Tag: hypoglycemia

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Hiking Journal Outdoors Trip Reports: Hiking

Leafy Days

Aizukoma Beech
Beech tree on Aizu-Komagatake making the first nod towards winter.
Aizukoma Beech
Beech tree on Aizu-Komagatake making the first nod towards winter.

It wasn’t all rain over the last two months. A few intermissions did manage to part the curtain of rain. Two days walking in the Aizu region north of Tokyo that I have rarely visited surrounded me with the kind of glowing green and yellow screens of leaves that I’ve been longing for all summer. It was quite a surprising area actually, a locale covered with a kind of corrugated blanket of hillocks and flat-bottomed vales which kept the scale of development down by the sheer privacy of separated valleys, sort of like an overturned egg carton. The train snaked through these valleys as if entering from room to room, and each room seemed more isolated than the one before, until, when I arrived at Aizu-Kougen station, I felt as if I had time-warped into a Japan of thirty years ago: a station built of wood, a station master standing by the ticket gate waiting to greet each passenger individually with a big, gold-toothed smile, and a bus stop out front that seemed to dissipate into a rice paddy.

The bus took another two hours to carry me beyond the reach of the trains into an unspoiled rural farming community that seems to have been largely lost throughout most of the rest of Japan. Just the evidence of the old trees preserved along the roadsides and the hand-made way people hung bright orange persimmons to dry under the great eaves of their houses or stacked rice stalks and rushes in cylindrical bales in the fields brought back images of organic connection rural people used to live by in older Japan. The rivers and streams rushing by along the sides of the roads, frothing with whitewater after all the rains, held a kind of icy blue light that could only come from pristine mountain sources.

It was too late to climb the first day so I found a roadside campground and set up my tarp way back among a stand of willows, beside a vagetable garden of lettuce, tomatoes, daikon radishes, and eggplants that the camp proprietor kept for his family. Darkness descended like a hammer; no sooner had I turned off the stove and sat back to sip my tea, than I could no longer make out the forest starting at the edge of the camp. The mountains surrounding the valley loomed into the sky like the black backs of huge, sleeping beasts. I sat a long time at the entrance to the tarp, looking up at the sky. Stars began to appear, with intermittent hands of clouds passing in front of them, leaving patches of blindness in the vast expanse. Sirius shone like a bright eye for a while, looking down at me and unblinking until the clouds won over and the sky ducked behind the gases.

Rain began pattering the tarp during the night, waking me from dreams of the baking red rocks of Australia. I lay in the dark listening to the tapping until it lulled me back into my dreams.

Dawn was a veil of mist that entered the confines of my tarp and hung over the slowly breathing earth like a poised egret, its grey net almost indistinguishable from the grey shield of my tarp. I sat up, brushing my head against the dew-laden under-surface of the tarp, and the chill of the water droplets shocked me to full waking. I rolled up my sleeping bag, stuffed away the unused clothes, and set a pot of water to boil. Breakfast consisted of the ubiquitous cold granola, its sweetness cloying in the watery green tea of morning. I promised myself to find a new meal to start the days with, something more akin to the chlorophyll and meat of the mountains.

By the time the tarp was rolled up and stuffed away and my pack hoisted on my back fat missiles of rain again sent the world into a repeat of the white noise of rainfall that had been overwhelming most of the last three months. I strode along the road to the trailhead and started up along the flank of Aizu-Komagatake, whose summit was lost in the clouds up above.

Two weeks of course made little difference in the state of my body and the going, like my last trip, was tough, despite a lighter pack. First I felt the drag on my muscles up the steep climb, and soon after could feel the peculiar heaviness in my bones, clutching of my brain, and derailing blurriness in my eyes that signal the onslaught of low blood sugar from my diabetes. It was a surprise because I had eaten my usual dose of heavy granola and the granola, with its relatively low glycemic burnout, usually kept me going for hours. Instead I collapsed on a log and chewed on an energy bar until my eyesight cleared and my muscles could spring up again. Several other hikers passed by, all offering much too cheerful greetings for my current state and I could only feebly wave back at them. One Japanese man, speaking in uncharacteristically well-pronounced English, boomed. “Hey, you going up or coming down?”

