by Don George
The next morning I awoke as the sun was just starting to tint the sky, and made my way in the crisp Andean air through the warren of just-opening stalls selling booklets, blankets, and bug repellent, to the Aguas Calientes bus stop. With about two dozen Peruvian guides and Western and Japanese tourists, I piled into the bus for the weaving 1,500-foot ascent to the ruins. As the bus jounced and switchbacked through the lightening dawn, a feeling I’d had for years, a yearning, an expectation—that something was waiting for me at Machu Picchu, that something would be revealed to me there—weighed undeniably in my stomach and my mind.
As the sky brightened, I worried that I was too late. But I had forgotten that Machu Picchu, despite its high altitude, is still a bowl surrounded by towering peaks. I raced up to the site and saw with relief that while the peaks to the west were tipped with bright sunlight, the ruins were still in shade. I made my way directly to the sundial, known as Intihuatana or “hitching post of the sun,” which sits atop a pyramid-like construct of terrace and wall in the site’s northwest quadrant.
I positioned myself at the sundial and waited, absorbing the stony stillness and the fresh scent of grass, the texture of tree. I watched the sun’s rays light the peaks behind and around me, slowly getting higher and higher, closer and closer.
Minutes passed. The molecules in the air ever so slightly brightened. Then, in a suspended moment, light flared over the top of the mountain directly in front and touched the sundial.
I was looking through the lens of my camcorder when it happened, and at the moment the sun appeared, rays shot out in six searing streaks at forty-five-degree angles. I felt like one streak was searing through me as well. I felt transfixed, transformed. For a suspended moment I felt drawn into the sun, enwrapped by the sun, plucked into some profound energy-stream of sun worship that coursed through the ground where I stood. This flowing energy seemed to stitch through me and through the world around me—the sundial, the rock plazas, doorways, and walls, the temples and the terraces. For a moment I felt a thoughtless understanding, a pure, empty-headed universe-connection, a solar spear-tip that pierced my heart and soul.
Then it was gone. A group of gossiping students clambered over the rocks, guides replayed their learned lectures, camera-wielding couples postured and posed. But somehow, everything had been transformed.
In retrospect, all I can say is that some deep energy radiates from that place. It’s a combination of the altitude, the pristine quality of the ruins themselves, the purity of the air and the sky and the sun—and something else too, a kind of spiritual energy that courses like water-springs through the site. I had felt it on the Sacred Plaza and by the Temple of the Sun, but I felt it especially at Intihuatana at dawn: the hitching post of the sun.
At mid-morning, Manuel joined me and we took a walk along the Inca Trail. Most trekkers take the trail from Ollantaytambo or from an intermediate stop called Kilometer 104 along the rail line to Aguas Calientes, but Manuel and I met at the Watchman’s Hut and walked up the trail in the opposite direction, away from the ruins and toward the Sun Gate, or Intipunku, where trekkers first see Machu Picchu. We shared the paved path with orchids and llamas and workers who were trying to repair one section of the trail that had been weakened during the rains. Looking into the jungle to the right of the trail we could see more Inca walls in the thick shade. Manuel said there were probably Inca walls scattered throughout the mountains. The dense slopes seemed alive with them, echoing with the spirit of the people who tilled, ate, and slept, planted, played, and prayed here 500 years before.
We reached Intipunku and then continued along the Inca Trail away from the site. We descended into a world of luxurious blossoms and thick cloud forest shadows. I remarked to Manuel that I was amazed by how well the path was paved, and he told me that at its height, the Inca empire had been laced by a network of 19,000 miles of trails, virtually all paved. I stopped and touched my hand to the rough stone and tried to conjure the imagination and organization, technology and toil, required to complete such a feat. I tried to picture the worker who had placed the very stone on which I stood, whose fingers had touched the very pocks and ridges my fingertips traced. What did he eat? Where did he sleep? What did he dream?
We walked for a half hour to a point where we could see another ruin on a mountain slope: Winay Wayna, a cleared site most trekkers detour to explore. I thought of the deep-shaded walls we’d passed before—who knew what secret cities these vast jungles still held?
