A morning's greyness in the east

(with apologies to Cormac McCarthy)

See the runners. Huddled and spendthrift, attired for the heat, mocked and made wretched by the rain. See the pandemonium of clouds, broiling around the smouldering mountain. See the lightning, splayed and dimmed behind its achromatic cover. Hear the thunder, elemental in its warning, unshrouding the pathetic ambitions of those forlorn and foolish huddled at the start line.

Climbed they did, up to where shape dissolved into a scattering of shadows. Spindly figures, outlines of no substance, each alone in wordless anguish, washed by the rain, absolved of all but their needless striving for an end.

And on they ran, crazed, driven by something primeval defying clined logic, reaching back to the obdurate essence of what we were. They ran because they had to and to do otherwise was a refutation of all that rendered them extant.

Like mud snared protean lifeforms spat from some subterranean sepulchre, splattered auguries of a sweaty despair.

And then it came to an end and all that was before terribly was suddenly delivered to the farthest realms of memory and all that was left was the exhausted now.

And the poison ivy. Sweet, scratching Jesus, the poison ivy.

Winning and being made to lose

There was talk of them having been in the Kenyan highlands for a month, training at altitude. Word was they followed that with a couple of hard sessions at Crusheen Hill. Talked Ger Loughnane into coming along. Said   he'd never seen anything like the commitment, the all-consuming will to win. "The intensity lads, the intensity. Like '95 again, but with more rice".
Brian O'Driscoll was brought in to give a pep talk and three minutes into it, he quit. "They don't need it", he explained, simple as that. Some say that after that they retreated to a Zen monastery high on the slopes of Mt. Fuji where they stayed while their minds wandered free, contemplating the singleness of victory and the immutability of loss.
They were spoken of in hushed tones of awe and reverence as befits those who joust with the immortals.
They were ... the White Team.
And as for the Red Team, well they had been seen training with Lance Armstrong; and later spotted at a pharmaceutical company on the outskirts of Beijing, allegedly on a 'goodwill visit'. There were rumors of cash in plastic bags and blood transfusions from orphanages. Never proven, but the rumors stuck. They were after all competing for the 'Undokai' (Sports Day), the biggest event in the Mizumoto Hoikusho calendar since, well, last year's  Undokai.
Stretching first - don't want to lose all that hard training to a tight Achilles tendon just moments before the start. Just look at the frenzied intensity in those eyes - Jesus, but it would give you the shivers.

The opening ceremony was a spectacular display of martial grandeur, evoking John Bonham, the movie 300, and in Cian's case, the hard bastard hurley swing of an enraged Ollie Baker. Kazuma and Taichi uttered some blood curling pronouncements about how they would trod the Red Team's bones into wind blown dust before making off with their womenfolk and sweets. All the while Cian continued to demonstrate just how those poor wretches wearing red would be rendered into dust.

Let the games begin!!! we thundered, and begin they did. First up was the tricky ball in the hoop competition. But the White Team won that one easily enough. 2 points in the bag there. This was followed by the parents demonstrating their complete lack of eye-hand coordination for the same event. Or at least the Red Team did. The White Team with their secret weapon, the tall, lanky foreigner, won this one too. Another 2 points in the bag.

Time for a totally random musical interlude. Why? Because they are White Team - they just can. Talent to burn, these kids.

Next up was the exclusive G 1 race, a decathlon for our times. Cian was the anchor and yes, all too easily the winner too. Another 2 points in the bag.

So we are up to the final event, the relay and by this stage White Team, having won the first three events are 6 points while Red Team, now firmly clasped in defeat's intimate embrace are 3 points. These games are over ladies and gents; those of you with familial bonds to the red team may begin to sneak away in shame now.
And we're ... off.

And incredibly, red team win. Though not so incredibly when the little refusenik girl at the start of the race is subsequently seen with a plastic bag full of cash and kit-kats. Still, even with this disappointing loss, White Team have it in the bag.
But they, nor us, us naive fools, us rain-soaked suckers who still believed in the purity of amateur sports, didn't count on the sheer, brazen cynicism of the must-win-at-all-costs red team.
In an unprecedented move of such breath taking, undisguised favoritism, the principal of the Hoikusho unilaterally awarded 5 points, yes 5 unfrigginbelievable points to the red team for their relay win, thus rendering the final score this

And thus awarding, nay handing victory in the Undokai on a Judas plate to the red team.
Unfrigginbelievable!!!
How that man can live with himself  is beyond me.
The crowd didn't like it either, not one bit and for a while there after final result was announced it all turned a bit Chinese.

