THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED: PART 5
A NOT SO BRIEF INTERLUDE, PART 1
I decided I had to climb Mt. Fuji because it seemed like the archetypal thing to do in Japan. The guidebooks all say the same reassuring thing: it's a tough climb, but even the elderly make it up Fujisan every year. What they don't tell you is that it's still a mountain, and mountains don't care how many grandmothers have summited before you.
Fujisan sits 3,776 meters above sea level, a volcano that last erupted in 1707 and doubles as the literal symbol of Japan. Tradition holds that every Japanese person should make the pilgrimage to the top once in their life, ideally timed to catch the sunrise. Stations line the route selling hot food and dorm beds, and these days buses run most travelers straight to the fifth station. Purists still start from the first. I am, of course, a purist. An idealist. A fool.
I should have smelled a rat the moment I got to Tokyo and couldn't find the right bus station. When I finally did, the bus dropped me not at the fifth station like planned, but at a closed train station ten kilometers from the first. Two cabbies were waiting, like they knew I'd have no other choice. I did the math wrong on the fare in broken Japanese, thought I'd agreed to 500 yen, and discovered halfway there it was actually 5,000. Nearly fifty bucks for a fifteen-minute ride. What was I going to do, argue in a language I didn't speak, in the middle of nowhere, in the dark?
He dropped me at a trailhead in a very dark forest, hollered goodbye, and drove off. I started walking into the black.
The trail, at least, was obvious, wide and well-worn despite looking abandoned. I passed several falling-apart old station buildings, ghosts of the original route before the fifth-station road made them obsolete. I hiked fast to make up time, and somewhere in those first couple hours, alone in the dark, my brain started doing what brains do when there's nothing else to occupy it: running through every mistake I'd ever made, every person I probably hurt along the way. It wasn't comfortable, but it wasn't nothing, either. A kind of peaceful regret. At least I could understand it.
Eventually I ran into three young Americans on a semester-at-sea program, loud and lost and looking for the fifth station same as me. I wasn't thrilled about the company at first. There's something about hearing your own country's volume and swagger from the outside that makes you wince. But they turned out to be decent people, just young and excited and far from home, same as I was. We climbed together in stretches after that, gasping out conversation between switchbacks.
About two-thirds up, the altitude started working on me. Steps got shorter. Rests got longer. I was scrambling more than walking by then, grabbing at rocks and the chains marking the trail's edge, running on chocolate-covered almonds and sips of water, occasionally seeing lights that weren't there if I looked too far up or down. It felt like the tail end of a bad night out, the kind where all you want is for the room to stop moving. I stopped thinking about when I'd reach the top and just focused on getting there at all.
The sky started to lighten around four in the morning, maybe forty-five minutes out from sunrise. I pushed as hard as I had left, which by then wasn't much. I made the ninth station just as the clouds to the south started going red, and kept climbing rather than stop and watch from there. I wanted to be as high as possible when that first light broke the horizon.
I made it. About a hundred and fifty yards above the ninth station, I stopped to watch the sun come up over a sea of clouds, and it might be the single most beautiful thing I've ever seen. The light turned everything gold and pink at once, the clouds rolling and folding into each other like something alive. People all around me on that mountainside were cheering, actually cheering, at a sunrise. I understood why. After a night like that, watching the sun return felt like witnessing an actual miracle, not just weather.
By the time I reached the true summit, I was running on nothing but stubbornness. I found the torii gate at the top, dropped some spare yen coins into the cracks in the wood the way pilgrims do, and sat down to catch my breath. A couple of older hikers, one Japanese, one a British-accented German speaker, struck up a conversation and asked if I'd hiked through the night. From the first station, I told them. "That's quite brilliant, actually," one said. It wasn't brilliant. It was pretty dumb. But if you're going to be dumb, you'd better be tough, and being hill-raised in West Virginia, by God, that's about the only card I've ever reliably had to play.
Then came the part of the day nobody warns you about: the way down.
-- Chef Matt
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