I'm a Lumberjack, and I'm okay

This past weekend we made the long, long 5-hour drive up to Nakagawa for the HAJET Northern Welcome party. It's only about 300km, but when you remember the Hokkaido speed limits are set at 50km/h year round, that is a long, long drive. Even when you feel like pushing that speed limit, it's hard to do so as even the toll expressways in this place are mostly just one lane.

And, there's always the cops, as Lindsay found out rather unfortunately.

Despite the distance, I was determined to make it out to the party. It was a modest, camping thing until the ALT in Nakagawa offered to host it, and her town backed her 100%, offering to make us food and to even move their town festival up by a month in honour of the attending ALTs. To take the ridiculousness even further, Nakagawa's mayor turned up to welcome us to the camp site and to give us advice for the log pushing even that some of us had signed up for the next day.

Nakagawa Sue's glorious mexican cuisine.

God damn, I miss mexican cuisine.

The pretty nice onsen hotel beside our campsite because no one roughs it in Japan without a hotspring bath on hand.

Sue's hero of a supervisor who spent all of Friday fishing for us and Saturday night cooking us chanchan yaki and yaki soba. Delicious.

Roz, me, Kevin, Lindsay, Mark, and Brian. All of the 2009 Hokkaido ALTs from Toronto. We all recontracted for a second year, and this is the first time we've all been in one place, really, since Sapporo Orientation last year.

With welcome parties come drunken bake sale auctions to raise funds for the HAJET-run Hokkaido English Challenge/Camp/Home stay program. You'd be surprised how much someone will pay for western baked goods in Japan when they've been drinking. I paid $60 for a pumpkin pie.

God damn, I miss pumpkin pie.

The food that Nakagawa served up was phenomenal and got us log-pushers good and energized for the competition we'd blindly signed up for at 9am on the Sunday morning. I'm pretty sure the two teams of guys and one team of girls signed up for a laugh, thinking that this log pushing would be fun and not too challenging to us big, burly gaijin.

Once we had to show up to weigh in and saw what we were in for, I think we all got a little worried:

(sorry about the Photoshop photomerge munching the log)

Those Kanji across the back there actually proclaim this to be a sumo competition, and you wouldn't doubt it once you saw how seriously some of the teams took the competition. It's a reverse tug-of-war, where the goal is to push harder than your opponents and to drive the red centre marker on the log over their baseline. Oh, and the log's pretty heavy, even with ten guys on it. Teams are weighed in as the limit is 400 kilos per team. Our own team came in at a cool 389kg.

Back before we realized we had anything to be afraid of, we came up with a jaunty, setting appropriate team theme: The Lumberjacks.

Chi, Alan, me, Brian, and Spencer. The MIGHTY LUMBERJACKS!

That would, of course, be the Monty Python Lumberjacks, complete with women's clothing (compliments of Simon Daly and the Engaru Free Store) and a bra (compliments of Heather...strangely no photos of that have showed up yet).

The other team of ALT guys went up first.

...and got rocked as they had the unfortunate pleasure of drawing the team that would eventually go on to win the whole thing as their first opponents. To give you an idea of how hard core this other team was, that dude on the end of the ALT log in the pink shirt, who's barely touching the ground, weighs about 110 KILOS, to say nothing about the rest of his team. Thankfully, we were able to learn something from their defeat (stay low, get as much of your skin on the log as you can), and when it came time for us lumberjacks to get on the log.

We knocked the fancy-coloured pants off of our opponents from Hokkudai University.

We weren't so lucky when we faced The Architects in the third round (we'd had a by into the second). Though we denied them a sweep by taking one win from them, they beat us twice and went on to the next round. Still, with the other men's team and the women's team having been defeated in their first match-ups, we were pretty proud of our showing in this event we knew nothing about and had signed up for as a bit of a joke.

Just before we were defeated by The Architects.

Though we were all kind of concerned about splinters, what with rubbing our nakedness up against a log, the log was pretty damn slick--hence why you needed your skin on it for traction. And traction there was as, writing this now on Thursday (I'm retconning it back to Monday), I still have a fairly livid bruise under my right arm from all of the friction of the log.

"I want you to occur to me daily..."

Friday seems to be music day, so here's some more of what I'm listening to over here.

