In 2017, I climbed Mt. Fuji, in Japan.
Mt. Fuji is, some folks would say, the cakewalk of mountain climbing. Physically, the hardest portions amount to scrambling over some big boulders; most of it is no more taxing than a hike or climbing a set of stairs. For spiritual reasons, some Japanese folks make the climb at ages upwards of 80 years. There are huts to stop at along the way where you can rent a sleeping bag inside, and buy food and water. Naturally, having done this research and deciding it sounded like a fun outing, I arrived at basecamp in sneakers.
Most of the way up was amazing and thoroughly enjoyable. I saw sights I’d never seen before, like the glow of a city under the sun through a break in the clouds, from above. Walking a path through a cloud was like taking a road into nothingness, with blank grey on all sides that weren’t a mountain. Every time we hit a station marker, I felt pride and accomplishment.
Until it was time to summit.
Most of the people who climb Mt. Fuji wish to reach the summit at sunrise. Some for spiritual reasons, others for Instagram, and for those like myself, it just seemed like the thing to do. Regardless, it was because of these other 5,000 average daily climbers that I found myself in an actual queue that snaked the entire path from the last station hut to the summit – in the pitch black pre-dawn cold. It took hours, for most of which, we stood stock-still, going nowhere. I took to doing calisthenics to stave off frostbite from the cold that threatened my sneaker-shod toes.
We did, eventually, reach the summit, and before sunrise. It remains one of the most beautiful sunrises I’ve seen – a pink-gold light that lit up the peak like breathing life into a painting, and that brought, mercifully, a degree of warmth. I was extremely happy, and felt pride and accomplishment.
Until it was time to descend.
There is a Japanese proverb: “A wise man will climb Mt Fuji once; a fool will climb Mt Fuji twice.” It is my own suspicion that this saying is based entirely on the difficulty of climbing down. The descent is essentially a loosely-packed, dirt and gravel road – on a decline. It is not, I imagine, significantly taxing with proper hiking boots, maybe snow tread, and a couple good spiked hiking poles thrown in. Wearing a pair of flat-soled street shoes, however, I fell. I fell often, and hard, about every three steps, for hours. I tried to take larger steps; it didn’t help. I tried to take smaller steps; that didn’t help, either. I tried cunningly to find a way to surf-slide my way down the mountainside and nearly ended up with a mouthful of dirt. As if literally rubbing salt into my wounds, without the gaiters I hadn’t brought, sand found its way into my shoes. It was without a doubt the most stupefyingly discouraging experience of my life.
On several occasions, more seasoned (smarter? well-prepared?) hikers passed me, a good many of them at least twice my age. I’m hard-pressed to remember another time in my life where I have been so thoroughly shown up by someone who might have been my grandmother, plunking hiking poles into the earth and sauntering past at a steady pace while I picked myself up, elbows scratched and covered in dirt, for the umpteenth time.
Eventually, we reached the bottom. At a tiny basecamp gift shop, I ate a delicious bowl of ramen and the tastiest sponge cake in the shape of a mountain that I’ll likely ever have.
The experience drove home two lessons that have gone on to serve me well: one, that all the good research in the world will not guarantee your experience; and two, that even when faced with a discouraging situation that you can’t seem to think yourself out of and thus the only way is “through,” there may still be something to learn from it, and there may be really good cake at the bottom.