Houousanzan a small ridge of mountains at the northern edge of the South Japan Alps with surrealistic rock outcroppings and a direct panorama of some of the highest mountains in Japan, including the highest peak, Mt. Fuji, and the second highest peak, Kita-dake. I've done the walk three times, and it is relatively easy, with easier access than most of the mountains in the South Japan Alps, but still the wild, weathered, more remote characteristic of the South Japan Alps.
In 1998 my dear friend Sally and her boyfriend Jim came to visit me and my wife Yumi here in Japan. Initially we were supposed to walk the South Japan Alps, but due to a huge landslide that took out the road going up there, and time constraints at my job, we had to cut back the walking time, and ended up walking the Houousanzan traverse instead. On the second day, moving faster than we had planned, we had time to stop and take our time to enjoy the scenery. I did this sketch on a small peak just past Kannon-dake.
Houousanzan a small ridge of mountains at the northern edge of the South Japan Alps with surrealistic rock outcroppings and a direct panorama of some of the highest mountains in Japan, including the highest peak, Mt. Fuji, and the second highest peak, Kita-dake. I’ve done the walk three times, and it is relatively easy, with easier access than most of the mountains in the South Japan Alps, but still the wild, weathered, more remote characteristic of the South Japan Alps.
Quick sketch of a coppiced tree, Lincoln, Massachusetts
(Please click on the images to see them at their full size.)
More drawings and sketches from my journals and sketchbooks.
Taking a break on the way up Ashitaka-yama in Shizuoka Prefecture. This was the first mountain I started climbing and getting serious about hiking. It is relatively unknown in Japan, even though it has some of the most spectacular views of Mt. Fuji in the country. Over the years the trail has changed a lot, with the rotten rock halfway up yearly falling away, and gradually eating at the narrow ridge where the only trail is possible. It might one day be that climbs to the summit will no longer be possible, as the ridge turns into a razorback ridge.
A secret hideout that I often went to when I wanted to be alone and sure of no other walkers happening by. It has the best panorama of Mt. Fuji of any place I walked. Many nights I pitched my tent right beside this enormous spruce tree and listened to Sika deer, macaques, foxes, raccoon dogs, and wild boars whistle, screech, yip, cry, and grunt in the underbrush. Bamboo grass gradually began to take over the grassy hillside, and these days this little area is most likely overrun with bushes and small trees.
Backroad behind Ashitakayama, a long walk around the foothill, and down to the town where I lived.
Walking home in the last light along the ridge of Ashitakayama. The first time I climbed the mountain late, descending as darkness came on, I hadn’t realized that the terminus of the northern branch of the trail led into Safari Park, a famous open-air zoo. As I stomped down the steep trail, I heard enormous grunting sounds from down below and was certain they were bears. My hands going cold and heart racing, I carefully made my way down, only to see, ahead through the trees, the flat grounds of the zoo. Tiny from where I stood, I made out the forms of male lions, all of them roaring in succession. Their voices boomed throughout the valley.
Commissioned illustration for the SeaDoc Society, University of California, Davis.
Sketch of Deady Hall, University of Oregon. I spent hours and hours every week sitting and sketch many parts of the university campus and environs. The campus was a perfect environment for contemplations and taking time to learn and see.
Quick sketch, descending a mountain from a rain storm.
Drawing has always allowed me to set my mind free. I love expressing joy and horror and all other range of emotions, and seeing where the pen takes me.
Besides hiking, I’ve loved bicycle travel ever since I was old enough to set out from home alone. I still find it the best way to travel and see new lands and meet people. It is just fast enough to cover a good distance each day, but slow enough to feel the wind and smell the rain in the air, and stop to talk to people.
My brother Teja. We’ve always been very close, like best friends, and have always been able to talk about everything together. It’s difficult living far away from him, and only seeing him once every few years. He’s an inspiration to me… living life to the fullest and with a courage and forthrightness that puts my shy efforts to shame. A born comedian, too. You can often catch him on PBS in Boston, doing shows about ethnicity and racial issues. Very proud to be his brother!
Wendy, a good friend from college, when we both studied architecture. We spent many hours discussing design and often seriously critiqued each other’s project designs. She was a jazz dancer, too, and always had me spellbound watching.
