Gray on Gray with Shades of Dark Green

For two golden hours on a mid-May evening, I chase the Canadian sunset northward. I leave behind clouds spread beneath me like fractured glass and enter a land of glowing snow-dusted ridges, jagged peaks, frozen lakes, ice fields, fjords and mist.

The town of Sitka nestles into Baranof Island’s eastern edge, where the Indian River twists out from dense, rugged mountains to meet the Pacific. Sitka itself consists of a main street, a Russian orthodox church, thousands of fishing boats and two seedy bars with smoke so thick you can barely see across the room, walls lined with decades of local history held in uniform faded photos. It’s a place where you walk into a gallery filed with thousands of chintzy souvenirs made in China, but when you turn to leave you nearly trip over the flimsy chest-high barrier set around a monster mammoth skull.

Sitka also happens to have one of the best-run raptor rehabilitation centers I’ve ever seen, product of a symbiotic relationship with tourism in the town. The center sits ten minutes’ walk beyond Totem Park, a wooded peninsula where totem poles from across the state stand tall amongst surrounding trees’ strong silhouettes. Amongst the park’s trails, soft brown trunks and roots create wild tangles across the forest floor, bordered by blankets of false lily of the valley’s broad, shining green leaves. Every so often, spruce and hemlock clear along the coast line, revealing views of Mt. Edgecombe’s near-perfect cone, snow-streaked slopes glinting under the midday sun as the tide recedes.

The boat, the National Geographic Sea Bird, is smaller than I expected. It resembles a toy next to the dock, dwarfed by the cable bridge linking Baranoff and Japonski islands. It barely clears the bright white clearance markers on the bridge’s columns, used by fishermen as reference in Alaska’s widely-fluctuating tides.

We leave under the eye of an eagle perched on the bridge’s tallest supports, head forward into the sound and spend the next four days exploring wild places. We follow Peril Straight northward from Sitka and swing west through smaller islands and inlets bordering open ocean before passing Glacier Bay en route to Haines, turning southward to Endicott arm and finally arriving into Juneau. Classic Southeast Alaskan rain casts the world in a soft light for the better part of our journey. Low clouds sink into valleys, wrapping ridges and blotting out mountain tops as they disappear above snow-streaked slopes. Bald eagles wing overhead and watch the world from treetop perches, almost as common here as crows in the city. 

In Pavlov Harbor, brown bears glistening silver on the shoulder and rump prowl the shoreline, turning stones and scraping barnacles as they feed after emerging from hibernation. Skunk cabbage sprouts from soft ground, bright yellow blossoms nibbled to stubby spirals by bears taking advantage of the natural laxative. The plant, although completely unrelated, attracts nocturnal pollinators by producing heat in the same method as Malaysia’s rafflesia flower in a beautiful example of convergent species. Tiny frogs, known as messengers between worlds as they move amongst land and water, hide in small rivulets amongst the harbor’s reedy bogs.

In Idaho Inlet, we step onto shore through slippery, matted seaweed and hike through marine meadow into rainforest, following bear trails so often trafficked they resemble human paths. We find places where bears has stepped in the same spot year after year, wearing depressions known as perennial footprints into the ground five inches deep. An eagle’s tail feather nestles into the sodden ground beneath a dead, forked tree. Tucked into the forest’s green underbelly, a narrow stream cascades down the hillside, singing across spongy ground. A short scramble brings us to a narrow lookout where we find old, half-buried bones, and a half hour later, hands and knees caked in soil, we’ve uncovered a brown bear’s jawbone and shattered skull, remnants of a final charge ended by a clip of bullets emptied straight between its eyes.

The Inian Islands rise as sentinels bordering open ocean. Gentle rain softens their jagged edges, transforming imposing stone towers to layered gray as they fade into the distance beyond deep turquoise water filled with twisting green kelp. We wind around the coast in zodiacs, stopping to watch a humpback whale surface 30 meters ahead of us, revealing its fluke as it turns downward to feed. We pass sea lion bachelor pads on our way to narrower channels where the currents rush with the incoming tide. We pause in the midst of a feeding frenzy while sea lions patrol the waters, surfacing with skates and halibut in their mouths, thrashing to break them into edible chunks. Gulls float in the wind by the thousands, diving to scavenge scraps while otters tuck themselves out of the way, wrapped snug in bull kelp.

In Glacier Bay National Park, light breaks and glances off the water in a blinding wash as orcas hunt in front of our ship, dorsal fins slicing forward. Coastal brown bears prowl grassy shorelines behind muddy tidal flats, and the breeze catches light green lichen hung thick from trees. We plunge headlong into a geological time warp as we make our way northward, slipping up sheer, glossy fjords. Polished gray walls cut by smooth, steep valleys tower thousands of feet overhead, and water streams down thousand-meter cliffs in slender, silvery ribbons.

