She stopped suddenly. “He wasn’t your husband … he was an ‘outside’ person, wasn’t he?” Yes, I told her. Mistakenly, Leila had used the word “husband” instead of “husband-to-be.” The itako nodded, then began again. Above a butane-fueled hot plate and a bucket of water with a bamboo dipper, a clock chimed eleven. A dog tied up in back growled, and snow on the tin roof began to drip, melted by sun.
Her chanting intensified, then stopped. “I can’t understand him. He doesn’t speak Japanese.”
“He was Welsh.”
“I’ll try again.”
The rubbing of the beads made a harsher sound. During the months just before and after David’s death, I had felt something cold behind my left shoulder. Now bright sun warmed my back. She began mumbling. I looked at Leila.
“It’s in some weird dialect,” she whispered.
The itako clapped her hands, then stopped. “I can barely make him out,” she said. “But he says he hasn’t forgotten you. I prayed for his well-being. I’m sorry. But he’s so far away. It would be easier if we were on Osorezan.”
Sakuraba-san and his driver picked us up early the next morning, and we drove north five hours in bad weather up the narrow arm of the Shimokita peninsula, shaped like an ax; its blade, if lowered, would strike down through the middle of Honshu. I was filled with melancholy. The night before, I’d dreamed about my dead friend. Unlike any other dream I’d had of him, he wasn’t about to die, nor was he already dead: we had infinity before us.
Rain swept across the road in gray sheets, lifting off and blowing back into seawater. In the town of Noheji we passed a hearse. Its ornate, gilded frame curved out over the body of the truck on which it had been built. From there to Mutsu there were no towns, only fishing camps where boats were pulled up on beaches and turned over on snow. Small torii faced weather-beaten shrines where offerings were still made “for luck in fishing.” Rain turned to sleet. The driver put on a tape of an itako chanting. The sky, sea, and the snow-covered shore were all the same gray color. An old woman with a curved spine slogged through a dairy farm in gum shoes, dragging the pointed end of an umbrella across the ground.
A waitress in Aomori had warned us: “If you go to Osorezan, the spirits will attach themselves to you and go down the mountain on your back. Be careful. If you let them do this, you’ll suffer sickness. When you go there you have to be strong and not let them in.” Aomori is the place where the word for dying also means “going to the mountain.” I looked ahead to where the mountain, Osorezan, should have been, but all I saw were particles of snow bombarding us as if the mountain had blown apart.
At Mutsu we stopped for lunch. Our driver didn’t want to have anything to do with Osorezan; he only wanted to eat and read the comic books the restaurant provided. Our young waiter’s sweatshirt had these words, in English, printed on the back: “O. Henry. His stories are famous for their urbane ironies and unexpected twist at the end.”
By the time we had finished eating, it was snowing hard. At the north end of town, where the road to Osorezan began, an iron gate swung across our path. The snow was too deep. Sakuraba-san looked crestfallen. All this way for nothing. But I had not come partway around the world just to be turned back by a gate. “We’ll walk,” I said. It would be a twenty-six-mile round trip. Sakuraba-san gave me an incredulous look, but when he saw there was no choice, he borrowed the driver’s galoshes and set off up the mountain ahead of us.
The road to Osorezan is not narrow but deep. Deep with snow, thick with forebodings, silent, inward, trackless. We started up through a dense forest, an island of wild vegetation in a country where rice fields dominate the ground. On either side of the road thick stands of cedar, pine, and cherry were twined with the vines of wild grape like “red threads,” a Japanese term that alludes to passion.
Ankle-deep at first, the snow was heavy as cement. Behind us, our tracks filled in quickly, so that our ascent left no trace, and I wondered if that was how it was when you died. I’d worn too many clothes and began sweating. “People walk to heaven,” Sakuraba-san said, pausing to look at the sky, then passing me again. I wondered what Shinto heaven looked like, if it differed from Buddhist heaven. I wondered if the dead do walk, what they walk on, and if, like Dante, they have a guide.
