My Solitudes : Chapter Eight : Forest in Winter : Excerpts

This idea of walking all the way to my little campsite in the forest worked very well last time, and there’s no way I’m going to use my bike to go there anymore. It’s a perfect transition from my home to the campsite – through the built-up area, over to the quiet walk along the footpath through the forest until I reach my chosen spot. By the time I get there, I’m pretty much settled down and ready to relax.

And so it goes today; it’s a peaceful walk. The rain is more of a drizzle than a real rainfall, so is not much of a bother. From a clear space along the way I have a view of the hills that are my destination, and I see that I will be spending the night camped in a Chinese painting; bands of mist are wafting across the slopes, which fade into the distance in gradually receding planes. When I get to the gravel forestry road, I see that the heavy snowfall in January has done a lot of damage to the trees here. The hillsides are quite steep, and many of the trees grow with an outward lean; looking up from below they always seem to be falling in towards the centre of the valley. And I see that quite a number of them have fallen since I was here last. I had heard on the radio that a number of trees around the city had fallen onto power lines and railroads, etc., and it seems that up here too, a lot of them didn’t survive the storm. The forest here is not tended at all, so I guess they will lie where they fell ...

The road is blocked in a couple of places by these falls, and at one spot a huge cherry tree has fallen from the hillside up on the right, completely covering the path. Somebody has used a chain saw to clear a way through the masses of branches, and there is thus a ‘tunnel’ through the tangle. Roughly estimating the height as it lies there, I think that it was perhaps about 12 metres tall, with a huge widespread top; it must have been a magnificent sight. But now it’s nothing more than a tangled mess of broken wood. Considering where it ‘chose’ to grow up though – on that unstable and steep slope – I guess this fate was an inevitable consequence.

The rain makes a constant patter on the leaves that litter the ground. At the end of the gravel road my route turns sharply upwards, and as I move up the slope, eyes on the ground in front of me, I see that some of the rain drops have a frosty look to them as they hit the ground, and by the time I get to the top, about five minutes later, the transformation is complete – it is no longer raining, but snowing. It seems that I might really be in luck with the weather today.

 

Actually though, I surprise myself – I sleep pretty much right through until morning. I half wake-up a few times in the night, but each time see that it is still totally dark, and just turn over and manage to fall back asleep. And then, on one of these wake-ups, I see to my surprise that the tent is suffused with morning light. Made it!

But what a difference the morning has brought to the interior of the tent! Instead of the familiar dome shape above my head, under which three people could sit comfortably together, the tent has shrunk down to a sort of collapsed pyramid shape. There isn’t even room for me to sit up in the sleeping bag. There must be an awful lot of snow out there, to deform it this much.

Each of the roof panels is pushed right down by the weight of the snow, and the side walls have collapsed inwards. I refrain from banging the roof to knock off the snow, because I want to see what this ‘buried’ tent looks like. I struggle in the restricted space to get my clothes on, and then unzip the door ...

In Japanese there is a simple word to express what I felt as I saw the surrounding landscape – sugoi! Do I need to translate? I think not ... Snow everywhere. Snow on every tree, on every branch of every tree, on every twig of every branch. As I can see on the branch that hangs just in front of the tent door (I don’t remember a branch being there last night!), the snow has adhered in such quantities that even the tiniest twigs have ballooned out to become some centimeters in diameter. And not only is there snow on every horizontal surface, as one would expect, but the vertical tree trunks too are plastered with it. From where I sit it is difficult to see any kind of exposed bark anywhere. The view is almost totally of white surfaces. And the sky above – a completely clear and bright blue! What a lucky break!

 

The view from the clearing across the valley is incredible. It looks like one of those photographs one sees on calendars, but never in real life. The entire mountain over there is as white as the one on which I stand, and the bright sun shining down out of the clear sky makes it seem to sparkle.

As I stand there the sound of a morning radio exercise program floats up from somewhere down below. ‘One ... Two ... Bend ... Stretch ...’ It seems a bit bizarre that people are actually standing there doing those exercises while this incredible scenery is all around them. Are they really going to just ignore it and spend their day ‘as usual’? I guess so, and of course I can’t criticize them – I do the same thing on most days of my life ...

I let my binoculars wander across the view, and everywhere I look it is the same thing – every tree stands completely draped in white. If I stop and look at one particular spot for a minute or two I see motion, as clumps of snow break loose and fall in a chain-reaction of cascading snow. If that calendar photographer wants to catch this view today, he had better hurry ...

The same thing is happening on this side of the valley, and I’m brushed a couple of times by falling clumps as I move further up the ridge. I learn quickly that anytime I want to stop and look around, I’ve got to look directly up first, and try to find a spot under an open patch of sky, rather than under a branch. And then I see just in front of me, marching right down the middle of the path in a neat row, a line of footprints – animal tracks! They are pointed towards me, and I see that the track moves off the path into the underbrush at the side. They look quite fresh, and none that I can see have been disturbed by any of these constantly falling snow clumps. Had he been coming this way, heard me coming, and then headed off to the side to avoid me? I stand and listen carefully but of course can hear nothing.

 

There is a shrine just off the path, about half-way back down the valley, an old and not particularly well-cared-for shrine. Being surrounded by tall cedars and thick bushes, it doesn’t catch much sunshine, so the roof is still covered with thick snow, as are the two stone lions who guard the entrance. A glimpse of red off to one side catches my eye. Piled against the wall of a little shed is a jumble of miscellaneous stuff, and on top of the pile is a large daruma doll, one of those round legless dolls that Japanese use to wish for good fortune by painting in one eye at a time. Both of his eyes are painted in, and he now rests here, presumably waiting to be burned at an upcoming festival. Just his face peeks out from the heavy mantle of snow, and the expression looks almost human – his brow furrowed with the weight of the cold snow on his head. He looks extremely unhappy, but there isn’t much I can do for him except take his photograph, and then wipe a little bit of the snow off his forehead. His twin sits in my own workshop, where he sat all during the decade-long construction of my Hyakunin Isshu print series. My own daruma had his second eye filled in once that series came to an end, but I have never been able to bring myself to take him to the shrine, as I know I probably should. Perhaps I am bringing myself bad fortune by holding onto him, thus keeping him from his appointed fate, but we went through some difficult times together, and to send such a stalwart companion to the flames just seems so heartless!

I see also, hanging from a hook behind the doll, a number of strings made up of thousands of folded paper cranes, now greyed with age, and I suppose there are plenty of stories, some tragic no doubt, hidden behind all these mute objects in this cold corner of a shrine compound in the woods. But there’s no point in dwelling on such things, and I move back out into the spring sunshine. There! I’ve said it ... ‘spring’ sunshine! We’re still in February, but that’s really what this day is starting to feel like – a warm spring day. The sequence of events hardly seems possible: yesterday afternoon I trudged up this mountainside in the cold rain, then huddled for the night in a cold tent under a heap of soggy snow, slogged through many centimetres of snow trying to beat a way along the trail this morning, and now am strolling along comfortably with my jacket open in the ‘spring sunshine’! All in the space of a few hours ...