Creative Nonfiction
Snakes, Squalls, and Doctor Seuss
Adventures on Mount Seppiko, Hyōgo Prefecture
Midnight on Fish Town Street in Himeji city is no place for a sober young person. Which explains why Lars and I didn’t meet any as we made our way through a canyon of neon sign boards in search of one last drink.
As the Friday night izakaya and yakitori joints belched brazier smoke and beer fumes into the cool air, I felt oddly depressed. Nighttime in a Japanese city sometimes has that effect; when being ‘alone in a crowd’ takes on a meaning more melancholy than can be imagined.
To add to my glumness, rain began to fall. It drifted across the city rooftops, dampening the streets and sending the brothel touts into their shadowy doorways. Lars suggested a nightcap in the Sampaguita Bar at the end of the street. With its guitar-shaped counter and Filipina bar girls with big flashy teeth, it was where we often ended our nights on Fish Town Street.
But as I stood in the drizzle waiting for the traffic light to change, I felt the tide go out on my soul. A creeping malaise consumed me. The light turned green. A sober young person might have called it an ‘epiphany’, but beneath the pink glow of the Midas Touch Soapland sign, it was an illumination. I turned to Lars. ‘Remember that Buddhist monk at the last bar?’
‘He wasn’t a real monk,’ Lars said. ‘He was just married to a temple priest’s daughter.’
‘He talked about the need to purge and purify.’
‘He was explaining why he comes to Fish Town every Friday night …’
‘I gotta get back to nature. I need Earth Mother by the motherlode.’
‘What are you babbling about?’
But it didn’t matter because Lars is an old sea kayaking friend of mine and he knew exactly what I meant. I think he, too, was feeling the same pointlessness of our late-night forays downtown. We skipped the Sampaguita Bar and caught taxis home.
Highway 67 hugs the Yumesaki River north of Himeji city, drawing the traveler deep into the Hyōgo hinterland, a place where wagyu beef farming, sake brewing, and hot spring bathing have been practiced for centuries. This mountainous interior attracts hikers, bikers, campers, cyclists and paragliders during the warmer months, and from December to February, snowboarders and skiers descend on its powdery slopes.
Between the plunging valleys, tectonic forces have combined with erosion to shape lofty peaks whose steep trails lead to shrines. I suppose that’s why Lars and I settled on Mount Seppiko. We needed a quest to purge ourselves of the big city blues; we needed to get high.
Seppiko-san (雪彦山) means ‘Snow Prince Mountain’, and though its craggy peaks were once considered beautiful enough to feature in a Showa-era “One Hundred Landscapes of Japan” picture book, such details were of little importance to us.
Tooling his old white Toyota Crown down Highway 67, Lars’s most pressing concern was the state of the shock absorbers. Each time we hit eighty km/hr on a straight, the chassis would rock up and down like a Chicano lowrider. He didn’t have enough money for new shocks. It was another reason to put the brake on the booze.
A short note: I met Lars ten years ago in a Fish Town Street bar. Back then, he was a cook for the Maersk shipping line and was in town for a two night layover. As is often the case, he met a girl. When his ship returned to Copenhagen, he quit and flew back to Japan to meet her, this time with a visa that said he would be an English teacher. The girl fell through but the job didn’t, and neither did his enthusiasm for the Japanese lifestyle and its great outdoors. We have kayaked the Japan Sea and the Seto Inland Sea every year, and when we tire of the ocean, we hike.
Through the flooded rice fields and sleepy hamlets of the Yumesaki riverina, we passed an uneventful trip. We dined on a late breakfast of soggy hamburgers which Lars had picked up at a drive-thru earlier, and to aid digestion, played AC/DC up loud with the windows down.
Mount Seppiko shares the same north-westerly location with Hyōgo’s highest mountains, Mount Hyōno and Mount Mimuro. What makes Seppiko unique is that it is not a single mountain but a series of rocky peaks. Northern and southern trails run to their summits, interconnect, then fall very quickly, making this a formidable climb. Some passages require grappling onto fixed iron chains. Due to the degree of difficulty, deaths and serious accidents are not uncommon.
For those in supreme physical condition, the seven kilometre-long round-trip is hikeable within three hours. For those who aren’t, it’s a heartbreaker. The southern route is exceptionally steep, the northern route divides into two trails: one fast and rocky, the other a long and gradual zig-zag through both cypress and native forests.
