Clinton Crockett Peters - Mountain Madness: Found and Lost in the Peaks of America and Japan

Mountain Madness

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Found and Lost in the Peaks of America and Japan

CLINTON CROCKETT PETERS

The University of Georgia Press Athens

2021 by the University of Georgia Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Peters, Clinton Crockett, author.

Title: Mountain madness : found and lost in the peaks of America and Japan / Clinton Crockett Peters.

Description: Athens : The University of Georgia Press, 2021. | Series: Crux : the Georgia series in literary nonfiction | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020036096 | ISBN 9780820358536 (paperback) | ISBN 9780820358543 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Peters, Clinton CrockettTravelJapanChichibu Region. | MountaineeringPsychological aspects. | Self-actualization (Psychology) | Chichibu Region (Japan)Geography. | MountaineersUnited StatesBiography.

Classification: LCC GV199.92.P4744 A3 2021 | DDC 796.5220952/13dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036096

For Hitomi-Chan

A big thanks to Beth Snead at UGA Press for seeing something worthwhile in this book and shepherding it, as she did Pandoras Garden. And thanks to the UGA readers for their key thoughts and support.

The biggest thanks goes to Dr. Jill Talbot. Much of this was written while I was getting my Ph.D. at the University of North Texas, and Jill was my biggest influence there. Thanks for being real, Jill. Thanks also to Priscilla Ybarra, Dahlia Porter, and Corey Marks for also shepherding this project. A huge thanks must also go to Kurt Caswell for kicking me out the door and into Japan.

Thanks to my friends and colleagues who read and/or helped me with earlier drafts: Amanda Kanowski, Kevin Kanowski, Kimberly Rose Gaza, Charlie Riccardelli, Cole Jeffrey, A. Kendra Greene, Lina Maria Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas, Lucas Mann, Inara Verzemnieks, Tina Cabrera, Chris Beard, and Stephanie Elizondo Griest.

Thanks to my family and to Yumiko. And to Katherine.

I gratefully acknowledge those journals that published essays:

The Divine Coming of the Light. Crab Orchard Review 23, no. 1 (Dec. 2017): 98104. Rafael Torch Literary Nonfiction Award

First Bow. Green Mountains Review 28, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 5862

Outdoor Pursuits. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, isaa050. Online, July 4, 2020

Mid-Slope. Carve Magazine (Fall 2020)

Giving Fire. Superstition Review 22 (Fall 2018). Online, Dec. 1, 2018

Coming Down. Yemassee Journal 24, no. 2 (Fall 2017): 12841

Hiking Tokyo. Arkansas International (Fall 2020)

Live From Kosuge Village. Catapult. Online, Oct. 5, 2017

Made Fire. Hotel Amerika 19 (Winter 2021)

Love in the Valley of Death. Fourth Genre 23, no. 1 (2021)

Rides with Strangers. Hotel Amerika 15 (Winter 2017): 11722

Mountain Madness

Only a fistful of people begin their hike up Mount Fuji from the verdant Sangen Shrine at the bottom of the island volcano. Halfway up they encounter an army. These hordes of hikers drive or bus up the highway blasted into the mountain for the 1964 Olympics, and there, almost every night in summer, three thousand people, winter coats in hand, backpacks of snacks of squid jerky and wasabi Kit Kat bars, supplemental oxygen, and trekking poles, summit Japans tallest peak. They shine their way up the mountain in the dark, rising through the clouds in hopes of catching the sunrise from the roof of the volcano, which is called go-raikou, the divine coming of the light.

Go-raikou is said to be good luck for a year, and I was beginning my year as an English teacher in Japan. One year would mushroom into three, but I didnt know that then. Just as I didnt know my obsession with mountains that led to a job as an outdoor instructor, which blossomed when I lost my Christian faith, would dwindle as my praying once had.

They say everyone must hike Fuji once, but only a fool would hike it twice. I would hike the volcano four times while in Japan, a symptom of my obsession with mountains not just for the views or the exhilaration or the macho-codified activity, though there was a little of that. I hiked for what I felt the mountains meant to my inexplicable self, which I thought existed, though I couldnt then have articulated why. A visage of religion, a bland hope, a matter of instinct? Why did I feel satiated with a view over Tokyo Bay and the Chichibu Mountains, with the clouds we rose above, the thunder and lightening reflecting my height then relative to the world?

I didnt know, still dont really, if its a choice to believe, to believe in something ethereal. Mountain lust gripped me, as it sometimes does when I think back on why I would spend twenty-four hours hiking up and down a rivet of magmic earth, one of the most-climbed, one of the most-photographed mountains in the world, why I would hike in the dark, through a storm, to sit in the cold and wait for the same light that appears everywhere on Earth.

When I was nine, I watched a news broadcast from the foot of Mount Fuji as my family was getting ready for church. We lived in Lubbock, which at the time was the second-most conservative county by votes in America. The town sat perched on the Caprock Escarpment, a tabletop flat of land that spread across the Panhandle, a mile up, overlooking the rest of Texas. Dust walled off the town, rising from the cotton fields watered from aquifers. The airborne agriculture interfered with our vision so that most of what we saw was each other. There were more churches than liquor shops, if only for the reason that there werent any liquor shops. I believed in Christ, as many did, because I grew up believing it, just like I knew Columbus had sailed the ocean blue. It was penciled into the architecture of my childhood.

While I gaped at the volcano, a female reporter, suited in red, relayed that at the moment thousands of people were hiking to the peak. The camera zoomed in, and I could make out a zigzag route swishing up to the crater. It was morning, but there was a string of headlamps like Christmas tree lights marching up the mountain.

I traced the line on the TV glass with my finger, thinking about caterpillars in the childrens book Hope for the Flowers, in which butterfly larva crawling over each other fight their way to a mountaintop. Once the larva break through clouds that had shielded the peak, they find their own struggling mass, a mountain of ambition, a warning against the lust of climbing.