We dock in Haines for a day. I make good use of the morning dodging moose poop as I climb three miles of trail and roots sheathed in water up Mt. Riley’s flank. A bog crossed by means of a narrow, tippy boardwalk sits just under the mountain’s summit, which happens to be completely, classically socked in. The hike reminds me distinctly and fondly of Tasmania… minus all the stuff that wants to kill you.

That afternoon I climb into a tiny plane, which floats into the sky, following the fjord’s clean line forward before twisting over snaking glaciers cut by dark moraines, deep fissures cresting and yawning blue beneath us. A hanging glacier shears abruptly above a deep, cavernous bowl, water spouting from beneath the ice, plunging over the edge to converge a thousand feet below before continuing its journey downward. Mountain goats perch on black walls high above the ice, munching mouthfuls of grass as clouds skim their heads. As we turn back to wing over another ice field, the pilot points out bands of bare rock separating the ice and tree line: telltale sign the local glaciers are receding in thickness as well as length.

Below us, the fjord’s waters spread in a kaleidoscope of icy blue, cool turquoise and deep brown, denoting individual waters’ sources as glacial outpourings find their way into the sea and converge, carrying silt so fine it remains at the water’s surface miles into its journey.

We spend our last day in Endicott Arm, nudging up to small ice bergs by kayak in the morning before continuing up to where the long, broad, twisting fjord ends in Dawes’ Glacier’s 250-foot wall of teetering, fractured ice. The boat picks its way through a frozen labyrinth as we approach the glacier, passing the occasional harbor seal sprawled on a flat ice berg. Rare translucent icebergs the color of blue curacao, indicative of hundreds of years of pressure squeezing the last traces of air from the ice, shimmer like glass as they glow in the afternoon light.

The glacier itself is so expansive it distorts perception: ice appearing to be within arm’s reach turns out to be miles from the boat. We load zodiacs and leave the ship behind to approach, finding ourselves surrounded by a film of floating ice amidst the deafening hiss and crackle of long-compressed air releasing from its icy prison. Sharp cracks split the air as blocks of ice hundreds of feet tall calve from the glacier, plunging into the ocean in what the locals refer to as “white thunder.” Churning water crashes outward against the fjord’s walls and waves push forward, sending ice bergs into lazy rolls.

We begin returning northward toward Juneau that evening, and I duck into the bridge after dinner to watch the world pass. The bridge is quiet at night. It provides a refuge of sorts from cold, wind, and rain, and from the closeness of a boat full of people, as twilight lingers. Dimmed lights turn the evening to a world of red, monitors and sensors’ readouts in constant flux above the paper maps spread across the counter.

Sometime later a pod of Dahls porpoises makes an appearance as we cross Stephens Passage, darting in and out from beneath the bow as they ride the vessel’s forward pressure, white flank patches flashing and tails throwing up sharp oval circles of foam as they break the surface. The porpoises remain with the boat until after I’ve found my way back into my cabin for one last night, and when I wake, we’ve arrived in Juneau.

City of Living History

Kyoto sprawls outward from the central train station in a stark contrast of modernity layered onto ancient foundations of architecture, culture and art. Dense webs of powerlines sprawl over narrow streets where shopfronts overflow with traditional craft in a dangerous sort of heaven. In one storefront near our hotel, women sew finishing touches into bamboo blinds, twisted ever so slightly to work delicate zig zag patterns into the screens. In another shop, column upon column of drawers filled with rice paper line the walls. Some bear designs based on wood-block prints, some are simple origami, some patterned for tea canisters, some screen-printed and others high-quality calligraphy paper.

We wander down a busy main street lit by little lanterns and find 400-year-old shops selling ferushkis­­– traditional carry cloths, with designs ranging from old, to modern meditative, to cats. Lots and lots of cats. We find a small shop selling hand-carved hair ornaments, lacquered and layered in wood and abalone. Further down the street, a man carries forward his father’s traditional craft of creating lamps and lighting fixtures from bent bamboo and paper.

One block north of Shijo Dori, a narrow covered lane brims with busy energy under a red and green and yellow-stained ceiling. Nishiki Dori, the city's market for pretty much anything in the world food-related, bursts with stalls selling specialty items. Green tea bracken rice cakes pile high on plates next to stores dedicated to chopstick rests. A little boy pulls his mom toward candied octopus on a stick. Packaged tins of sweets line walls, pickled cucumbers smothered in sake blanket bamboo display counters and oysters are fried over coals in their own shells. Shining glass cases display cuts of fish, sliced into sashimi only after a patron has discussed in length and paid for each specific piece.

