Samsquanch

Wolfmother - Joker and the Thief.


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How do you start off the story of a three-day cross border weekend adventure (the kind typically referred to, in my group of friends, as a gong show) so it doesn’t sound like every other trip of its kind? It’s hard, when they all start the same: Friday after work, like herding cats, we all manage to get ourselves in one place, pile our possessions in the back of someone’s poor car, and head south (or sometimes north) out of the city’s slow-moving rush hour traffic, our windows rolled down, arms thrown out in accompaniment to shouts of “Wooooooh!!!!”

And they all end the same too: rolling back home on a Sunday night, grubby and sun or wind-burned with piles of laundry.

But the stuff in the middle, the meat and cheese of the city-getaway sandwich, is never the same.

I look forward to these getaways, whether to Whistler or Seattle or Oregon or the Rockies, like a prisoner of war looks forward to his daily potato. This particular steaming hot potato involved an epic Friday night drive across the border and into Washington’s badlands, destination: The Gorge for The Sasquatch Music Festival.


The drive up: eight people piled into Allyson’s newly-acquired van, known in the UBC days as the Funkmobile, now dubbed Bubba. We consumed mass-amounts of junk food and Miller High Life (left over from the previous weekend's surfing trip to Oregon, to which I was excluded due to work), and by the time we were over the border (each border crossing inevitably involves the re-telling of every terrifying and hilarious customs experience each of us has ever experienced), the mass beer consumption necessitated a million pee breaks.


Each stop was an excuse to interact with the other two cars in the convoy and bust rowdily into an unsuspecting Shell gas station or hotel lobby and pile three at a time into single-occupancy toilets. The drunker we got (minus, of course, the three drivers), the funnier each pee stop got. The highlight, other than Keith and Cheryl’s discovery of “snausages” (pretzels rolled around cheese, indistinguishable from dog snacks) and Keith’s and my discovery of a beer we dubbed “Angry Penguin Beer” (made in Canada but exported directly out of the country to be sold at gas stations for $2.50 US for a six pack, or $4.89 US for a twelve), was Gunner’s breathtaking wipe-out in a gas station just outside of who-knows-where Washington.

It went something like this: Erin and Gunner’s kidneys were officially exploding. Mine weren’t far behind. We pulled into a lonely gas station and the sliding door was open before Ally had fully come to a stop. Erin did a rolling jump out (it would have made Steven Segal’s stunt double proud) and made a run for it. Gunner came next, hot on her heels, and I followed. We got into the convenience store and rounded corner number one (a sharp right behind the Bugles and Sun Chips). Erin made it around and was nearing corner number two (a sharp left down the bathroom hallway) when Gunner, still rounding corner number one and wearing flip-flops with a scarce amount of tread, went down like a speed skater on his last lap with an Olympic gold in his sights. He went down hard, flat on his front and did a little skid into the slurpy machine (or was it a rack of road maps?).

Erin turned around briefly at the commotion and did a hysterical skipping prance while unbuckling her belt, and I went down into the Excalibur position (on one knee), knowing that peeing my pants now would be a waste, given how close I was to the washroom. Gunner moaned an “Ow,” pulled himself up and kept going to the men’s washroom. I rounded the corner myself, buckled over giggling, and could hear Erin, now behind the closed women’s washroom door, in paroxysms of laughter on the toilet. And she remained that way, red faced and laughing, trying to tell the story of Gunner’s fall through giggles when we finally made it out to our friends standing at the gas pump.

(Rossy Interlude: "All I remember from the Great Gunner wipeout is coming around the corner and seeing mass hysteria. As I was trying to get the info out of an out of control Kristen who was pulling me towards the bathroom door to hear the mad cackling from behind it, a stonefaced and silent Keith had grabbed my other hand and was pulling me towards the wall or something. Drunken and confused, my mind couldn't gather what was going on as my head was being pressed against the women's bathroom door, and my left hand was being used as a middleman fondling mechanism for Keith, whom I hadn't really gotten to know yet. It turns out Keith had just wanted me to touch the brail. That is what I remember from the Great Gunner wipeout.")

We continued the ultra hilarious A to Z car game, moving on from “discharge” to the topic of “body cavity searches at the border crossing.” “Ribbed” was the highlight, other than maybe McFarlane’s, “What was that, R? What comes after R? U! Umm… UGANDA!!”

There was also the famous stop at Haggen for food and booze. We were nearly in the parking lot when someone with a quick eye noticed that the Krispy Kreme on the other side of the parking lot had its doughnut light on, which meant that a fresh batch had just been pulled from the oven and samples were being given out for free. (Last time we tried to hit up Krispy Kreme it was closed, although that didn’t stop Diga from trying to place an order at the drive-thru anyway). Ally did a doughnut, excuse the pun, in the parking lot, and b-lined it to Krispy Kreme, pulling through the drive-thru and asking the little squeaking box,

“Hey, so, doughnuts! Um, word on the street is that you’re giving them away for free or something?”

To which the little box responded, “That’s right. If you park and come in you get a free doughnut.”

The car immediately erupted into an earth-shattering celebratory roar, sixteen arms shooting up in the air, and as we peeled out we distinctly heard laughing from the squawk box.

We parked the car on the other side of the shop and exploded out of every door like a breaking geyser, empty beer cans spilling all over the parking lot in a cacophony of clanking metal, and we ran in for our free doughnuts. We left twelve seconds later, two of us wearing paper Krispy Kreme hats. It was my first Krispy Kreme, and will most likely be my last. After one bite I had handed it over to Gunner who had already inhaled his own.


Haggen was an in-out operation. We played Price is Right with the bill, making sure to include the cashier, Christine, in the game. Deanna won this time with “$102, Bob.”

We finally arrived at the campground sometime after 1:00 a.m. There was no rhyme or reason to the parking/camping situation, and the cold, tired people in navy blue Sasquatch windbreakers and flashlights who took our camping ticket had no idea what was going on, so we drove aimlessly through the darkness, weaving through small hoards of meandering campers and divisions of the seemingly endless sea of tents, looking for a congregation of port-o-potties with a big number 22 painted on a piece of plywood. There we were to find Anna, who had reserved a spot for us near her tent. It was spookily easy how quickly we found her, or she found us, and we pulled in and began setting up our tents, shivering in the black Washington night.

Once the tents were up everyone plopped into their sleeping bags, Ally, Dom, Cheryl, Keith and I, not ready to call it a night yet, sat up in Bubba, who was now being called “The Ranch on Wheels,” or “The Mobile Ranch” (in honour of Dom and Ally’s house, which is called The Ranch), and we drank in the dark and played more A to Z until it was finally time for us to tent-it-up ourselves.

I fell asleep to the sound of Dominic discussing how fun it is to say the word “snausage.”

It down-poured all night long. The heavens opened up and flushed their toilets on the poor inhabitants of tentland, hunkered down in a giant cow field and trying to get some sleep in preparation for twelve straight hours of concerting scheduled for the next day. Every single person in tentland who had drank too much and had to pee in the middle of the night (I estimate that to be about seventy percent of the community) lay there in agony in their sleeping bags, cursing the freezing plops of rain on the roofs of their tents and the distance they would have to travel to the nearest port-o-pottie for a terrifying pitch-black wazz. I lay there somewhere between an hour and a half to two hours until I saw the crack of dawn squeeze through the grey roof of my tent, and sucked it up, now sure I had done some permanent internal damage, put on some flip flops and grabbed an umbrella, and trudged through the cold, miserable, sopping grass to the dirtiest port-o-pottie I have ever had the pleasure of utilizing.

When I got back I saw the little heads of Rossy and Deanna poking out of their tent.

“Good morning sunshines,” I happily saluted them, for, even though I was cold and wet and hadn’t slept a wink, I no longer had to pee, and was looking forward to my warm sleeping bag.

Deanna responded to my chipper greeting with, “Are you wearing a nightie?”

“Yes,” I said, looking down at the skirt I had put on so as to not get the cuffs of my only pair of sweat pants wet, “I always go camping in a nightie.”

Which is when Erin came scurrying over from the van, informing me that the tent she, Deanna and Rossy had been sleeping in had flooded, and they were moving camp into smelly Bubba. I wished them luck and zipped myself back into my cozy tent and went back to sleep, lulled by the melodic snores of Keith.

