About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory by Barry Lopez Read Free Book Online Page B

understood, and I know no moment so blissful at the end of such a daylong effort than repose between fresh sheets, one’s skin bare and still puckered and tingling from a hot, soaking bath.
    I N THE MORNING the four of us drive up to Mount Iō, a barren, jagged volcano on the periphery of a taiga plain. The wail of the ground vents, that violent escape of steaming air, and the pall of sulphurous fumes end our conversation along the footpath and send each of us off into private thought. The surface of the ground near the larger vents is coated bright yellow with sulphur deposits. Apart from these brilliant fumaroles, the volcano has a stern, prehistoric visage. It’s a dark shoulder set against the melancholy taiga and denser forests to the west. The Hokkaido bear, the same species as the North American brown bear, lives out there in good numbers, but it is rarely seen by the automobile traveler. If you want that encounter you must hike up into the mountains. Standing on the volcano’s steaming flanks, staring up into the moss-hung limbs of the pines andspruces, I could easily imagine bears watching the handful of visitors strolling here. Perhaps the bears have their own version of the
ofuro
rituals, and are waiting for nightfall, when all of us will have moved on.
    Our next stop—the two-lane roads we are traveling all look as if they’d just been paved, and Mr. Nishibe contends that these sleek, new roads simply encourage visitors to Hokkaido to drive too fast, that they actually cause more accidents than the old roads—is at a caldera (the basinlike depression left after the collapse or detonation of a volcano), which Mr. Taketazu tells me holds the clearest water in the world and is called Lake Mashu. He also adds that we are most fortunate: the lake is almost always blanketed with fog, but today it glitters under a cloudless sky. The reflection of sunlight on the water is too dazzling for us to see anything beyond its surface from our vantage point on the rim. Mr. Taketazu assures me, however, that from the right angle it’s possible to see the bottom contour at about 130 feet.
    I’ve been trying all day to put my finger on an essential difference between Hokkaido and similar landscapes in western Oregon and maritime Washington. From the rim of this caldera I sense part of the answer. It’s more domestic here. In the distance are family farms, herds of Holstein dairy cattle, and rows of windbreak poplars. The maples and beeches in the woods are beginning to turn. In all this the landscape more resembles the Berkshires or the Adirondacks: the individual setting of each farm, the pursuit of small-scale agriculture hard by the haunts of wild bears, and autumn spreading like fire across the forest.
    Mr. Taketazu must leave—he’s a veterinarian and has to attend to some animals at a nearby farm. But we’ll all meet later for dinner. Naoki, Mr. Nishibe, and I continue the trip over a high pass, driving beneath the shelter of extended snowsheds along a sinuous road that clings to the mountainside to my left and affords a view to the right of great stretches of evergreen forest and steep-pitched mountains standing alone, a scene reminiscent of views in the American Cascade Range. We descend afterlittle more than an hour to Akan-kohan, a tourist town at the edge of Lake Akan. The shop windows are filled with Japanese kitsch. A variety of watercraft stand ready to take visitors out on the lake.
    But Mr. Nishibe has other ideas.
    I should know by now that a thought offered only in passing might as well be a formal request as far as my host is concerned. I’d mentioned earlier that I was not eager to seek out remnants of the aboriginal culture of Hokkaido, that of the Ainu. I find their modern predicament painful to consider and believed witnessing the roadside scenes here—a few Ainu dressed in traditional costumes performing faux rituals for tourists—would be depressing. (The southwestern peninsula of Hokkaido,