The river is never the same (2)

Continued: an excursion along the Kurobe River's Upper Corridor

“Though the river's current never fails, the water passing, moment by moment, is never the same. Where the current pools, bubbles form on the surface, bursting and disappearing as others rise to replace them, none lasting long. In this world, people and their dwelling places are like that, always changing.”

In his classic Account of a Ten-Foot Square Hut, Kamo no Chōmei presents himself as the reclusive literary type. But his opening passage, quoted above, outs him as a prototypical Heian-era sawanaut, one who well understood the morphing, braiding, mining, sapping ways of a great river.

Had we read our Chōmei, we wouldn’t have been surprised to find ourselves forced into a roped river crossing where, only a few years before, Sawa Control and I had just kept walking along an easy embankment. And we would have spared ourselves the shock, right now, of finding a deep channel where none had previously existed.

This too was a crux pitch. The rock walls of the gorge were too steep to climb. Our buoyant packs floated us too lightly for us to use our feet to make headway; and we couldn’t swim against the current. Eventually we slipped through by flattening ourselves ninja-like against the rock.

While we’d been tussling with the river, the sunlight had retreated to the mountaintops. Down in the gorge’s shadows, we urged ourselves forward. Campsites are far and few between in the Upper Corridor, and I was aiming for the one that we’d found on the previous visit, a broad tableland standing several metres above water level. Then, you could have pitched a small town of tents on it.

“I’m sure it was here,” I said, “right here in this bend.” And there, indeed, it was, when we looked more closely. But the tableland was gone; in its place stood a mere pedestal, washed down to a sliver of its former size. As Chōmei might have warned us, the river had shifted the scenery as dramatically as in any opera.

We scrambled up the bank and found a flat patch of sand for our bivvy shelter. Shivering in the evening gloom, we changed into dry clothes and scrabbled around for firewood. There wasn’t much to find on this portaledge-sized terrain.

We saw no trace of any prior occupants on our pedestal – in fact, we would see no trace of human existence until we climbed out of the river next day: no footprints, no pitons, no garbage, nothing to indicate that other people had ever passed that way. There weren’t even any contrails in the sky above. We were the sole inhabitants of this gorge.

It is difficult to conceive of a region uninhabited by man, says Thoreau in his account of a river climb up Mt Ktaadn, “We habitually presume his presence and influence everywhere. And yet we have not seen pure Nature, unless we have seen her thus vast and dread and inhuman, though in the midst of cities. Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. … Here was no man's garden, but the unhandselled globe … Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific … the home, this, of Necessity and Fate …We walked over it with a certain awe, stopping, from time to time, to pick the blueberries which grew there, and had a smart and spicy taste …”

It was too dark now to go in search of berries. Nor did we expect any smart or spicy taste from the sachet of freeze-dried food that I’d just retrieved from the depths of my army pack and set to simmer on the Epigas stove. Not that we cared – after six hours in the river, our appetites, like those of Edward Gibbon’s Gallic army, were as indelicate as they were voracious. Caspar got a feeble campfire going just as the moon floated clear of the unhandselled ridge above us. Then we sat down on a river-rounded boulder to eat.

(Continued)

The river is never the same (1)

How two sawa-nauts learned respect for the Kurobe

The weather wasn’t to blame: the forenoon sun, roaring down from a cloudless sky, had bleached all colour from the landscape. Nor was our pace anything to fret about; yomping under ferry-weight packs, we’d easily make the boat across the lake. If the two of us weren’t fit enough for the Kurobe River, we never would be. Yet something still bothered me.

We’d left Shinjuku at 2am to start the five-hour run to the Northern Alps, the weatherbeaten Subaru lurching out into Kabuki-chō’s rush hour. Caspar had come straight from a bar: strictly business, he explained. I wasn’t afraid that lack of sleep would affect him – a few months back, he’d helmed a yacht through a particularly knockabout iteration of the Sydney-Hobart race. No, it was more the attitude that unsettled. I mean, if the Kurobe River and the Southern Ocean have one thing in common, it’s that nobody disses them.

On the once-a-day boat across the lake, we were the only passengers. This too gave me mixed feelings. On one hand, too much company might diminish the majesty of the wild Upper Corridor, the river gorge through the corrugated heart of Japan’s Northern Alps. On the other, if anything happened, the nearest hut was a day away and the mountains would muffle any bleating from radios or phones – not that we were carrying either. Time, though, was pressing – we were both due to leave Japan soon, and this was our last chance to explore the great river.

Two hours later, we’d gone as far as paths would take us. From here, it was us and the river. We swung our packs onto the river-smoothed gravel and assumed the guise of sawa-nauts; in my case, UV-faded polypro mountaineering clothes hiding a sawn-off wetsuit; a natty banana-hued ensemble for Caspar. Felt-soled sawa shoes replaced hiking boots. We put on climbing harnesses too, but no helmets – they drag your head down when filled with water.

