“Titmice,” I said.
“Yes, titmice.”
He scratched the dog’s ears for a while, and looked at her head.
“I’ll take a photograph of her someday if you like,” I said.
“That would be nice. She’s a good girl.”
He nodded toward the river. “It’s been five years since I’ve been down to the place where Mr. Brewster had his boathouse. I must go down someday.”
“It’s in ruins now.”
“I know. It was once a fine building, and there were fine people there. Days like this in spring they would come. Father and I would have the boats varnished by then, and they would bring their sandwiches and baskets of cold chicken. Gilbert would go with them. He was a fine rower. You know, all the ladies liked Gilbert, even though he was young.”
“I’ll have to go down there again and look around.”
“There was ever so much to do here. Still is. There’s no end, it seems—the woods, the river, these new birds. And I wonder about these newer houses I’ve heard about up Ball’s Hill Road.
“There is a lot to look at.”
“You know, I went to Lawrence once, on one of those new highways. But I shan’t go there again. There’s so much right here. But then I wonder if it isn’t all up here.”
He tapped the side of his head.
“It’s just what you make of a place. What you think it is. Not so much what it really is,” he said.
“Sounds true.”
“Such an odd thought, really. I’ve never had such an odd thought.”
Later in May I went back to his house with a camera to take pictures of his dog. It was another one of those brilliant days, and Sanferd was in better form this time, working in his strawberry patch. He had a wheelbarrow with him, and as usual the little dog was at his feet. I took a few pictures of him with the dog, but he was stiff and formal, so I began to snap the dog by herself in the harsh spring light.
“Get up here in the wheelbarrow,” he said to the dog.
She obediently jumped into the bed and sat down, but she was nervous. He stepped to the side out of the frame. She looked over at him, licking her lips. I took a picture.
“Look at the camera, Muffin,” he said.
She shifted, glanced at me, and looked again at Sanferd. I took a few more pictures.
“I’ll come back and give them to you in a week or so,” I said.
I finished the roll and got the prints back in a few days. There was the dog, her black and white fur shining in the spring light. In the best picture she was looking loyally at her master, who was standing outside the photograph, the dark streak of his shadow passing over her. But before I could deliver the prints, I learned from the local newspaper that the owner of the shadow was dead.
By May the garden that I had planted in April began to consume more and more of my time. The seedlings sprang up out of the moist earth, and neat rows of planted annuals ran along the back wall in orderly, pleasing lanes. They contrasted sharply with the disordered forest held at bay behind the wall. The tentative blossoms of the spring perennials appeared, and all around me in the fields and woods there was a freshening greenness. Great waves of migratory birds rolled up from the south, plunged against a cold front that first week of May, and then, when the weather finally broke, surged over New England, filling the world with song. Long before dawn I could hear them; little whines and chips, whistles and buzzes, burst out from the wall edges and the tree tops, sounds I had not heard in a year—the combined voice of spring. Leaves appeared in the woodland behind the cottage, a small, delicately shaded tracery. Foxes crossed my meadow; and in the old field just north of my house, a fat woodchuck emerged from its burrow and sat alone under the clear sky, squat like a Buddha, meditative and all-knowing. I turned more garden soil, hoed down the channeled rows, planted more flowers, and waited.
Periodically as I worked the soil I would come across more remnants of the Case family, bits of broken dishes and cups, the arm of a China doll, and pieces of old leather shoes. Fifty years ago when old man Case carried his trash up from his house to this spot in the former orchard, he could have looked out and seen the lonely peak of Mount Wachusett to the southwest and the higher peak of Monadnock to the northwest. The land beyond the boundary wall of his property was all cleared field, and if he had cared to, he could have climbed to this spot each evening and watched the sun set over the Schooly Penaplain to the west. In my time the view of Wachusett is obscured by pine and oak forest, but from the other side of the valley, on the rise where the Digital plant now stands, the mountain is still in view, a lonely blue height.
