Tag: Noh RIver

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Journal Living Things Nature Walking

Little Old Men

Grey river Little Egret
Little Egret hunting in the Noh River, Chofu, Tokyo, Japan, 2004

 

Grey river Little Egret
Little Egret hunting in the Noh River, Chofu, Tokyo, Japan, 2004

 

Whenever the Barn Swallows swoop past my head for the first time in the year I know that Spring has returned for sure. On my way along the river to the sports club yesterday the liquid chortling and twittering of this first harbinger of Spring spun out of the grey, rainy air like cotton candy, a taste of what was to come. The next moment the daredevil eye drop of its lean, indigo and rust body, wings cutting the air like scissors, flashed past my head and dove to within a finger’s breadth above the water’s surface. It banked and disappeared in the bend of the river.

All the along the river birds were preparing for the Spring Bash, everyone breaking off into pairs. The pairs of Green Winged Teals kicked the water in tiny sambas, the males complete in their Mardi Gras emerald green mask. A female Carrion Crow (similar to the American Common Crow, and smaller than the more numerous and Raven-like Jungle Crows) chuckled as she tenderly tended her new nest of twigs, in clear view among the bare branches of a Beech tree. A pair of Common Kingfishers, both flashing metallic turquoise, perched beyond sight of one another, but staying close to the tiny nest burrow in the mud embankment and keeping to their customary solitary habits in spite of pairing. White Wagtails square danced among the rocks while Spot Billed Ducks tangoed amidst the watery grasses. A Great Cormorant, dressed like a blackjack, flamencoed right through the crowd, unable to make quick turns. And in the champagne cloud of blossoming Cherry trees a contingent of White Eyes turned minuets, their wispy chirps giving voice to the Cherry trees’ ardor.

And off to the side, hunched like an old man, stood a Little Egret, his yellow feet in odd contrast to the swirling grey water and cold rocks. The wind stirred the billowy fronds of his coattails and, almost dejected, he pulled his long neck further into his shoulders and eyed the darker depths of the water for morsels. While everyone else danced, calling up sunshine that still didn’t have the strength to break the hold of Winter, the Egret remained a realist, looking at the present with still and uncompromising eyes. I crouched down along the bank of the river and tried to mimic his immovable spirit, but like all humans my mind wandered and took off with the dancers. Soon I was up and walking again, off to other, more pressing matters.

Categories
Journal Living Things Musings Nature Outdoors Walking

Standing in the Rain

Sasaone Mountain Azalea
Mountain Azalea blooming on the slopes of Sasaone, Oku-Chichibu, Tokyo, Japan, 2000

 

Sasaone Mountain Azalea
Mountain Azalea blooming on the slopes of Sasaone, Oku-Chichibu, Tokyo, Japan, 2000

One thing I’ve been missing is that sense of raw expectation that infuses wild places, that prescience exuding from the interaction between unseen, but watchful presences, where even the wind takes on the personality of a living entity. In the city this only rarely manifests itself and it is a rare gift when it happens.

Lately I’ve taken to running to my sports club and then walking home, both along the banks of the Noh River, which runs northwest and southeast through the western half of Tokyo. Though most of the river has been encased in a concrete cast, earthen banks, resembling European towpaths, run along the sides, with stairs leading down to them for those who want to walk their dog, watch birds, or just go for a run. Hardy grasses, reeds, and scattered trees flourish where the water stills or doesn’t often reach, and among them all sorts of wildlife, mostly birds, carry out their lives. When you walk along the banks, down below the busy passage of the human world above, you get an almost palpable feeling that the awareness of the creatures around you arises out of a connection to a past memory that characterized the whole landscape all around you in years gone by. It is their world you have entered, and with each skittish creature waddling away or bursting into the air you further sense your disengagement from the symbiosis of the organic world.

It was raining when I started home from the sports club the other day. The first rain since the start of winter and a much needed slaking of the soil’s thirst. The workout with weights and the long push with the stairmaster, and afterwards the solitary soak in the great Japanese bath, left my muscles radiating with heat and, in spite of the chill of the wind and the rain, walking along the path stirred up exhilaration. The air smelled green with new leaves and bitter with earth. The wind scythed in the sky, muscling at invisible impedances, bullroaring, knocking, bellowing. Shivers of wavelets raced across the river’s surface, as if invisible wings were darting by.

There is an old cherry tree leaning out across one section of the river and that day its branches carrying the first knots of swelling blossom buds. I stopped and just stood there, letting the rain drop its curtain of silence all around me, while I watched nothing in particular. Some Spot-billed Ducks. a pair of newly arrived Green-Winged Teals, a stately Intermediate Egret, and a self-conscious Great Cormorant splashed in the grey water, each in their own world, watchful. A bare bank of clay, into which a Common Kingfisher, brilliant turquoise in the sun, had burrowed, stood unmoving, no hint of any life.

And that was it. Just me in that place with the wind blowing, rain pattering on my head, and birds minding their own business. No grand adventures or dramatic international crises. Just me and the river. But it was enough… For that small instant I felt connected to everything and whole. Completely empty of myself. It was an echo of the world as it wants to be.

