富士山

Shall we start from the top?

The crater was the best, Hawaii black and Morroco white with Utah red in crayon thick sedimentary lines. And the slightest bit of under-ocean green, lush, the only bit in miles, moss that crept around the boulder making the highest point of Fuji. On top of the boulder was a white painted wooden post like one you’d park next to, with a simple “arigatou”, scripted in inch high black letters. And politeness level 2 (the equals/inferiors level) of all things...I was tempted to dig a bit and see if it continued on to read “...for all the fish”.
It was bested by the shoddiest temple gate in Japan, three homely poles nailed together and set on the wind torn ridge that made for best place to let the dawn crash in. For some phallic reason (I love Shinto), two little bells were tied to each walking stick (whose onsite purchase was de rigueur), and those bells were to be transferred and tied to the underdressed gate. More transference, than castration, I hope.
Despite the uncomforting thinness of the air, it gathered mightily and firked the heat from our North Face and Gortex shells, and I was surprised the pumice around us didn’t whistle as the wind rushed over the innumerable inverted bubbles. The bells fell like grapes from the vine, and only one hefty bunch remained attached to the gate, lofting at an angle as the rest came down into the rocky soil, where they shone up like the undersides of sea shells. I kept picking them up, thinking to nick them, but in the end I could only take rocks, as the human order remained more sacred to me.

The pun demands itself “things went downhill from there”, but in all fact, the wrong things really started at halfway up the mountain. I had intended to meet Kristi at the Station we started from, number 5, but as Japanese logic would have it, there are several station fives, as Fuji sprawls like Alex parks when so inclined, across several prefectural boundaries. (This does not just confuse foreigners, my favorite Japanese teacher told me of climbing Mt Fuji twice in the same day, lucky for him he’s a tri-athlete, iron man.(and this would consummately be a footnote if I knew how to do that, confound reading all that discworld…)) We had conferred, Kristi and I and despite all the internet, we were still shaky on actually meeting up. As soon as I reached the top my cell phone promptly fell from full bars to one. The sun left as did my friends, disappearing into the starry delta between the buildings and lower back of Fuji. For hours JETs trickled in and on, this being the best window, the weekened after official season, when least likely to be deluged by rain or Japanese.
I asked every fresh off the bus face, “what ken are you from”, but I ended up trying only patience. Just as I got tired of trying to figure out who were the kabalist and who were the psi-sci guys in Gravity’s Rainbow, Kristi emailed me saying she was arrived. No bus pulled up, and as I typed in terror into my cell phone, “where are you?!”, it flared red, and died its habitual death. I spent the next few minutes with a 9 year old girl sales girl trying impotently to jab a cell phone recharger into my unwilling phone, and if the girl hadn’t been impeccably calm and of masterful brevity, a Kurtzean touch of lost-in-third-world-Asian-madness might have touched me.
Kristi magically appeared. She bought a stick and I, incapable of such kitsch, did not. Instead, I bought a wooden sword. Now. This could be a launching point for an essay on Me And My Basement And My Feelings About Swords (and the relevant aesthetics!), but I’ll jut mention I bought it for Nick, who wanted a sword full of the brandings normally reserved for tinkling light brown kitsch hiking sticks. Thus armed, we climbed into the cloudless sky.
A very pleasant few hours of slow hiking happened, where conversation wasn’t make-work, I was still awake enough to appreciate the beauty, and there weren’t a million sluggish Japanese tourists. Then partly because of a bad cold, and partly because she had just driven near nine hours to Fuji and would have to drive back all the way when she got down, Kristi took refuge at a heated hut where she could spend the night. Not nearly half enough gossiping or playful hipstering had gone on, but I was hell bent on beating the sun to the top, so on I went.
Before leaving the hut, I asked the man to brand my sword, but he said that wouldn’t do, either because the lacquering or because he was feeling crotchety. Making my way up to the slope, I found that the rest of the hike would be taking place on scoriac steps of unhewn stone, with natural steps just big enough for a foot. I pulled out my flashlight to illuminate the way, and immediately found I had left it on, and the backup batteries I ‘d switched to had burned an embery, useless orange. Enough monkey left in me, I used my free hands to swing up the cliff side freely, until scraggly groups of Japanese tourists slowed the way. Three steps rush, four steps wait, three steps rush, four steps wait, that was the worst of Fuji. Hours behind my friends, phone dead, lightless and armed with a sword I couldn’t stamped, lost in flow slower than my bathroom sink.
A zen regimen of step when I can, plus run when I can cut, got me to the next station in a blurred few hours, and there I found the jaded second year JET set, cold and slowly trailing up the mountain. It was all uphill from there. A younger man sitting around the coals agreed to mark my sword, and between the few new lamps on the trail and the ten thousand head lamps, grayscale visibility was restored. Even the slope increase was welcome, as it let me see beyond just the next and last switchbacks and up to the ever lengthening string of pale blue gems, hung on Japanese foreheads. We began weaving like drops of draino through the clots of tour groups, every turn left turning us up towards Orion (and I kept smiling, because like me, he had a sword in his belt), and every switch right giving us look out over distant clouds, which thunderless bolts lit every few thousand steps, causing half the mountain to give subdued but delighted cries.
Knowing less with each step I marched up with group, eventually losing them and finally crashing a mile from the top, unable to move. I sat, dully regretting the un-nutritious junk food munched all day on the bus ride down, until I remembered the kitkat bar in my bag, uneaten and as large as a fair sausage. It was quickly gone, and with it the best banana chips ever. I found I could stand, and faded into line with the tourists, marching exhausted but inexorable, like shades onto styx, to the ridge of crater. The beautiful silence of the exhausted reigned, rippled only by bells and the sighs. Despite the head lamps, the puddle of city shining behind us and the smaller stars above, darkness leaked out of my head, blotting the outside, and soon I forgot even my feet, only wondering which set of pockets kept my hands warmer.

I took three steps on the top before I realized I had finished, and was immediately besotted with not my victory, but with the hut promising hot noodles. The eight dollars and shrimp flavoring aside, thinking of Cup Noodle brought a tear to each eye. Heaven has been on my mind lately, and both cock sized chocolates and Maru-chan have made their place.

And what of down?
Time with quieter JETs who know how to make their own yogurt, who understand about climbing a little too high after everyone　else has left, and then walking down too fast. Huge steps on loose gravel, half sliding, dead rocks rolling by with the clink of bone, what had been the Moon all night suddenly turned to Mars, iron red with just the first bits of green showing, where the terraforming was starting to work. In the last stretch, after long concrete avalanche-shelter halls, where all the trails bled into one but only two of us were left walking this far, this fast, I told someone I’d brought my PHB. But only after hearing about how she’d brought hers.