We turn into the Gion after dusk, finding our way down dark, twisting alleys. Round, red lanterns and totems crafted from rice paper and twisted straw guard doors shielded by norin­– vertically split fabric drapes. Long, slender shades obscure upper windows. Small women in bright kimono, faces painted white and hair arranged just so, scurry amongst the alleys before disappearing into houses. Sleek, dark cars and dark-suited businessmen own the streets. From a corner building the sound of raucous laughter leaks into the night as hostesses fawn over patrons in the district’s more modern version of a gentleman’s club.

We step off the train the next morning across the street from Fushimi Inari, where twisting flights of light gray stone stairs lead ever upward through thousands upon thousands of iconic orange tori gates. The gates, marked by size and inscription to signify monetary donations given to the shrine, create tunnels of orange as they wind to the top of the mountain after passing an initial monster of a shrine. As the path rises, tori gates give way to smaller family shrines tucked into the woodland to the side, each guarded by stone or porcelain foxes. As the sun breaks, morning light begins streaming between the gates. Light catches mist as it rises from the mountain’s surface, and we find our way back to the train through the day’s arriving crowds.

We continue on to Osaka, where I break off with my uncle to search out the tiniest of specialty ceramic brush shops tucked into the side of a small back street. Between a stroll over a bridge that reminds me a bit of Chicago, and Edo translating the gentle man’s explanations and demonstrations of his wares, we manage to fit in some conversation to catch up over the last ten years. The slightly stilted awkwardness we encountered during my arrival to Tokyo vanishes by the time we rejoin the rest of my family. For me, that in itself makes the trip back across the ocean worth it.

We find our way into the Bunraku. The age-old art, for which apprenticeship begins no later than 15 years of age, gives an otherworldly essence to puppetry through subtle movement and synchronized breathing amongst multiple puppetmasters, achieved through decades upon decades of training. Black-robed puppetmasters breathe life into the characters they control, dancing and bowing and spinning and fighting into fantastical scenes borne of legend and lore, emotion made electric with the aid of singing narrators and three-stringed guitars stretched tight with cat skin. Over the course of an afternoon we find ourselves party to tragedies, dances, and mortal fights, souls drawn into the sagas of demons and warriors; princesses and housewives; maidens and bumbling priests.

We eat that evening at a little restaurant where hundreds upon hundreds of dishes stack high against the wall behind a sushi-style bar. The round-faced hostess talks us through the evening’s options, piled high in deep round bowls atop the long, slender counter. “Octopus?” she asks. “Duck in dumpling?” Make us a meal, we tell her, once she figures out what we can (and can’t) eat. Under the cheerful chefs’ watchful gazes– and emphatic corrections when we begin to eat the food wrong– we feast.

We find our way into the maze of Kiomizudera’s preserved hillside neighborhood the next morning, joined by half the world’s people plus another dozen as we amble up a twisting street toward the temple’s towering orange pagoda. We find a small indigo shop tucked to the side, where a soft-spoken gentleman talks us through his craft: this was made with paper cut-out resist, this was dyed with persimmon, this was dipped time and time again into the indigo vats to create subtle gradients from deep, soul-snaring midnight blue to blinding white. Further up the road, layered beneath chintzy tourist fans and sandals and beach towels, we find traditional Japanese purses and kitchen craft next to shops full of designer umbrellas.

From the pagoda’s panoramic view of Kyoto city, situated beneath hills now blazing red in full autumn foliage, we descend into a neighborhood where golden cranes take flight from pagoda towers, rising above dark-tiled roofs tight-packed in an ancient jigsaw puzzle. The street spits us out into a wide courtyard containing a shrine where row upon row of oversized white paper lanterns creak as they sway in tandem under the day’s crisp breeze. Booths lining the exit hawk crispy, scorching taiyaki—grilled fish-shaped doughnuts filled with sweet bean paste.

That evening we manage to track down a shop called Zohiko, a kind of marriage between showroom and museum for the most beautiful of laquerware. I lose myself for a time in a world of black and red ink, gold leaf and dust, abalone and wood inlay. I find plates and trays, calligraphy boxes and tea jars and hair combs. I step into scenes of cherry trees and mountain journeys, free-flying birds, blooming irises, gentle seas and wandering warriors.

We spend our last morning in Kyoto at the the Buddhist temple of Kinkaku-ji, where a gleaming, three-story golden pavilion rises over a broad pond’s still, glossy water. Even under opaque cloud, the pavilion glows. Bright violet irises emerge tall from the pond and thousands upon thousands of crisp, miniature crimson maple leaves contrast against pine trees’ deep gentle green as we make our way through the temple’s surrounding gardens. 