Osorezan’s Ainu name means “Dreadful Mountain.” It is an eye in the head of the ax, staring into the closed eyes of humans cut down by death; once a fiery volcano, it too is dead. I slogged up its slopes, its rivers falling away from my feet. Every two hundred yards or so, we passed a statue of Kannon, the deity of mercy and compassion. “I pray to Kannon every morning,” the itako Mrs. Nakamura had said, and I wondered how many prayers it took to get up this mountain blind.
As the road steepened, Sakuraba-san upped the pace. Finally, we stopped at a spring and drank thirstily from a bamboo dipper left on a rock for pilgrims. The snow was now up to my shins. We crossed one animal track all day—that of a serow, a wild sheep protected in Japan. That was all. The sky, like an iron plate, lowered on my head.
Near the top the road wound down to the caldera before flattening out into a wide plain. Wind gusted, carrying the smell of sulfur. Pools of hot water, orange and green, bubbled out of the ground. We passed a ramshackle, seedy onsen, boarded up for the winter. A child’s pink bike lay on its side in the ooze. I walked on. When the steam and the cold mist lifted, I could see across a broad lake, whose ice-dappled emerald waters filled the volcano’s crater.
Osorezan has its own cosmology. The beaches are called gokuraku-gahama, which means “Beach of Paradise.” The tumbled, sulfur-stained rocks are the site of one of Osorezan’s hells. Beyond is the “Pond of Blood”—now white with snow—where the journeyers must drink, another one of the hundred and thirty-six hells where relatives of the dead pray.
Ahead was a narrow red bridge, the one the itako had told me about. It connects higan and shigan—this shore and the other shore—and the dead spirits must cross it before taking up residence on the water.
I walked over the Taiko Bridge and continued on. Ahead, in the mist, I could make out the temple, Bodai-ji. As we approached its high gates, four ravens appeared out of the forest, cawing. Greetings! I cawed back. Leila and I rested on the steps, because the gates to the temple were locked. Twelve hundred years ago a priest, Jokaku Daishi, studying Buddhism in China, had a dream that he must return home. From Mount Hiei near Kyoto, he began to walk. He had been directed to a mountain in the northeast corner of Honshu. Thirty days later he reached Osorezan and fasted. Finally, the “thin spot” revealed itself, “opening” so the holiness could come through; on that spot he built this temple.
Inside there is a carving, left by the priest, of Jizo, the savior of those lost in the bardos. Every night Jizo walks these grounds, gathering up the ghosts of dead children. Believers say the edge of his robe is wet from the children’s tears and that the walking stick carried in his right hand is hot to the touch. Sai no Kawara is the beach in front of the temple, where children, chased by demons, are saved by him.
After eating an orange, we walked to a building where smoke was coming from a chimney. Two leathery-faced old caretakers came out, shocked to see they had visitors, and Americans at that. Timidly, they invited us in. Two caged doves cooed as I unlaced my boots. Inside, a television was showing a Mickey Mouse cartoon dubbed in Japanese. We sat on red cushions around a wood stove and drank tea from big, handleless mugs.
The caretakers, both in their late seventies, looked more Chinese than Japanese, with their dark skin, high cheekbones, and easy smiles. They had been on the mountain since September. It was now January, and we were their first visitors. Both had been born in Mutsu, the town where we’d had lunch, and, as bachelors, had traveled in labor camps to Tokyo and Yokohama as construction workers. Now they were too old to work and had taken this job. “We come up when the people are leaving and go down when they come up,” the older of the two said.
Through a doorway I could see a large table
heaped with cabbages, onions, and carrots, fifty-pound sacks of rice, and stacks of eggs. “We don’t like each other’s cooking, so we cook for ourselves,” one of them said, as if the results could be that different, given the ingredients.
After tea, they refilled our cups with instant coffee. We offered them a crumpled American candy bar, which they refused. I asked them if they were afraid to live here. The older one shrugged, no. But the younger of the two said he heard dead people crying at night and saw them moving around, legless, on the shore of the lake. “They glide on air like birds. I don’t know why they don’t have legs,” he said.
I noticed Sakuraba-san checking his watch. It was after four when we rose to leave. “You better stay the night; it will be dark in half an hour,” the younger one said. “No, no, we must go,” Sakuraba-san protested, stepping into his galoshes. The caretakers followed, showing us where on the temple grounds the itako do their work. “Sometimes we come back up in July, just to see the itako,” they said. “The caretaker who was here before us died here. His spirit didn’t have to go anywhere. It was already home.”