(Rossy Interlude #2 : "As Deanna, Erin and myself awoke that morning to wet pillows and sleeping bags, we couldn't help but laugh at the stupidness of the situation. Our poor little tent had simply given up the will to protect us from the elements and was now in a pre-death collapse as rain dripped on us from the sides and the roof, and water moved in like a silent menacing snake. A we giggled and dissed our tent, frustration slightly grew as someone exclaimed, "Who the hell uses napkins as flies on tents? " Damp, cold, and hungover, Erin decided to take first action and brave the rains outside to get the keys from a sleeping Ally so that she could move into the comforts of the van. However in doing so, she awoke the Water Beast, which allowed all the water that was being held at bay by the flimsy sides of our little-tent-that-couldn't to rush forth, causing squeals, laughter and exclamations of "stop moving Erin, you are waking the Water Beast." Sadly, Deanna and I had had to abandon our little tent as well, leaving it standing there in the rain like the that sad little lamp form that IKEA commercial a few years back. But it will be a great summer tent.")

We woke up around 9:00 and unzipped our tents when the rain subsided to a less threatening pitter pat on our tent walls. As we shook the sleep from our eyes and unlocked Bubba to get at the juice, water and Erin’s cinnamon buns, we got our first glimpse of the landscape we had driven through in the dark the night before.

We were a million tents deep into a sprawling city of dripping nylon and wet cars, in a huge expanse of field that stretched for miles in either direction. To our left and behind us the land was flat and grassy, but to our right, and straight ahead, lay rolling green, brown and yellow hills topped with layers of heavy low-lying charcoal clouds interspersed with bright white fluffy clouds. Behind the dense, looming sky that threatened thunder and lightning and crisp May rain were splatterings of bright blue sky. The sky looked both menacing and inviting, and cast huge dappled shadows on the hills.

It was beautiful. The whole sight was beautiful, even with the dilapidated, rain-drenched tents, clusters of port-o-potties, and the bits of sun sparkling off the chrome of several thousand bumpers and license plates boasting state and provincial mottos from regions as close as Alberta and Oregon, and as far away as Michigan and Alabama. It was both pristine and filthy, orderly and ramshackle, dry and wet, sunny and overcast, quiet and noisy, energetic and groggy, happy and hung over – this converted cow field where tractors were still making their rounds through rows of tents and piles of discarded beer cans, and spiders picked their way through long blades of grass into the sunshine (and eventually into my tent).


The people who were sleeping beside us had been given, by mistake, a kitchen tent instead of a regular tent, and had spent a miserable night getting rained on through the screen walls. They got up early and drove to Seattle to buy a real tent for the next night. We took advantage of the empty tent and its plethora of seating options (chairs, air mattress, coolers) to create a socializing area just as the rain returned. We gleefully accepted compliments by passers-by who admired the arrangement, announcing with pride that we commandeered the tent and all its possessions, including the ripped poncho I was sporting, while the owners were who knows where.

(Rossy Interlude #3: "Not only did we commandeer their tent and poncho, but also their chairs, cooler, air mattress, and if time had allowed us to do so, we probably would have polished off their milk and premade burgers while curled up in their blankets. Hell we probably would've packed up the tent of they had never returned by the time we were ready to leave.")

We also made friends with a Colombian whose name I’m still not sure of, since everyone immediately gave him a nickname. Out of the following names he was called by my friends: Javier, Juarez, Juan, Joaquin, and Joaquin Phoenix, one of them is likely to by correct. He had rescued a stranger the night before when the poor guy, hammered and discombobulated, had lost his friends and couldn’t find his way back to his tent, and was sleeping in a blanket in the rain. “Juan” invited him into his tent and saved him from certain death from exposure.

After a breakfast of left-over Haggen sandwiches and salads and a few glasses of juice, we cracked open the beer, and from 9:30 onwards drank in and out of our commandeered tent, in the sunshine and rain, until we were all good and tanked and ultra elated with life.

On one of my many, many, MANY trips back from the terrifying port-o-pottie #22 base, I took a wipe out on a loose rope on Aiden’s tent. Juan came running up to me with concern. I pulled myself up and examined the damage: a muddy knee.

“Never mind the TENT!!” Juan exclaimed as he lugged me to my feet, “Are YOU okay?!!!!”
I laughed, slightly embarrassed. He was relieved, and then said to me, “Here, come join my new group of friends,” ushering me forwards and pointing to everyone drinking in lawn chairs. Juan ran off, happy to have given me some new friends.

The sun officially came out around noon, and we left tent land for the twenty minute walk to the Gorge at around 3:00. Erin took a fabulous slow-mo bail into a ditch while mimicking the Excalibur pose I went into when Gunner wiped out. The fabulousness just wouldn’t end. We also allocated buddies to make sure no one person got permanently lost from the group. I was buddied with Gunner and Erin. The buddy system, not surprisingly, quickly broke down. We have yet to find a system that works. The closest we’ve ever come was our fluorescent t-shirt Arts County Fair. But even that was full of flaws.

(Rossy Interlude #4: "Aiden and I were buddies and we had no break down in our buddy system, except for when it came for Aiden and I to fend off the hail under our own blanket. I needed the extra body to create more cover and Aiden wanted to take the hail like a man. "Aiden get under the blanket and work with me!!!" He didn't and I fled.")

Iron and Wine were on stage when we arrived, and we got ourselves a beer and a spot on the grass at the top of the hill and marveled at the view.

Halfway between Seattle and Spokane, the Gorge is in George, Washington, and it’s an absolutely incredible venue. At the bottom of the hill was an open stage. Behind the stage was the Columbia River (which, incidentally, runs through Trail), and behind the river was Washington’s badlands: a grassy desert peppered with low-lying shrubs and coyotes (well… at least ONE coyote). Then a wall of cliffs rose straight up in a semi-circle around the valley, carved into steps like a mini version of the Grand Canyon. The river snaked through the valley and around the cliffs towards the horizon, and clouds, flat and dark grey on the bottom, and white and fluffy on top, hovered over the scene, trying to obscure our view of a bright blue sky that peeked through and brought with it sunshine. Heavy grey clouds loomed in the distance where the river met the horizon. We could have been anywhere. We could have been in Alberta, or New Mexico, or Arizona.

We baked in the heat, listening to the bands like background music while we waited for 5:40 to roll around so we could join the throngs of people at the bottom of the hill when The Tragically Hip came out. We baked and applied sun screen, and baked some more, eyeing the blackening clouds in the distance and trying to calculate whether the wind was going to blow them on top of us, or past us. When it started to thunder everyone cheered like idiots cheering a fight at a hockey game. Little did we know what the thunder would bring. Had we known, we might not have been so enthusiastic.

We were all so busy looking east, at those damn black clouds, all 22,000 of us, that we didn’t see the ones coming from the north. The wind changed direction and in a matter of seconds the sun was gone and a cold wind was picking up, dropping plops of thick, juicy, ice-cold rain on us. We turned our heads to the sky, welcoming the refreshing water on our hot skin, when the plops suddenly got bigger, and colder, and mighty harder.

The hail came down in a sudden fury, and everyone fled in every direction. McFarlane, Deanna, Rossy and I, taken by surprise and expecting the sudden dump to be fleeting, hid under the big green blanket, shrieking and madly laughing, being pelted with spheres of ice the size of chick-peas. When we realized the hail wasn’t letting up and we were getting absolutely drenched (and pummeled), we peeked out from the blanket to see if there was room under the roof of the hot dog stand up the hill. No go. And then we caught a glimpse of the mayhem on the hill. About a third of the crowd was left, hiding pitifully under blankets and being mercilessly assaulted from the heavens. Hail was gathering around us in piles of snow, the band had fled in terror, and the sky was black like the apocalypse. From under nearby blankets were muffled cries of, “What the FUCK?!”, while braver people scurried about frantically. Bags, beer, blankets and girlfriends were abandoned in the madness. (Cheryl quote from later in the day: “Dom abandoned me and fled like a little girl.” Dom unapologetically agreed with this assessment).

The four of us decided to stand up, and Aiden, braving the onslaught like the Fumanshu cowboy he is, helped us to our feet. Now the four of us were standing in a huddle under the blanket which came to our ankles, trying to formulate a plan. In the process of strategizing someone spotted, through the slot of visibility under our blanket, two giant Ziploc bags of Triscuits abandoned on the grass a few feet away. We were now distracted by abandoned food. Something else to commandeer.

