Personal Narrative Essay: Belonging Trip To The Mountain

I once spent an entire three-day backpacking trip with my mind in a tape-loop of a Japanese mamba song, which I hated at the time but grew to love over 72 hours. I’ve had more ideas occur to me on commuter trains or when walking my Shih Tzu then on the 14 days I once spent canoeing in Montana. I don’t mean to suggest that communing with outdoors is underrated. The scenery is sometimes worth the journey and can jog the brain later for points of reference of fondness and wonder. But not when you can’t see anything or the scenery itself is terrible. My route was a little bowl dug into the ground that wormed down the hillside covered with taller, out-of-control sasa. These sasa towered. One moment I was in an open field, and then the sasa

I could see, maybe ten miles off, the station where I often boarded the train for Tokyo. I could make out the tiled roofs around the parking lot, the ramen peddlers and coffee shops, and even, vaguely, the track itself, the artery feeding middle Japan. I tried to pay attention to the trail, but the window was so uncanny, the size of a painting you’d hang on a wall. It was a landscape so real I could crawl inside. And it was then I rolled and popped my right ankle. I hadn’t noticed the twelve-inch drop in the trail. The front of my boot planted on a wet root, while the heel slipped and spilled into the drop. My pack and I came collapsing around. I was spitting and sweating as I unlaced the boot. I have broken my ankle once before in my life, and the pain was this. The ankle was so fat I had trouble getting it out the shoe. An involuntary cry, and I had the heel free. I unsheathed my limb from the sock and found it was purple and jade. I sat there sobbing with blubbered screams. “Fuck you! Both of them?” I hollered at the dirt and reeds, as if a bargain had

I took a ticket from the front, and the uniformed driver didn’t seem surprised to see me as he hopped off for a quick smoke. I toyed with the idea in my blurry mind that if I were in Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” this would be my version of the plane that takes me to the next life. Instead the bus hummed unmemorably to the train terminal. After I got back to Kosuge, I took a train to Tokyo, where the English used book store had a half-off sale, and I forked over a hundred dollars of yen. I then spent every morning in cafes writing poorly because the smoke that still fills Japanese restaurants. I read memoirs by people in other cultures elsewhere — China, Vietnam, Pakistan. I followed white men bravely nation-trekking. The first time you peel the scab is never the last. The summer grew hot; I retreated indoors with my fans, rode my bicycle because that was possible with my feet. Gradually the ankles healed. My idea of an adventurer hero was dead, as was my identity as the American adventurer, the nicer colonialist with a self-important book. I can’t help but wish that man well, he who I will never