Lars and I are not climbers, we’re campers and kayakers, and while a night on the mountain hadn’t been part of my Fish Town Street ‘illumination’, it was now our plan. As we entered the Seppiko-Mineyama Prefectural Park (part of the Chugoku Mountain range which runs 500 km from Hyōgo Prefecture in the east to Yamaguchi Prefecture in the west), the valley narrowed and the river separated into filaments which mysteriously disappeared. Plantations of cypress rose on three sides, and where these ended, native flora grew thickly to the peaks of Mount Seppiko itself. We arrived at the Shinto gate, which marks the terminus for the day trippers arriving by bus from Himeji city, and solved our first critical decision with the toss of a ten-yen coin. Lars called it: we would take the long, gentle slog over the punishing rock scramble.
In our backpacks we carried a tent, oil skin, sleeping bag, and AirRest mats. For rations, Lars had two dozen marinated chicken wings he’d frozen a month earlier; I, a homemade bean stew which I’d discovered in my freezer box that morning. Added to this was an assortment of cup noodles, a can of pineapple chunks, and three baguettes.
I’d slipped in a two-litre cask of Chateaux de Cardboard, and Lars confessed to a dozen cans of low malt beer which he’d prioritized over toilet paper, toothpaste and towel. Our logic being that purging oneself needn’t mean depriving oneself. Afterall, the climb would require a reward.
Of water, there was plenty. We set out along a boulder-strewn stream which grew to a gushing torrent as the gradient steepened. In places we leaped from rock to rock, dodging the rivulets which coursed around tree roots and fallen deadwood that covered the trail. Rain had softened the earth, filling the air with a heavy pungency of decay.
Snakes slithered from our path. Sometimes they basked motionless on stream rocks where sunlight filtered through the canopy. They were mamushi, small venomous vipers, and shima-hebi, nonvenomous rat snakes, which are common throughout western Japan. Frogs, in these parts, are quick or dead.
I must admit to feeling an eeriness when entering forests in Japan. I find this difficult to explain, suffice to say that if someone had said it was the spiritual presence of those who had trodden the forest paths long ago — acolytes, itinerant monks, wandering tradesmen, fleeing warriors, poets, hunters — I’d probably have believed them.
As Lars and I ascended through a cypress plantation and into native forest, we came upon hewn rock steps and moss-covered stone abutments. It seemed strange that such structures should lie so high on a steep mountainside, so far from the villages of the valley below. On the other hand, pilgrimage routes are built to last. Mount Seppiko belongs to the ‘Three Hiko Mountains’ (Mt. Yahiko in Niigata prefecture, and Mt. Hiko in Fukuoka prefecture are the others), and as such, maintains a strong link to Shugen-dō, the religious tradition which combines folk beliefs with indigenous Shintō and Buddhism. Practitioners, called Shugenja, believe they are neither priests nor normal men, but inhabit a world between the two. Mountains are their temples and shrines, and to enter them they believe that one must first die spiritually in order to be ‘reborn’. Lars and I had already died, at least our brain cells had suffered hideously on Fish Town Street the night before, so I felt I’d already achieved the first step towards purification.
We met no one. It caused me to wonder if the southerly route was the more popular choice. Or, maybe it was the threat of rain that had kept other hikers at home that weekend. Scattered showers had been forecast over the next twenty-four hours, but since mountains are rain magnets by their very nature, we continued on our merry way. I felt my urban malaise slipping away with every metre gained.
After climbing for an hour, we reached a small waterfall and paused to let the backpacks ease from our shoulders and slump beside its pool.
‘Oh shit!’ Lars said.
I shot him a glance. A half-dozen leeches clung glistening and bloated to his calve muscles. Several had slipped beneath my own socks to gorge, and despite pinching them off painlessly, the resulting bloodbath looked otherwise. The leech’s scientific name is Hirudinea — Japanese call them ‘hiru’ — and they have been used since ancient times, and still are in modern day medical practice (peptide hirudin is used as an anticoagulant to treat blood-clots). These facts didn’t impress us as much as the ribbons of red streaking down our pale legs. It was time to tear the tab on a can of beer and anesthetize.
Mount Seppiko comprises a range of mountain peaks including Mount Otensho (884m), Mount Mitsuji (915m), and Mount Hokotate (950m), all of them connected by a marked and maintained trail.
We reached Mt. Hokotate (950m) around mid afternoon. There, Lars and I discovered a grassy ridge line beneath the peak where the cypress and pines had been thinned, and where the waning sunlight bathed everything in a welcoming glow.
‘My tent … ‘ said Lars, watching me forlornly as I unpacked in a small clearing.
‘Is? ‘ I said.
‘Back in the car.’