The Upper Corridor of the Kurobe River lures you in gently. Like the immaculately raked approach to a shrine, an expanse of white cobbles leads towards the layered cliffs of Kuro-pinga. We walked to its end and crossed the river in water that was barely knee-deep. Perhaps this would be easy.

Soon we were disabused. Dry land ran out in the cliff’s shadow, where the river bends sharply and pinches down into a gorge. The river had to be crossed again, this time above a cheese-grater set of rapids that promised to punish any slip-up. Level with us, the river slid by like a green slab of steel on some monstrous high-speed production line. In its headlong drive towards the Japan Sea, the Kurobe didn’t seem to leave much scope for negotiating a crossing.

I doffed my pack again, uncoiled the dayglow pink rope, and tied it unhastily into my harness loop. To tell the truth, I wasn’t in a hurry to try conclusions with this river. When Caspar had taken up what I hoped was a firm stance behind a boulder, I waded into the racing green waves, eyes fixed on the far bank to avoid disorientation, and launched myself across the channel, like a human rescue rocket. As the rope twanged taut, dragging me off my footing, a bowshock of green water smacked me in the face.

Struggling to my feet and wiping the water from my eyes, I found myself in the shallows, back where I’d started. A second try, and again the river swept me contemptuously aside. Like I said, nobody disses the Kurobe, but the sentiment isn’t necessarily reciprocated. Yet we had to get across if we wanted to reach our bivvy site before nightfall.

Something different was needed. Forget the rescue rocket; instead, I would angle myself like a paravane, getting the current to swing me across the channel. Warning Caspar, I walked into the river again. When the green firehose hit, I felt the rope stretch, as if soaking up the shock of a climbing fall – it thrummed with the strain – but the ploy worked. Staggering up the opposite bank, the river cascading from my gear, I set about finding a belay.

Then it was Caspar’s turn for the laundromat. As he lurched to his feet at the end of the rope, water sluicing from all freeing ports, I saw respect in the eyes of a man who had faced down the yacht-smashing waves of the Southern Ocean. “You know,” he said, after he'd sufficiently recovered himself, “when you kited yourself across the river, the rope was slowly dragging me over the boulder. The friction of my kneepads was the only thing still holding us.” Now it was my turn to be thoughtful.

(Continued)

Mountain photography in yellow brick mode

Camera review: wading with a Weathermatic up the wildest river in the Japan Alps

Ah, the joys of yestergear. Yes, you read that right – I mean, today’s gear gets plenty of attention from Bre’er Hendrik and many other puissant hiking and mountaineering bloggers.

But what about the kit that Workmen Alpinists used twenty years ago? Who’s going to write about that? Well, I guess I’ll have to fill the gap myself, starting with a review of the Minolta Weathermatic Dual 35 (above). This, for the benefit of youthful readers, was an imaging device that captured light on a chemical-smeared synthetic substrate. We called it “film”.

As I had to get my Weathermatic in a hurry, from Yodobashi Camera’s pullulating multi-storey emporium in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district, I probably paid close to the full list price of ¥36,800. Back home, I unpacked what looked like a yellow brick, solid as a bank vault, with an armoured window jutting from its front casing.

“Your Minolta Weathermatic DUAL 35 is a fully waterproof 35mm camera that is designed so that you can take pictures anywhere you go,” I read in the instruction leaflet. Apparently, I was the proud owner of “the world’s first waterproof camera that lets you select either standard (35mm) or tele (50mm) lenses at the touch of a button.”

I needed a waterproof camera because Sawa Control had just invited me on his return match with the fearsome Kurobe River, a multi-day swimming and scrambling expedition through the upper reaches of Honshu’s wildest mountain river gorge. No ordinary camera was going to survive this epic. And even the Weathermatic’s creators seemed to have their doubts.

“The Weathermatic DUAL 35’s watertight seals and rugged body are designed so that you take pictures in any weather and anywhere,” the manual says, “however, special attention must be given to the following precautions:”

In the event, the river let us off lightly - there was no need to surf or dive.  In just two days, we made it all the way through the Kurobe’s “inner corridor” to the hut in Yakushi-sawa. Perhaps we relaxed too much. On the second day, I tripped over in a boulder field, falling on top of the camera. The Weathermatic wasn’t even scratched; it was my ribs that came away with contusions.

But can this yellow brick actually take pictures? Eccentrically, the camera works only with two film speeds – ASA 100 or 400. I opted for 400-speed Fuji slide film, as river gorges can be dark and gloomy. Alas, the Provia proved a touch too fast in brightly lit places, where some pictures came out overexposed.