In his time Henry Thoreau could see Wachusett from Concord, and he felt a certain affinity with the mountain. As he pointed out in an early poem, it stood alone, like Henry himself, “without society.” For years he and his brother, John, had thought about climbing Wachusett, but had chosen, in their 1839 mountain trip, to go north to the greater heights of the White Mountains. The year John died, Henry decided finally to take the expedition to Wachusett. He and Richard Fuller, the brother of Margaret Fuller, walked there from Concord, climbed to the summit, and spent the night there in a tent. They both kept journals of the trip, and as they walked west they quoted passages about the great journeys and adventures of the heroes of classical Greece. This was a literary trip if there ever was one. Throughout the journal and the subsequent essay that emerged from the walk, Henry quotes from Virgil and Wordsworth. Even after he and his companion retired to the tent, they read their classics by moonlight. It is no wonder Henry tended to see the world as metaphor.
While they were on Wachusett, Henry and Richard Fuller looked north to Mount Monadnock, rising nearly a thousand feet higher, and far grander in aspect. That night they saw a large fire burning on the distant peak. It lit the whole horizon and made Henry and his companion feel that they were a part of a greater community of mountains, and not so alone as they had imagined. The next day, before dawn, as if in communion, they made their own blaze.
This was in a time when the concept of small fires for cooking had not yet taken hold; Henry was always lighting immense fires to cook simple meals—fires so large, in fact, one might suspect that they served some additional purpose. Zoroastrians also kindled fires on peaks in honor of their god Almimar, the benign deity of goodness and light; and the spiritual symbolism of heights, the idea of gaining ground above the base earth, the aspiring toward light, was very much a part of nineteenth-century transcendental thinking. It is not surprising that, seeing from Wachusett the greater heights of Monadnock, Henry would feel compelled to climb it too.
He first went up Monadnock two years after he had climbed Wachusett, and he made three subsequent trips there, spending eleven nights all told on the summit. The Indians of the region had a legend that the mountain contained rich veins of silver and gold, which would be discovered only after the human community was able to use the precious metals to their proper end—the gold to honor the sun, the silver to honor the moon. Current New Age theories hold that seven ley lines, or currents of energy and power, cross at Monadnock, and in our time the region around the mountain has become a center for people from a variety of religious traditions. But Henry’s writings about the mountain deal more with the natural history of the area than its spiritual overtones.
He did speak of the mysterious passing voices of the nighthawks as a fitting accompaniment for the thrumming, rocky chords of the mountains—“strains from the music of Chaos,” as he wrote—and he did seem to link the mountain with the wilder high peaks of the world, Ararat and the Caucasus Mountains, where Prometheus was chained. But generally, in southern New England, the landscaped world below and the rocky heights above seemed comfortably balanced. Henry did not despair and tremble on Monadnock as he had on the inhuman, chaotic heights of Katahdin.
In 1844, the same year that he first scaled Monadnock, Thoreau went alone to western Massachusetts and climbed Mount Greylock. This trip came at a low ebb i
n his life. He had recently returned from a stay in New York, where he had failed to establish himself as a writer. The one outlet for his writings, Dial magazine, had closed down. He had been working at his family’s pencil business that year, generally without much enthusiasm, and that spring, in April, while on a boating trip up the Sudbury River with a friend, he had accidentally started a forest fire that burned over several hundred acres of precious wood lot in Concord. The trip to Greylock seems to have been in part a journey of atonement, and an attempt to get some perspective on his life.
He spent the night at a farmhouse in the area, and the next day made his way straight up the mountain, passing directly through the thick undergrowth rather than following any path. The trees had a scraggly, infernal look, he wrote, “as if contending with frost goblins.” Forcing his way through them, he reached the summit of the mountain just as the sun was setting. He had time to observe the countryside before dark, and he made a small fire and collected some boards—part of an observatory that had been constructed on the summit. He did not have a tent with him, and the night was turning cold, so he built a shelter out of the boards, an oblong structure very like a coffin. He crawled inside and pulled some boards over his head to form a roof, which he held down with a heavy rock. Sheltered in this way from the cold wind, hard through his bed must have been, he reports that he slept well.