His forgetfulness often leads to minor inconveniences which, in this instance, were happily not mine.
‘Fuggit,’ he sighed, ‘I’ll sleep under the stars.’
In a short while, a fire crackled on a rough hearth. Lars fed in needles and cones until the pyre fumed into the sky a fragrance which smelled vaguely incense-like. The red wine flowed, the fire settled. Onto the wire grill he placed his chicken wings and turned them until their skins were crispy. Make no mistake, this was a dish which had been prepared for such a trip. Two dozen wings, marinated in a cocktail of soy sauce, sake, brown sugar, minced garlic and chili peppers, are then slow-smoked in a covered barbecue for ninety minutes. Frozen, they will last for months until needed.
I hardly spared a thought for the lively night streets of Himeji. We dined on our own brand yakitori, washed down with cheap plonk, and then, from my dented pot I served warm bean stew with Tabasco pepper sauce and baguettes toasted on the grill. The cost of the entire feast would not have bought us two draft beers in a bar on Fish Town Street.
Typically, after such a feast, Lars might say something profound like, ‘Fatigue makes the best pillow’ or ‘The best view comes from the hardest climb … ‘, but tonight, stretched out beside an open fire, he was quiet. There is something hypnotic about a dying fire, when the wood has burned and only a pile of glowing tiger eye embers remain.
A breeze lifted.
On it came the smell of rain. Presently, gusts rustled the trees along the ridgeline. Any plans Lars had of sleeping under the stars were snuffed out — just as the fire would be in a few minutes by the sheeting downpour. I bundled myself inside my one-man tent, leaving Lars to curl up inside my side vestibule, wrapped in his sleeping bag and a groundsheet as the rain lashed Mount Hokotate. There wasn’t much to say; words would have been wasted in the deluge, so a belch and a muffled fart were the last sounds we traded before the Sandman arrived to put our long day on to rest.
I awoke sometime in the night to an utter stillness. In a city, sounds of cat fights, newspaper men on cranky Honda Cubs, singing drunks, wailing ambulances, a hundred humming air conditioners on a street, play white noise to our sleeping hours. Tonight, on Hokotate, the silence was deafening. Neither a breath of wind, nor a drip of rainwater, not even a peep from Lars, offered itself up. For a long while I could not return to sleep.
Then from down in the valley, amidst the dark raging streams and solemn cypress trees, came an owl’s hoot. It carried up the mountainside like a town crier calling that all is well. It was both the loneliest and most comforting sound I’d ever heard. Wrapped in my goose down sleeping bag, cocooned inside a tent, on a mountain somewhere in western Japan, I couldn’t have felt more snug.
My contentment carried to dawn, when, opening my tent flap, I was greeted by the sight of the valley filled with mist. Like the Yumesaki river itself, it seemed to reach all the way to the Seto Inland Sea. From beneath the tent I gathered dry twigs and pine needles for a small fire and soon had a pot of water steaming. Lars rose like a Lazarus, urinated for record time, then joined me for coffee and pineapple chunks.
‘Ever read Doctor Seuss?’ he asked.
‘Only Green Eggs and Ham … Sam I am!’
‘You gotta read, I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew — the story of a guy with troubles at home. He sets out to find Shangri-la, believing all his troubles will disappear when he gets there. But he can’t enter because the Key Slapping Slippard creature, who lives inside the lock, won’t let him open the door to the promised land …’
‘The point?’
‘He returns home with a new perspective, and a baseball bat to deal with his problems.’ Lars slurped his coffee. ‘Depression is just a state of mind, man.’
He might have been stating the obvious, but it was food for thought as we struck camp and descended along the ridge to the rocky outcrop known as Mount Otensho, Seppiko’s most imposing peak. There, we paused at the small shrine to offer a prayer for a safe descent, knowing that we weren’t likely to get any closer to the gods.
At Izumo Rock, on the southern approach route, there is an overhang beneath which rock climbers grapple across the granite when the weather is favourable. For hikers, the view from atop this outcrop is spectacular — the valleys of Hyōgo ripple away into the distance like ocean waves, imbued with every shade of blue imaginable. Lars unpacked two cans of low-malt beer, and as we sipped our poor man’s champagne, letting our legs dangle over the abyss, I knew the Doc had been right: changing one’s setting does not necessarily change one’s situation. Only perspective can do that.
And mine, at that very moment, was just fine.
Snakes, Squalls, and Doctor Seuss: Adventures on Mount Seppiko will appear in Biyori, an anthology of hiking stories set in Japan (forthcoming).
