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Chapter 10

Cuckoos and Chains

June 13–14, 2018

The morning after I returned to Tokyo from Mount Zaō, I woke to the violent hammering of rain against the window and the eerie wail of wind in the balcony railings. Already behind on my climbing schedule, I’d hoped the summer rainy season would hold off a little longer, but the rain outside suggested the typhoons had now arrived.

The rain continued for over a week, and every day my anxiety grew.

You’ll never finish the climbs in time, my inner voice repeated.

On the morning of June 13, with driving rain still coming down, I jumped out of bed, switched on my computer, and panic-planned another climb. Ironically, the only hyakumeizan peaks far enough away to escape the typhoon, close enough to one another to justify the cost of extended travel, and with buses running to the trailheads in early June were in Tōhōku—where I’d been the week before.

Two hours later, I sat on a shinkansen headed north through the pouring rain with a hastily packed suitcase at my feet. The apartment buildings of Tokyo soon gave way to single-family homes and then to the deep-green rice fields of the countryside. White herons stood in the flooded paddies, gazing into the distance as if contemplating life.

My thoughts drifted back to the first few climbs. I wasn’t making the clear, dramatic progress I had hoped for. One month in, anxiety still tied me in knots at every turn. If I wasn’t afraid of missing a bus, I was worried about falling to my death. If I wasn’t fretting about failing to reach my ultimate goal, I was frantic about immigration denying my visa a second time. And beneath it all, I was terrified my cancer might come back.

The difficulties were piling up. I felt my anxiety rise.

Cutting the anchors didn’t change anything. You were foolish to think it would. Instead of letting my inner voice push me into an anxious spiral, I asked myself, If you died tomorrow, what would you wish you had done differently today?

I watched the rice fields speeding by outside. A jet-black crow with outstretched wings swooped down from a tree and circled over the paddies before winging off toward the distant mountains.

In that moment there was nothing I would change.

Is that true, or just what you think you’re supposed to feel right now?

It was true. Right then I felt no need to grieve over the parts of my life I could not change.

Anxiety reminded me about my visa issues and the threat that my cancer might return, but neither of those was a thing that I could alter. I had wasted so much time and energy fretting about things I could not control. I hoped this year would teach me how to stop.

* * *

The Mount Nasu (那須岳) volcanic complex sits on the border between Tochigi and Fukushima Prefectures, northeast of Tokyo, in Nikkō National Park. The most popular hiking course begins at the Nasu Ropeway, crosses over the summit of Mount Chausu (茶臼岳), and curls around the side of Mount Asahi (朝日岳) en route to the high point, 1,917-meter Mount Sanbonyari (三本槍岳). Of the range’s five volcanic peaks, only Mount Chausu is still active, but it’s active enough to hold a permanent place on the Japanese Meteorological Agency’s live volcano early-warning list—a fact I’m glad I didn’t know before I made the climb.

The first gondola of the day began its climb at 8:30 a.m. with me aboard. At 8:35 I emerged from the upper station and took a “summit photo” with Mount Nasu’s summit marker, which sits about a hundred yards from the gondola. Afterward, I started up the rocky trail toward Mount Sanbonyari.

The path cut switchbacks up a slope that looked more like a moonscape than a mountain. Giant jet-black daddy longlegs wandered across the rocks. I am not a spider fan, and found their size—and prolific numbers—disconcerting. I couldn’t help wondering what they ate in such an isolated place.

Most likely, one another.

I followed a short detour trail to the summit of Mount Chausu (1,915 meters), where I stopped to enjoy the view and photograph the summit shrine. Nothing grew on Chausu’s slopes, and the smell of sulfur lingered in the air. As I descended the opposite side of the volcano, I looked across the valley at tree-covered mountains stretching away as far as I could see, and wondered what it would be like to climb not just a hundred but a thousand Japanese mountains.

What new hubris is this? You climb six mountains, and you think you can climb a thousand?

As ridiculous as it seemed, part of me wondered if I could do it—whether I had the strength, the will, and, most importantly, the years remaining to finish such a massive task.

