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.
Her words still ring in my ears as I step off the ropeway onto the freezing, windswept plateau of the Pilatus terminal at the northern end of the Yatsugatake range. “I LOVE YOU, Miguel!” It is a confirmation of all I had been looking for and waiting for over the last few months, a statement that stills my stormy heart and promises to wait for me when I descend back to the world of trains and schedules and meetings and sullen students. We have overcome the woes of distance and newly immersed intimacy, at last announcing that we are truly together.
I lower my pack and survey the trails. Skiers up from the ropeway wait in line for head of the trail, to fly down the artificially-made snow to the snowless plain below. Though the thermometer reads -15ºC and it is early January, hardly any snow covers these alpine heights. The snowpack is so hard that walking in my running shoes is as easy as jogging along a beach. I remove my mittens from my pack, but leave the overboots inside and the snowshoes lashed to the front. I glance up at the balding white pate of the hill overlooking the plateau. A sharp, icy blue wind sweeps down from heights and fingers my collar. I laugh. Those old feisty fingers, ready to strip me bare and rush away with my shelter and food!
A voice calls out from behind me, naming me. “Miguel? Miguel from BPL?”
I shoot my head around, completely not expecting that. Two Japanese walkers, donned in ultra-lightweight gear stand there grinning. I have no idea who they are.
“You don’t know us, but we know you from the Backpacking Light site. Miguel, right?”
I nod in confusion. “How do you know me?”
“You’re famous in Japan! Everyone who does ultralight hiking in Japan knows you.”
“Really?” I pause. “Really???”
We introduce ourselves and talk about Mr. Terasawa and Mr. Tsuchiya, two people all three of us know who have done a lot to introduce ultralight concepts to Japan. They laugh and point at my pack, a specialized harness with waterproof drysack, instead of a traditional backpack: “Is that the BPL Arctic Pack?”
I nod.
One of them shakes his head and approaches with his camera. “May I take a picture of it? I’ve never seen one in person before.”
I laugh in turn. “We UL enthusiasts really are crazy about lightweight gear, aren’t we!” I spy his own pack and laugh again. “Just as I thought. How did you sleep last night? Tent or tarp? Or bivy?”
“We used a tarp coupled with a bivy. It went down to about -20 last night and I was worried that our lightweight gear wouldn’t be enough, but I was surprised that by using my clothing system with the layered bedding system I was actually very warm.” He eyes my pack again, “What about you? How are you camping?”
I shake my head in embarrassment, “I’m not camping. I’m staying at a mountain hut.”
Both their eyes pop. “You’re kidding!”
“I know, I know. Now my reputation in Japan is shot.”
“No, not that bad. At least you’re wearing running shoes!” They point at my light hikers. “No one but an ultralighter would do that on a winter mountain!” They laugh and nod to each other.
We shake hands, take a group shot, and promise to contact one another and get a whole band of UL people together in Tokyo some time, perhaps to go for a camp out here or in Okutama, west Tokyo. They head north towards Futago Ike (Twin Ponds) and I watch their silhouettes climb the through the rock garden and disappear at the crest.
The sun is already lowering toward the west and day walkers and skiers have begun to thin out. I have about three hours until sundown.
Only a few hundred meters out of earshot of the ropeway the forest settles into a deep hush. My shoes creak through the dry snow and my breath sounds loud amidst the snow laden fronds of the larches that line the path. Footprints from walkers who had passed all day break through the snow along the trail and tell stories of where they were going or how they were feeling. One set of snowshoe tracks breaks away from the main trail and wanders for a bit amidst the dark trunks of the larch forest before being forced back to the main trail by the thickness of the brush. Crisscrossing the human tracks I can make out hare tracks, ermine tracks, Japanese marten tracks, and another one that I can’t identify. Nothing seems to be happening as I plow through the landscape, but the tracks tell a different story. Life goes on all around and beings live out their family stories.
The light begins to fail and the shadows clench me in the gathering cold. With the light going so flees my daytime euphoria and the concerns about reaching the hut take over. My thoughts return to Y. and all the trials we’ve been through over the last few months. While it is true that she had told me that our relationship was sound, she had said the same thing only three weeks earlier, before her bout of silence. Just the fact that she cannot join me on this walk, like on almost every endeavor we talked to doing together, ensures that doubts begin to creep in again. I stop in a clearing and watch the fiery orange alpenglow touch the last brow of peak to the east, while standing down here in this blue forgetfulness. I feel small and vulnerable, totally alien to this snowy world. And Y., far away, doing holiday part-time work and not getting enough sleep, and feeling cold and frustrated as the wind blows through the station where she works, and losing confidence in her ability to keep a relationship going… Why was I not there, beside her, keeping her warm? Why all this distance? Why the vagaries of chance, that we would fall in love, only to encounter a minefield of responsibilities and lingering effects of past relationships?