We shimmied over, hidden under big green, in attempt to lower the blanket another few inches to the ground, obscuring the bag of Triscuits and sucking them up undetected, then shimmying onwards to consume the crackers unbeknownst to the Triscuits’ rightful owners. Kind of like a big green octopus.

We must have looked like one of those creeping bushes in the cartoons, when someone is trying to covertly infiltrate some sort of situation and camouflages themselves as a tip-toeing bush or garbage bin. As we tip-toed I pictured that sneaky high-key piano music playing in my head. Doop doop doop doop doop…

The owners (merely a pair of feet from our vantage point), who happened to be standing right next to the Triscuits, quickly put a kibosh on that plan, immediately detecting our intent, and we shimmied onwards giggling madly.

When the hail finally subsided about twenty minutes later everyone was soaked to the underwear. People came out from their hiding spots and the crowd erupted into applause and cheers, not so much at the dispersal of the storm but at the hardiness of everyone who had braved it. We were cheering ourselves more than anything else, and cheering the utter madness of the situation. In fifteen minutes I went from sitting in a tank top boiling to death, getting a sun burn on my bare arms, to wiping out down a hill on snow and slush. Aiden immediately belly-slid down the hill, taking out people like bowling pins ("or like a drunken penguin who had misjudged the steepness of the hill and the speed at which he travelled - Rossy"). He donated his toque to one of his victims as consolation.

The hail caused more havoc than just freezing and soaking everyone. It flooded the Wookie stage, rendering it unusable, and forcing the acts who were supposed to appear on that stage to cancel. Good-bye to Sam Roberts and Matt Costa.

It also delayed the main stage by over an hour, and we had to wait until nearly 7:00 for the Hip to come out.

We headed down the hill into the crowd, more for warmth than anything else, and double-fisted our $10 cans of American beer figuring, if we had to suck it up and be cold and wet and miserable for the rest of the day, better to be drunk and numb to that fact than hyper aware and grumpy. And better to make friends with everyone around us in the crowd.

We initiated a loud, raucous singing of Oh Canada (in the pre-Hip concert tradition for which I have grown quite fond, and for which the Americans around us were not remotely impressed), and then initiated a butt-slapping train in the crowd worthy of a baseball park wave.

A million cold, long, suspenseful years later The Hip came out and put on a great 50-minute show. Beach balls with the design of the Canadian flag painted on them bounced through the crowd in front of a backdrop of pink and yellow clouds and Grand Canyon cliffs.

With the loss of Sam Roberts and Matt Costa we went for a beer and food run after the Kingston band left, ran into people we knew, lost them, ran into more, lost them too, and came back to the Main Stage in time for The Shins. Erin spent the time harassing people at the port-o-potties near the pizza, going up to people, asking them if they were Canadian, and if they were, announcing, "Funk you, Tron!" They had no chance.

Post-shins: While waiting for Ben Harper to come out the crowd around us broke out into a spontaneous “Let’s go Oilers!” chant. The Americans were very confused, one of them turning to Erin and asking her what an Oiler was. Ben Harper finally came out and put on an amazing show, most of which I couldn’t see because I either had gigantic Mathieu in front of me (no matter how much he tried to have me in front of him), or a wookie of a woman with a wall of hair obstructing not only my view of the ENTIRE stage, but also BOTH jumbo screens. Didn’t matter. All I needed was the music. (Best song of the night, With My Own Two Hands, no doubt about it - Rossy)

I had no energy to stay to see the Flaming Lips, so when Ben was over I fled home fatigued and freezing, taking a tortuous half-hour walk through ice-cold mud back to the campsite. I shivered in my tent all night long and fell asleep sometime before pneumonia set in.

We were packed up and on the road by 9:30 the next morning. Had a breakfast of stale croissants and warm juice while listening to the pick up stories (one of which involved Gunner bringing a lady friend back to the van). I gave up my shotgun in the van and moved into the caddy for the ride home, giving a little more space to the people squished in Bubba, and enjoying the backseat of Dom’s spacious 1977 Cadillac, a boat of a car with a saggy memory-foam ceiling and a backseat like a bed (not to mention a trunk that closes in and hugs itself tightly, as Erin almost learned in her near death experience of being closed in the trunk). To top it all off it came with two Roger Whitaker A-tracks.

We put on Ben Harper and watched the beautiful countryside roll by, enjoying finally being warm, dry and comfy, and didn’t hit rain again until we were back in the familiar Washington mountains.

We were back in Vancouver by 5:00, and after Dom drove off with my backpack still in his trunk (I didn’t care – all I needed were keys to get into my house so I could shower the smell of cheap beer, snausages and dill-hole potato chips off my skin), I crashed on the couch and waited for my roomy to get home so we could re-discuss every second of the weekend.

Check 'er oot: http://www.sasquatchfestival.com/

Passing Afternoon: Our Endless Numbered Days.



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Astair.


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The wind is blowing

“Buddy, the wind is blowing.”

The wind is blowing, and nothing will do till we’ve run to a pasture below the house where Queenie has scooted to bury her bone (and where, a winter hence, Queenie will be buried too.) There, plunging through the healthy waist-high grass, we unreel our kites, feel them twitching at the string like sky fish as they swim into the wind. Satisfied, sun-warmed, we sprawl in the grass and peel Satsumas and watch our kites cavort. Soon I forget the socks and hand-me-down sweater. I’m as happy as if we’d already won the fifty-thousand-dollar Grand Prize in that coffee-naming contest.

“My, how foolish I am!” my friend cries, suddenly alert, like a woman remembering too late she has biscuits in the oven. “You know what I’ve always thought?” she asks in a tone of discovery, and not smiling at me but a point beyond. “I’ve always thought a body would have to be sick and dying before they saw the Lord. And I imagined that when He came it would be like looking at the Baptist window: pretty as colored glass with the sun pouring through, such a shine you don’t know it’s getting dark. And it’s been a comfort: to think of that shine taking away all the spooky feeling. But I’ll wager it never happens. I’ll wager at the very end a body realizes the Lord has already shown Himself. That things as they are” – her hand circles in a gesture that gathers clouds and kites and grass and Queenie pawing earth over her bone – “just what they’ve always seen, was seeing Him. As for me, I could leave this world with today in my eyes.”

- A Christmas Memory, Truman Capote

Tofino, British Columbia

Thoughts about buses

Found this assignment I wrote for school this past year. For some reason, re-reading it made me smile, thinking about how, for some people, being dependent on the "loser cruiser" to get around is a tragedy. But I don't have to pay for parking, car insurance, or a spot twenty blocks away from my house, and my electric-run bus has got nothing on the detrimental exhaust being spewn out by all those death traps idling in rush-hour traffic. As much as I love to complain about buses, they aren't all that bad. Consider...

The bus pulls up to the stop with the slow sigh of heavy brakes and a whiff of exhaust. Commuters, shaking out umbrellas, jostle to be the first onboard, not because of the January drizzle, but because there are prime seats to be had.

The doors close and the bus heaves forward into traffic. People, jammed together, their warm breath turning into condensation on the glass, turn inwards to their music, books, or newspapers, or concentrate on the ads above the windows, careful not to make eye contact.

Windows, wiped with sleeves to see up-coming stops, fog over within seconds. Those forced to stand clasp grimy metal poles or plastic loops, swaying precariously with each lurch of the bus and rubbing shoulders with grumpy commuters.

I’m sitting against the cold, draughty window on a cracked plastic seat, hot blasts of air pumping out of the vents near my legs. I plan out pieces of my day while stifling yawns, and spend six whole seconds wondering where the girl in front of me is going.

The bus smells like rubber and that wet dog smell from rained-upon toques and wool coats. Businessmen clutch briefcases in their hands or on their laps. Old women in the courtesy seats eye teenagers who either hop about boisterously, or sit and stare complacently at traffic out the window, immersed in their iPods.

The only common link between all of us is that we’re not here, with the cracked seats and dripping rubber floors, but are either absentmindedly re-visiting a moment in the past, or thinking about the world we will trudge into once we step off the bus and back into the January drizzle.

Read this book

"We left about midnight and walked down the hill in silence. The night was muggy, and all around me I felt the same pressure, a sense of time rushing by while it seemed to be standing still. Whenever I thought of Puerto Rico, I was reminded of those old magnetic clocks that hung on the walls of my classrooms in high school. Every now and then a hand would not move for several minutes - and if I watched it long enough, wondering if it had finally broken down, the sudden click of the hand jumping three or four notches would startle me when it came."

Death Cab and Franz Ferdinand: Fight to the death!