The trails wound on and on, I realized, some into the cloud forest fastnesses, some into the secret cities of the soul. Then I thought back to that dawn moment when some inexplicable energy had stitched the sun to all—and on that lonely, well-trod mountain trail, I finally felt whole.
A Pilgrim at Stinson Beach
Stinson Beach, in Northern California’s Marin County, is the natural equivalent of Ryoanji or Notre-Dame for me. I first discovered it in the late 1980s during my ramblings as the Examiner’s Travel Editor. Something about the place touched me deeply and immediately, and it quickly became a place where I would go at the beginning of each year for a kind of gathering and grounding of myself. Over the years, these journeys expanded to other seasons as well, and this piece describes a pilgrimage in the summer of 2011, when much had changed in my life from those first visits two decades before. I wrote this essay for Gadling. As with so many of the stories in this book, writing for an understanding editor—that is, me—allowed me to write exactly the way I wanted, infusing these reflections and questions, this attempt to make sense of things, with what I hope is a poignant poetry.
JULY 20, 2011; 11:30 A.M.—I’m sitting at the southern tip of Stinson Beach, a glorious mile-long stretch of sand that borders the unincorporated, population 650 hamlet of the same name in Marin County, Northern California.
Stinson Beach is a ragged, flip-flops, bikinis, and board shorts kind of town, and whether you’re a Bay Area visitor or resident, it’s a terrific place to stop. A couple of inviting restaurants face each other across the sole street—famed Highway 1—that runs through town; both have sun-umbrella’d patios that are intimations of heaven on a balmy, blue-sky day like today. There are arts and crafts galleries, a quintessential little-bit-of-everything market, B&Bs, and a beguiling bookstore with a compact, ecumenical, and eminently Marin mix of books ranging from Zen treatises and Native American history and culture to mainstream mysteries and fiction, and a proud selection of work by local authors.
I love these riches, but they’re not why I come here. Stinson Beach is about an hour’s winding drive from my house, so it’s not exactly an on-a-whim destination for me; rather it’s a touchstone place where I come to gather myself. And today I need gathering.
So here I am, ensconced on a rock beyond an outcrop of massive boulders that separates this thin slice of sand from the main beach, where a couple hundred people are blissfully surfing, strolling, and sunbathing.
I’ve been in this spot for twenty minutes and I haven’t seen anyone—except a teenaged couple who appeared holding hands literally just as I wrote “I haven’t seen anyone” and jumped when they saw me and now have abruptly turned back—and I like it that way.
In the 1980s and ’90s, when I was the Travel Editor at the San Francisco newspaper, I used to make a pilgrimage here every spring to write a column. This was the place where I gathered my thoughts, looked back on the triumphs and failures of the year past and ahead to the new year’s goals and dreams.
It’s still a good place to take stock of things. The simplicity of the scene strips away the veneers of life, reduces the distracting complexities. Sea. Rocks. Sand. Sun. That’s it. The spareness helps me—makes me—slow down and pay attention.
The roar and swash of the waves echo in my ears, the salty sea-smell fills my nose, the sun warms like a hot compress on my shoulders, my toes wiggle into the wet cool sand. The water white-froths in, spreads into rippling fans over the sand, then rushes back. Again.
And again.
A seagull web-walks through the waves, leaps onto a rock, scans the water for food. It prances with oddly brittle legs along the sand, flaps to the top of a rock, and imperiously surveys the waves.
A slick six-foot seaweed pod washes onto the beach. A tiny insect scurries over my keyboard, a neon-green bug lands briefly on my screen.
I let the sea wash over me, let the waves fill my head and lungs, lose myself to this inconceivably old and ageless place.
I think: This is the same scene I witnessed two decades ago, quite possibly even the same rock I sat on then, scribbling in my journal as I tap into my laptop now. And if I come back in twenty years, it will almost certainly be the same still.
But of course, much has changed in those two decades. My children have grown up and moved on. My dad and other loved ones have passed away. New jobs, new places, new books, old dreams.