I long to call her, hear her voice, counterbalance the silence and cold of these woods, but there is no reception. And I begin to wonder what that, “I love you” meant. It sounds like an echo, a sublime way of saying good bye.
The trail takes me up a ridge and drops into a bowl of rocks where it seems the shortened trees gather for a motionless conference. When I enter the space I almost feel like an intruder and a vague anxiety stirs somewhere in the center. I don my snowshoes when the trail begins to get icy so as to get the traction of the snowshoe crampons. Halfway down the descent the straps of the old snowshoes snap and render them useless. The light continues to fall and I scramble through the rises and falls, trying to keep from taking a spill on every descent and rise. It is not a long way, thank goodness, and I finally make it to the access road that heads up to the hut. I abandon the trail and huff it through the gloom until the familiar pointed roof comes into view above the treetops.
The owner of the hut, a soft-voiced man in his forties, stokes the stove for me and offers me a cup of hot barley tea. I gratefully accept and cup it in my palms. He hangs my gear on the rack over the stove and puts my broken snowshoes into the corner. He pulls up a stool and sits across the table from me, sipping his own cup of tea.
“Is this your first time here?” he asks.
“No, I’ve been here many times, even in winter, but this is my first time to stay.”
“It’s a good place. Quiet and friendly. That’s why I stayed,” he said. “You just missed the crowds, though. Yesterday there were more than fifty people here and it was full of music and laughter. I think there will only be eight of you tonight, though.”
I sip my tea, pensive. Then after I while I say, “The mountains are so beautiful, but without people you really can’t live here, can you?”
He shakes his head. “We have to work together to survive here. The high mountains can be really hard if you’re not careful.”
“Like relationships,” I murmur. He raises his eyebrows, confused. I shake my head. “I’ve recently gotten involved with someone and it is rocky and often so easy to lose our way. Here I am with someone and supposed to feel like I belong and full of hope for the future, but instead I feel lonely most of the time. When I try harder to reach out, she draws away, unwilling to set the path together. The harder I try to get closer the further away she seems to draw. I don’t know what to do.”
He nods and smiles, not knowing what to say.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “Shouldn’t be talking about things like that. We’ve never even met before.”
He leans forward and points at my cup. “Another cup of tea?” He gets up and bustles about in the kitchen. He returns with big kettle and sets it down on the table. “Don’t think,” he says. “Have another cup of tea.” He pours more tea into my cup and smiles. “The fire is warm, no?” He nods and smiles again.
I wake from a deep sleep to the sound of laughter outside in the subzero night. Foggy-brained, I sit up and remember that three of the lodgers had decided to get up at four in the morning to look for a comet that only comes up on January 3rd. I pull back the curtain, but the window pane is covered in a thick layer of ice. I can make put a blurry wisp of light waving in the blackness of the window. Laughter again. And the sound of a door rolling shut.
I lie in the darkness of the room for a long time, debating whether to face the freeze of the room or stay here under the blankets, warm. I reason that life is about getting up and getting out there, but that it is also about lying a bit longer under the covers and getting some proper sleep. But then I figure that comets don’t come about very often and I really should get up and see one. So I haul the blanket off me and throw on my down jacket and march out of my room, down the dark hallway, and down to the warm glow of the stove room. I pull on my running shoes and, making the same racket with the door as the person earlier, I step out into the night.
First the cold. Hard and bitter and right down from the stars. I have forgotten my gloves so I stick my hands deep into my down jacket pockets. The air, when I look up, seems gelid, like a still lake, and beyond it shine the stars. Thousands of them. All spilt across the velvet dress, so distant and impersonal that the cold seems perfectly suited to their needs. Below them, on the dark hillside, stands an almost insignificant little group of people, pointing their pinprick of a flashlight up at the heavens and remarking on the constellations. I shuffle through the snow and climb up to their lookout. Their flashlight swings down to identify me then back up at the stars. I see shadowy arms reach up and point. Voices murmur at close hand, punctuated by bursts of quiet laughter.
They never find the comet. We stand looking up until the cold finally penetrates our defenses and we all decide to head back to the stove room to warm up. We position ourselves around the fire, putting our hands out to flames to receive the benediction of heat. The hut owner brings out a tray of coffee and biscuits and we sit around for hours, until dawn, discussing Japanese youth, the effects of the recession, how to make a firebrand, even the way to read a star map. At one point, not having an answer to a question, one of the hut helpers takes out her cell phone and connects it to a specialized antenna, where she consults the internet. I ask if I might use the antenna to check for any messages I have gotten. They say sure.