More than a foot of snow had fallen since we had started up, and the walk back, which I had expected to be easy, was just as laborious. A little way from the temple, I stopped and turned. The two old men, who looked as if they belonged in the Tang dynasty, smiled sweetly and waved goodbye. Around the lake, over the Taiko Bridge, up the lip of the crater, then down in steep snow and dark. “Oku … oku … oku …” The word came with the rhythm of each step. This was my narrow road to the deep north, my walk to a distant shrine, my inward journey, my penetration of darkness.
The day before, I had asked Sakuraba-san if he believed in itako, if he believed Osorezan was a place of spirits, and he had said, “No, not really.” But now because it was dark, he passed me with a frightened look and began running down the mountain. I did not try to keep up.
Singing to myself, I shook my shoulders every now and then to see if there were any spirits clinging to my back. Nothing. I felt light and heavy at the same time. I wondered if the itako we visited had really talked to my dead friend, if they actually talk to anyone, or were they simply meting out consolation at two thousand yen a shot? I didn’t care. We are always looking for difficult truths in easy contexts and demanding simple answers within complicated wholes. Perhaps the gesture is enough. Like an ax coming down into a log, a gesture dents consciousness, wedging it wider. It pleased me to have found a place where disbelief could be suspended, where the mind was open, permissive, accepting, and could see worlds behind masks and sacred dances, hear voices inside the wild conch shell and the rasping rosary.
At the spring I drank deeply and bowed to the goddess Kannon, who inspires compassion. To go with suffering, to go with passion … that is what the word “compassion” really means. Trudging, glissading, my heels sinking deep in fresh snow, I saw that the New Year’s new moon had come almost full and the road to and from Osorezan glistened white.
HOME IS HOW MANY PLACES
Wenè mu. That’s what the Chumash Indians called this southern California harbor: “resting place,” because it was here that they waited in their high-bowed, ocean-going canoes for rough seas to subside before they paddled to their island homes. My destination is Tuqan, the Chumash name for San Miguel, the northernmost of the Santa Barbara Channel Islands, about sixty miles from here.
In the dark, I step onto the Peace and stow my gear. She is a sixty-five-foot diesel-powered boat fitted out for diving expeditions, though tonight she is taking twenty of us on a museum-sponsored tour. Eleven P.M. rolls around. It is usual for the Chumash to wait until at least midnight before heading out, when the seas are calmer. James, the young, dark-haired captain, stumbles into the galley, rubbing sleep from his eyes. He asks for water and glances at the clock. “Not yet,” he says to no one in particular, then disappears up a ladder to his bunk because he’ll be on watch all night.
The harbor is quiet, only a gentle breeze. The decks have been scrubbed down, but the bolts that hold this iron workhorse together are rusted. By comparison, the Chumash tomol (canoe)—used as transportation between the mainland and the islands—was constructed from driftwood shaped into planks with rock tools and sanded smooth with cloths made from sharkskin. Lashed together with milkweed fiber and sealed with black asphaltum—the tar that seeped up on Santa Barbara beaches—the tomol was painted ocher, its bow inlaid with abalone shells that flashed in moonlight like two eyes.
For eight thousand years or more the Chumash lived in isolation and peace. One of at least sixty tribal groups in California, they once numbered fifteen thousand. They had no neighboring enemies and no warrior cult. Personal vengeance, carried out with poisonings, was the only violence they knew. Climate, the unjust taskmaster of the Plains nations, blessed the Chumash with year-round sun and abundant food from land and sea. Tule elk, deer, and bear were hunted; mussels and abalone were plucked from rocks; acorns, seeds, and berries were gathered. They lived in a five-thousand-square-mile paradise. From San Luis Obispo south to Malibu, the Chumash nation included a chain of pristine habitable islands, a unique south-facing coastal range, inland valleys, and three hundred miles of beach.
Hardly anything would be known about these people if it had not been for John Peabody Harrington, a Smithsonian anthropologist and onetime resident of Santa Barbara. In 1912 he returned to his hometown and rented a Spartan room in the ivy-covered Riviera Hotel. He was not a young man, having already amassed 800,000 pages of notes on Native American cultures elsewhere, but the Chumash were dear to his heart.