My room in Newton, Massachusetts. A bit of a crazy place, with room mates who must surely have crawled out of a TV comedy. One roommate on the witness protection plan (as he revealed one evening when he was stinking drunk), the other roommate a violent diabetic who would eat whole tubs of ice cream and then thrash about the apartment breaking down doors. The neighbors upstairs were insane, too. Out front stood a 8 meter tall sycamore tree stump, all the branches lopped off. It stood at an angle, so I called the entire house, “The House of the Bent Phallus”.
Quick sketch of a coppiced tree, Lincoln, Massachusetts
View of Akadake, the highest peak in the Yatsugatake Range.
(Please click on the images to see them at their full size.)
Laughing Knees is 10 years old today! What started out as a way to express my rage and anguish at the Iraq War and Bush, gradually lost it’s fever and mutated into something much closer to my heart. It’s been a long, long journey, not always easy, but also never boring. Blogging has connected me with people around the world I would never have met otherwise, some of whom have become close friends, and most of whom I am still in touch with even today. While I haven’t been around much for the last two years, lately I’ve begun to revive my interest in blogging and slowly uploading material that wasn’t part of the blog in the past. I hope to make Laughing Knees more comprehensive, but also more focused. Hopefully you, my friends, will find more to read and think about in the coming 10 years.
(These are not the best of my drawings, just a sampling of my recent, first scans. I hope to get some of the better ones up soon.)
Laughing Knees started out as a reaction against the Iraq War, and was the only way that I was able to express the rage and anguish I felt. But as time went on I couldn’t sustain the anger, and reverted back to my normal, daily thought-about connection to the natural world and being outdoors.
Laughing Knees started 10 years ago today. I’ve been designing and redesigning elements of the design and layout again and again, never quite happy with what came up on the Web, or simply too unskilled to get it to be the way I wanted it to be. My original goal was to make the blog resemble pen-and-ink drawn illustrated books of the 1920’s, and of Tove Jansson’s wonderful, wonderful series of Moomintroll books. Alas, I could never quite figure out how to get the images in there. I’ve gotten the basics of CSS design and layout down, but not well enough to really do a good job controlling the elements.
Study for a sidebar banner for Laughing Knees.
Originally the blog was supposed to have a separate banner for each category, but at the time I didn’t understand what the difference between categories and tags was, and hadn’t quite understood the way that loops had to be used, so was never able to implement more than one banner for the whole site, except when I divided the website into 5 separate websites… way too much work!!!
It took quite a few years to begin to really understand exactly how a website navigation system is supposed to work. Coming from books, I had a tendency to think in static pages, not quite getting my head around the fluid nature of hyperlinks. Because of that there was a lot of redundancy in both pages and links.
Naturally it wasn’t all the blog that was on my mind all those years. However, besides writing and photography, I’ve also spent countless hours drawing the world around me and figments of my imagination. Recently I took out 30 years of sketchbooks, backs of envelopes, napkins, and margins of tests and note-taking during boring work meetings, and started to scan what I hope are the more interesting outtakes. Here are a smattering I’ve started with:
Drawing something helps you to understand something, and see it, much more comprehensively than taking a photograph does. I’ve been drawing and examining and sitting for hours watching insects, birds, plants, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, spiders, the wind and rain, clouds, mountains, and ocean waves all my life. I can’t imagine my life without them.
I have to been to the Yatsugatake Range more often than any other higher mountain range in Japan. I’ve been going there since I was 10 years old, staying at a school camp in Kiyosato. For some reason it holds a special place in my connection to mountains, seeming to pull me toward it every opportunity I had. I got married there, did my one and only hike with my father, wandered the higher trails crying my eyes out the week after my wife and I made the decision to get divorced, and immediately followed by the tragedy in New York on September 11, and slept for the first time in snow. A special place.
I’ve never been very good at taking care of plants at home, though I’ve always had some growing if just to bring in some life to the often dreary living quarters I had. I have doubts about keeping any kind of living thing captured, away from their natural homes.