I stopped rating my concert experience long ago. I've been to so many concerts over so many years, it seemed impossible to place one above another. But after Friday, I'm back to rating. Franz Ferdinand, surprisingly, came close to being on par with the Radiohead concert I saw in Osaka two years ago. I don't know if any concert can ever come close to that amazing night in Japan, but Franz Ferdinand comes in a close second. And that's saying a lot.

I was there primarily to see Death Cab for Cutie, and was gutted when we showed up at Pacific Coliseum and could hear them playing their set inside the arena. Late as always.

We walked in to the loud, dark arena, Ally, Rossy and Erin sporting amazing goggle burns on their faces from a weekend of snowboarding in Whistler, their noses peeling in huge gruesome chunks and their cheeks glistening with moisturizer. Hot. We shuffled down the aisle in the dark, trying not to get in peoples' way and eager to get sitting down and enjoying the show. This proved to be difficult when we got to our row and every seat was filled. After fetching an arena official with a flashlight, we stood aside as she examined the tickets of every single person sitting in the row. Everybody hated us. Three songs later, the culprits were booted out (I contemplated tripping them as they trotted up the aisle past us, but real life Kristen is never as evil as inner urge Kristen, and my feet stayed where they were), and we were in our seats.

Death Cab was wicked and their set was amazing. I didn't want it to end, and silently cursed Franz Ferdinand as they played their last song and welcomed the next band.

But by the time the break was over and the lights were dimmed and Franz were making their way onto the stage, I'd had a red bull and two beers, and was levitating off my seat.

They came out with more energy than I'd ever seen. This was the last show of their tour, and both bands, who seemed pretty much in love with each other, just didn't want it to end. They were relishing every minute of being on stage, and putting so much into each song.

The entire stadium was on its feet. Except... our section. Apparently the "A" in section A stood for LAME. We were literally the epicentre of sit-town. Ten rows up, ten rows down, and two to the left and the right, all populated by people glued to their chairs, their heads barely bobbing. Not wanting to obscure the view of the people behind us, we stayed sitting for an entire song before Ally got up and started dancing in the aisles. She got kicked out by the lady with the flashlight, and when she came back to our seat we all stood up with her. Sitting shmitting. Franz was on stage and they were giving 'er.

The four guys in front of us (none of whom would give poor ultra hyper Ally a high-five) stood up too, but stood like statues, unmoved by the energy of the crowd and the band. I think they were deaf. The guy directly in front of me was as tall as a freaking tree and as immobile as a brick wall. The four people beside Ally snuck out, never to return, and the four of us spread out along the rest of the row as the music got louder and faster and crazier.

The show seemed to be building towards a crescendo. Each song got more wild and unstructured, until eventually the concert reached its climax: a song after the encore, where two band members grabbed drum sticks and surrounded the drum kit along with the percussionist, so now there were three people wailing on the drums. They went nuts for about a minute, and I jammed to the music while watching a wily nymph doing the jig to end all jigs in the open play pen on the floor. He just unleashed, oblivious to anything and everything but the incredible music, flailing and jamming, doing epic, uncoordinated flips and jump kicks in the air, then spinning in the air, throwing his arms in every direction, running back and forth, skipping and diving and jamming. He was fabulous.

Then the stage went completely dark, the drummers still wailing away on the drums, and when the lights came back on there were eight more people with drums on stage flanking the drummer who was still in the centre with the other two band members, still wailing away. Eleven people were now pounding out the same mad, electric, almost primal beat, going faster and faster and faster. You could practically see the sweat pouring off their foreheads as they pounded away, bent over their drums. I peed my pants.

It was the single most amazing thing I've ever seen in a live concert, and it went on for so long, the song, and the concert, ending in this climax of drums.

It was the raddist thing ever. I wish I had it on tape so I could re-live those five minutes as many times as it would take to process how incredible that moment was. But then again, maybe having constant access to that moment would make it less special. It's certainly a memory that won't fade any time soon.

Do it up Franz Ferdinand. I'll line up to see them again in a heart beat. In a drum beat.

Victoria

I had to go to Victoria last weekend for work, of sorts. I spent April working as a sort of activities leader/tour guide for my ESL school, taking a group of 18 Thai teenagers on outings around Vancouver. On weekends these outings took us further afield, to places like Whistler and the Island. It was a pretty sweet gig, and I'm sorry it's over. It certainly ended on a high note.

I relish every chance I get to get out of Vancouver. As much as I love it, I'm the kind of person who needs a frequent change of scenery, to de-compress and get out of the doldrums and monotony of the same thing and the same people and the same sights day in and day out. Even when you live in a beautiful, exciting city surrounded by loving, hilarious, adventurous friends, going in a complete different direction helps replenish the soul and mind. And Victoria is the perfect place for that.

We took an early ferry over on Saturday morning. The kids, new to the Pacific Northwest, spent the entire hour and a half journey out on the freezing cold, windy deck, immersed in the beauty of the landscape and enjoying the sunshine, which hadn't shown its face in a week. I told them to look for killer whales. Their eyes never left the water. I stayed in the warm ferry reading The Rum Diary and eating the lunch I'd packed to save money, guarding their bags dutifully.

We arrived in Victoria and dropped our stuff on in our downtown hotel, and then spent the afternoon at the Royal British Columbia museum, learning about global warming, the ice age, first nations culture, and Victoria through the ages. They were bored. I was engrossed.

Then we went on a wander around the small, quaint, beautiful downtown core. We wandered lazily towards the Parliament buildings where we encountered the end of a parade. Sprawled on the manicured lawn in the incredible spring sunshine was a congregation of every hippie denomination you could think of. It was a gathering of liberal, left-wing, vegetarian, yoga, peace activist-types come together to celebrate everything they could think of to celebrate, and protest everything else. The students boggled, and I giggled telling them they were truly getting the west coast experience. They barely understood, being only fifteen and from Thailand, but they loved it all the same, and ran around on the grass, talking to people and taking pictures.

And I sat down on the lawn, back to guarding bags and snacks and cameras, watching the scene drift by: dred locks, hemp hats, naked toddlers and kids in sarongs playing hacky sack, a group of people doing yoga on the grass, people with mohawks slinging stuffed animals in a sling shot, bare feet and long skirts, a live band singing about George Bush and the horrors of olden days residential schools, Woodstock-style jigs on the grass, the smell of pichouli, dark-skinned, bare-chested men sporting buns and smoking pot, dogs and kids chasing each other in the sun, tye dye, Darth Vader playing a violin with a light saber, people handing out brochures about peace, vegetarianism, seal hunting, oil, Bush, de-forestation, water crisis, greenhouse gas emissions, and anything else you could think of. All this was going on in front of a backdrop of totem poles, sail boats and the harbour, and behind that a jade ocean and sparkling blue sky, while the provincial capital building loomed behind me.

I set the kids free for their favourite passtime: shopping, and went with Sam, their group leader, to sit on a cafe patio in the sunshine at Bastian Square, watching the seagulls, watching people, people watching us, drinking tea and eating a brownie, talking about beer and Thailand and how amazing it is to travel and meet new people.

That night we had an epic nineteen-person dinner in a restaurant that was overwhelmed with the Thai chatter and hyper activity of nearly twenty teenagers, and I took them back to the Parliament buildings when it got dark so they could see them lit up, their lights reflecting in the black, bobbing, sparkling harbour water.

Then I put myself to bed. At ten thirty I was under the covers in my very own, quiet, dark, cozy, antique-clad hotel room flipping between The Karate Kid and Pretty Woman, and falling soundly asleep by eleven. It was the best sleep I've had in months.

I woke up early that morning, went down for breakfast, stole a bunch of bagels and cream cheese for lunch, then went back to my sun-drenched room for a shower. After that I spent the next hour and a half lying in the big, white bed in a terry cloth hotel robe reading the weekend edition of the Vancouver Sun, lying like a cat in the crack of sunlight that was streaming through the parted curtains. I was sad to leave that hotel.

We checked out and walked north towards Craigdarrogh Castle, through the beautiful Sunday morning sunshine, under cherry blossoms. The trees looked like they were full of cotton candy, with fluffy pink arrangements of flowers like soft balls, their plush petals floating into my hair and blanketing the ground like snow.

We caught the 5:00 ferry back to Vancouver, and while the kids scanned the waters again for killer whales and seals I sat listening to Modest Mouse and reading the first few chapters of Breakfast at Tiffany's as we sailed in the sinking evening sun towards home.