I stumbled across "Apology" by Shane Koyczan and the Short Story Long in a CBC Radio 3 Artist Series Podcast, hosted by Dan Mangan. I listened as I mindlessly repaired flash cards today in the junior high school office, waiting for my 15 minutes of work as a human tape recorder for each grade's English listening test after lunch.

The lyrics of the song (can they be called lyrics? the poetry of the song?) struck me almost immediately, and before it'd finished playing on the podcast, I'd already bought the song on iTunes.

It might be one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard.

Give it a listen, if you're interested...but don't do it while you're doing anything else. Give the words the consideration they deserve. I've reproduced them below in case they move you as much as they moved me. There are a lot of them, though.

Oh, and Shane is--of course--Canadian, and Dan made some mention of him having performed at some point during the Olympics, if you remember that kind of stuff.

i’m sorry, i’m sorry that i keep saying that i’m sorry. i know it’s strange, strange in a george w bush hasn’t been assassinated yet kinda way. but i say i’m sorry for stupid shit and trivial things and she sings the sweet logic that apologies should grow like trees, only able to bear fruit if it’s root is planted in the soil of genuine sincerity. but i somehow manage to parrot each apology by speaking it before i react. and the fact is that i’m not really sorry that i completely dig degrassi, because it was yick and arthur who got me through wet dreams and puberty. lady, i don’t expect you to understand the reference but i’ve been into this shit ever since the casting director said fuck physicality, give me some reality. gimme kids who can’t act and are ugly: they’ll teach the world about beauty, lady—i can relate to this.

because before i met you i used to want to lock myself into a vault just to feel precious. but now with every kiss hello and good bye—i feel a self worth no banker can tally. and, my heart is a protest that i let rally against my ribs ‘cause i want to build my bones into cribs and lay my reluctance to rest. test what it would be like to live frenetically, to hold you unapologetically

to plant a giving tree on my front lawn, so that when you’re gone it can give you back to me. and i’m sorry that when you sleep next to me you’re forced to listen to the symphony of the unplugged nostril. and, i’m sorry that one time, for some reason, i called you ma’am. that’s fucked up. fucked up in a ‘i just bought a pair of speedos so i can go swimming with you’ kind of way. and crazier than that is the fact that i’ll play at being brave. because doubt is about as useful as a fire escape when you’re trying to dodge a tidal wave, when you got no time to save anybody yourself—you better believe that you’re worth it.

and you are worth the time it takes to take the time to get to know you. we’ve managed to muddle through the awkward stages of i like you and you like me, and when we both said ‘yes’ life became a multiple choice test, not knowing anything we became each other’s best guess. and, holding your hand is less like exploration and more like discovery. lady, i don’t have to study you to be sure. you’re the choice i made before i knew what the other choices were

and, like the best idea i’ll ever have, i want you to occur to me daily. and, i’m sorry, but i want to kiss you every time you have something incredible to say. but you’re beautiful, beautiful in a you kinda way. you’re like the long lost vinyl of louis armstrong, and i wanna play you until it, /until it/ skips. i wanna tell you a secret and i want you to listen with your lips. i want my hands on your hips like they were their final resting place. then, put that funeral under paper so that you can trace their lifetime back to the fact that i’m more inclined to find a space in your heart to haunt for as long as you want me to, lady, i’ll rattle chains up and down the halls of you.

and, this isn’t the greatest romance the world has ever seen. let’s face it: we’ve been making out to songs about break-up and heart ache. but i’ve come to realize romance should be less like a flower and more like an earthquake. and i’m not saying that i wanna shake cities to the ground, i’m not saying that i want the ruble that remains to be come a lost and found where we find the kind of tolerance it takes to rebuild in the face of tragedy, because I’m tired of living in a world that says people only come together when faced with catastrophe.

i want you
to want me
to be the me you see when im free to be the me that got me next to you,
and as for romance? well i want that too.

i wanna fall asleep next to you 100 times a night so i can no you 100 times better before we hit the daylight. and in spite of all of this i also want amnesia, so i can relive each kiss with a perfect newness that leaves me smashed in the arms of rapture. i want the sky to fracture under the impossible weight of an apology, because i’m sorry. i’m sorry that i want so much. i’m sorry that i’ve been using i’m sorry as a crutch to lean on for so long, but if you sing me that song of sweet logic again, then i promise to make the effort to stand on my own.

theres a reason that our hearts are more like a muscle and less like a bone. i’ve known so many people who’ve grown up flexing in front of the mirrors as if falling for their own reflection would be adequate—and that’s bullshit. because we only get from now until the time we go, and if they’ve only got time to love themselves, then no one’s going to be around to hear the sound of their heartbeat echo. so, lady, don’t expect an apology when i tell you i’m only held together by a heart that pumps glue, it’s the strongest muscle in my body… and i’m flexing it for you.