And suddenly these words flow into my brain: Where does it all come together? What does it mean?
The sea swashing ceaselessly scrubs the mind clean.
I palm the rough, sandy surface of the boulder to my left, warmed by the sun, cradling sand in its pocks and green ridges of moss in its cracks, etched by wind, wave, and rain.
Wisps like smoke from a seaborne fire drift around me, and on the horizon a bank of gray-blue fog gathers, curling at the top so that it looks like a frozen tidal wave. I think of the tsunami in Sendai, where my daughter traveled recently and saw the destruction with her own eyes, where the local man who was guiding her broke down and cried. All those uprooted lives. . . .
Where does it come together? What does it mean?
The waves push glinting pebbles onto the shore, fan, recede. The seagull flaps away, unsatisfied, searching. Life is precarious, uncertain, brief. There is a precious precariousness at the heart of all things.
The sea swashing ceaselessly scrubs the mind clean.
The waves roar-splash in, getting a little closer now. The tide is coming in; the blue pebble we inhabit is turning in the celestial sea.
Where does it come together? What does it mean?
Focus. Enjoy the moment while you have it. Enjoy your loved ones while you have them. Recognize the gifts the world gives you: Inhale the sea, sink your toes into the sand, let the ocean-roar silence your mind.
Then take this simple scene home with you: Sun. Sand. Rocks. Sea.
The sea swashing ceaselessly scrubs the mind clean.
What it all comes down to, I think, is the relationships you forge, the experiences you embrace, the lessons you bestow, the bridges you make, the ideals you seed, the love you live and leave.
Dedicate yourself to creating something of value with your days. Something that will last.
The sea swashing ceaselessly scrubs the mind clean.
Where does it come together? What does it mean?
Sun. Sand. Rocks. Sea. A Stinson Beach clarity.
Japan's Past Perfect
Almost immediately after I left Lonely Planet in 2007, Keith Bellows, then the Editor in Chief of National Geographic Traveler magazine, asked me to become a Contributing Editor, writing a monthly column about new books with a distinctive sense of place, as well as essays and feature stories. “Japan’s Past Perfect” resulted from a conversation we had in his office about my favorite place in Japan, my wife’s home island of Shikoku, and why it was special for me, from its pristine nature to its kind and welcoming character as a traditional place of pilgrimage. My challenge with this story was to find a way to write “publicly” about the spirit and charms of a place that had such a deeply personal connection for me. As it turned out, my wife’s family provided the perfect compass for my explorations to find the heart of Shikoku.
I’M SITTING ON THE POLISHED WOODEN STEPS of a 300-year-old farmhouse in Japan’s Iya Valley, looking out on a succession of mountain folds densely covered in deep green cedars. Skeins of morning mist rise from the valley floor, hang in wispy balls in the air, and tangle in the surrounding slopes. No other houses are visible. The only sound is the drip of predawn rain from nearby branches and from the farmhouse’s roof of thick thatch. The faint scent of charcoal from last night’s hearth rides on the air. I feel as if I’m in the hermit’s hut in a 17th-century ink-and-brush painting.
“Extraordinary, isn’t it?” says Paul Cato, the expatriate manager of this farmhouse, inn, and living-history classroom. “There are mornings when I wake up here and wonder what century I’m in.”
We’re at Chiiori, the project of an American author named Alex Kerr, who fell in love with this part of Japan when he was a student in Tokyo in the 1970s and bought this farmhouse as a way to preserve the traditions he treasured.
The Iya Valley is set deep in the mountainous interior of Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four principal islands, cradled between Kyushu to the west and the main island of Honshu, with the Inland Sea to the north and the Pacific Ocean to the south.
I fell in love with Shikoku in the 1970s too, on a visit with my then girlfriend, Kuniko, who brought me to her family home here from the university in Tokyo, where we were both living. On that trip I discovered a Japan I hadn’t known existed: a place of farms and fishing villages, mountainside shrines and seaside temples, rugged seacoasts and forested hills, time-honored traditions and country kindness. Thirty-two years later, in the summer of 2010, I’ve come back with Kuniko to celebrate our twenty-eighth anniversary and to see if I can rediscover that special place. While Kuniko relishes time at home with her family, I’m on a solo sojourn tracing pilgrims’ trails and winding one-lane roads in search of this lost Japan.
