Part 1: Kyushu to Gifu

I was holed up in a capsule hotel nursing an injury. The pain in my right knee was unbearable. It felt like pieces of glass cutting the meat between the bones. The pain was bigger than me. I limped to the communal bath and peeled off the cycling jersey and shorts. Two wrinkled old men soaked in the bath. I waded in. We sat like pink faced macaques in mountain hot springs.  The water bubbled and swirled around me, massaging my weary legs and stiff lower back. Half an hour later, I crawled out, slipped on the Japanese robe, and hobbled back to the capsule.

Capsules, one writer wrote, look like oversized tumble-driers stacked two high. I crawled into mine. I had over-exerted myself, cycling 180 km in 18 hours. I began cycling from Fukuoka on the island of Kyushu and had planned to ride back to my flat in Gifu, the belly button of Japan. Two days later, I was convalescing in a capsule hotel near Hiroshima’s red light district. I wanted to continue, but my knees ached. The spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak. 

The next morning, I woke up in my coffin like chamber still weary. Capsule hotels are for people who can sleep soundly in trenches, not for lightweights like me who are easily roused by the sounds of jangling keys, snores, and talkative drunks who bring their noise in with them. I crawled out, gathered my things, took 2 Tylenol, and left the hotel.

I decided to ride. If the pain in my knee persisted, I’d have to concede and return to Gifu by train. I mounted my bicycle and started pedaling slowly. The pain stung (Drive a nail into your knee to empathize with me). 

I cycled slowly past Genbaku Dome, the building which survived the atomic attack. The blast peeled back the skin of the dome and left the skeletal steel frame exposed. It looked out of place in the new shiny metropolis that grew around it. But, that incongruity was a tribute to the power of the human spirit, the indomitable human spirit.

Ganbatte!

I pedaled slowly down the main road out of the city. Old men with cigarettes dangling from their lips and schoolgirls in pleated skirts pedaled passed me. Office ladies on steel framed bicycles signaled with bells before they overtook me. Shops were opening; trolleys chugged down the tracks. Slowly the city receded, and so did the pain in my knee. Mile by mile, one mile at a time, I rode another 60 to Fukuyama.

Then I got lost…

again. Japanese roads are unmarked labyrinths. They bend like streams around the hills that pimple the country, branching off and winding through the cities and towns, narrowing into alleyways, sometimes forking abruptly, sometimes converging with other streets and spilling out into large intersections. They were intentionally designed that way to confuse invading armies and stupid gaijin on bicycles.  

Days ago, before the injury, I was following a rural road that ran parallel to the expressway. Abruptly, the auxiliary road I was on became a dirt trail that cut through a bamboo grove. The GPS unit I navigated by pointed the same direction as the expressway. So I tossed my bike over the fence, hopped on the expressway, and raced through a tunnel. I was stopped on the other side.

Three police officers wearing ping-pong ball helmets rolled up in a black, mid-sized sedan. The senior officer wore a permanent frown on his wrinkled face. An avuncular old man in glasses and a thirty-something with chevrons on his sleeve flanked me. They didn’t have muscles, or batons, or badges on their chests. They didn’t look like cops. The senior officer asked me if I spoke Japanese.

“I’m sorry. I don’t understand much Japanese,” I said in that deferential tone which men of his rank expected.

“We are police. We take you to police house,” he said, and they escorted me to the car.

At the police house, which looked a lot like a teacher’s lounge in an inner-city high school, they peppered me with questions. They wanted to know why I was on the expressway and where was I going. I explained as best I could in caveman-like Japanese. They also wanted to know how many kilometers I had cycled in a day, where I slept at night, and that question most often asked by Japanese, how did I like Japan? They wrote a report and took my fingerprints- as a formality, the sergeant explained. I thought I’d be slapped with a fine, but I was released with a kindly, “Kiotsukete!” (Be careful!)- a common farewell that parents often give their children before they set off for school.

I hopped on my bike and continued riding, legs and knees flexing and extending.

That night, cycling up a hill in the rain a sports car raced past me. A few seconds later, I heard the screeching of tires and saw the car slide across the road like a hockey puck. It slammed violently into the median divider and skidded to a stop a few meters ahead. The air smelled of burned rubber. I raced up the hill and saw the driver standing beside his knocked-out ride calling for help on his cell phone. He was unnerved, but unscathed. Passing motorists stopped to help.

Now on a quiet mountain road, I came to a fork. Rain pissed on my gear and the wind tugged at my sleeves. I stopped at one of the ubiquitous vending machines and stood under the awning sipping Pocari Sweat, a sports drink. Do I take the right road or the left? I didn’t really care. The only problem I had now, to borrow a line from Dale Carnegie, was “choosing the right thoughts.” I continued pedaling in the rain and into the night chanting the words that had become my mantra: a new breath, a new moment, new choices… Despite the rain, the pain, and the setbacks, I was where I wanted to be.

Part 2: Hokkaido to Gifu

I was on the train. The bicycle was disassembled and packed in a nylon carrying bag. I had the bike outfitted for the tour. All I needed was a rack, water bottle cages, and a mount for the odometer. Over the years, I’ve become a minimalist. I was traveling light. I packed no food or drinks. Convenience stores and vending machines were ubiquitous.

But I did pack tenacity and the will to win. Ganbare! I’ll do my best. The Japanese respect tenacity. Perseverance is one of the virtues they admire most. Ganbaru is one of those verbs which ought to be imported into the English lexicon. It connotes tenacity, perseverance, a sincere intent to do one’s best.

