autumn tactics

Hotel Locoz, Royal. Hotel Chapel Christmas. All of the Hachioji love hotels hanging along the opening stretch of the Kanetsu expressway, so many garish, sordid havens calling to tortured lovers, tempting with the poorly cloaked promise of two to four hours’ escape from prying eyes and questions.

Shuffling through the Dogenzaka rest stop idly for the tenth time, I look at the tsukemono, I look at the over-sized nikuman, slowly taking in all the chain-mall glory of the Japanese highway system: surreal, smug. They aren’t actual products I’d ever consider buying; it’s QVC and a sideshow. So many hours of saying nothing but thinking so much idly, it’s the closest thing to switching off that a neurotic medical journal entry like me can manage.

There’s a zone one enters when travel of a sort becomes familiar to the point of being able to comfortably plan and execute the patterns with a minimal amount of waste and uncertainty. Somewhere around the fifth time out of Narita international immigration was little more than a trip to the dentist; a positive outcome from an extended period of immobility during which I could alphabetize all of the manila folders of my mind. All the spare trash and receipts of my backpack and wallets, the comfort from advance knowledge of how to time my beverage consumption to the cheapest vending machine along the route. Today I made about the fourth or fifth trip to the Suwa interchange Oginaya and I could see myself sprinting across the byway to Game St., the next time around. iPod with playlists, notepad, roll of coins and a ticket holder. I derive a great deal of pleasure from skiing simply because it is an activity that I can ratchet up my skill level simply through scientific method. A leads to B leads to C.

Nearly everything outside of mental decompression is based purely on distilling an action down to the most simple and refined of processes, the essence of cognitive life. It is perhaps my greatest strength and weakness, application of ordered analysis. So many conquerable fields, tangible and not, so little time in this continuous consciousness to separate them all.

I’m sitting in a kotatsu (or is it under a kotatsu), and sipping my morning acerola juice. I’m currently at a friend’s vacation house in Nasu, Tochigi-ken. This is the first time that I’ve worken up after eight o’clock in several weeks. Usually waking up at this time requires turning over, and half not-sleeping for a number of hours. I’m not sure if in the end this is beneficial or detriimental, but Mom usually says, “You needed the sleep.”

I came here with my firend, Matsutsuka-san, and his co-worker Hayakawa-san. They both work at Fuijitsu, but I know Matsutsuka-san because he’s the husband of one of my Japanese sensei from Carnegie Mellon. I walys feel just a little off-blaance aournd them, because she was my teacher and all, so I fumble over culling all the slang and off-color jokes from my Japanese. I don’t want to make any mistakes; I feel it would be a bad reflection on her if I chattered on like some sort of heathen.

Anyway, we came here to ski, the last skiing of the season. It’s been an exceptionally warm winter, so we’re lucky if there’s any snow left. There isn’t any here, desptite being in the base of the moutnains. But Matsutsuka-san said he called the resort a couple of days ago and they still had a few feet of snow on the trails. I’m really not sure what’s going to happen. Every other time I when I went on a ski trip it was always a package deal with a hotel, fixed meal times, etc. We got here at about two a.m. (work), and then had some drinks and snack before bed, which I think are partly responsible for my uncomfortable daze. I want to get in as much skiing as possbile, but since we’re going to be here for a couple days, it’s probably best to take it easy so I can pace myself. Usually after about six hours or so my leg muscles start to wear out and I can’t make the turns I need to anymore. Then I just get sloppy and crash.

Since we may be on the slopes for three days, I finally took the time out and bought myself a pair of skiis. Wednesay was the first day of spring, which is a Japanese holiday, so after a photo shoot in the morning, I went ot the Alpen in Kanda and chose my blades: a pair of 175 Dynastar Troublemakers.

I read that you’re supposed to select a pair of skiis just above your skill level, so you have room to grow. I think that these will work out for now. So far I’ve had the best luck with rental carving skis, but these Dynastars are of the “freeride/new school” variety. I’m don’t know that menas, but they’re light, not very narrow, and dual-tipped. I’m not sure how to interpret that, but in theory I should be totally sweet.

I’m on my way back from skiing, coasting down the Chuo Expressway with a sore throat and a lot of contemplating miles under my belt.

This weekend I visited Nagano for the first time since my semi-disastrous skiing trip to Kita Shiga in 2004. It’s kind of hard to believe that I’ve spent more winter seasons in Japan than I did at UVa. This time I went to Shirakabako, which is pretty close to Tokyo for a ski resort. By bus it’s about three and a half hours, with roughly forty minutes of rest stops in between.

The dantou (warm winter) has had a considerable effect on the area. Though it is the middle of February and the height of ski season, the snow was sparse and barely appeared right before the base of the resort. There were a lot of adventurous plants poking throguh the frost and most of the heavily travelled routes were solid ice.