“Not sure yet,” I replied.

“Well, it’s a good place to think about it,” he said and kept on.

The sun suddenly broke through the canopy and inundated the whole world in green and autumn yellow brilliance. All my discomfort evaporated. I sat up and gazed around and felt the backboards of my eyes burn with new heat. That sense of being cloaked by your surroundings bloomed along the hairs of my skin, what the Japanese call shinrin-yoku or “forest bathing”, and from that moment the old terminus of my love for the natural world kicked in; I forgot myself and instead ran on the heat in my eyes, all at once feeling the world with all my senses as if they were one beating sense and I were just an organ acting to give these senses expression.

Invigorated and filled with renewed joy I started up the trail again and took my time to climb while at the same time stopping now and then to just absorb it all. The huge beeches had begun to turn cadmium yellow while around them Japanese maple, rowan, and lacquer vines blushed bright red. The higher I climbed the brighter the world seemed to grow. When the forest finally broke and the first view out across the mountains caught me by surprise, I was ready to run and jump and click my heels.

The mountains breathed clouds like hirsute gentlemen walruses lounging in a huge steaming pile, smoking pipes and puffing smoke. All around the clouds rose from the ravines and valleys, climbing with a gentle unconcern toward the sky. Ravens flapped through them, and called across the treetops. I couldn’t stop taking photographs. Every other step had me halting to peer into a bush or fingering some tree bark or nosing up close to a mushroom. I tried to capture the glow of sunlight through the translucency of a yellow leaf, but the camera couldn’t capture the ineffability of touch and ephemerality. In frustration I lingered longer and longer at each investigation, until the sun had climbed quite high in the sky. How to express the expansion in my lungs or the intuitiveness of spreading my fingers and discovering in them the completeness of the stillness of a tree’s life as it spread in glory above me? How to rein in time so that I could exist out here without being a stranger or an intruder? How to step so lightly that my passage is the the brush of the wind or the trajectory of a falling leaf? How to come home and so sink in that I am indistinguishable from the mountain and the forest?

So much time I spent lingering that the halfway point at which I had to turn back came and went. I missed my chance to gain the mountain’s summit. I could see the summit just fifteen minutes away. But that would mean a half hour round trip and if I took it I would miss the bus going home. Warring emotions had me wasting more time until I forced myself to turn away and head back down. I passed all the spots I had stopped at along the way up, sometimes seeing them in the different light of the opposite direction. The intensity of the light also reversed as I descended. Like coming down from the roof. Step by step the rocks and roots slipped behind me until I reached the base of the mountain again and stood on the road, all semblance to joy replaced by asphalt and passing cars and signs. The asphalt always felt too still and level, and that nagging self began to speak again, telling me that I needed to make something of myself, finish projects, redefine the me that stood separate from the world it lives in. It was safe and warm and nourishing here, but I always forget who I am here. My body seems to lose justification for why it is formed the way it is, eyes and legs seemingly irrelevant now.

I headed home on the bus, then the train. WIth another mountain slumbering and unassaulted behind, speaking alone to the oncoming skirt of winter. When next I come this way white might be the color of choice.