Most of the kids were picked up by their host families at Tsawwassen, but the three of us who lived in Vancouver proper had to take a cab back. The taxi reaked of beer, which was alarming for a Tsawwassen cab driven by a Sikh at 7:00 p.m. on a lazy Sunday afternoon, but he complimented my earrings as I was getting out of the cab and Granville and Broadway which earned him an extra $3 of tip, and I didn't care about the beeriness of the drive and my own fatigue as I bounced down to the bus stop in the warm evening air. I didn't mind that the air was a bit exhausty, that I had left quiet, laid back Victoria for sky scrapers and traffic jams and business men rushing around on cell phones (funny, sounds like I'm describing Toronto. It's all relative, I guess).

The walk home from the bus, a walk I've done a million times, felt new . The air was thick with the smell of flowers. It was nice, I thought, to come home to familiarity: the people in the green heritage house on the other side of the street sitting on their porch, the two beggars coming up to me for change with the same lie about not having money for the bus, kids outside the bar trying to get me to boot for them, random happenings in the alley, and our upstairs neighbour's cat in the window meowing at my return.

Thoughts on Nagasaki

It's crazy to me how we as humans bomb the shit out of each other, and then build memorials to remember it and honour the victims. And it's weird how we flock to these memorials and pay fees to enter museums. Why is it that we visit them? Is it out of a sense of obligation to remember the victims? To pay respect to them for their sacrifice? For most of them they were ismply at the wrong place at the wrong time. I think this fills people with a degree of guilt, and perhaps on some level we feel it's our duty to witness their suffering.

I don't know.

Humanity's gruesomenss fascinates and horrifies me. It fascinates me because it seems so unbelievable. Like the idea that dinosaurs once roamed THIS earth... or that babies grow INSIDE us... or that the Universe is infinite, yet possibly EXPANDING. These things boggle me. I can sit and think about those three things and boggle and boggle until the cows come home and never be any less blown away. Contemplating these insane wars has the same effect on me. I look at pictures of Nagasaki after the explosion, and it is nothing more than a steaming rubbish pile. A city reduced to smouldering ashes. And then I imagine what it would be like if that were Vancouver or Toronto. If someone obliterated everything I knew and loved. It's like something out of Terminator, a scene so chilling and apocalyptic that it could only come out of a sci-fi horror movie. And yet it happened. Here. Not during the dark ages. Not in Roman times. We think Gladiator fights and the Crusades were barbaric. When it comes down to it, not much as changed other than the setting.

A single person murders five, and he is a sociopath and deemed unfit to be a part of society. But a nation does the same to another, and it is part of life. It is war. The victims are collateral damage. Can we shrug it off simply because it's always been so, because that's the nature of our world? Mankind's ability to inflict such pain on ITSELF is beyond my comprehension.

It's horrendous to say, but after a while, all the pictures and stories in all these museums start to blur together. From a distance, they are indistinguishable from each other. Washington's Holocaust Museum, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Cambodian Killing Fields, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City. I go to these places and marvel and mourn. I force myself to read books like Shake Hands With the Devil because I'm afraid of turning a blind eye to these atrocities. I don't want these people to be forgotten. There will always be things of which I am ignorant, but I never want to be ignorant about these events.

Unlike the museum in Hiroshima, Nagasaki's didn't gloss over the fact that the bombs were dropped without warning. I am not discounting all the horrible things the Japanese did during the war, but the fact of the matter is the Americans were the victors and therefore "in the right" (and vice versa) simply because they had the upper hand: they had a secret weapon. And it's always easy to justify an evil deed after the fact. We live in an ends justify the means world. I mean, isn't that the nature of capitalism? Capitalism is, at the risk of oversimplifying a complex concept, another form of war. But I digress (as I so often do...)

It's scary to think that we have the power to unleash such destruction, that scientists devote their lives not to finding ways to make the world better and safer, but to developing a science that facilitates destruction; that governments actually fund their research and development, and then fund the efforts to prevent other governments from doing the same. And then they fund the wars to sniff these other people out. Instead of expending energy to obliterate nuclear warfare, our top nations are spending money to IMPROVE it. Can't EVERYONE see that this is utter madness?

There was a Truman quote up on a wall wherin he stated that Nagasaki (and undoubtedly Hiroshima) was bombed "in order to save the lives of thousands of young Americans." Why were their lives worth more?

On display were several clocks and watches that had been collected from the wreckage of what were once buildings. All stopped at 11:02. It was chilling, and it made me think of how many lives time stood still for at that moment. Forever. 40, 000 souls suspended in one second. I know it's a small number compared to, say, the death toll in the Nazi concentration camps, but each of those numbers was a person. And their only crim was that they were Japanese. They were on the wrong side.

Outside of the museum there was a beautiful park, throughout which were scattered peace statues donated to the City of Nagasaki by various countries from around the world. Tons of mothers cradling babies and doves and that sort of thing. I was pretty surprised to come across (the ugliest one of all) a statue donated by the United States (literally seconds after uttering to Aneke, "Imagine there was one from the States here!"). The nerve! What, was it a consolation prize? Sorry we slaughtered all these people while they were going about their morning activities. Here's a little reminder that peace is the way to go, let's be friends (not like you have a choice), and for next time, don't be so freaking evil.

Then I got to thinking - while digging the beauty of the park and museum - of all the effort that was put towards the museum and garden and park. All this energy and money put towards peace... after the fact. Too late.

It was a Japanese doctor (who died from leukemia after - and as a result of - the bombing) who said, "The person who prays for peace must not hide even an needle, for a person who possesses weapons is not qualified to pray for peace."


Sadly, this is appropriate considering the state of the world right now.

All this hypocricy makes my head spin.

A portrait of my grandmother as a young woman

Last year my great-grandmother moved from the small house in Scarborough where she had spent a good part of her adult life, into a new home close to my grandfather just north of the city. Over the course of packing my mother came across boxes and boxes of photographs, many of which were undated and unmarked, and none of which were in any sort of order. An entire lifetime of memories had been relegated to dusty shoe boxes and for the most part forgotten.

My mother, in one of her many benevolent gestures, decided to take up the daunting task of going through the seemingly infinite snapshots, identifying people and places, putting them in chronological order and then in photo albums. It was a project borne out of her love for her grandmother, a gift to grandma and to everyone who would come after her.

Over the Christmas holidays our dining room table became a towering scrapbook factory littered with pictures, photo album pages, post-it notes full of names, dates and question marks and a much-needed magnifying glass. We sat down with my great-grandmother and began the process of piecing together dozens of obscure lives.

My great-grandmother’s past pay spread out on the table before her, and I watched as she shuffled through it, holding her life in her delicate hands and watching it replay before her eyes. Every so often she would slap down a picture and exclaim, “OHH yes!! I remember this!” and she would reveal an anecdote, a moment caught in time, an event, sometimes large, sometimes small, but always important to her. Often these snippets were uttered more to herself than to those around her, but eventually the stories began to fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and her exquisite life, and the exquisite lives of her family, started to take form.

In a way, putting all these photos in order gave depth to my own past. My history came alive at that table. People seemed to come to life and ride right off the glossy dog-eared snapshots and into our dining room. I was flooded with faces, dates and stories, triumphs and tragedies, loves and losses. Names danced across my brain: Bertha, Paul, Selena, Alph, Olive.

I was amazed how quickly I began to recognize faces, how the scattered names started to come together in my head as I began to connect people and see how they all related. These strangers became three-dimensional, and the more time I spent with them the more I saw their personalities. My mother and I were blowing the dust off their faces and as we did we found that their silence was full of voices, the black and white pictures full of colour.

What lay across the table were echoes from, what was for us, a time past, but a time still very much alive in my great-grandmother’s heart, made clear from the way her eyes lit up at snapshots of Christmas dinners, sparkling cottage lakes, men on docks proudly displaying recently-caught fish, children on swings, women in straw hats in gardens, men, no older than my younger brothers, standing in military uniform in backyards, and impeccably dressed women with cocktails, their heads thrown back in laughter (just like I laugh).

I now know that Grandpa George had the kindest face and warmest smile. I know that his wife, Winnifred, my great-great-grandmother, remained beautiful until the day she died. I saw my brother Michael’s face in that of Uncle Donald, whom my great-grandmother, even years after his passing, still referred to as “my beloved brother.”