Beneath my boots, the rocky trail slowly changed from gray to deep brick red. Overhead the sky stretched wide and blue. The trail wound down the mountainside in front of me, across a saddle and past a mountain hut, before it disappeared from view around the side of a neighboring mountain. An hour later I reached that point. Beyond it, the trail crossed a narrow pass. The wind picked up both speed and strength as it funneled through the gap, and gusted almost hard enough to knock me down as I hurried across the opening.

On the far side of the pass, the path continued up a boulder-covered ridge to a set of enormous steel chains bolted into the mountainside.

A number of Japanese mountain trails have permanent chains installed through steep or dangerous places, both to serve as balance aids and to mark the safest route. The chains on Nasudake followed an incline steep enough to qualify as bouldering, and then crossed a ledge so narrow that my shoulder brushed the cliff face as I passed. The pebbles my boots dislodged from the path clattered down the rocky face for more than 20 meters before coming to a rest in a gully far below.

I focused on my footing and did not look down.

After almost an hour of climbing over narrow, rocky paths, the trail crossed yet another saddle and descended into an alpine wetland similar to the one on Mount Hakkōda. Raised wooden walkways offered a dry-ish path across the sucking, snowmelt-swollen mud field on the ground. Birds sang in the bushes beside the trail; their unfamiliar songs made me wish I had learned more about Japanese birds before my climbs began.

As a child in California, I recognized most of the birds in my neighborhood by sight or song. I even started a short-lived bird-watching club with six other kids from school. But aside from the Asian cuckoo, whose call is easy to recognize, and the raucous cries of crows and raptors, I knew nothing about bird songs in Japan.

Beyond the wetlands, the trail ascended once again, this time through fields of sasa interspersed with brush just tall enough to block my view of the mountaintop. Despite my plan to worry less, the time weighed heavily on my mind. I pushed myself to move as fast as possible. Just before noon I passed through a thick stand of brush and emerged, unexpectedly, on the summit of Mount Sanbonyari. The far side of the small plateau offered expansive views of the surrounding deep-green mountains, but the peak itself had been completely hidden as I approached.

I wanted to enjoy the summit, but the unforgiving tick of the clock and the now-familiar fear of missing the final gondola off the mountain made me too uneasy to take an extended break. I shot some pictures, gobbled down an energy bar, and started my descent.

An hour later my legs began to tire, and I grew careless. On a flat patch of trail just above the steepest part of the descent, my boot slipped on a patch of scree. I tumbled backward and landed hard. Blue absorbed the worst of the fall, but I almost threw up when I thought about what might have happened if I’d fallen a couple of minutes later. Fears about visas and the future shrank to nothing by comparison.

I stood up, brushed the dirt from my pants, and forced myself to focus.

Ninety minutes later, after descending safely past the chains and across the windy gap, I began my reascent of Mount Chausu. Halfway up the slope, I heard the hissing, whistling sound of steam escaping under pressure.

Above me on the right side of the trail, a column of pale white steam surged up and out the side of Mount Chausu. It was a fumarole—a volcanic vent, where steam and gases emerge from the mountain. I hurried past it, trying not to think about news articles I’d read in which Japanese hikers were killed by pebbles flung from similar fumaroles.

I reached the gondola with time to spare, and as I rode back down the mountain, I considered the fact that the hyakumeizan were more dangerous than I realized. The climbs weren’t technical, or even very long (by experienced hikers’ standards, anyway), but they were potentially hazardous for novices like me. My knees and feet ached mercilessly from the 12-kilometer round-trip climb, and it seemed a little strange that I felt compelled to do something that scared me so much (and hurt a great deal too). Yet even in that moment, I remembered the views from the summit and along the trail, the iridescence of the stones beneath my feet, and the scent of the mountain air, and I wanted to climb again (after a rest and a desperately needed bath). The thrill of accomplishment I felt when I completed the chains, and the joy of the unexpected summit, made me feel thoroughly happy and alive.

And that, I decided, was worth a little pain.