Categories
Hiking Journal Musings Outdoors

Street Lights

I’ve been avoiding writing in the blog these last few days because I’ve been in a funk and I can’t seem to find anything worthwhile to write about without sounding like I’m whining or taking the world for granted. It’s been a strange and awkward kind of funk that I just can’t seem to shake. Bad faith from my design work partners (now telling me today that they don’t know when they will be able to pay me… alarm bells going off), a string of overly critical comments recently from my boss at my evening job about my teaching methods, the start of the planning stage for going about moving out separately from my wife (the talking is calm, but I can’t help always feeling this screen of unreality veiling our tenderness; like watching a heartbreaking movie from within a shower. You want to cry, but the tears keep getting washed away by the water), weekends intended for mountain walking thwarted by tiny events like a low blood sugar attack that prevents me from catching the earliest train that would allow me enough time to get out to the mountain or being so tired from all the recent work that I can’t find it in me to roll out of bed or a call from the landlord asking me to be around on the day I was to depart to wait for the plumber, and so forth and so on, ad addendum.

So it was with some hunchbacked relief that I boarded the train this evening after work, knowing that from tomorrow I will have seven days of vacation. There will be mountains and mountains and yet more mountains on my brain, hopefully, to feed the hunger for heights that has been building up for the past few months. I’ve sewn together two tents and a tarp and will have my chance to finally try them out. Don’t know if they will work, but at least I will know it was my fingers that caused the failure of my equipment; there is something reassuring in the knowledge that even a failure of mine will at least be my failure and no one can take that away from me.

The evening sits upon the deserted residential streets (all lined with walls around every house and apartment building… one ends up walking alleys and lanes here in Tokyo, rather than the passage between furry green carpets of the States) like a fat cat just finished with dining. A cool breeze wafts through the blurry heat, stirring my view of the soundless clouds scudding by overhead. And real cats tiptoe under the street lights, their shadows racing to catch up then passing them by. Cicadas sing electric duets in the limelight, some whirr away from the safety of their perches in the trees and break themselves against the lamp glass, their wings shredding like paper. These creatures of the earth, messengers of the subconscious, lost among our alien concrete.

I stroll home, but my legs lost their swing until I come to a standstill under one street light, looking up ahead and back over my shoulder. I look up and dark birds whistle over the roof tops, heading… home? Or standing still, while the earth yaws beneath them? I can almost hear the timbers creak. Uncertain, my footsteps break from reverie and find the door as I fumble for the keys. And that is the crux of the problem, isn’t it? Just these keys. The lock snicks open and I step away, my back turned toward the expanses, to be cupped in windless inertia. A home away from home.

Categories
Hiking Journal Natural Reality Nature Outdoors Trip Reports: Hiking

A Lack Thereof

Sidewalk Debris
Debris on a sidewalk in Soest, Germany, 1988
Sidewalk Debris
Debris on a sidewalk in Soest, Germany, 1988

This is the sixteenth installment of the ongoing Ecotone essay series. This week’s topic is Food and Place. Please stop by and read the other essays or feel free to contribute your own words.

In this fast-tracked modern world, where the goods that hold up our daily lives magically appear, cut up, cleaned, wrapped, and ready to eat, more and more it seems as if we’ve lost touch with how and where it all comes from. Even when we do head out into the “wild” to harvest some measure of communion with our green past, we carry all the implements with us, like an astronaut walking on the moon. Throw away the backpack, the quick-drying clothing, the stove and pot, and most importantly, that nylon ditty bag of sustainables, and we’re lost. Most so-called “outdoorsmen” today, if suddenly left to fend for themselves far from the road and the aid of transportation, would quickly find themselves starving to death, even if an abundance of food presents itself an arm’s breadth away. Just watch a “Survivor” episode; those people know nothing about actually surviving.

In the late summer of 2001, upset and disoriented from an argument, I set off one weekend for the back country mountains north of Nikko, a national park area 2 hours north of Tokyo, without properly checking my packing list. All I could think of was that I needed to get away from people and from my home. I hoisted my pack and set off to the train station, intent upon images of forest trails and windy ridges.

Things went badly from the start. I had forgotten the map for the area and so missed the campsite that would have set me right at the trail head for the following morning. Instead I had to pitch my tent in an auto camping area, a few kilometers from the trail. It was hot and muggy and all night I lay swatting mosquitoes while drunk campers nearby reveled until the coming of dawn. I got perhaps three hours of sleep, and when morning broke, my muscles and head felt as heavy as the wet mist that sat upon the tent.