Before leaving the city for Tokyo, we stop at an indigo shop tucked into an unobtrusive street in a quiet neighborhood. Inside, a quiet man dressed in deep blue robes oversees the dying process while his wife, clothed in a sleek black dress and showy pearls, designs clothing from his fabric that often ends up in national museums. Their shopfront brims with silk and cotton scarves, handbags and shirts, meticulously woven from dyed threads and lined with antique cloth.

The man leads us to the back of his workshop, where chest-high vats hold a mixture of deep blue dye with added limestone to aid the curing process. “Sometimes we dip fabric 100 times for the deep color,” he tells us. Later, sat on broad tatami mats inside his “museum,” he holds a flame to a small patch of dark cloth. The cloth slowly curls into itself and disappears under the flame’s touch, leaving indigo behind in the clay dish. “Indigo never burns,” he notes. His dye-stained hands hold out a heavy antique firefighter’s robe, made of hand-stitched cotton and dyed so deep a blue as to be almost black. This one, he says, took over a year to complete.

And so we say good bye to Kyoto and return northward. We spend two last days perusing streets jammed with and fabric stores and eating noodle soup at corner shops where white-capped chefs toss dough into long, slender strings by the meter behind broad windows. I find an entire wall of vegetable-shaped vibrators in a discount electronics store. We do some shopping and cram our faces with scorching fish pastries and green tea slushies. I find a couple of Daruma Dolls (the meditating man who sat so long in one place his arms fell off; used in modern days as a reminder of perseverance) and tuck them into my bags.

That evening, for the last time in three years, I step onto a plane to cross the Pacific.

Sidesteps Through Centuries

JAPAN: where people are so polite, department stores "advise care" on the escalator if pushing a stroller or in a wheel chair, and a jaunty version of “I’ve Been Workin’ on the Railroad” plays as trains approach the station. Where humans line up in single-file lines and chefs leave the kitchen to see you off from their restaurant after you eat.

Speaking of which. I eat more whacked out food during my first week in Japan than any other place I ventured the last three years… save maybe Vietnam. (because, you know, fresh beer-fried squid, snails smothered in hot sauce, dog stew, honey bee rice wine and horse carpaccio). We eat little pearly striped fried fishies whole. Since fall is the season of gingko nuts and mushrooms, we chow on dainty tempura (apparently less batter means better food, because it doesn’t fill you up as fast). Somehow, fermented beans that look (and act) like they’re held together with slug slime make it onto my plate. Also: tempura baby sardine balls. Also: beans and yams and mushrooms and rice balls for days and days. Mall food happens to consist of seared tuna so tender it almost falls apart like butter as it makes the journey from plate to mouth.

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The Shinkansen whips forth beneath the mountains north of Hiroshima so fast I barely glimpse the countryside between tunnels as we head toward Hagi, nestled beneath a peninsular hill from which a castle once watched over the passage from the Korean Peninsula. Neat streets lined with old, traditional houses fill the town. Quiet, vibrant gardens wrap light and airy mansions constructed of rice paper and bamboo. Family-run pottery shops line the town’s main streets, brimming with wares coated in thick, clinging white glaze created for centuries by adding the ash of rice husks.

Somewhere along the way we find our way into a soba noodle restaurant run by a reserved, cheerful old woman in a traditional country house. Old wooden walls display antique framed newspaper clippings about the artists whose work she utilizes to serve our meals. The unassuming woman becomes effusive and animated as she lays food in front of us and explains the history of each soup and noodle and sauce dish on our trays: this was made by the twelfth generation; that man was designated a national treasure but died before he could accept the award.

We leave behind orderly mayhem strewn across the table. Seriously, doing dishes in Japan is a nightmare and a half that I never, ever want to experience.

We leave behind Hagi’s quiet for Okayama’s metropolis: centered amongst a myriad of smaller outlying towns, the city serves as home base for the next few days. Okayama itself, filled with orange trains and trams from which cheery cats wave to the crowds, cradles a sprawling garden where herons preen amongst miniature pavilions and koi fish cruise broad ponds beneath arcing wood bridges, begging for pellets from young children in pink fleeces and black leggings plastered in bright red hearts. Small, dense bamboo forests shade lily-covered ponds and narrow wooden planks cross creeks in geometric, zigzagging footbridges. Five minutes’ walk from the garden’s sheltered serenity, a black castle blazes in the sun, protected by heavy iron gates and smooth stone walls rising above the river’s curve.