When he sat down with Fernando Librado, Maria Ignacio, and Mary Yee—Chumash descendants—to record every remembered detail of traditional and contemporary Chumash life, Fernando was already 108 years old.
“I remember Mr. Harrington,” Paulina, my friend, told me. She had grown up with Mary Yee’s daughter. “He wore an old suit, always the same one. He didn’t eat, he didn’t sleep. He was sick, but he always worked. Every day he came to Mary Yee’s house. She had married a Chinese man, but she was Chumash, and she was teaching the language to Harrington. We girls were sent out because she didn’t want us to hear. She was ashamed to speak that way in front of us. But she told Mr. Harrington everything she knew.”
Those notes were kept uncatalogued in eight hundred cardboard cartons in the basement of the Smithsonian until recently when the Museum of Natural History in Santa Barbara brought them home piecemeal. The resident anthropologist had to order the notes by the inch. “We didn’t have much money. That’s all we could afford.” Now the museum is a workshop of Chumash culture: recordings of Mary Yee are being transcribed by her daughter, notes written in longhand are being typed and archivally stored, and Harrington’s one-of-a-kind typewriter fitted with Chumash-language keys is on display.
Sometime after midnight, James, the young captain, reappeared, hair slicked back De Niro style: “Get ready to go under way,” he yelled down to the two galley cooks, Ventura women along for the ride. “This isn’t going to be an easy night,” he whispered, passing me. Then the diesel engines revved, and we moved slowly to sea.
The moment we passed beyond the harbor’s protective breakwater, heavy winds hit. Nothing had prepared me for the size of the swell on the outside: ten-foot waves slammed against us as James headed the Peace up into the wind, her heavy bow dropping down into troughs as new swells rose, big as buildings.
Long after the museum people had gone below to sleep, I sat alone on deck, holding the rail. There’s no place else I’d rather be than under way at night in a small boat. Once, on a sailboat, I was lashed to the tiller in a sea this rough and felt wind send shocks up through the keel and down the mast into my hands. Now the coastline lights of Oxnard, Ventura, and Santa Barbara receded and those of a drilling platform loomed ahead. We seemed to move forward only by going up and down—as if a giant were playing ball with an elevator.
I was raised in a house in Montecito with a view of the sea and never
understood how the steel legs of an offshore drilling platform could stand so straight in water and why, at Christmas, the rig was made to look like a Christmas tree. Now the Peace chugged under the platform’s city-sized deck, stacked with metal containers for living and sleeping, its cold immensity mocking us as we lunged away into the dark curvaceous violence of the sea.
The wind strengthened. I thought of Saint John of the Cross’s “dark night of the soul.” At least he had decent footing. I felt sudden happiness. Who cares where water stops and wind begins, or if night ever ends, or what the difference is between dream and hope and doubt and reality? There’s a sameness to it all, which I relish, even as the boat stands upright on swells, walking the ladder of night, then—kabam—belly flops again.
I lick salt water from my face. Spray blots out stars. Above, the boat’s running lights are the only constellation. No celestial navigation tonight, unless it is possible to take a fix on oneself, which would mean I’d have to know where I was while still lost.
Now, instead of salt, I lick darkness from my mouth. It’s said that at the bottom of the gravest doubt there is satori, and mention is made of fireflies lit up inside a grave. Light can come into being anywhere. The boat shudders, and the captain’s face, illuminated by chart lights, is a torch.
The Chumash thought the cosmos was made of three flattened disks floating in the ocean and the middle one, where they lived, was the biggest island of them all. Two giant serpents held it up. When they grew tired, their tails moved, and that is what caused earthquakes. The lower world was inhabited by nunasis—creatures who came out after dark. Some could swallow whole trees, while others had faces with loose, putrefying skin. The upper world was presided over by Slo’w, an eagle whose flapping wings—like bellows—caused the moon to grow full, and after, the wings were knives, cutting the moon to a sliver. The water in the streams and rivers was the urine of frogs.
Islands, the Universe, Home Page 9