I packed quickly and headed off toward the trail, leaving early so that I might avoid the crowds of hikers. The approach to the trailhead zig-zagged along a river valley, with no signs posted, and only by querying a few farmers tending their sweet potato patches did I manage to make it to the trailhead. By that time the sun had already climbed quite high and the Japanese summer heat had begun to melt away the mist. There were no other hikers, which, because I was glad to be alone, I didn’t take note of.

The trail led into an overgrown wood with downed trees across the path and thick, almost impenetrable bamboo thicket lining the inclines on either side. Much of the walk involved scrambling through branches and stepping around crumbling ledges. Luckily a few faded wooden signs pointed to the one name of the mountain I was trying to reach and I followed them on faith.

The trail grew steeper and entered a dry ravine riverbed, old painted trail markers polka dotting the boulders and outcroppings. Walking here meant digging my boot toes into gravel and pedaling through loose scree, pumping heart and breath in an effort to stay afloat on a steep slope.

Huge, fat, wingless grasshoppers began to appear all around in the gravel and dry grass. All of them moving in the same direction, adjacent to my own movement. They were so heavy they could barely hop, but even when I approached they seemed not to notice my presence. When I reached a small ridge, I sat on a stump, eating a rice ball and watching the mass movement of the swarm, like a flowing green carpet displacing the stillness of the terrain.

I reached the summit at about noon. The peak overlooked a tarn with lead blue water across the surface of which dragged shadows of the storm clouds, mounting behind the peak opposite. Thunder rumbled from the distance. I stopped to evaluate the trail and saw that I needed to traverse a treacherous slope of loose rocks and slippery mud.

That’s when my hypoglycemia, a diabetic reaction to insulin, too little food, and high energy exertion, hit. I absently reached into my pack’s top pocket for the chocolate bar I always kept there for just such occasions. My fingers fumbled around and found… nothing. I threw the pack down and rummaged more carefully throughout the pack, hoping that I had misplaced the bar somewhere in the main compartment. Nothing. I paused, looking into the pack, then pulled out the ditty bag of food I had brought. That would do, I thought. I’ll just eat the lunch I had brought. When I opened the bag though, only a package of freeze dried rice, another package of freeze-dried spinach, a packet of soup, and a tea bag fell out. Panicking, I emptied the contents of the pack onto the trail and sifted through everything I had. Nothing.

The hypoglycemic reaction was beginning to make me dizzy and my vision blurred. I forced myself to sit still and think. Carefully I placed everything back into the pack, leaving the ditty bag of food out. I sized up the incoming storm cloud and figured I had just enough time to get my stove going and cook all the food I had left. I found a sheltered space beside a huge boulder, set up my stove, and placed a pot of water on top to boil. I waited.

I observed the landscape around me. With my vision blurring and hands beginning to shake and an uncontrollable sweat slowly drenching my clothes, the mountains seemed surreal. I hugged my knees as a frigid wind blasted the shelter and howled among the treetops back behind the trail. I pulled on my insulated jacket and watched the water in the pot, counting the tiny bubbles forming on the bottom. Steam curled off the edge of the pot and was whipped away by the wind.

During those fatal moments, when I thought I might die, all I could think of was how soft the clouds looked and how I missed my wife, with whom I had argued. The mountains seemed cold and pitiless and my stomach had no belief in the bounty of nature. Everything felt like bones around me.

I was breathing fast when the water started to boil. I emptied the open packages into the pot, not caring what mixed with what, and whispered a litany to myself, of the dream of an explosion of flavors in my mouth. Of warmth streaming down my veins. Of a pact with the world in which my body must sacrifice its independence to house the freewheeling flight of my soul. Food is life, and life is food. There is no such thing as life without the death that food requires.