When he woke, he found himself in another world, as if he had died in the night and come alive again. Clouds had moved in and had settled over the valley and the lower peaks around him. He imagined that his coffinlike shelter was a boat, floating aloft above the clouds. The known world had disappeared, and as the light increased, the splendor of this higher country revealed itself.
It is perhaps difficult for us, in an age when flight above the cloud cover is an ordinary experience, to appreciate the awe he must have felt at finding himself above the clouds. Getting to a high spot above the common ground of the everyday world was an event in itself; rising above the very clouds of the sky must have been a transcendent experience even for the prosaic, and Henry was hardly prosaic.
He recorded the impression in his book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.
All around beneath me was spread for a hundred miles on every side, as far as the eye could reach, an undulating country of clouds, answering in the varied swell of its surface to the terrestrial world it veiled. It was such a country as we might see in dreams, with all the delights of paradise. There were immense snowy pastures, apparently smooth-shaven and firm, and shady vales between the vaporous mountains, and far in the horizon I could see where some luxurious misty timber jutted into the prairie, and trace the windings of a water course, some unimagined Amazon or Orinoko, by the misty trees on its brink. . . .
The earth beneath had become such a flitting thing of lights and shadows as the clouds had been before. It was not merely veiled to me, but it has passed away like the phantom of a shadow. . . . As I had climbed above storm and cloud, so by successive days’ journeys I might reach the region of eternal day beyond the tapering shadow of the earth.
At sunrise he found himself a dweller in the “dazzling halls of Aurora”; saffron clouds drifted over the rosy fingers of dawn, and he saw there the far-darting glances of the god of the sun. He was renewed.
He descended Greylock later that morning and met a friend that same day in Pittsfield. He was worn out by his experience on the mountain. He was unshaven, seedily dressed, and disheveled from sleeping in his clothes. But he had come to terms with something. Astute readers of the account have pointed out that he seems to have experienced a rebirth on Greylock, philosophically and perhaps spiritually. Within a year he would move to Walden Pond, and during his two years there not only maintain his journal and complete his book A Week, but also write the book that made his reputation.
Henry made other ascents during his life. Two years later he went up Katahdin. He climbed Monadnock again in 1852, then again in 1858 and 1860. He climbed Kineo in Maine, the White Mountains, and Fall Mountain in Vermont. True to form, he compared these heights with the more famous peaks of the known world, but it is certainly a pity that in his time, before the opening up of Japan, he could have had no knowledge of the greatest height of all in spiritual terms—Fujiyama. Henry’s Monadnock and Mount Fuji are linked by more than spiritual overtones: they are now the two most commonly climbed mountains in the world.
My father’s literary idol, Lafcadio Hearn, climbed Fuji and had an experience that was similar to Thoreau’s vision on Greylock. Like Henry, he was ever alert to the symbolic overtones of mountains, and he was acutely aware of the religious significance that Fuji holds for the Japanese.
The summit of Fujiyama is the most sacred place in all of Japan. Arguably the most beautiful mountain in the world, Fuji is the very altar of the sun, the first spot in Japan to be touched at dawn. Shinto tradition holds that Fuji rose out of the earth in a single night. It is said that once, centuries ago, a shower of jewels fell from the heights, and that on certain occasions a misty, luminous maiden can be seen hovering over the crater. The peak is sacred to the Shinto: the deity Ko-no-hane-saku-hime dwells there, and a temple was constructed on the summit a thousand years ago to honor her. Buddhists also hold Fuji in awe. Its white peak represents the bud of the sacred lotus, and the eight cusps of the volcanic crater signify the eightfold path.
For more than a thousand years, pilgrims from all parts of Japan have ascended Fujiyama to watch the sun rise over the sea. Even in Thoreau’s time, Fuji was a common pilgrimage site. It was the duty of all the reverent to climb it once in a lifetime, but since not everyone could afford to make the journey, pilgrimage societies were formed in small villages to send representatives to the holy mountain.