Kuniko’s hometown, Johen, is a tranquil place of about 9,000 people in the southwestern corner of Shikoku. Although it is a main island, Shikoku is what most Japanese consider tooi inaka, the deep countryside. Though there are a handful of famous sights—the 17th-century castles of Matsuyama and Kochi, Ritsurin Koen garden in Takamatsu, and the hot spring spa of Dogo Onsen in Matsuyama—and though three bridges now link the island to Honshu (the first opened in 1988), Shikoku remains a mystery to the average Japanese. It’s even more mysterious to foreigners, who rarely venture this far off the beaten path.
On my first visit here, I literally fell off the beaten path. Everything was going beautifully until Kuniko and I reached her family’s house, which was located on a lane that seemed narrower than our rental car, with a ditch on one side and a stream on the other. When I tried to turn the corner, a rear wheel slipped into the ditch. And that’s how I met my future parents-in-law, asking if they could help me lift my car from the trench. Kuniko’s mother, Obaachan, recalls this moment thirty-two years later, as the entire family gathers outside their home to bow me off on a sunny September day. “Don-san, stay away from the ditches!” she calls in Japanese as I pull away.
I’m bound for Cape Ashizuri, the island’s southernmost tip. Last night, over sushi, beers, and a shiny new Shikoku map, I had asked Kuniko’s parents and two brothers to tell me where to go to find the heart of Shikoku. Kuniko’s older brother, Nobuhisa, had nominated Cape Ashizuri, the same place he took us on my first visit. “Be sure to take this road,” he said, tracing a squiggle with his chopstick. “For me, that’s the best way to see what we call aoi kuni Shikoku: ‘blue country Shikoku.’ Blue sky, blue mountains, blue rice paddies, blue sea.” Blue rice paddies? He noted my quizzical look. “In old Japanese, aoi means both blue and green.”
A half hour out of Johen, I’m already immersed in classic aoi scenery: a deep blue sky over evergreen-cloaked mountains, sloping down to emerald rice paddies with a silver-glinting river ribboning through. There are hints of human presence: handmade scarecrows in straw hats placed among the paddies, wooden farmhouses darkened by age, and a diminutive Shinto shrine, with its stout torii gateway and sacred rope, set at the foot of one slope.
After a couple of hours driving through a thousand shades of green, I stop in a one-street hamlet of about two dozen wooden homes. The mai
n street curves along the seafront, past a placid row of shops: vegetable market, hardware store, hair salon, bakery. Behind one house, three men in wide-brimmed straw hats tend a fire of backyard vegetation, the smoke stinging the air. At the end of the street, a bent old woman in a sunbonnet pushes a three-wheeled walker. She smiles and bows as I pass. Three kids pedal by on bikes. In the half-moon harbor, fishing boats gently rock. A thickly forested hillside rises steeply behind the houses, and gray cemetery obelisks zigzag in patches of cleared land up the slope. The summer air is still.
“Wah!” the grandmotherly woman behind the counter at the bakery says when I walk in. “A foreign guest!” She is about five feet tall and is dressed in the region’s traditional blue and white dyed kasuri pants and a floppy floral shirt. Her wrinkled, tanned face crinkles into a bright smile.
I ask if she grew up in this village.
“Oh, yes, I was born here and have lived here all my life.” She counts on her fingers. “Seven decades.”
Has she ever thought about living anywhere else?
“Oh no!” she quickly responds. “Why would I want to live anywhere else?”
How about the young people, I ask, do they stay here, too?
“Ah, well, the young people,” she sighs, “they don’t think there’s much to do here, so they all go to Nagoya or Kobe. They prefer the city. But I like it here; it’s peaceful and close to nature. For me, there’s no reason to leave.”