An hour’s train ride from Okayama, deep green mountains cradle the small town of Imbe, marked by winding roads and a single, old-style telephone booth. The town carries forth the area’s own ancient form of pottery, for which families mine clay from beneath rice paddies and store it for future generations. Pots are formed without glaze: color blossoms over a once-yearly, 13-day firing period as flames and heat interact with ash and rice straw in the expanse of a mud and brick kiln.

On our way home that evening we make a side trip to Osafune, where smiths carry forward the ancient art of swordsmithing with old-style forges and tools, creating weapons over several months’ span. A soft spoken gentleman shows us around a room filled with old swords, pointing out how styles and workmanship changed through centuries. He points out a 14^th-century sword paid with 2,000 kg of silver, then leads us through a myriad of rooms filled with the means to craft blade and hilt and guard and sheath. While most craftsmen are home for the holiday, a lone artisan in blue robes crouches in a window workshop, sharpening a blade in the afternoon sun’s rays.

Himeji castle, an hour’s ride in the other direction, soars in seven stories of blazing white serenity above the “castle town’s” chaotic hustle, framed perfectly amongst high rises from the local train station’s exit. Twisting paths lead from a broad lawn past tiered, tapering stone walls, through heavy gates and heavier dark metal doors. We climb steep wooden staircases with oversized rails polished by hundreds of years of use. We wind upward through seven sturdy, airy stories supported centrally by twin cedar pillars, carried down from the mountains and erected centuries past. From our top-floor lookout, we peer down over the city and surrounding mountains.

We pass our last day in the Okayama region in the town of Kurashiki, where ornate black-tiled roofs top delicate wood shophouses and handicraft shops and old ryokans and whitewashed storage buildings. Inside the preserved historical district, narrow, winding streets twist along the base of a small verdant hill topped with a shrine. Swans cruise a narrow canal under gold and orange fall foliage, glinting under crisp morning sun along the main street. Confectionaries sell fresh sesame doughnuts and crepe-wrapped chestnut jelly. Persimmons hang from strings to dry in the sun. Ivy blankets old brick buildings situated next to archaic telephone booths and post boxes. And there just happens to be a town-wide fetish of denim. Absolutely. Everywhere.

The quiet fishing island of Naoshima has in recent years become an oasis for modern art, reinstilling vitality into a once-failing economy. The window of my room in a small, traditional guesthouse near the sea looks over a jigsaw puzzle of roof upon roof sheltered by dark, swooping tile. We wander the village for an afternoon, stepping into select houses transformed into art installations. We find LED lights blinking from the bottom of a shallow indoor reflecting pond and delicate roses carved and painted from wood. We walk into a house to be surrounded by waterfalls cascading from ceiling to floor, meeting their reflection in the polished dark wood beneath our feet. We venture into narrow tunnels beneath a delicate shrine constructed of glass and light wood, surrounded by smooth, pale stones. And we feel our way into a room void of light and wait as dancing lights appear like flame over a white screen as it materializes from the abyss in the distance. Eventually we stand and walk forward, reaching out to touch the screen only to have our hands pass through soft white mist.

We catch a ferry to the neighboring island of Teshima the next day, stopping into a quiet coffee shop lined with books and homemade scones and cozy arm chairs before exploring the town (because for a Westerner in “rural” Japan, coffee is a commodity to be sought and cherished). We find our way to an old house and silo filled with illusions and color manipulation, where deep red glass hides a courtyard where koi cruise a small creek surrounded by vibrant stones. Inside the silo we find infinity mirrors overhead and below our feet, reflecting walls pasted with thousands of vintage post cards.

That afternoon, we catch a bus upwards to a hill overlooking the sea above golden rice paddies, arriving at quite possibly the only abstract art installation I’ve ever truly connected with. We walk into a broad, low, whitewashed oblong disc half-buried in the ground above a natural spring. Water creeps and seeps up through miniscule fractures in the concrete beneath me to bead on the floor, eventually gaining enough mass to snake its way forward over the hydrophobic surface and drain with the cheerful echoing ring of a softly flowing brook. I hear people whisper in my ear as acoustics amplify soft conversation across the “hall.” Broad, circular cut outs from the roof reveal forested ridgelines below gray skies. Closer in, I catch glimpses of trees where rustling branches betray wildlife. Delicate white ribbons anchored to the ceiling in upturned crescents sway in the gentle breeze.

Eventually we find our way back to Naoshima’s onsen, soaking under the watchful gaze of a full-size elephant and stained-glass windows and mosaic sea creatures. The next morning we catch a ferry back to the mainland, find a blessing of a coffee shop near the train station, and turn our journey northward.