It is no wonder that Fuji is so revered. Rising nearly 12,500 feet above sea level, the mountain is visible from thirteen provinces in Japan, a distant white apparition, huge and domineering. Sometimes in spring and autumn, when the summit is still covered with snow, the snowless base takes on the color of the sky so that the great white peak floats free, apparently suspended in the blue upper air—a vast inverted fan hanging alone in the heavens. One does not live with indifference beneath such an eminence.
Lafcadio climbed Fuji at the end of August 1897. He traveled to the village of Gotemba, spent a sleepless night in one of the little pilgrim inns of the village, and began his ascent early the next morning, accompanied by several goriki, or Fuji guides.
Over the thousand years pilgrims have been ascending Fuji, certain traditions and traveler’s aids have been established to assist them. Among these are the Fuji stations—wooden houses and huts, some dug into the mountain slopes, where pilgrims can rest, eat, and get supplies. There were ten of these stations between the base and the summit in Lafcadio’s time, and they provided welcome relief for those who were not in good shape for the climb. Fuji pilgrims traditionally dress in white, carry long staves, and during poor weather cover themselves with straw mats and wide-brimmed hats. During the ascent, the staff is branded at each station with a kenji character indicating the place.
Lafcadio was perhaps not in the best shape for an ascent of Fuji. Never in perfect health—among other things he suffered from poor eyesight all his life—he began, as did many pilgrims, on horseback, riding to station two and a half, where he dismounted and began walking through the soft ashes and cinders that characterize the upper slopes of Fuji. It was cloudy and foggy, as it often is on Fuji, but periodically the fog would pull back and reveal the black slope of the mountain looming ahead of his little party. Slowly, station by station, zigzagging all the way, the group rose. The air turned cold. They reached a great stretch of snow, forced their way through the wind, and by 4:30 that afternoon, having attained the eighth station at 10,600 feet, they decided to rest for the night.
Lafcadio was completely exhausted. Even though it was August, the night was bitterly cold. The climbers wrapped themselves in thick blue robes, built a fire, lit the la
mps for the night, and prepared to sleep. Cold and tired though he was, Lafcadio could not tear himself away from the vision beyond him. Night was falling, the stars were flickering in a blue-black sky, and the world below had disappeared.
Traditionally the cloud world below Fuji is called the Sea of Cotton, but as he looked out over this impossible landscape, the long swells of the cotton balls settled, and a great white seemingly self-illuminated flood of clouds spread out below him as far as he could see. Lafcadio had another image.
“It is a Sea of Milk,” he wrote in his account of the ascent. “The Cosmic Sea of ancient Indian legend—and always self-luminous as with ghostly quickenings.”
That night he listened attentively to the folk tales of Fuji shared by the goriki in the warm hut. Just before he went to sleep he was warned not to go outdoors alone, although the goriki would not tell him exactly why. He woke at four in the morning and, in spite of the warning, stepped out onto the slopes. Over the Sea of Milk the moon was dying; the wind was filled with ice, and above him the dark slope rose ominously, stretching up into the black nothingness of the sky. The goriki were out after him in a second and pulled him back in. Fuji slopes are alive with spirits at night, they said. Once, centuries before, the Luminous Maiden had lured an emperor to the crater, and he was never seen again. There is a little shrine on the summit to mark the point of his disappearance. Sand that rolls down the slopes of Fuji by day, loosened by the feet of pilgrims, rolls back up again at night, when no one is watching. Fascinated though he was with the macabre and the supernatural, Lafcadio went inside.
The next morning they made the summit. Lafcadio was horrified by the broken volcanic landscape, the scarlike ridges, the vast jagged walls, the hideous overhanging black cusps. But the view beyond was wreathed in clouds, a phantasmagoric landscape. The Sea of Milk had billowed up again, great rents had opened, and the yellow glare of the wind-blown fire of the sun ran along the eastern horizon where a ragged edge of purple cloud was infused with a red glow like that of burning charcoal. All around him he could hear the rhythmic clapping of the Shinto pilgrims as they prayed to the sun. But they were denied the sunrise. The clouds rolled back in, the east was obscured, and, still fatigued, Lafcadio descended into the warmer foothills.
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