I connect my cell phone and let the feelers scan the invisible voiceways for word from Y. Nothing. The receptacle remains empty. Feeling like the man on the moon, I write a short message and send it out to her, casting it into the dawn darkness, “I love you.” Letting it resound like an echo where no sound reverberates.
“I love you,” the message says. The words that draws together the strings of the universe and can make a measured difference in the strength of even the tiniest beating heart, if only it is heard.
The comet group stays awake until breakfast is ready and, still bleary-eyed, but full of laughter, we sit over our bowls of miso soup and diced cabbage and omelette and continue our lively discussion on all topics from the four corners of the world. We get onto the topic of children, since one of the women there has only just recently started getting outdoors and the other members wonder how she manages to take care of her children while she’s out here. “Well, they’re older now and can more or less take care of themselves,” she says. “But, I figure it’s time my husband stay home sometimes and give me the chance to do some of the things I love doing. I’ve always wanted to go hiking in the mountains. I don’t want to get old and feel I haven’t done anything I wanted to do.” She beams. “Who would have thought I’d get up at 4:00 in the morning in the mountains to go outside to look for comets!”
I ask about children and if she thinks that when they are young it is impossible to do all these things together. She thinks a moment and shakes her head. “In fact, I think their lives are richer for the experiences and the chance to learn what the world is about. Learning how to mentally deal with climbing a mountain or riding a bicycle long-distance or even put up a tent and survive a storm all helps make you stronger and more confident. My family did a lot of that when the kids were younger and I think the kids grew up with an appreciation for what their abilities are. Not all of them like being outdoors, but none of them is afraid of being out there.”
The dishes are quickly cleared off the table and with a whisk of a towel the crumbs are wiped away and the company disperses. Five minutes after the room was filled with the banter of people whose eyes were bright with stars, the room returns to being empty. I stumble upstairs to the bedroom to pack and get ready for the walk out of the mountains.
While jogging along the trail in the late morning sun, the heat reflecting off the snow, my cell phone suddenly vibrates in my shoulder strap pocket. I stop and pull it out. I press the open button and check the message. One. From Y.
“If you have time, meet me at Kofu station around 1:50. Can’t wait to see you. I love you.”
It is nearly five in the morning and the dawn light is filtering through the curtains. For an hour I have been up, after having been woken by some clowns who decided to have some fireworks fun outside my window. All is tranquil again, though, and the air is ringing with the orchestra of crickets, winding down the finale of the night. The trees are so still I can feel the soil breathe.
In about an hour my alarm will go off and the business of activities will intervene. My wife and I will join two friends and go for a two day hike in Yatsugatake, a range of mountains that yearly draws me almost like a spiritual fulcrum. The weather forecast says rain, as it nearly always does whenever I plan a hike recently, but the release of the strings to my apartment will make all the difference, as will, of course, the comfort of watching and joining good friends in laughter and stories. It’s been a long time.
Color hasn’t yet infiltrated the scenery outside. The greens of the false acacia and the errant avocado still harbor the grays of midnight and the horizon has yet to toss up the fireball of the sun. An in-between time that half echoes the voice of my thoughts, where my night self and my day self meet at the parting of some inchoate veil. It is as if my breath incorporates my spirit, hanging inside and out, not quite corporeal, and yet imaginary at the same time. If I were to wake up to the world one day to the absence of humanity, this is what the city might feel like. For a while. Before my own realization of lost purpose.
I lift my eyes to the sky, now brightening and introducing birds. I wager the first call will be the brown-eared bulbul’s, always brash and brave and eager to get going. It is the kind of cheery attitude that makes waking and forging on worthwhile; the kind of spirit that walkers in the mountains seem to wear on their sleeves. It is perhaps the basis of my faith; heralding life as it is and rejoicing in yet another turn of the great circle.
Larch forest, Shirakoma Lake, Yatsugatake Range, Japan, 2003.
Larch forest, Shirakoma Lake, Yatsugatake Range, Japan, 2003.
Returning from the mountains this last weekend was like descending from a great height. For three days I walked along fern festooned paths, my head literally in the clouds, all the while counting raindrops that seemed to have taken over the whole world. Originally the walk was meant to start along the higher, steeper crags of the South Alps, but with all the rain this summer landslides took out the one road that leads up to the riverine valley of Hirogawara. A whole mountain range that in normal years is overrun with hikers, this year sits in relative silence as most walkers avoid the astronomical ¥25,000 ($220) taxi fare for the long detour.