I had a great time, however, and it was a pretty good value, ringing up to 19000 yen for a two-day jaunt with everything included except for lunch. Unfortunately I wasn’t as adroit on the slopes this time as last February, when I spent six hours as an amateur skiing god. It may have been the ice, it may have been a year’s rust, bad rental skiis, or a nasty cold that hit me at the end of last week, but I didn’t really get into the swing of things until it was three-thirty and my last run down the mountain before catching the bus.

I’m not the kind of guy to buy gear for a fad, and will suffer with the most beat and (to my naive mind) cheap setup as long as possible before committing to another ten pounds of bulk to make the next move all the more difficult. However, in doing the math of going skiing two-three times a year for three years, possibly more in the future, I decided it was time to buy my own gear, especially for these single-man economy runs that I’m growing fond of. So right now I have a pair of entry-level Dolomite boots and Kazama poles, and probably next weekend I’ll buy a pair of skiis. I wanted to get used by haven’t had much luck, so it looks like a little of my stock money is going towards some shiny powder rails to decorate my foyer. If only I can hunker down and get the chops to cut my own little slice of the mountain without it taking a chunk out of me.

Every muscle in my body is sore. Fortunately, this is a very good thing. It has been a very, very, very long time since I exercised to the point of really being able to feel it. Twenty-five miles on my bicycle around town on a Saturday just doesn’t do it anymore. But now, I am tiptoeing around like I’m barefoot in a room full of mousetraps with a spine board on my back.

I went skiing in Fukushima over the weekend, travelling the Tohoku Kosokudoro (Northeast Highway) past Nasu, much like I did when hitchhiking to Sendai last summer, only this time in the lovely accommodations of a modestly sized tour bus. Unfortunately, this time there was no complimentary showing of Whiteout.

I’ve been skiing only four times in my life, though recently I’ve been doing so more frequently with staggering acceleration. The first time I went I was being hosted at the University of Utah, having been accepted as a Ph.D. candidate to their School of Computing. It was actually a really nice program, and I was entertained in a manner almost on the level of a dot-com bubble Microsoft intern. We had about three banquets, two parties, a drinking night, and to top it all off went to Alta just outside of Salt Lake. I tried my best, but had a problem with regulating my speed. It was late March, and consequently the snow had thawed and refrozen into a very hard layer of ice. I left the slopes up with a concussion because I couldn’t for the life of me control my high speed falls. At the mixer later that evening, I ended up spending most of the affair in between the tiger silk sheets of my host’s bed, just wishing everyone downstairs would party a little quieter. My head throbbed with wincing agony for three days.

One would think that this would discourage me from going again. Yet, for better or worse, I’m not one to learn from pain, or more positively, have it discourage me from doing something twice. In the winter of 2004 Mikiko and I joined a tour group in Nagano with one of my old friends from ATR. Unfortunately, the three years of not skiing had hardly improved my skills and resulted in one more concussion, with me missing yet another party to the dismay of my hosts. Perhaps I am doomed.

However, I’ve now been skiing twice this year and surprisingly had no major injuries, which I believe is on account of rain. Both times started out rather dry and uninspiring, with lots of people to wait behind at the lifts and to carefully pick my way around on descent of the bunny slopes. Luckily though, Sunday was an absolutely horrid day weather-wise as it was foggy and raining with steadily strengthening winds for the better part of the day. What this did was drive all the “casual skiers” off the slopes and into the cafes and hot springs to beat an early path back to Tokyo. This left the dedicated (read: crazy) to go about skiing harder and harder, taking on slopes of increasing difficulty, making upwards of six runs an hour. The rain poured and I mummified my cell phone with toilet paper to keep it mostly dry in my drenched inner coat pocket. The more the crowd thinned the bolder I got, tackling steeper slopes with quicker turns until there were precisely five people left on the mountain.

So alone I set to zigzagging down the intermediate courses with flair, my legs compressing and unloading like the suspension of a finely-tuned car, lowering my stance to a virtual crouch, dragging the tip of my uphill pole along the ground for magnificent sweeps to curb my speed. Resonance echoed through bone as my gloved fingers raked the icy ground. Though I occasionally found trouble keeping my weak leg in line on turns to the left, the converse was rife with the satisfaction of simple physical purity, much like a perfect golf swing. I fed off of the frothing verve that erupted from the harmony with earth; a bond between the snow, my heart, and the universe. It pleases me to no end to have my temerity repaid several times over with such visceral, tangible rewards. The beast that lies within hungers to exert itself with such abandon, and the thinking man which holds its leash is ravenous to sing about it.

[All in all, I ended up skiing for about seven hours on Sunday, right up until they turned lift off at the resort. I was the last one down Andromeda (Why are so many slopes named after constellations?), and the nighter four color lights of blue, purple, green, and yellow cast fanciful shadows across the thinning powder. I must have started exerting a certain air of accomplishment as I was asked once to carry an errant ski up the lift by an attendant, and cheered on by two separate groups of people while braving the woods to retrieve a lost pole.]