Adventure the Third: Words, words, words

This is the third instalment of the “It’s February: GET OUT!” series. It's about the HAJET winter conference in Furano. However, it's also one for Craig, who asked for his brother to send him some words (“as many or as few as you want”). What I wrote him was far more elegant than any of the stilted, formal stuff I tried to bang together as a summary for an excellent weekend. Call it brotherly love; call it the inspiration that comes from unconditional fraternal faith.

I found a new word for family this weekend:

HAJET.

It describes a force that pulls you out of your cold little corners of the countryside and forces you into warm spaces with people who were only mere acquaintances before. It feeds you and it entertains you and it makes evident your commonalities so nothing can stand in the way of meeting and greeting. It describes a degree of responsibility as you are elected to the role of Social Coordinator in this family, and it falls to you, now, to make sure the reunions happen, to make sure that all the distant relations are invited and attending. In the end, it describes a support structure for when you’re in distant lands, living in the future of all you used to know—when all of the people you once counted on now seem to live only behind windows in computer monitors.

I found a new word for beauty this weekend:

Furano.

It describes a sunny, blue-sky day, where the blizzards from yesterday have assured that all of the trees in the alpine have come to curves under bulbous, weighty clouds of snow. It describes taking in the width and breadth of a grid-paper agricultural valley from on high in a ski lift, climbing the back of a mountain you’d prematurely decided wasn’t worth it. It describes the thick grey of snowclouds just skirting before the sun, enough so that they can release the first crystalline trailers of their vast loads of snow, and yet they can still let that sun shine through to gild the flakes as they fall: vibrant stars on a sea of blue mountain shadows.

I found a new word for grace this weekend:

Snowboard.

It describes a condition of having your feet securely fastened to a plank of metal and fiberglass and plastic. It describes how you hook the thing into your very bone structure at the ankles, making it one further extension of your spine, so that you can eventually control it like an appendage of your self. On this thing, you ride mountains with control and ease unlike anything ever accomplished on two planks, and should you hesitate and fall it is only the beginning of your next rise, your next ride. It is a word that provides so much confidence as to be consummate; a word that avows that your only obstacle is yourself.

I found a new word for inspiration this weekend:

Yoichi.

It describes a place that is so void of people and spirit on the surface as to be the perfect hiding place for dreams and ideas. It is a terminal for words, and ethereal, Ghibli-esque cat-trains pull up to disgorge walking, talking metaphors and smiling similes. The ghosts of poets and philosophers haunt the rafters of it and call forth images from your weekends with phantom voices. As you sit, immobile, in such a place, if you have eyes enough to see them, the ideas pile in around you: standing one on top of the next so thick that they eventually have to suck in their guts to squeeze a few more in through the sliding doors. In this place, you feed on all of them like a verbiage vampire: typing them all into that little touchscreen keyboard in a way that builds momentum until your fingers are firing across it at the speed of thought. As your bus pulls up outside, and you’re forced to leave the place, you hasten to cram all the words you can into your Tupperware containers and your Ziplock bags, trailing them out behind you like cigarette smoke as you bolt through the doors.

And I found a new word for affection this weekend:

It describes a book that is all illuminated with bright illustrations of kindness and caring and love for all things, and yet you can’t make out the text worth a damn. It describes fingers that will crawl over and entwine with yours like tarantulove, seeking out your prints and lifelines with a dexterity and dedication that only you yourself ever seemed to espouse. It describes unexpected revelations, set in formal, theoretical languages that only amount to so many arbitrary letters when you’re speaking in tongues. This new word speaks of voids between arms and the forms that fill them; of the earthquake, gooseflesh shivers that can be set off by the most tentative of brushes; of soft, butterfly kisses that resound with the force of avalanches.

But that’s the word I can’t share with you; not here, not yet. For you see, brother, these words of ours, they have power. The Allfather hung, and died, and was reborn on The Tree, a sacrifice to himself, for but a handful of words.

So some of these words I’ll give you, but some I keep for myself. Regardless of whether I share them with you or not, these words are my words, and if you ever tried to use them, they'd be my words still. However, if you need words of your own for these things, then take heart because they’re out there, and you’ll find them.

Mountain Days 5, 6