Yatsugatake was a good choice though. Keeping my tent staked out in one place allowed for light jaunts up along the ridges around the pond. Everything stayed dry in the tent. On the second day, while attempting to climb up to the ridge dropping off into a sheer cliff to the south, thunder rolled in like the stomping boots of some giant strider in the clouds. Two walkers came stumbling down from above, calling out that they had just recieved notice on their cell phones that a huge thunderstorm was brewing and that a deluge would accompany it. I heard the thunder pass overhead and rumble away south, so my experience told me that most likely the rain would pass. Big, fat, chilly drops began bombarding the trees and I stood hesitating, caught between the need for safety, and the desire to traipse along the ridge. Caution held out, and I retreated down the mountain, only to be greeted at the base with streams of sunlight through the trees.
Some slow walking along the perimeter of the pond revealed light, texture, and color of all the basic elements of water, fire, air, and earth. It was like stepping along with some slow music that caught the eye and begged to be taken seriously. And with each discovery of some subject for the camera, the steps slowed further, until at times I barely moved a pace before I was kneeling and examining something through the lens or just sticking my nose right up against the curiosities. Insects, roots, leaves, swirls of water on the pond, the light tiptoe of mist across the tree tips, the strings of lichen bristling from branch notches… There was too much to see. I could have lost myself in the passages from one discovery to the next moment. It had been a while, but the mountains opened their complexity and allowed me to wallow for a while.
Packing up and pulling up stakes brought back thoughts of the crowds and rush of Tokyo. Another world. Like a great magnet, the roads drew me back down out of the ether and back into the boiling pot. I’m still in a bit of a daze, straddling the stones between neccessity and desire.
Approaching storm over Amida Peak, Yatsugatake Range, Japan, 2002.
Approaching storm over Amida Peak, Yatsugatake Range, Japan, 2002.
Down here in Tokyo a summer storm might cause people to grumble about sopping pants hems and forgotten umbrellas, but rarely does it make for more than passing banter. Up in the alpine regions of the mountains, though, a storm can stop you in your tracks to reconsider all your plans.
On my first solo climb of the Japan Alps back when I was 24, the third morning of the traverse of the ridges found me crossing an open col, blissfully unaware of what the mountains were brewing up for me. One moment I was sauntering along, gazing at the 2,000 meter drop on both sides of the trail, the next I found myself staring at this gargantuan black cloud, rising up from the valley like Godzilla. Ten minutes later Godzilla was angry and started to blast the ridge with winds so strong that I soon found myself crawling on hands and knees to keep from being blown off the mountain.
Needless-to-say, I was utterly terrified. I hadn’t a clue as to what I should do. I crawled as far as my courage would take me, but each stretch from protected boulder to protected boulder was like jumping into a wind tunnel with your eyes closed. Twice I witnessed ptarmigans, those tough, surefooted mountain veteran fowl, blown across the ground like paper bags. I ended up behind one venerable outcropping, wet as a rat and whimpering. I must have huddled there for about an hour and I thought surely I would die there.
To my wonder and luck, three old Japanese men appeared out of the maelstrom, like prophets out of the wilderness. They were strung together by a lifeline and trudging slowly along the windward side of the ridge. When the leader came upon me he stopped and looked down. He must have thought he was seeing things, to have this skinny foreigner hunched in a ball, crying. He furrowed his brow and cocked his head, and seemed to take a while to find the right words to say. Nothing wise or momentous came out, just “And just what are you doing there?”
I must have babbled, because all three men glanced at each other, then began to laugh. The second in line patting me on the shoulder. “It’s not safe to stay here,” he said. The leader lifted me up and told me to join them, adding me to the trailing end of their lifeline. “Follow us and do what we do.”
We kept to the windward side of the ridge, making our way just over the final peak of the range, before taking a break amidst the creeping pine on the leeward side of the mountain. Here the wind stopped dead. We sat eating manderins and commenting on the tiger lilies that stood motionless in a sloping meadow at our feet. We could hear warbers burbling in the undergrowth and the steady drip, drip, drip of water falling off our wet hats and the dewey fronds of the creeping pine.
We got out of the storm after that, taking the path that led down the east side of the mountains, the bulk of the mountain blocking the worst of the storm. The three men hardly spoke a word the entire descent, just short, gruff murmurs of encouragement.
At the base of the trail they invited me to join them in the local hot spring, an old place with wooden bathtubs. We sat in the steam and sloshing water, rubbing our aching feet and sighing away the fear in our muscles. It was one of the best baths I have ever taken.
To this day I am forever grateful to those men for saving my life and for their generosity and discretion. They never made me feel ashamed. That’s what the mountains bring out in you. Why I love the mountains so much.
Laughing Knees 