- Shane Koyczan and the Short Story Long

Oh, and this, too:

The Yotei-zan Climb

Despite numerous people having cautioning me that Yotei, as a mountain, was hard and steep and tall, I underestimated it a bit. I based my expectations on Rishiri from last fall: a mountain that we hiked a month later, several hundred kilometers further to the north, and which we never actually summited because we were losing light.

In short, though both were sunny and glorious, they were very different climbs.

Mark, Lindsay, Perry and I all met up at Kutchan station at 9:30 on Saturday morning, picked up some food and drink, and then drove over to the Makkari trail head to start our climb at about 10:30.

We broke for lunch at about 1pm at the Fourth Station, which was at an elevation of 930 meters and, I reasoned, about half way up the 1898 meters of Yotei.

However, it only got steeper from there, making Fourth Station feel like it was only a third of the way up the mountain.

The weather was utterly glorious--pretty much perfect--which meant that there was LOTS of sun to make the exertion of the climb EVEN SWEATIER. My current Japananotebook, which had been packed into the pocket closest to my sweaty, sweaty back was irreversibly scarred by the experience and needed a day or two to fully dry out.

That being said, all of the exhaustion and water rationing were definitely worth it:

(that's meant to be a panorama, but the blog munches it. Best to click it and check it out on Flickr proper.)

We reached our destination, the Yotei mountain hut or Yotei hikers cabin (I'm not sure what it's actually called) above ninth station somewhere around 4:30pm. This was where we were planning to spend Saturday night. It's the only building on the mountain, and for the very cheap 900円 you can have a blanket and a piece of floor to sleep on at an elevation of something like 1600 meters. All four of us bunked on the second floor of the cabin, along with 20-30 other Japanese folks. Mark had been told that the two floors of the cabin could hold as many as 100 people, but, having seen the cabin, that number seemed like the product of optimistic creativity. I would have guessed 75 souls at a tight squeeze.

Such fanciful capacities would also have to worry about overflowing the long-drop toilets provided in the cabin. You were meant to click the counters hanging on the walls to give the cabin manager an idea of how full the tanks were getting (0ne click for Number 1, two clicks for Number 2), but a quick peek into the squatters to see how short the drop was getting told me that there weren't many clicks left in the tanks. The whole thing was presided over by one fat old fly who would lazily hover up out of the toilet when you lifted the lid. He'd buzz annoyingly around your head while you did your business, like a particularly malicious and disease-ridden washroom attendant, only to return to his moist, warm cave when you closed the lid on it once again.

Despite the facilities and the lack of drinking water for anything other than emergencies, the mountain cabin was fantastic--particularly when we got to eat our modest dinners (dried sausage, onigiri, soyjoy bars, caloriemate, and an apple for me) outside on a slapped-together picnic table, overlooking the most ridiculous, clouded-over setting sun.

Once the sun had gone down, the mist had rolled up, and a chill was starting to set in on the shoulders of Yotei, we headed inside and made a poor attempt at playing the world's highest game of Settlers of Catan by headlamp light (the board of which was another of my sweat-damaged items).

However, we all joined the chorus of snorers around us before it had gotten much later than 7pm. Between the blanket-padded floor, our rudimentary pillows, and the ever-changing collection of night ruminations around us (seriously. I heard more types of snores in that one night than I have in my lifetime. I should have been recording them), the sleep that came was fitful, and it wasn't long before my alarm was going off at 4am, beckoning us to start our climb to the peak for sunrise.

We achieved the peak somewhere around 5:30am on Sunday, but, sadly, there wasn't much to see:

The conditions for our climb down were much the same, but all of the clouds and fog made for a much less sweaty descent.

Also, there are certain other-worldly benefits to climbing down through the grey.

Know the Points 4: Wakkanai

The last stop before the long haul back to Sapporo:

Distance from Sapporo: 316km

Distance from last Point (Shiretoko): 438km

It may be uncharitable to say so, but when we made it to Wakkanai last year on our road trip up from Sapporo, I was thoroughly underwhelmed with the place.

