As unreal as snakes and snow

Japanese four lined rat snake or 'Shima-hebi' (Elaphe quadrivirgata)

A two metre long snake was not what I was expecting on a windy day after a stiff walk over snow and the debris of winter up to the ridge. But the sunshine was warm on the narrow edge, with the wind hitting the mountainside and shooting straight up, leaving a pool of stillness on the rocky edge and heat sufficient for reptiles to wake up from their winter sleep, along with their prey. The winter is so long that at the first hint of spring everyone, human, animal, plant or otherwise, leaps to make the most of every minute.

Head bottom left, tail top right

This 827m (2,713ft) mountain above Yokota in Kaneyama-machi, Fukushima-ken is one of those that, while unremarkable in itself, offers great beauty, a village laid out like a toy at it's foot, and wild expanses of space and light. I cycled to it's base and up the winding road that leads to abandoned homesteads, changing into running shoes for the top half up a forestry track and onto the final slopes.

The first flush of green above snow holes warmed by tree trunks

The path was covered in snow, so I lost it and ended up thrutching through the tangle of trees destroyed by the heavy snow, some of them big but with their trunks snapped anyway. Where the snow had melted on the steepest slopes the thick stems of tall grass and bamboo had been plastered down and combed directly downhill, making for slippery going on their smooth stalks.

A classic Okuaizu view from the ridge

I gained the ridge path and began scrambling upwards, shreds of plastic rope rotted by the sun on the ground. The snake and I surprised each other, and it lay stock still as I seemed to be neither small enough for lunch nor dangerous enough to bother moving away from. As I moved in closer it suddenly shot straight forwards past my leg and threaded like an arrow the undergrowth that had slowed me so much. That must be the speed that enables it to catch frogs, lizards, insects, mice and small birds, and I was very glad of my size at that moment.


The top, with no leaves to obscure the view

It was lovely to be up here alone, surrounded by space, with the sunshine, the snow, and the first leaves of spring all to myself - or my ever changing bundle of narratives, if you prefer the modern approach. Bundle of nerves feels more like it these days, with many of our comfortable assumptions having taken such a battering from nature and human folly recently. A lot of those personal and national narratives are having to be hastily rewritten on ragged scraps of paper with broken pencils.


Native beeches, looking south east towards the Tadami river

I spent some time pottering around, breathing in the air and feeling the burgeoning life of the hills, trying to get some comfort from greater perspectives of time and space than the house, the television and even the internet can afford. It worked, as usual, though there has been more to overcome since the March disasters. I mean, the net is great and all, and during the hours we spend in thrall to it it certainly feels significant, like right now,  but in the end we are just sitting there alone in front of some glowing metal and plastic, aren't we? Current company excepted of course - I am really here, talking to you now, you aren't alone in a darkened room, your face lit from beneath by your screen. Isn't there a hill you could be going up? That seems more real. The Romantic narrative about it has got a bit of a longer history anyway, and I am buying into it, big time. It is cheaper to buy into than a laptop, that's for sure. Wordsworth wouldn't have written half so much or walked half as far on the fells if he'd had the internet.


Looking west towards Asaksa-dake. Definitley real in a romantic kind of way

I wandered lonely as a blogger, until at length it was time to descend the ridge again, being a little more alert for wildlife this time, and better able to see where I had mistaken the path on the way up. Below, the cerulean blue roofs of Yokota surrounded the wonderful primary school, where I have run art and songwriting sessions in the course of teaching English. It has a special atmosphere amongst the children and staff - that Okuaizu magic, and is in an idylic position, full of light and life. What a tragedy that it is at risk of closing due to falling numbers. I mean, look at it for goodness sake!

Yokota school and village in it's majestic setting

The snow is nearly gone

Photos from April. Speeding up the melt by hand is hard work

The snow is finally leaving us again after four months and a winter that lasted longer than usual.

A neighbour calls in the big guns to speed things up - snow from her allotment.

A heavy duty council snow machine clears the pavement

Evaporation above Oshio - one of the famous views of Japan

Rainy season

River of mist over the Tadami river

July is rainy season in Aizu, and my, how it rains. The heat and humidity take their toll, and the first words out of everyone's mouth are "It's hot!" At the sides of roads in discrete places at midday the road workers and construction crews who have been hard at it since early morning are flaked out in their cabs, only their socked feet crossed over the steering wheel visible. Others kip on the verge, the remains of their lunch boxes by their side. Siesta's are supposedly foreign to the work obsessed Japanese, and it must be difficult to get away with it in an office, but round here they are all the rage, and long may that continue say I.

