Hokkaido Highway Blues

hitched a ride with dropped me off on the side of an expressway. ‘Are you sure this is legal?” I asked as I got out.
    “Sure. Completely legal. Don’t worry”
    I was on a high curve of asphalt, miles from the nearest town. A silver river ran through the valley below like a trail of mercury. Farther out, railway tracks cut a suture line across green fields, adding to the sense of space and distance.
    I walked into the landscape. I was on the watershed of Japan; to one side the mountains sloped toward the Inland Sea, on the other, they sloped north toward the colder, wilder Sea of Japan. The air was clean and the views were panoramic. As long as the highway patrol didn’t drive by, I was fine.
    I walked toward what I thought was a small village. It turned out to be a graveyard, stacked up along the side of an embankment. There was a scattering of farmhouses nearby, but little else.
    “What on earth are you doing way out here?”
    It was the first question asked of me by a couple in a large family sedan when it pulled over. He was puzzled. She was concerned. ‘Are you lost? Are you in trouble?”
    They were Masaru and Teruko Ito. Masaru was a kindly man, with a heavy face and gentle eyes. His wife, Teruko, although in her fifties, had the energy of a schoolgirl. They were on their way into Maizuru City, and they welcomed me into their vehicle and fretted over me like parents anywhere. They had a daughter my age, they said. She could speak English, a little, and wasn’t it a shame she wasn’t here to meet me.
    In lieu of her daughter, Mrs. Ito flirted with me instead. Did I have a girlfriend? Sort of. Was she Japanese? What did I think of Japanese girls? “Well,” I said, “like you they are very attractive.”
    She laughed. “He’s charming,” she said to her husband, and he gave me a congratulatory nod.
    We compared our countries, our lifestyles, our differing approaches to dating and romance. And wasn’t it a shame that their daughter—who was single, by the way—wasn’t it a shame she wasn’t here to meet me.
    The Cherry Blossom Front was only now coming to this side of Japan. “These use officially designated cherry trees,” said Mr. Ito. “The trees are planted at one hundred and two different weather stations across Japan, and the degree of blossoms are carefully monitored. That’s how they decide the percentage of flowers and the location of the Front itself.” It sounded very scientific. And it was.
    Mr. Ito warned me that the cherry blossoms were late this year. The radio had announced that they were only at sixty percent bloom. His wife paused, suitably worried on my behalf, and then immediately launched into an inquiry about Western weddings. Was it true that the bride and groom kissed, right up there in front of everybody?
    We began our descent in lazy looping corners, down from the mountains and into a patchwork of fields and rolling foothills. We passed stands of top-heavy bamboo, listing in the wind like giant feather dusters, and then down to the naval port of Maizuru and the Sea of Japan. I had expected to see the cold blue color of slate, with relentless waves and windswept houses perched along its shore, but for all the foreboding images, it wasn’t that bad. A few waves, yet not much worse than the calm, flat waters of the Inland Sea.
    “You should see it during a storm,” said Mr. Ito. “It attacks the coast. Frightening.”
    “But exciting,” said Mrs. Ito. “Storms are full of life.”
    A flutter of cherry blossoms flitted by outside the window. Mr. Ito frowned. “Those don’t look sixty percent in bloom,” he said, and we then had a long, guy-oriented discussion about whether the flowers were fifty percent in bloom or only forty percent. We compromised in the spirit of friendship and decided that they were in fact forty-five percent in bloom. Mr. Ito formally apologized to me on behalf of the cherry trees.
    “The younger trees blossom later,” said Mrs. Ito, making it sound almost poetic. “The older flowers are pink, the younger ones are whiter—purer.”
    “So there is beauty in age,” I said.
    And both Mr. and Mrs. Ito laughed. “You are too charming,” she said, accusingly.
    They were supposed to drop me off outside of Maizuru, but when I told them I was heading to the Bridge of Heaven, they decided, with that unspoken agreement that married couples have, that they would take me up the coast. I made a perfunctory protest, but they insisted, and we