What had started a such a celebration of sporting joy had ended as an exercise in easy cynicism and violence. 
For shame.

Winter....

This evening's news had a report about the first fall of snow on top of Mt. Fuji. It was 18 days earlier than normal. Not even the end of the second week of September, a ball yet to be kicked in anger in this year's All Ireland football final and I'm already writing about snow. Why?

The Trees of Life

"Look out through my eyes. Look out at the things you made. All things shining"

"Do good to them. Wonder. Hope." 

Dinosaurs

They bestrode the earth before man was but a twinkle in a mammal's eye. They left behind nothing but bones and Steven Spielberg movies. They were....dinosaurs.
And we went to see them, or rather what bits we could find of them a couple of million years later. This led me to thinking about the very ubiquity of dinosaurs in modern culture, from Jurassic Park to the Flintstones, to exhibitions like this. They have become commonplace and the unfortunate result has been a loss of wonder at what once was. The bones, amazingly reconstituted, are millions of years old and that in itself should invoke a sense of both awe at their longevity, and humility at the lack of ours. But no, it provoked nothing more than a half hearted shrug as I skimmed through the explanations about the Mesozoic period. Similarly, the sheer size of the beasts has been rendered less impressive by their repeated CGI renderings on film and television and there is a sort of media-induced 'ho-hum' reaction to it all.
Or at least that was me.
But Cian...well he was torn between awe and fear. Dinosaurs were that big!! Wow!!!! And their teeth were that big!! Wow!!! And these are really their bones!!! Wow, wow!!! And why do I have to stand for this stupid picture with Daddy?
Mind you the visit to the dinosaur exhibition did provoke a number of near unanswerable questions like "Where do dinosaurs sleep?" and "Can dinosaurs eat whales?" and "How do dinosaurs keep their teeth clean?" and "Why are there so many dinosaur bones?" and "What are the Flintstones?"
I will say that this constant stream of unanswerable questions did get a bit tiring after a while, but I am still glad he had the untrammeled curiosity to ask them all.

Battleship

It has been pointed out to me by a reader who wishes to remain anonymous but who, for the sake of convenience, I shall call 'that Japanese woman', that my posts of late have (a) been essentially solipsistic exercises in navel gazing; (b) have had little to do with Cian or the wider Gaynor-Takahashi family, which is ostensibly the raison d'etre of this blog; and (c) and have featured a lot of hairy navel gazing and overt displays of devastating chest rug.
So, to remedy that this is the first in a series of Cian heavy blogs that will feature a lot of pictures of battleships, dinosaurs, segways and zero hirusteness. No matter how much you clamour for it, Mella.
First the battleship. Last weekend saw the Japanese Marine Self Defense Forces' 2,500 tonne, Abukuma class destroyer Oyodo visit Muroran in celebration of the port's 140th anniversary. And yes, the Marine Self Defense Forces is what Japan has instead of a navy, just as they don't have an army, but rather the Ground Self Defense Forces and yes, you've guessed it, no air force either, instead they have the Air Self Defense Forces.
Anyway, the navy, sorry Marine etc., etc., were having an open day on the ship in an effort to sway impressionable young minds into joining the navy, sorry, the Marine etc., etc. Being the highly impressionable sort, myself, Cian and 'that Japanese woman' went along for the walk around.

Cian wasted no time in heading straight for the bridge where, in the role he was so obviously born for, he immediately assumed command and ordered gunnery sergeant  Sanae to "loose off a couple of rounds" from the forward 76mm, just to "let the goddamned Chinese know we're not going to take any more shit over the Senkakus".

This was duly done, which successfully saw the Shin Nihon Seikyu oil depots on the far side of the bay being blown to smithereens. "That'll let Beijing know we mean business" said Cian, going below to the Captain's cabin for some celebratory drinks at 12 bells and some Louis Armstrong covers.

Meanwhile 'that Japanese woman' was out on the poop deck caressing the HOS-301 triple 324mm torpedo tubes whilst looking longingly at the Chinese iron ore carrier docked at the Shin Nitetsu factory wharf.