It is in the twenties and thirties every day, with at least 80% humidity, and sleep beckons at every moment, especially when, like us, you don't have air conditioning. You know it is humid when a drop of water on the kitchen table that was there when you went out in the morning is still there when you return late in the evening. Your body takes on a fungal quality, and paper feels slightly mushy. Cold showers and ice cream appeal, hot tea does not, and a wet towel round the head hits the spot. The Japanese appear to be made of tissue paper, as they won't go out in the rain unless they have to for work - even otherwise tough runners and cyclists. Landslides are a reason commonly given, though the chances of being actually hit must be tiny, and apply equally to driving, which is not an issue apparently.

A rain storm about to hit a mountain top taxi and bus stand and it's soon to be electric chairs

On very humid days you long for the rain to come and break the looming tension in the air. Sometimes it comes with electrical storms cracking down on the grumbling mountains. We were once caught on the motorway in a storm of truly epic proportions, the like of which I have never seen. The wipers couldn't cope, the blinding flashes came every few seconds, and a service station was the only option. We were soaked to the skin in the three seconds it took to run to the café. As I write, it has rained without a break all day, and the dips between the rows of beans and corn in the garden are full, the water spattering down from the roof, cars and timber trucks thrashing past on the valley road outside the window.

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No cold, no heat, no tiredness

Now that the leaf canopy has arrived to soften the snow-mauled mountains, cloaking their winter wounds in green flames, it can seem even more as if they are empty. Looking at these precipitous wooded slopes you could be forgiven for thinking that yours are the only human eyes at work.

Aekichi-san in May on his daily rounds looking for sansai (wild vegetables). He is in his seventies

Yet every day, in every area, beneath the secretive trees scores of eyes are bent to the ground from the early morning. Gradient, undergrowth, bears and snakes are no obstacle. When you have been doing the same thing for fifty or sixty years, why worry? It is as natural as breathing for the inhabitants of Aizu to collect wild vegetables. It is almost an automatic response to the colour green to try and match it to one of the many shapes and forms that spell 'food.' They are not hunters, but they are certainly gatherers. And they do it with a passion and focus that equals any animal hunt.

This isn't an occasional pass-time - it is a serious part of everyone's diet, and the picking, preparation, preservation and eating of sansai is an important part of local culture, on a par with farming and vegetable growing itself. Special patches are closely guarded secrets, and it is a matter of great concern if outsiders, especially organised gangs, come and steal the locals' wild food. Each season provides it's own changing harvest, each with it's own taste and texture, but each with a sense of the mountain in it. Local people feel that there is a special kind of health to be had from sansai, as if the power of the mountain is somehow in it - and looking at them, who is to doubt it? It is certainly in your body if you are the one who goes and gets it every day...

Preparing zenmai, a complicated process. It is poisonous if you don't get it right.

Now that the growing season is here, aunty Siako-san is helping us in the allotment, as we know what is most accurately described as 'bugger all' about growing things. Hell, I can't even grow hair. She fits us in between her own rice fields and vegetable plots, always on the go now that winter no longer keeps her a prisoner in the house. Her and her husband won't stop until the rice is in now, always with a ready laugh and apparently tireless. "If you are a farmer," she said over a cuppa in our kitchen, "You cannot feel the cold, you cannot feel the heat, and you cannot feel tired." Then she laughed, and went out to do some more work.

Coming back from picking Kogomi (an edible fern shoot) with Aekichi-san in May, we crossed some small rice fields in the hills that looked as if they were still being worked, although there was no road to them. Further on, we met a wizzened little man in his eighties at the end of the nearest track, contemplating the snow that was preventing him riding further in on his moped. On the floor were some tools and heavy looking sacks that he obviously wanted to get through to the rice paddies. Hayasaki-san and he knew eachother and chatted a while, while I weighed up whether to offer to help or not - always a difficult decision with this elderly but extremely proud populace. Well, he was looking balefully at that snow, and he did look to be well on in his eighties. What the hell. "Can I help you with those?" As if prodded with a sharp stick he immediately picked up the bags and began walking across the snow.  No cold, no heat, no tiredness.

These are the days

Arai Racing Club members having a Van Halen Moment

There are days of such radiant perfection that everything beats as one: your heart, the light on the mountains, the rhythm of the pedals, the swish of rubber on tarmac and the flash of sunshine on emerald water, and clichés seem, if not expensive, just that little bit less cheap. Eee, but it's grand as they used to say in Lancashire. If Rose, who my daughter is named after, the old lady eking out her last days in a Rochdale nursing home , was here, she would sing. But then, she always sang.

