I Go to the Hills

We grew up in the White Mountains and began hiking on Appalachian trails as children. When you have trudged up steep inclines with your head down, carefully monitoring each step to avoid slipping on moss-covered rocks and loose stones, or grabbed onto a tree that isn’t green and risked tumbling backwards, humped over because the pack on your back with food, clothing, water and other necessities is weighing you down, you know what it is to hike in the mountains. The weather can be humid, the flies thick and an unexpected rain shower or drop in temperature can cause havoc all around. Then the trees open up and there is a path to a boulder that provides a vista across a vast landscape to the horizon line. So breathtaking you forget what it took to arrive at the point where you are standing.

When you walk the land through dense forests and scramble up rocky cliffs, you experience a different sense of place. Or so I have found.

I have just returned from a trip climbing and hiking in the Kyushu region in southern Japan. We spent two days on the island of Yakushima and had an opportunity to see Yaku monkeys and deer. Butterflies abound in Japan and we often would pause at the edge of a trail and watch as one, or often two, lighted on a flowering azalea bush and opened its wings in a display of pure beauty. Often, as we ascended to the top of a peak, a thick fog would come rolling in and for a few minutes the view would disappear. Only to come into view again a few minutes later when the fog would begin rolling out again. The inspiration for the design of Japanese screens and scrolls was immediately apparent.

Nature plays an essential role in Japanese culture. Arrangements, using native flowers and often formed in vases made from moss or natural wood, are found in most rooms. Japanese poetry is written around nature and the changing seasons. Basho Matsuo, the well known Japanese poet, made four literary journeys around Japan and wrote a travel diary titled Oku no Hosomichi, The Narrow Road to the Deep North that was published posthumously in 1703 and became a best seller.

We met a number of Japanese hikers along the trails we covered and would exchange a greeting, with the few phrases we learned, either good morning, ohayou or good afternoon, konnichiwa. They were appreciative and often smiling at our attempts at Japanese, usually responding back in English.

Hiking in the mountains, one forgets about violence and war. President Obama was in Japan last week too, the first American president to visit Hiroshima and to remember those that had died or been maimed as a result of the atomic bomb dropped on August 6, 1945. It is difficult when you are there to imagine the devastation. Tokyo was so heavily bombed it was almost completely destroyed, and now one of the leading mega-cities with transportation systems, architecture, shopping and museums that are ahead of what you find in most cities. Certainly New York.

I boarded my flight back to New York from Tokyo’s Narita airport at 11 a.m. Sunday morning, knowing that I would arrive at JKF in New York at 11:59 a.m. on the same Sunday morning. Inflight maps always keep you updated with time to destination, distance to destination and time at points of departure and arrival. These flights are long and tedious and I always pack a few books that will keep me engaged. On the flight back I read Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail (Broadway Book, 1998, New York). It seemed the perfect ending for a climbing adventure, as it would connect me again with the White Mountains. I finished the last few pages just as we began making our approach into New York.

“I understand now, in a way I never did before, the colossal scale of the world. I found patience and fortitude that I didn’t know I had. I discovered an America that millions of people scarcely know exits. I made a friend. I came home.”
The seat belt sign was on, the plane was in its final descent. I pulled my mud-covered boots down from the overhead bin and laced them up for the last time, stashed Bryson’s book in the top of my backpack and slipped on my fleece, realizing I had a rock, a leaf and a few other various things I had picked up on the trail in my pockets. I was home. My view of the world has been slightly altered and my deep reverence for nature and love for mountains confirmed.

Elizabeth Howard’s career intersects journalism, marketing and communications. Ned O’Gorman: A Glance Back, a book she edited, was published in May, 2016. She is the author of A Day with Bonefish Joe, a children’s book, published by David R. Godine. She lives in New York City and has a home in Laconia. You can send her a note at: [email protected]