Then again, that might have been because we’d just spent the day watching the scenery of Hokkaido dwindle down as we went: from mountains, down to rocky ocean cliffs, down to escarpment-like sandy bluffs, and, eventually, down to the otherworldly flat sand and grass of Sarobetsu, where they needed to install tunnels in the middle of nothing as wind shelters for drivers, where there was absolutely nothing to impeded our view of a perfect sky fire sunset behind the Mount Doom of Rishiri Island, out in the sea of Japan.

After the flat of Sarobetsu, the road gradually climbed over a ridge before dumping us into the hollow carved out by the northern port of Wakkanai.

I blame Wakkanai’s bleakness on too much exposure to Russia. The Japanese citizens of Wakkanai can actually make good on Sarah Palin’s vacuous exaggerations about seeing Russia. On a clear day, from the hills around the city, you can clearly see the Siberian peninsula (island?) of Sakhalin extending down from the north. Wakkanai definitely seems like a city suffering from a little too much soviet influence.

Or Wakkanai’s bleakness may be blamed on the fact that the city appears to have been in declining stasis since sometime back in the 70s or 80s. Everything is old in Wakkanai, but not in that proper, historically- or even nostalgically-significant old way. It’s more of a past-expiration old: a beyond-collecting-dust-and-in-to-collecting-dirt old.

Long story short, Wakkanai is the only one of the points I’ve been to before, and it’s the one of the points I’m in no hurry to get to again. Its presence as Point 4 is a bit of a geographical necessity of traveling to all the distant points of this island, and I’m really hoping that when we get there this time I’m forced to eat my condemning words about it.

I mean, I guess it’s not all bad:

And, with the fourth and final Point covered, all that's left now is to get on with the road trip starting September 18th!

Destination: Yotei-zan

This weekend, Mark, Lindsay, possibly Perry, and I are finally going to get off our collective butts and climb one of the prettiest mountain in this place: Mount Yotei.

An active volcano (well, not since like 1050BC) with its crater rim at an elevation of nearly 1900m, Yotei is sometimes referred to as "Ezo Fuji," or "Hokkaido Fuji" due to the way that its conical shape mimics the iconic image of much larger Mount Fuji down in Honshu. Yotei has been staring us in the face all winter as we boarded on neighbouring Niseko An'nupuri, and its shape was clear on the horizon both when we all climbed Sapporo Dake in May, and when I climbed Shakotan Dake with my boss in June.

Long story short: It's about effing time we got up that mountain. We're planning to make the ascent using the Makkari course on Saturday morning, stay the night in a mountain hut at the summit, then come down on the Sunday in time to make the town festival in Makkari.

Wish us luck...particularly now that I've learned that Hokkaido may be expecting a typhoon this weekend!

Know the Points 3: Shiretoko

Next up: our third goal, and possibly the bit of the trip that we're all slavering over the most. The great, untouched, eastern peninsula of...

Distance from Sapporo: 411km

Distance from previous Point (Erimo): 349km

Shiretoko has always been the goal.

Well, for me and Mark at least, but maybe for Lindsay, too. Once I got better acquainted with Heather last year, I soon realized that she had it as well: that thought sitting so immovably in her mind as to almost have become material in the grey matter—just as it had become in ours.

Shiretoko.

The eastern peninsula. The last untouched wilderness of Japan. The spear of mountains and forests and hotsprings and bears, unbroken by civilization beyond the communities of Rausu and Utoro, which sit like anchors at its base.

Shiretoko.

It was the inexplicable destination of our initial mad attempt at this Four Points road trip, back when we hardly knew this island from a hole in the ground. Even then, there was some phantom magnetism pulling us towards it. And, now that we’ve reprised this wild adventure; now when we know where we’re going and how we’re getting there; now when we’ve researched what to see and why it’s important; even now there still seems to be this same, unspoken, ethereal-yet-domineering group telepathy about it.

Shiretoko.

We’re going, and, beyond spouting off about trees and rocks and bears, I don’t know that any of us could really tell you why. It's just a certainty. Like roads and cars and konbinis. If all the fluff of sight-seeing and friend-visiting and draconian circumnavigating in this trip fell away, one thing would still remain:

Shiretoko.

Distance to next Point (Wakkanai): 438km