I did manage to get a furtive shot of some top secret, classified, highly confidential information on the bridge, but when I tried to sell it to the Chinese, they, unbelievably, said they were not interested in shelling out the big Yuan for the Muroran tide times. So I got Cian to wake up the 76 and lob some at the tug boats circling the harbour just to let those sons of Mao know we were still 'mad as hell and not going to take it anymore'.

A good day then had by all.

Mt. Nipesotsu

The last time I went hiking was in the spring of 2006. It was Aconcagua and somewhere around the 6,500 metre mark I had to turn back as the guy I was climbing with was suffering from altitude sickness. In December of that year Cian was born and, well, taking care of him took care of the mountains for a while. Which was a pity as I have all this mountain gear cluttering up the house and driving Sanae mad as I won't let her throw any of it out. Not even my commemorative albeit smelly Aconcagua pee bottle.
Earlier this month I finally got to go high again when we were down in Memuro during the Obon holiday. Abandoning my family (and/or fleeing from Sanae's extended relatives who were coming to visit), I headed up through the rolling farmlands around Kamishihoro where the morning sky was bedotted with colorful balloons floating gently up in the glimmering sky. The town hosts a balloon festival every year and given the happy crowds at the riverside campsite, seems quite popular.

I, however, was planning to go higher than the balloons, so I pushed on, past the signs warning me that there are no more petrol stations for the next 80 kilometres. The road after Kamishihiro heads into the mountainous wilderness of north Tokachi. There's not much up here besides trees, bears, deer and the small tourist village of Nukabira - which has neither petrol stations nor convenience stores. But wood carvings - that they do have.

Alluring as life size depiction of a bear eating a salmon was, I kept on. I was heading for Mt. Niposetsu on the eastern side of the great Daisetsuzan Plateau. I had climbed this mountain a number of times before and if it is possible to have a favorite lump of rock, well this would be mine. There's nothing particularly awe-inspiring or sublime about the mountain - it's a long, 8 hour there-and-back trip; thankfully, it's not very popular, and more than anything else, I enjoy the solitude.
It was past 8:00 by the time I got to the trail head and there were about 10 cars squeezed in against the trees. According to the hiking log, the first hikers set out at 4:40 that morning.
You get used to this sunrise trail fever here after a while. I used to feel particularly unmanned if I set off up the mountains after 6:00am, but with age comes wisdom and a desire to eat a full breakfast before spending the rest of your day in the hills. Though, admittedly finally getting under way at 8:30 did make me feel like a bit of a slack-ass. Albeit a well fed one.

The trail winds its way up initially through mixed forest, before breaking through the tree line into pine scrub and bushes. Then you skip over slabs of rock, stopping only to admire the late blooming alpine flowers up here. But for not for too long as a predatory pika (marmot) might savage you for their winter feed.

Can you spot the voracious, man-eating pika?

This high the trees give way to lichen covered scree and patches of flower spotted meadow. Small fragile alpine flowers were enjoying their brief time in the summer sun, and the wild blueberries were ripe and sweet. A man, I began to reckon, could make a life for himself up here. Live off the land as it were; grilled pika meat and blueberries, clothe himself in pika fur and shack up with the bears over winter... But no, wife, son and responsibilities beckon. As does a hearty dinner of butadon.

There is a lot of up-down, up-down on this climb; the trail follows a ridge line over two intermediate saddles before the final summit and it's not nice on the knees. I gradually began to meet the other early bird hikers, most of them on the way down from the summit. I'm not too sure which amazed them more: a foreigner climbing the mountain, or a foreigner climbing the mountain this late in the day.

And on I went as tufts of cloud came skudding across the sky and the midday heat braized the ridges and valleys. It was strange to think that within another four weeks or so, the first fleeting snows of winter would be dusting all these high places. Already some of the plants were blushed by autumn.

By the time I finally got to the top of the mountain, I was the only one there. All the rest had been and gone. So I stopped a while, took in what I could of the shimmering, hazy view, ate a leisurely lunch and thought of absent friends, Griff and Ben, who had made the journey with me years before, never thinking it would be our last.

The Ainu call me kumanomune - 'He who has the chest of a bear'