Categories
Japan: Living Journal Life In Nature Tokyo

Restlessness

Aeroskobing Boat Shore
Moored skiff in shallows of AEroskobing Island, Denmark, 1988.
Aeroskobing Boat Shore
Moored skiff in shallows of AEroskobing Island, Denmark, 1988.

During my Saturday evening walk along the Noh River near my house, the clouds teased the air with tastes of drizzle, more threatening with the rumbles of thunder, than with dumping the buckets overboard. I needed to get out of the house, away from the computer, and just walk, feeling my heart pump and seeing otherly creatures inhabit the space that we humans have been so miserly with. The river reeds had grown tall with the rains and mosquitoes soon had my bare ankles itching with bites. But I stalked slowly nevertheless, wanting to see and to listen and not rush anything.

Dark damselflies propellered among the underbrush, and I tried to photograph them, but it was too dark, and I didn’t want to use a flash. So I put the camera away and just moved through the greenery, feeling the dry scrape of grass blades and the slight shock of dew against my legs and arms. Spot-billed ducks huddled in the middle of the river like a spellbound audience, keeping an eye on the shadowy form sliding past. It was the sort of evening when you expected to come upon elves dancing under a bush, their music was that close. But the lights that glinted in my eye always turned out to be just the street lights reflected in the water.

I got to thinking about just why it is that a place like Tokyo so disturbs me, to the point of making me unable to get out of the apartment at times, the depression is so great.

Ever since I can remember there has been a fierce need within me to break away from company and spend time alone in wild places. It isn’t “alone” in the usual sense of “having no one else”, but an alone away from humans, away from the pressure of monoculture and intolerance with the world. Walking alone there was a sense of dialog with things other than myself, and often it afforded me insight into what it means to be alive. It helped me understand that I, and the world of people that I was born into, is really not all that very important, at least no more than any other world.

And in Tokyo, such chances to be alone are nearly non-existant. Even small alleys behing houses will have people walking along them or or standing by the side, watching. Watching. Always watching.

Worse, it is the sense that for someone like me who needs live things, who needs clean rivers and stretches of untouched trees and lonely paths, that what I am relegated to are these slivers of nature eked out of the concrete of the city. When trees are cut down, nothing but more concrete replaces them. The city grows hotter in the summers, and yet the inhabitants think nothing of chopping away the trees. They think nothing of paving over the river banks and trapping the soil beneath.

And I am expected to tolerate it, as if this is the way the earth should be. As if there is simply nothing to be done about it.

Perhaps I am a dreamer and don’t take this reality very well. But as Peter Gabriel once sang in his song “Mercy Street”:

“All of the buildings,
All of the cars,
Were once just a dream
In somebody’s head.”

What is this dream we are living today where we tolerate, even condone, the destruction of all that we are and that has made us? There are 6 billion of us on the planet now. If we don’t start caring now how we see things and want things, just when will we start? When there is no more water?

The rumbling thunder during my walk drifted away as evening fell. And all went silent as I walked home in the dark.

Categories
Japan: Living Journal Nature Tokyo

Wet Reeds

My afternoon run took me along my usual route along the Noh River near my apartment. As I ran atop the walkway that follows both sides of the river, the flattened reeds and rushes that had been standing higher than my head a week ago indicated how high the flood waters had raged through the channel during the deluge last Thusday. I wish I could have made it down to the river that night, wearing the Barbour waxed jacket I bought so many years ago in London, but which has always been too hot or cold for Japan, and gazing at the waters roiling beneath the bridge, while the rain crashed down.

I took the first emergency stairs down to the reedy embankment and ran over the wet grasses. All the flattened reeds lay downriver, in the direction of the flow of water. Dead fish, silvery grey creatures about the length of my index finger, lay scattered about amidst the browning grass stems where they had become trapped.

The tops of my white and grey running shoes dashed through the wet detritus, turning dark grey from soaking up moisture. I could feel the chill of the water soaking through to my socks. And I passed through a series of zones…

First the dead fish zone. Followed by the grey dragonfly zone (Orthtrum triangulare) where they raced a knee level ahead of me, one after another, popping onto grass stems and flying up again at my approach. This was followed by a zone of pigeons feeding along the banks, a whole chortling flock of them, exploding into the air as I pounded by. As I made my u-turn across the river, to run along the embankment on the opposite side and return home, I passed into the silent, elfin zone of dark, victorian-matriarch-like damselflies (Calopteryx atrata) the large kind that beat their black wings like mute, slow-motion helicopters and flash their slim, cobalt blue abdomens between wing beats. They rose up from the path in dark droves, a mysterious flock of insectine birds. And on into the zone of fluttering white cabbage butterflies, dancing around me like tufts of tissue paper. A zone of spot-billed ducks, resting upon the shallow river water in the afternoon breeze. One mother trundled along the bank just by the water’s edge, herding her flock of seven ducklings. The final zone appeared overhead, with the silhouettes of a hundred jungle crows crouching along the telephone lines, keeping watch on the bridge below. Their harsh cries filled the grey air with the same wild abandon as the wind itself.

Of course I didn’t have my camera with me. I never have my camera with me when I see the best pictures. Perhaps that ought to tell me something about awareness and participation.