I feel like I’d developed a relationship with family that had been lost to me, people who were at one time ghosts from somebody else’s past. Life has been breathed into them and they are now vibrant and familiar. They have been resurrected from those dusty shoe boxes and from the very pages on which their images have been immortalized. I have found a new connection to these amazing lives from which my own eventually sprang. Their laughter makes me smile, their losses fill my heart with sadness, and through my great-grandmother’s reminiscences they have become real.

Through knowing them better I feel I got to know my great-grandmother better, a woman who, up until December, had merely been a laughing, merry face that came through the front door with a whirlwind of snow and cold air every Christmas and left that same evening after a dessert of rum and egg nog and Trivial Pursuit.

The reward of this new intimacy helped balance the sense of loss I felt when she passed away a few months later.

She might be gone now, but before her final parting I was finally granted the honour of truly knowing Phyllis Schwendau. She was my lovely, smart, funny great-grandmother. She was Edna and Winnifred and George, Norma and Vernon and Donald. She was the echo of their laughter. She was my grandpa and my mother and my brothers. She was me. And I am all of them.

And thanks to the love, patience and dedication of my own mother, these people, who would have been lost with my great-grandma's passing, have been re-born, and will now live on.

FUJI

The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter is a tenth century Japanese folk tale about five princes who want to win the hand of Kaguya-hime (“radiant night princess”), the mysterious princess of the Young Bamboo, who was discovered by an elderly bamboo cutter inside the stalk of a bamboo plant when she was a baby. He takes the tiny child, who is the size of his thumb, home to his wife, and together they raise the beautiful girl as their own.

Kaguya-hime grows to be a beautiful woman. Five princes and the Emperor, Tenno, come to ask for her hand in marriage. But she refuses all of them, for it is not her destiny to stay on earth. Whenever Kaguya-hime would see the full moon her eyes filled with tears, knowing that one day soon she would have to return to her people on the moon.
Tennō places guards around her house to protect her, but when an embassy of heavenly beings arrives, the guards are blinded by the light they bring with them, and the entourage takes Kaguya-hime.

The forlorn Tennō dispatches an army of soldiers to climb the tallest mountain in Japan and burn a letter from the Tennō to Kaguya-hime with the hope that it would reach the now distant princess. That mountain was Fujisan.

The origin of the name Fuji is unclear. One of the earlier folk etymologies claims that Fuji came from the kanji “not” and “two”, meaning “without equal” or “nonpareil”. Another folk etymology claims that it came from “not” and “exhaust”, meaning never ending.

Perhaps the most popular folk etymology is the one that claims that the image of the innumerable soldiers of the Tennō's army ascending the slopes of Mount Fuji was immortalized by naming the great mountain "Fujisan" ("Mountain Abounding with Warriors"), written with the Chinese characters for “abundant” or “wealthy” and “warrior”.

It is thought that the first ascent was in 663 by an anonymous monk. A sacred mountain since ancient times, Mt. Fuji's summit was forbidden to women until the Meiji Era

Singer Kyu Sakamoto once had bearers carry a grand piano to the summit for a concert.

My own reckless plan to climb Mount Fuji had been in the works since I first flipped through my Japan travel guide eight months before I would arrive on a scorching hot August evening. My two roommates in Japan, Heizy and Angelique, and I had intended to climb Mount Fuji at some point before our final departure from Japan. It had always been discussed with zeal, but with the attitude you have discussing a big plan that seems so far in the future you can’t imagine it ever really happening.

But as the months flew by and our departure date sped towards us, that distant “eventually” became a “now or never”, and, as so often happens with things you want to do in theory but not necessarily in actuality (like laundry), we woke up one Saturday morning and said, “Today’s the day.”

Our spontaneity that humid and overcast morning brought on a surge of adrenaline that propelled what would otherwise have been sluggish feet out of our tiny apartment in downtown Nagoya and to the grocery store for supplies.

We planned to make it to the base by nightfall, climbing all night to arrive at the summit for what we envisioned (and were promised by friends who had already undertaken the journey) a spectacular sunrise. But it wasn’t so much the desire to see the sunrise from the top of the country, as it was as a need each of us had to make this trip symbolic. We saw the rising sun as representing the dawning of a new adventure, thus reminding us that our leaving Japan in a month wasn’t the end, but a new beginning, because with the closing of one chapter, another is opened. Angelique was going home to England to get a teaching degree. I was meeting up with friends spend two months backpacking around south-east Asia. The sun represented dreams soon to be fulfilled.

As we packed our rucksacks and decided which bag of chips was likely to give us the most energy for our yen, we discussed how the grueling climb would also represent our individual struggles throughout our year in Japan. The mountain was the obstacle, an emotional or psychological issue that we would have conquered and overcome by reaching the top unscathed, to a view that would in the end make everything worthwhile. We would have overcome the trials and tribulations of living in a beautiful yet often frustrating country: the language barriers, the culture shock and frustration at social values that conflicted with our own, tackling relationships that had driven us to states of phone-throwing insanity, quitting terrible jobs, moving from one apartment because it was noisy and ramshackle, to a new one that seemed like a palace until we found we had to share our space with cockroaches like golf balls a cicadas the size of pigeons, learning to live in a foreign country where you are revered as a movie star as often as you are gawked at on the subway. We had certainly come out of all those problems stronger and more independent than we had been when we first arrived, and we were attaching the ‘whatever doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger’ cliché onto this final journey, our final test of resolve, strength and character. And yes, people climb Mount Fuji all the time. In the grand scheme of things, it’s a less impressive feat than you might at first think. But for three girls who tended to spend their weekends lounging in the park reading Thomas Hardy poetry and gorging on pasta, chocolate and red wine, it was like tackling Everest.
Mount Fuji, at 3,776 meters, is Japan's highest mountain. The nearly perfectly shaped volcano has been worshipped as a sacred mountain, and experienced big popularity among artists and common people. Fuji is a dormant volcano, which most recently erupted in 1708, standing impressively tall on the border between Yamanashi and Shizuoka Prefectures, and can be seen from Tokyo and Yokohama on clear days.
The most popular period for people to hike up Mt. Fuji is from July 1 to August 27. About 200,000 people climb the mountain every year, 30 per cent of are foreigners.

But Saturday September 20, our climb-a-huge-mountain day, was not smiled upon by the Gods. To start things off on the wrong foot, the mountain had technically closed at the end of August, thus ending the official climbing season. We were informed by our guide books that all closed meant was the stations on the mountain were no longer open, so there would be no staff on site, so to speak. And while the woman at the Nagoya tourist information booth at Nagoya station told us unequivocally that we could NOT climb the mountain, there was no one there to prevent us from going. It’s not like the authorities rope it off, we scoffed.

You can take a bus or train from Nagoya to Fuji in just under two hours, but we were trying to leave Japan with a little savings, and opted for the long route: Nagoya to Fuji via local trains. It took four hours and seven trains. The last leg of the trip had us on a rickety old local, sparsely populated by bleary-eyed commuters intrigued by the three of us with our backpacks and jittery, nervous banter. We knew, as the train trudged on, that had it been light outside, we would have been able to see the mountain lurking in the distance. But because night had fallen we couldn’t see anything except our own reflections in the rain-streaked windows. In our minds Fuji became this monster, a living entity that was out there somewhere in the rain and darkness, looming huge and waiting for us. Invisible, yet powerful and almost predatory.

When we finally arrived at the last station, Fujinomiya, it was pouring rain. We hailed a cab and drove through the trees, and for a while I felt like I was back in Canada, winding up a narrow road that cut through a dense black forest with tall, dripping evergreens reaching up into the black night and leaning, high above the road, over our tiny car. We drove higher and higher, on this mountain that we never, in the darkness, actually got to catch a glimpse of.

The ascent can take anywhere between 3 and 7 hours, and is divided into ten stations, but there are paved roads to the fifth which, at about 2,300 meters above sea level, is where most people start, and is considered the base. We reached the fifth station at around 9:30, exchanged phone numbers with the cabbie and told him we’d call him when we got back to the base the next morning. Armed with a map and two flashlights, we began our hike.

When we hit the gravel it was raining, but not too badly, and we were kept dry by our rain gear and warm by walking. The fifth and sixth stations were quite close together, but we weren’t used to climbing and were winded quickly. It took a good hour to adjust and find our rhythm and breath. It wasn’t until our descent hours later that I realized the path between those first two stations were the flattest part of the mountain. And yet they were the hardest to climb.