It was a day when bursts of speed were interspersed with stops for laugh out loud wonderment. But then it is murder getting Japanese people past blossom trees at the best of times. You know you are in the grip of a cultural institution when a racing club stops in its tracks as one man.

I took them over one of my favourite mountain roads from Nishi Aizu to Yanaizu, which was just barely passable over the top, with some snow left and the winter's tree debris carpeting the road. And then on the way down, a landslide had inundated the road, and rocks and sticks made even the rest a little more sporting than usual. Though we stopped for the blossom, we didn't stop for that.

Or this...

Heading back in the lengthening light we split into two groups, and as usual I opted for the traffic free and beautiful option over the easier one, receiving a battering at the hands of the small chain gang that developed as we chased to catch back up, re-united over ice cream at our local visitor's centre that also does wonderful soba....

That night, over a great communal meal, with everyone tired and staisfied, I was handed a club jersey by Takeda-san, the club captain. There is no membership fee or paperwork in becoming an Arai member, but I had wanted one of those for a while to show solidarity with a group that had welcomed me so kindly.

And then, when I returned to pick something up, another two unexpected windfalls. Takeda-san had left his full suspension mountain bike for me to borrow, on the condition that I seek out some good routes for the club, and for good measure, Shigemura-san gave me a new short-sleeved jersey too. It was all nearly, but not quite, too much. That, as they say everywhere, was a good day.

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At last

After a long snowy winter and a stutteringly slow start to spring the wait for good weather was beginning to tell on the nerves. No vegetables could be planted, and everyone was tired of spending a lot of time indoors, when the outdoors is the natural environment of the people of the mountains. Like them snuffing the air and raring to go, I saw that this was the first day that a longer mountain run was feasible, and I leapt at it.

In the mountains forming the rim of Numazawako, the lake in what was a volcano, the saplings were lifting their heads and springing up from the snow in which they had been bound to the ground, suddenly snapping up and shaking their heads at their release. Even mature trees can be broken or keeled over by the snow, and the winter's casualties lay across the path at intervals. The grandees of the woods, big deciduous trees that have survived hundreds of such seasons, will not now be done in by this one.

The path was hard to find where the snow remained, but it was good to run, stride out and shake off the cobwebs, enjoying the views before the coming of the green canopy. A few insects and small lizards, those princes of the leaf litter,  were signs of the rising temperature and the woods awakening. I wondered where the snakes were sleeping.

The air was sweet and good. From the a rocky promontory the huge open light flowed across the lake and the mountains beyond, into the deep blue of the air.

Crushed

That'll teach them for leaving me on the climb

The recent council announcement about being careful about landslides and avalanches seemed a little over the top in these first tentative days of spring, until my exploration of which mountain roads are now clear was halted by this minor inconvenience. Of course each one of those slabs of compacted snow would be enough to break your legs, and all together they would both preserve and slim your figure, in as much as you would be a frozen and flattened corpse, not on my preferred cycling agenda. Still, last time out with the club I was dropped on a hill, and oh what a terrible shame it would have been if the breakaway were passing underneath just as the snow itself broke away. Think of the wasted equipment.

This is the first time I have been turned back by an actual avalanche, and it looked as if the snow plough driver had the same idea when he came back and saw it. I climbed over with my bike, ever the optimist but only a few yards on the other side were clear.

Obviously, I need to invest in one of these:

On the way home I passed our very own mini Matterhorn, Gamou-Dake, from which the panorama used for the page title above was taken on a summer's day, big black butterflies in the air all around on the summit.

Gamou Dake, Aizu, above the Tadami river and route 252

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Melt, can't you?

Rice husks help to melt the snow on a rice field

Nobody understands the weather any more. After one of the snowier winters in recent years, spring was late, and has had several false starts. These were ended by great dumps of the white stuff, sufficient to bring the ploughs out. 

Dazed insects confused by the household heat flew heavily out into the white in search of flowers. 

People were starting to sniff the warmer air behind the clouds, looking out of windows, or standing by allotments with arms folded, appraising the melt. Would they be able to plant any time soon? After months inside, they were itching to be at it, and had to be satisfied with tidying and picking at the edges uncovered by the sun. To help it along, they spread rice husks, ashes, vegetable leaves and peelings on the snow. Anything that is darker will warm more quickly and speed things up. The very keen could not resist breaking up the snow with spades, and even using machines to chop it up and spray it to one side. The growing season is six or eight weeks shorter than elsewhere, and this year it is going to be late starting. But everyone is on the starting blocks, and everything green is ready to leap at the solar signal.

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