Ganbare! The mountains, I knew, would intimidate me, the winds would discourage me, the rain would punish me, the sun would pummel me during the day and the cold would harass me at night. But, I was ready. It’s one of the things I love to do.

The train chugged along. We rolled past bamboo groves and patches of wilderness and mud brown rivers with wide banks. Along the banks, life breathed. Ants foraged. Cicadas buzzed. Crows cawed.  They were indifferent to the ambitions of man.

I peered out the window musing. If I were independently wealthy, billionaire rich, if I had enough money to do anything I wanted to do, I would be doing exactly what I’m doing now. I had just enough money to return home. 

I transfered at a station in Aomori and waited to take the train that would worm its way beneath the sea to Hokkaido. In the waiting room, I watched spiders spin webs near the lamps. Clever. I saw a black spider with a swollen abdomen consuming its victim. Another insect wriggled free from the web. I waited for my train in a room where a hundred worlds co-existed. I doubt the schoolgirl texting her friends was aware of them.

I arrived in Sapporo and found a hotel. Then I toured the town by bicycle. I stopped at the botanical garden. I saw a tree kneaded as if by a potter’s hand. There a shrub with leaves shaped like butterflies. Here a tree with a trunk laced like the skulls of cantaloupe. Each tree is a child of the light, a sun worshipper. I don’t remember who wrote that line, but i like it.

Each tree has it’s own history- and I want to learn them all. I don’t know their names. What is the name of that yellow one with the drooping leaves that remind me of bumblebees? I give the plants names from a Dr. Seuss book: Grackle grass. Truffula trees. Tree and I are made up of the same stuff. We share a long, but divergent evolution.

All other species are our distant kin because we share a remote ancestry. We still use a common vocabulary, the nucleic acid code, even though it has been sorted into radically different hereditary languages. Such is the ultimate and cryptic truth of every kind of organism, large and small, every bug and weed. The flower in the crannied wall- it is a miracle… Every kind of organism has reached this moment in time by threading one needle after another, throwing up brilliant artifices to survive and reproduce against nearly impossible odds.”

-EO Wilson

    How I hate the man who talks about the ‘brute creation,’ with an ugly emphasis on brute... As for me, I am proud of my close kinship with other animals. I take a jealous pride in my Simian ancestry. I like to think that I was once a magnificent hairy fellow living in the trees and that my frame has come down through geological time via sea jelly and worms and Amphioxus, Fish, Dinosaurs, and Apes. Who would exchange these for the pallid couple in the Garden of Eden?

-WNP Barbellion

    We walk with swinging gaits and worry about the girth of our incomes. We fill our bellies with fruits and meats and shiver when temperatures drop below 30 degrees. All of these are adaptations as unintentional as octopus tentacles and chlorophyll and knotted branches. Or is there intention in it? I pedal back to the hotel and prepare for next day’s ride.

Journal:

    I am grateful. I have the time and the strength and the freedom and the money to cycle across Japan, to dine at restaurants, and to lodge at hotels. Billions of men and women suffer unimaginable miseries while I pedal up hills and whistle my songs.

I’m having a good life, a very good life.  While I ride, children bleed. We are privileged. We are very privileged! God gave us so many blessings, we could not count them all. Don’t take your blessings for granted. 

The following day, I cycled 84 miles to the wharf where the ferry was moored that would take me back to Honshu. 

Mist bordered pine woods

A Buddhist temple

At water’s edge

Willow trees fishermen’s huts

Zen monk with

Empty bowl after noon

Old fishermen drying nets

In the setting sun.

-Gido

    I cycle, but my mind is elsewhere. Breathing in, I turn my awareness on. Breathing out, I turn my thoughts off. The reveries cease and I hear the crickets chirping and see a red dragonfly. And the smell of the wet grass reminds me of mint tea. I’m on point.

    The sense of smell works like the sense of hearing. The brain fishes for sounds, traps them and drags them in. I keep my head still and detect where a scent is coming from. Its one of many games I play while Im cycling. It is the nature of the mind to wander. Cycling helps me concentrate. It’s a meditation of sorts.

    Cycled 200 km the following day and 184 km the next. Human beings are built tough. I respect God’s design and push this body to test its limits. As respectable as these numbers are, I suspect I haven’t even come close. I can go farther, ride harder, and endure much more. We were well-designed.  This is a body designed to endure greater hardships. It is the same model worn by tough people: the Cherokee, the Bedouin, the Masai, the Vikings, the Samurai. We’re of the same stock.

    Rivers sculpt the mountainous landscape which is terraced at points. I follow the winding river along the road. The upper reaches of the river are characterized by narrow valleys. The rivers meander through the broader valleys below in wide loops and bends. From the mountain top, I can see meander scars and floodplains etched in the valleys below.

    My eyes rove side to side, following each line of prose in river and rock. “Can you appreciate the miracle that’s taking place right now?”

    When you were just a single cell, that cell divided and divided again. In that one cell was the blueprint for the pupil, lens, cornea, retina, sclera, iris, eyelids, rods and cones. You read these lines and interpret for yourself what they mean and give them what significance they might have.

Journal

Don’t complain. Appreciate what you have. Find perfection in the mundane and imperfect.

Why its but the motion of the eyes

And brows! And here I’ve been

Seeking it far and wide. Awakened

At last. I find the moon above the pines, the river surging high.

                                        Yuishun

Next day, I count the miracles: dew on a spider’s web, the reflection of a cloud in a rice paddy, the crease in a woman’s arm.