We got to the sixth station in what seemed like no time, and were relieved to find a little building, dimly lit from within, in which an old man sat cross-legged on a tatami mat, surrounded by Fuji souvenirs and walking sticks. Worried about the life span of the batteries in our flashlights, we asked through the window if he had any that we could buy, only to be shooed us away grumpily. Dejected, we trudged on, and promptly got lost in the darkness, venturing off what had been a clear and well-lit. Suddenly we were on what felt like the dark side of the moon, half crawling and half climbing up the face of the mountain on small crumbly rocks with no sign of a trail or scrub in any direction.

Having had the pleasure of being lost in the woods at night with no provisions or light in northern Ontario one summer, I knew we had to go back to the sixth station while we could still find it, and re-assess the situation. When we got back, the man in the shack was waving his arms at us and pointing in what proved to be the right direction. We had actually been climbing a random piece of the mountain, and it hadn’t taken us long to get lost.

The trail wasn’t well-marked, and with nobody else there, there was nothing to follow but our own instincts. We continued to lose the trail several times after the sixth station, realizing we were off course when the terrain became loose and difficult to climb. Each time we immediately turned around to the last definite point of the trail, and shone the flashlights in each direction until we all agreed which way to go. Sometimes it took us five or ten minutes to get it right, so hard was it to distinguish path from desolate Fuji landscape. The last thing I wanted was for us to get lost, hours before sunrise, with no one else on the mountain to help, being forced to sit in the rain and wait for light. I had to entertain the possibility of spending the night in the open wilderness once before, and the combined humiliation and fear that I nearly had to resign myself to made me determined not to let this story end in that way.

I tried to be positive, but once the sixth station with its surly sole inhabitant was out of site, Fuji was creepy. Not only did it look like we were on the moon – desolate and rocky, no vegetation or signs of life, no moon light, just howling wind and barren darkness – but there was nobody there. No other flashlights and no comfort in the knowledge that other people were also trudging through the howling darkness with us. We were entirely alone on a huge mountain, climbing into the night sky towards the highest peak in the country. And we were doing it alone, in the pitch black.

After a short time we were all so engulfed in the climb, in the act of putting one foot in front of the other, concentrating on our precarious footing, that we weren’t talking anymore. It’s hard to talk when you are constantly puffing, and being cold and wet and tired makes you sullen. Not that we were in bad moods. We realized we were doing something epic, especially since it was off-season and we were by ourselves. It was exhilarating, despite being exhausting physically and psychologically.

We all fell into place right away. I stayed in front with a flashlight, setting the pace, picking the path, making route decisions and yelling out obstacles. I was happy with the role, but it was also hard to be responsible. When we got off track it was because I lost the track. I knew the terrain before the others and had to find the best path and footing. I was the one reminding myself, “The Von Trapp family climbed a mountain RANGE. The Von Trapp family climbed a mountain RANGE… Old ladies do this. Old ladies do this…”

My mind also wandered to thoughts of less realistic yet often more frightening perils. If an alien or fujimonster were to jump out at us, I would be the first to go. These were often of greater concern to me than the thought of us running out of water, or getting lost, or someone falling off a cliff or breaking an ankle and having to be carried down, or any other legitimately dangerous scenario.

On top of all that, our matching rain gear had plastic see-through visors that stuck up a bit like K.K.K. outfits, and we looked like the NASA guys in E.T. who turned Elliot’s house into a one big plastic bubble. We were officially in outer space. I kept imagining that we were scientists scoping out some unchartered part of the Antarctic or perhaps even outer space, on some ridiculously expensive government-funded expedition. For a while we were members of the Von Trapp family escaping the Nazis in gortex two-pieces and speaking (in my head, of course) in a German accent. None of this lasted long.

The distance between the sixth and seventh station felt like a lifetime, and it was getting to be impossible to envision ever reaching an end. I’m glad there were stations, even though they were boarded up, because it gave you something to work towards. Those eerie, dark shacks, which would have been welcome respites from the rain had they been open, aglow with light and smelling like green tea and hot ramen, were proof of progress, and an opportunity to stop. When we got to the seventh station we rejoiced. But it was a short-lived joy. The station was completely shut-up and offered no shelter from the incessant rain. There wasn’t even a flat surface for sitting. After stopping for thirty seconds we were immediately penetrated by biting cold and started to shiver violently. We moved on quickly.

Frustratingly, the next station, a million feet further up the mountain, was also called the seventh station. There seemed to be TWO. Mentally, that brought me right back down the mountain. It was like the past several hundred vertical meters hadn’t happened, and we hadn’t actually been walking up, but were on the mountain’s cruel joke of a stair master, as sort of mount-o-conveyor belt. We didn’t linger around there for very long either.

It was after the second seventh station that the weather really started to get bad. Up until then it had been raining constantly, but it suddenly got a lot colder all at once, as if we’d suddenly crossed a weather threshold. The rain was now coming in sideways. The sound of howling wind was stronger, which made everything feel worse even if they were just sound effects. It made us feel colder, and smaller, and further away from life and warmth and safety. I started imagining how scary it would be to be on the moon and to see the earth in the distance, cold and unattached to anything around it, floating in the darkness like an embryo in an infinite womb.

The hike had suddenly gone from being a difficult but wicked adventure to a dangerous, very uncomfortable burden that might not actually end with a summit after all. And then what would have been the point? Still, we pushed on.

Everything went by in a bit of a blur. One wet, soggy, black volcanic moonrock (or fujirock) is not that different from another. One hour spent climbing UP in the black spikey rain is no different from another hour spent climbing UP in the black spikey rain. Thigh burn is thigh burn. Huffing and puffing is huffing and puffing. And black endless darkness is black endless darkness, spreading from my flashlight in every direction to infinity. I had established a rhythm. Climb climb climb pull the visor back from my eyes, squeeze the rain out of my mitts. There were no more German-accented thoughts going through my head. My thoughts were purely (in a Canadian accent): one step, two step, one step, two step, breathe, puff, breathe, puff, inhale, exhale, “Biiig rock guys!!”, exhale, is the light looking dimmer??, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, one step, two step, one step, two step, I can’t feel my fingers, one step, one step, one step, please be close to sunrise, please please pleeeeeeeease be close to sunrise, one step, one step… And this goes on for four hours. If they didn’t have rope to help guide the path, and to pull myself up with, I would never have made it past the sixth station. Thank god for that rope.

Just below the eighth station we had three group meetings within a fifty meter distance. We figured we had about another three hours of climbing ahead of us, and the same amount of time until the sun came up. One flashlight was dead and the other emitted the light as a key chain flashlight. We could make it to the top but when we got there the chances of there being a sunrise were slim. We had made it really high up, and hadn’t gotten out of the clouds. All our dry clothes were sopping. Our map had disintegrated into a paste in my bag. My phone was dead. If we had jumped head first into a lake we wouldn’t have been any wetter. And the temperature was hovering at about one degree Celsius. It was only going to get colder, and if we were going to try and make it to the top, that meant there were still at least eight more hours of being wet and cold ahead of us. Was it worth risking getting really sick? We discussed. We trudged on.

Thirty seconds later, another group meeting. The rain had gotten twice as hard in the past few minutes. It was now completely horizontal. We were climbing into the storm rather than out of it. Our feet were lakes. We continued on.

Twenty seconds later. I brought the party to a halt. The wind was actually blowing us over. And then, in the distance, a flash. We froze. I thought maybe it was a camera. For the past few hours we had seen flashlights coming up behind us. Then another flash. Was it lightning? Two seconds later, a third flash. That one was DEFINITELY lightning. There were no more group meetings. Angelique was not REMOTELY happy with the lightning factor. I took my place in front, this time lower than Angelique and Heizy, and we started booking it down the hill.

I don’t know exactly how I felt at that point. It was now official: we weren’t going to make it to the top. There were no trees on the mountain and there was no way I was going to get hit by lightning. I was actually contemplating slithering down on my stomach to stay low. I was disappointed beyond words. But at the same time, I had a stronger, more Darwinian sense of relief surging through my body.

The whole time we had made decisions based first on safety and second on comfort and sentiment and pride. This was the ultimate test, and proved to be the ultimate example of our sanity and evidence of our survival instincts. We weren’t defeated. The mountain hadn’t defeated us. We hadn’t been defeated by fear or pain or weakness or hunger of cold or wet or thirst or fatigue… or even laziness. We had been defeated by horrendous weather.

