Sometimes you’ve got to go to work. You know, the day job. You can’t be climbing mountains every day. But lucky you. You bicycle past Yatsuyama every day. Right downtown. And even with the day job, you can find the thirty or forty minutes it takes to get up and down—less, if you run.
Yatsuyama. Yatsu Mountain. All of 108 meters above sea level. Once I told someone I liked hiking in the mountains. I told him when I didn’t have much time I’d hike up Yatsu Mountain. He laughed and said that you could hardly call Yatsuyama a mountain.
That had been bothering me a bit, but this time, atop Yatsuyama, I was lucky enough to run into a goddess ( somewhat diminuitive and rather bent in the back) . . .
. . . who’d just been cleaning up the place, and I asked her what she thought.
“Is Yatsuyama a real mountain?”
“Did you climb up it?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Along the way, did you hear elfish voices saying, ‘Keep going! Just a little farther?”
“I think so.”
“Was there a top?”
“This is the top, isn’t it?”
“It is, indeed. And you can look down and see stuff, can’t you? Look, the whole city, the ocean.
And if you look out, you can look over a lot a stuff and see a lot more stuff. See, there are the southern Alps. And step over there, and I think you’ll find an old friend of mine out and about.”
I did. Mt. Fuji.
“I see,” I said. “Thank you.”
Ah, what a wonderful thing to be able to say: I was kind of busy, I didn’t have much time—just enough to climb a mountain.
Yeah, not much time. Just enough, up on Yatsuyama, to watch the sun set.
Just enough time to see the sun set a single spear of pampas grass aglow.
Amazingly, the spear was not overwhelmed. It made the sun’s light swirl, and while it took in all the sun’s energy, it kept its own glow soft.
And I thought that if I could only take home that swirl of soft glow, that swirl holding the whole of the sun, if I could only hang it over the dinner table that evening, a light and lightshade au naturel, well, someone might just lean across the table and give me an equally soft kiss.
Hello, mr. Redford!
I could not resist and had to visit your blog you had spoken about today. I really like your pictures and I must say that I share your predilection for walking in the mountains. Every year I make trip to mountains with two best friends of mine. For one day or for more which depends mostly on our free time and weather. I will never forget that feeling when we got back to city after 5 days living among hills and rocks and forests of Giant Mountains without meeting a single human being but three of us. We climbed down, dirty, hungry and maybe little bit wild looking, to noisy town – filled with cars and all those strange people – and I felt like I wanted to run away back to the mountains. Away from “civilization”. I remembered all those days in wild with my friends when we talked in our classes about Thoreau and Emerson and I felt very close to their way of thinking and I decided to read their books as soon as I don’t have so much study literature.
Although I have climbed Yatsuyama only twice so far, it immediately became my most favorite place in Shizuoka. It isn’t so wild as Giant Mountains in northern part of Czech, Yatsuyama is in the middle of city after all, but so far it is the closest place resembling me that beloved part of my fatherland 🙂