (much like the gods themselves, I imagine). He shifted in his seat, and then, again with a sigh, decided to take another stab at it. “I climb mountains, right?” Yes. “And mountains are closer to the gods, right?” Yes. “In fact mountains are gods.” He waited until I nodded before he continued. “So when I—we, anyone—even you—climb a mountain, climb it with sincerity, the gods—” He looked across at me. I smiled back in what I hoped was an attentive way. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but changed his mind. The theology lesson was over. I never did figure out if he had actually met the gods—like a close encounter of the divine kind—or if he was just speaking figuratively. He didn’t seem like the type of man to resort to metaphors, he was too rooted and no-nonsense.
    “My eldest girl, Etsuko, she practically grew up on the mountains. We first carried her up a mountainside when she was just five months old. She has since traveled through Switzerland, France, and China, climbing mountains along the way. She climbed the Great Wall as well. It was exhausting because it’s man-made. Stairs are too systematic. Nature,” he said pointedly, “doesn’t work in steps.”
    We passed a lone pilgrim—it may have been the one I saw earlier—and Saburō gave his approval. “That man is a real traveler. He has the spirit of Kōbō Daishi. Today’s pilgrims, bah! They travel by bus, they stay in hotels. I call them ‘instant henro.’ Just add water, like Cup Noodle.”
    “Have you done the Eighty-eight Temple Pilgrimage?” I asked. It seemed like a fair question: the pilgrimage route is mountainous, with many of the temples located on peaks high above ravines.
    “The pilgrimage?“ he said. “The pilgrimage?” but he was just buying time. He was already starting to blush, ever so slightly, as though I had caught him in a fib. “No. No, I haven’t, but,” he said in a nonsequitur that seemed to make sense at the time, “I am going to the Rocky Mountains next June with my family. We will climb every mountain there.”
    “Every mountain? Are you sure? I mean, that’s a lot of mountains. Jeez, there must be—”
    “Every mountain,” he said and looked over at me with a cross look, as though I weren’t holding up my end of the conversation.
    We had lunch in the town of Uchiko, on a beautifully preserved street. Uchiko is one of the many places in Japan that are just a half step off the main tourist beat and therefore spared the influx of visitors that infests more famous sites like Kyoto. The town had made its fortune in candle wax, which may seem strange, but in the days before electricity, wax merchants were somewhat akin to the oil barons of today. The entire street, from the Kabuki theater to the stone lantern temple at the other end, was slower, calmer, and more dignified than the modern world that raced by just a block over on the main highway. Saburō’s hands were far too clumsy for flowers I thought, they were the knuckles of a miner, yet here he was drinking fragrant tea, his fingers barely able to grasp the tiny ceramic cup. Above us were wide roof beams. “Yakasugi trees,” he said approvingly. “They come from Yakushima Island. The trees there grow like giants. Biggest trees in the world.”
    “You mean Japan.