I could barely hold the bowl as I spooned through it, my hands were shaking so badly. I ate so fast my lips and tongue were scalded. Lights swirled in my eyes and I was shivering from the cold sweat. I used the remaining hot water to make a cup of tea and while it steeped I finished the rice soup. The soup poured into my recesses and glowed like a firefly, reaching into niches of sustenance that only the heat could revive. Gradually the shaking died away and I squatted beside the pot, breathing slowly, in and out. Breathing slowly, slowly. When I switched off the stove the stillness clapped shut around me, with only the wind speaking.

That was perhaps the best meal I ever ate, not because I had abandoned preferences and simply enjoyed the taste of rice and spinach and egg and salt, but because that meal was stripped of distractions. The cold wind, my beating heart, and the flow of calories and nutrients made up the entire moment.

It began to rain.

I put away the tools and scraps and cinched up my pack. I stood up on steady legs. I picked my way across the slippery slope and reached the ridge on the opposite side of the dale. From there it was just a matter of crunching down the steep trail towards the road below, just discernible. And a step ahead of my next meal.

Categories
Diabetes Health Journal

A Gift

Girl Breton
Girl wading along the shore of Bretagne, France, 1989
Girl Breton
Girl wading along the shore of Bretagne, France, 1989

It’s been quite a few days since I wrote anything in this journal. I want to apologize to anyone who has been checking in to see anything new and was disappointed. I haven’t been feeling well all week, what with the delicate balance of my diabetes deciding that it would commence its summer vacation without me.

And that is what diabetes is… an equilibrium of outer circumstances meeting with inner workings. Getting the disease has, of course, irrevocably altered my life and my reactions to it have ranged from rage to despair. Most people when they think of diabetes think of the scare scenes in movies, so often depicted as occuring when some hapless diabetic just so happens to be at the wheel of a car and blacks out. I’ve never blacked out, though there have been a few humiliating moments when I miscalculated my insulin dosage and, having fallen asleep, woke up sweating up a river and shaking so badly that water would spill from a glass I was holding. Luckily I was never alone when these incidences happened, but I wonder what I would do if ever something like that caught me while I was up in the mountains?

But really, diabetes, in its day-to-day manifestation, is no worse or better than managing your body in the same way that anyone who cares about their health would try to maintain themselves. If anything diabetes is like a strict coach, doing good by you when you treat yourself right with balanced food, exercise, rest, and right attitude, but punishing you when you trip up and act stupid. The symptoms that diabetes throws at you can really open your eyes at times, and remind you just how sensitive your body is to changes and things which aren’t good for it. I certainly will never forget the importance of exercising my legs and feet regularly after some excrutiating cramps that woke me from sleep screaming in agony. Those cramps in a swimming pool have nothing on these cramps… these are the kings of cramps!

Because diabetes follows you day in and day out every day of your life and never once loosens its grip on your throat it is hard to put thoughts of it aside. Like any human I have my moments and I just want to lie back and turn into a couch potato, forget about abstaining from the ice cream or potato chips or beer. At such times walking into a convenience store, or passing a pizza delivery store weakens even the hardest won patience. I want to EAT!

You would think that all this would leave me bitter and resentful. I admit that at times, like when I can’t coordinate my fingers to write clear letters or I miss steps as I walk up the stairs, anger flares up, but usually it’s learning to observe and understand myself better. The amazing thing is that diabetes has taught me to quiet the pall of anger that I used to carry around for so many years. I guess it helped me understand that there is nothing really so important or urgent as the ticking of my heart. And, for those times when the pain is great or the fear of not having enough food when my blood sugar has plummetted, really remind you of the preciousness of each moment.

I don’t know how long my health will hold out, if diabetes will one day claim victory over the equilibrium and take my life, but for now I want to coddle the daily spark that flickers in here and live each day as it comes as best I can. That is perhaps all we can hope to do. Nothing is certain, and there are no guarantees.