I love writing by hand and doing my best to make the writing look well proportioned and flowing. I started when I was in elementary school and am still learning to get the proportions right. Because of my diabetes my nerves don’t work so well anymore and at times it is very hard to get the pen to do my bidding. Practicing the writing helps keep me steady and to see new ways of forming the letters. I’m still not happy with my signature after a whole life attempting to get one I like!
In the early days of my lightening up my backpacking load, I started out with this gear. The Hilleberg Akto tent was, at the time, one of the best lightweight solo tents around. 15 years have passed since I started, and along the way I went to the lightest I could get it to go, just about 3 kg. But when arriving in camp late in the evening in the cold and rain, with nothing but a long night under my tiny tarp to contend with, I began to miss being able to read or while away the hours with my camera. So I began to add back those things which allowed me basic creature comforts so I could enjoy the trips, just enough to make it worthwhile, but not so much that I ever got bogged down again. Ultralight changed the way I walk and spend time outdoors, or even traveling.
It’s amazing how the women I’ve known in my life have changed me and unwittingly helped me to grow as a person. While not always tranquil, much of what I learned was an opening my eyes to both what other people are and how they see the world and want to live, as it was a growing understanding of who I am and what worth I have. Beth, probably more than any other woman I’ve known intimately, helped to understand that life is for living fully, no matter how difficult the circumstances. I will never forget her elfin smile and indomitable flair for adventure.
Airplanes are like hell to me… an enclosed tube in which I must sit for many hours without moving. One way I pass the time is to draw sketches of people around me. It often helps me to empathize more with the often short-tempered or unpleasant reactions many of them have when I encounter them. Often it’s led to conversations and friendships.
When you take the time to look, you will see tenderness everywhere. It isn’t all anger and violence and indifference, that seem all-prevading when you browse the Internet. This is what the world is made of and what keeps it beating. Without it where would we be?
View of Akadake, the highest peak in the Yatsugatake Range.
Walking along a country road outside Kiyosato, in the Yatsugatake Range, Yamanashi Prefecture
People are endlessly fascinating. I love sitting somewhere and just letting myself become part of the place, while watching people and drawing them in all their emotional and behavioral range. strange for someone who is very shy and doesn’t communicate easily with people…
It’s been a while since I did live model drawing, but it is still one of two of my favorite subjects to draw. The other is landscape drawing. Even though the subject is just a human being, the expressions you can discover and the connection that we humans have to one another becomes more and more apparent, and trying to bring that out without making it look like a caricature is one of the most difficult tasks an artist can try to master.
Hands and feet are among the most difficult parts of the human body to capture correctly. Especially the hands. I have a particular love for feet. They can be incredibly beautiful.
Zoos are very painful places for me to enter. Few zoos treat animals with enough knowledge and respect to allow them to live even close to their natural way of living, and I believe no animal should be in a zoo. But the Singapore Zoo was, to some extent, an exception. I wandered about the park-like grounds and spent hours drawing the inhabitants.
After you’ve been poking around the ultralight backpacking world for a while sometimes the lengths we take to get our gear as light as possible stretches to the verge of madness…
Loathe to carry the weight of stakes, we prostrate ourselves for the sake of a few grams.
Enjoying the great outdoors from the comfort of your own home.
Trying to convince the uninitiated about the benefits of going light!
Sketch of dead female Calliope Hummingbird found outside my house window, Eugene, Oregon, U.S.A., 1981.
Sketch of dead female Calliope Hummingbird found outside my house window, Eugene, Oregon, U.S.A., 1981.
Lisa of Field Notes posted an account of her encounter with a dead raccoon that had been hit by a car and how she was moved to stop and take it off the road. The story reminded me of Barry Lopez’s essay “Apologia”, from his book, “About This Life: Journeys to the Threshold of Memory”, and both Lopez’s essay and Lisa’s struck a recurring chord in me.
Just the other day I was walking to work and passed the crushed and flattened body of a pigeon that had been hit by a car and run over multiple times, until it was recognizable only by the splash of its grey feathers.
