Mid-morning Saturday my garden thermometer read 102.  Farenheit, that is. No need to get out your cell phone calculator. It comes to about 39 degrees Celsius.

One choice was to crank up the air conditioner and sit. Yeah, just sit it out. For days, weeks maybe. . . . Nope, that just wouldn’t do. Actually I’d been thinking about Ryuso since the night before. “Ryuso Mountain is right at 1000 meters,” my sports-club sauna buddy had told me a few days before. “That’s a four-degree difference.” A Celsius four-degree difference, he meant.  In the freezer, I had two chunks of rice. Soon they’d be onigiri.

Blue Aqua Hybrid. First to Senna, then up into the hills. About thirty minutes in all. I fill my bottles up from the hose that’s taking in water upstream somewhere. One of them I turn up right then. I fill it up again.

It all depends on your pace, but the leg up to Hozumi Shrine took me about thirty-five minutes. Close to the river, thick cedar canopy, cool. Well, cooler. Maybe thirty-one or so. I forgot to tell you that I have a long concrete stoop that runs the length of  the two sliding glass doors on the backside of my apartment.  It’s a sun catcher. That’s why my garden gets so hot in the morning. Thirty-nine in my garden probably meant thirty-five or so, on average, around town.

Anyway, I was soaked in sweat by the time I got to the shrine.  Was that better than sitting and checking my e-mail an extra twenty or thirty times? Of course it was. For me. You, you might come to a different conclusion.

“The woods are lovely, dark, and deep.”

. . . but with no premonitions of death!

And okay, not really all that dark.  But darker than back down in town, and, at least for the moment, deeper and more lovely.

 One hundred and two.

Mossy mountain cedar trail.

A reason to move.

You won’t be surprised, given the Frost quotation above the moss and root photos, that 15 minutes after Hozumi Shrine you’re offered a choice. A road with metal stairs. A road without. My experience passing or not passing fellow hikers tells me that the road without is less traveled. But not untraveled. I took it.

But it didn’t matter so much. The two paths hook back up and lead to the very same summit! On this mountain, no danger of getting lost! Coming down, my knee asked me to take the stairs. My knee really likes the rail. I was happy to oblige.

Ryuso Mountain is composed of twin peaks. First you come to Yakushidake, at 1051 meters, then you dip down and go back up to Monjudake, at 1041. In winter, from Monjudake, you get a great view of both Mt. Fuji and  the Southern Alps. Saturday, I got a great view of the haze.

BUT!  . . . the thermometer at the top of Yakushidake read twenty-eight.

Two riceballs. A bottle of mountain water. Twenty-eight degrees. Heaven.

“It didn’t make sense to me. It was like a giant cedar tree asking a hawk to teach it to fly. A cedar didn’t need to fly. It held its head up high enough already.” (Kenta Ishiguro, narrator of Along the Same Street)