I noticed, as we slowly and carefully made our way out of the typhoon, that the lights that had been trailing us were now descending ahead of us. These strangers, who for some time I had secretly hoped would catch up with us, were taking the low road too.

The descent was so much slower and more perilous than the climb. But we were actually talking again, and cracking jokes. I guess, subconsciously, I had known that things were getting bad. I hadn’t spoken for ages, keeping fears and doubts in my head, making plans and strategizing and thinking about worse case scenarios. Now that one of the scenarios had finally come I was relieved. Now I was a member of the Argentinean soccer team that crashed in the Andes Mountains and had to hike out to get help.

Descending did, however, take a lot of concentration. It was more grueling and with one fading flashlight it was hard to see and easy to trip over rocks and wipe out. Every boulder was now a figure huddling by the path waiting to leap out right as I got close enough. My wild imagination, now on over-drive, was terrified by the lights, previously below us, that had recently disappeared altogether of late. And now a new set were coming down the mountain from above us at an alarming speed. “I hope they aren’t psychopaths,” said Angelique, mirroring the thoughts now racing through my mind in a German accent.

We hadn’t noticed the lights during our ascent, and now they appeared out of nowhere, as the other set disappeared into the night. Where had they come from? To up the creepy factor, the lights appeared to be floating in the air, not displaying the same bumpy motion you see when lights are being held by people. Heizy and Angelique kept hesitatingly asking if maybe we shouldn’t stop and wait for them, to which I replied, “Nah. Let’s keep moving. It’s cold, and with the speed their traveling, they will catch up with us soon anyway.”

Your mind plays crazy tricks on you when you’re highly stressed and in a state of mild shock. Secretly I was afraid of the inevitable encounter. I didn’t know what the hell they were. And I still felt like I was in outer space, so there was an element of Event Horizon weirdness going on. Like in war or sci-fi movies when the dude with the bit role is sitting in front of a bunch of fancy clashing controls and blinking monitors, and he announces in panicked surprise, “Captain, something has shown up on radar!” And the captain bends over the blinking whatnot and furrows his brow, and people gather around, and a lot of buttons are pushed and levers are pulled and brows are furrowed, and the captain says, “What can it be?” And nobody knows, but everyone is worried. Blink, blink, blink.

Eventually the floating moon demons did catch up, and they weren’t ghost warriors or fuji monsters. They were four very friendly, very wet Japanese people, about our age, with head lamps (which explained the smooth motion of the light and the speed of their descent). And they spoke English. And so we had companionship, and continued down the typhoon-ravaged mountain in a group of seven.

We only strayed off the path once the entire way down, but it was the single most horrendous part of the entire journey. We started going down the face of the mountain, like when we first went off the path back at the sixth station. Only this time we went a long way, mostly because everyone was talking. By the time we had realized our mistake we had a long way to climb back up. It was the hardest thing I have ever had do to in my life. It was like scurrying up slippery, crumbling, tennis ball-sized marbles that were three feet deep. You couldn’t make any progress, and it was straight up at about a 50 degree angle. I almost suffocated trying to breathe, and it took every last piece of energy to make it back up the path. Everyone nearly died, and when we made it back to the path we lay starfish in the stinking dirt and mud, our veins pulsing from all the blood our hearts had been pumping through us in an effort to provide oxygen. I never regained my energy. That was everything I had been storing like a camel to get me through the next several thousand meters down, all used up in five minutes of struggle.

The next few hours were marked by the following: one step, two step, one step, two step, ow, owwww!! THIS IS HORSESHIT!!! Followed by a scurry and a slip and a small landslide as someone hit the turf and acquired yet another spectacular bruise (all of which we compared enviously later on when we had our humour back). One step, two step, one step, to stub, slip slip stumble bail, one step huff puff huff puff human landslide and everyone gets taken out like dominoes.

My descent went something like this: “I can’t believe how much water is in my shoes. I wonder if I squeezed them out, if the water, combined with the sock water, would fill a pint glass. Who am I kidding? Of course it would… I wonder if it would fill TWO pint glasses. OH GOD they’re cold. Don’t think about it. You’ll start to cry. One step two step one step two step breathe breathe breathe go to your happy place why in the hell won’t the sun come up already, is this the apocalypse? I expected less cold and rain and more fire and general scorching. Happy place happy place rain drops on roses and whiskers on kittens, something and something and warm woolen mittens (my woolen mittens feel like lead on my hands) brown paper packages tied up with strings, warm bed. Oh I could be asleep right now. I want to be dead. I want to be dead. I want to be dead. Slip wipe out OW.

Reaching the fifth station was like heaven on moon. I couldn’t believe I was still alive. My legs were Jell-O, and we huddled in the parking lot and slurped hot ramen (courtesy of our new best friends), shivering like mad and trying to figure out how we were going to get home. My phone was dead and the taxi driver’s business card had liquefied in my bag. Some deity’s idea of a sick joke. The Fuji gods. I didn’t laugh. Or maybe I did. If I did it was one of those crazed hysterical lunatic laughs, those really spooky toothy ones where the laugher’s eyes have rolled back in their head and it’s all whites, and then it’s followed by uncontrollable sobbing, and then a few bits of laughter mixed in just to freak people out even more. Anything was possible at that point.

Before I could start crying the group called directory information and ordered us a cab, which proceeded to take an entire hour to arrive. In that time I saw my life flash before my eyes seven hundred times. I was honestly at that point where I couldn’t envision an end to the horror, like a horrible nightmare from which I would never awake. We still were so very far away from home. We had so much distance to travel, all in a state of miserable cold and wet. There were no dry clothes to change into. My back weighed fifty pounds more than when I had first put it on. I was beyond feeling. I breathed and blinked and reacted to basic stimuli, but I was somewhere else. The sky went from black to charcoal to dark grey. That was the sun coming up. When the cab finally arrived at five o’clock the sky was an ashy colour. If death had a colour, that was it.

I pulled myself off the wet picnic table on which I had become comfortably numb, and we got in the cab, soaking everything. I sat there praying for warmth, stewing in my own excessive moisture, and fell into a delirious non-sleep. I was awoken once when the cab evidently hit a big puddle in the middle of the road, skidded, went over a bump, and momentarily became airborne. This little tidbit of excitement, which I really didn’t need, was followed by the driver’s “Gomen nasai!” All I could think was, we should be apologizing to you. I’m sorry for the wet. Too bad you don’t accept tips! Back to unconsciousness.

We had the cab driver take us to the nearest shinkansen station. There was no way on earth we were taking locals home, with seventeen hundred transfers, and we were quite happy to fork over a small fortune to take a one-hour bullet train straight to Nagoya station. We handed the poor taxi driver liquid money, everybody (including the driver) bowed profusely with apologies and thanks, and we slunk into the tiny station. It was 6:10, and the first shinkansen train was at 6:20. We went into the washroom to see if there was anything that could be done. Any sort of adjustment that would help the situation. There was nothing. I caught a glimpse of my horrific appearance in the mirror: blue lips, chattering teeth, soggy hair, mishmash of clothes, a sopping fleece scarf, rain pants, a stinky brown wool sweater. I felt like vomiting. None of us had any money left after the hundred and twenty dollar cab ride, so Angelique said she’d put the tickets on her Visa. She sauntered into the ticket booth, looking and smelling like a dead river rat, and requested three tickets for the next train to Nagoya.

The men behind the counter snorted. Cash only. They were indifferent to our plight. I sobbed into my fleece scarf, controlling the urge to rock in the fetal position on the floor. Ange and Heizy left me propped up against a cement pillar in the station while they hitch hiked to a 7-11 that had a cash machine, got money, came back, bought tickets for the next train, and together we climbed a death-defying thirty steps to the train platform Within an hour we were on a glorious, spacious, comfy bullet train speeding towards Nagoya. We slumped in our seats, saturated in warm wetness, and emanating a nasal assault that kept curious passengers at bay.

When we finally got to Nagoya it was 9:00 on Sunday morning. People were everywhere, looking dry and normal, and out we walked, sauntering through the crowded station like escaped mental patients who had gone for a little dip for a week in a swamp. We were a sight, with our half matching outfits and our soggy everything. And I announced, as we slopped through the station, that I would simply DIE if I ran into anyone I knew. The mountain wouldn’t have killed me. Seeing people I knew would have.

When we got home we stripped, did several loads of laundry, had long hot showers, drank a pint of hot tea, compared injuries, dried out money, inspected our trench foot, and went to sleep.