So many animals I’ve seen downed by cars, all over the world. In Japan it’s mainly birds and large insects, hit by cars or ramming into windows and street lights. In America it’s raccoons, squirrels, skunks, armadillos, deer, opossums, seagulls… In Europe it’s hedgehogs, badgers, pheasants, foxes, jackdaws… I still remember finding a badger in Northumberland, its paw still soft and warm, like a baby’s hand, and blood leaking out its eyes. I called the animal rescue service; there was, of course, nothing they could do.
On my walks I try to keep an eye out for where I step and for creatures that might benefit from a bit of helping hand. Grasshoppers, spiders, cicadas and cockchafer beetles sprawled on their backs, even bold-faced hornets, all get the tip of my finger to grab onto and hitch a ride into the verge bushes. On the trains, when a butterfly or hoverfly find themselves baffled by the false lights and cannot find their way out, I will swallow my embarrassment in front of all those unconcerned people (who nevertheless shriek when the insects get too close) and lift them to safety. Bees and wasps always present an entertaining diversion, because no one around me can understand how I would risk getting near them. It’s not risk for me, though; if you know how to move and to anticipate them there is no danger. I have never been stung. Can’t say the same for the people…
But the numbers of the dead always outnumber the living.
Perhaps the most searing memory of roadside death occurred while I was still living in Oregon, back in 1984. I was driving with a friend around the Dexter Lake area just after sundown. My friend was talking and driving and not keeping her eye on the road. Suddenly there was a loud thump on my side of the car. My friend slammed on the brakes and the car screeched to a halt. We opened our doors at the same time. I stepped out onto the tarmac and looked back. From the darkness came a high pitched screaming, like a woman with a very high voice. I trotted toward the sound and came upon a raccoon writhing on the ground, her stomach split open and her guts spilled over the pavement. I kneeled down, horror struck. My stomach heaved.
From behind came my friend’s voice. “What is it?”
“It’s a raccoon.”
“A raccoon? Is it hurt?”
“Yes. It’s not going to make it.”
A short pause. Then, “Well, let’s get out of here then. It’s cold. And that sound is awful!””
I didn’t say anything. The raccoon continued screaming and writhing, aware of me, and attempting to drag itself away. Its urine had spilled out. Suddenly across the road, from the grass I saw two pairs of eyes… her cubs. They watched unmoving, without a sound.
I stood up.
“What are you doing?” asked my friend. “Come on, let’s go!”
“I’ve got to do something.”
I stepped into the grass opposite the cubs and felt around for a stone. I quickly found one that fit in my grasp like a loaf of bread. The screaming behind me cut off, followed by quick gasps.
I stepped back onto the road, wielding the stone, and made my way over to the raccoon, who was sprawled halfway across the road now, a trail of blood painting a wet swath on the asphalt. I knelt down beside her and reached out to touch her fur. It was warm and soft, like down. Her ribs heaved quickly. Her tongue lolled from between her teeth. Her breath wheezed now.
Closing my eyes I lifted the stone and brought it down on her head. I felt the crunch of the bone and the jerk of her muscles. I lifted the stone away and stood up. Silence. An awful, nauseous hole bored into my stomach. I lifted the stone and tossed it into the grass, then kneeled down again, ripped out a wad of grass stalks, and then lifted the limp, wet body. As gently as I could, I carried it toward the cubs, but they dashed away at my approach, one of them mewling quietly. They disappeared into the surrounding shadows.
I lay the body down in the grass, away from the reach of car-strewn dust, under a blackberry bush. With a stick (I just couldn’t bring myself to do it with my fingers) I did the best I could to push the innards back into the gash in her abdomen. I sat back on my haunches and silently apologized to her, tried to find words to make some kind of recompensation. What came out was an awkward, self-conscious prayer. Then I stood up and headed back to the car.
I said nothing to my friend, just wiped my hands on the dry grass, got in and waited for her to join me. Without a word she started up the car. We made a u-turn and headed back to town.
Nineteen years later that event still flashes through my mind. It was perhaps one of the most authentic experiences I’ve ever had with a wild mammal. And one of the most troubling.
I am still unsure how to utter a proper prayer.
India ink and scratchboard drawing of young male raccoon skull. Body found and moved off the road in Lincoln, Massachusetts. A year later, returned and found the skull. Cleaned it in bleach. Drawn in Watertown. Massachusetts, 1988.
Laughing Knees 