Where it mattered, though, the Weathermatic’s metering was spot on. The photo above shows Sawa Control moving pack-awash through a deep channel. Note how the film manages to capture the shadowed foreground without getting completely burned out by the sunlit rocks behind. That’s a trick that digital sensors still struggle to emulate.

Sharpness, said Henri Cartier-Bresson, is a bourgeois concept. Weathermatic users are compelled to agree. In anything less than the brightest light, this lens is what Ansel Adams would call a fuzzy-wuzzy. It harasses the light a little as it passes by; its zones of confusion would extend beyond the planet Pluto. It is, in short, an optic of the Anti-Leica.

Does it matter, though? To my mind, the unsharp image (right) does honour to the way that the late-afternoon light shimmered off the river as we worked our way towards that first day’s bivouac site. On the other hand, National Geographic is never going to beat a path to your door if you use a Weathermatic.

On the fourth and final day of our expedition, we went home over Washiba-dake. The camera’s metering coped well with all manner of lighting, from the pre-dawn airglow over Yari, through fogbows above the clouds, to the gloom of forest glades on the long, straggling ridge that we descended. Only the flower pictures were a bust – the autofocus couldn’t cope with close-up subjects.

After this trip, though, the crappy lens, the limited zoom (35mm or 50mm, but nothing in between), and the sketchy autofocus meant that the Weathermatic stayed at home whenever I could get away with something less robust. On our second visit to the Kurobe, three years later, I took along one of the newfangled Pentax Zoom WR90s, which had a proper zoom lens and better metering.

My last outing with the Weathermatic was a winter climb on Yatsu-ga-take. The last pitch of Sekison Ridge takes you into a steeply angled lava tube, almost like a miniature subway tunnel, except that the roof had fallen in. I was halfway up this defile when the rope came tight – we’d run out of slack, and Mike, belaying 50 metres below, couldn’t hear my shouts for him to come up.

For a moment, it looked as if an unstructured situation might develop. Jammed in my tube like a Northern Line train in the London Underground, I could move neither up (no rope) nor down (too steep). Spindrift came blasting up the tunnel, driven by a fierce cold northerly. The last piece of protection was far below. A giant chock was desperately needed, to slot into the only wide crack within reach. Unfortunately I had no such gear with me. Unless, perhaps, the camera would fit.

Before the Weathermatic could be put to this ultimate test, Mike moved up and the rope came free. So I never did find out how this most bombproof of cameras might function as a makeshift bong. No, not that kind of bong. In our day, a bong was a kind of expanded piton made of folded aluminium, specially shaped for off-width cracks. Really, is it necessary to spell out everything for the youth of today?

Tao of sawa

赤木沢出合にて, a photo by Alpine Light & Structure on Flickr.

Is sawa-nobori, the Japanese art of river-climbing, just an offshoot of modern alpinism - or is it something entirely different? After pondering that question in a previous post, I came across this quotation from Mishima Yukio's novel, The Sea of Fertility:

Mahayana Buddhism, especially the Yuishiki school, interpreted the world as a torrential and swift rapids or a great white cascade which never pauses. Since the world presented the form of a waterfall, both the basic cause of that world and the basis of man's perception of it were waterfalls. It is a world that lives and dies at every moment. There is no definite proof of existence in either past or future, and only the present instant which one can touch with one's hand and see with one's eye is real.

Related post: The ahistoricity of sawa

Sucker hunch

In Japanese river climbing, unusual challenges demand special solutions

Surly and turbid was the mood of the Tamba River, swollen by the June rains. A sneak eddy had already taken down N-san. He bobbed up again, but not his spectacles, alas.

Now, on a gravel shoal ahead, Sawa Control was setting up a belay. “You can do this,” he said, handing me the wet end of the rope. This time, though, he would be wrong.

Flailing my way across the foaming pool was no problem – but, upstream, where the gorge narrowed, the current speeded up. As Mr Micawber might have said, had Charles Dickens been more into river climbing, “Swimming speed, two knots; flow rate, three knots: result, ignominy.”

Climbing round the impasse didn’t appeal; the gorge was sheer. As for hauling oneself upstream, no crack or hold came to hand on those slimy walls of chert. Try as we might, the river kept flushing us back into that foaming pool. Eventually, we had to give up – we’d come back when there was less water.

Back at home, reading a ‘how-to’ book, I realised we’d lacked a vital piece of kit. That’s right; the humble drain unblocker. Slap one onto a hopelessly smooth wall (see right) and you can haul yourself forward against raging torrents of moving water. Indeed, the slimier the rock, the better it sticks.

For really critical passages, you might even consider a brace of them - one in each hand, like ice-climbing tools (only cheaper). But don’t forget to lanyard your unblockers to your belt. In strong currents, as any sawa-naut will tell you, there’s a sucker borne away every minute …


References

Yoshikawa Eiichi, Sawa nobori: nyumon to gaido, Yama to keikoku, 1990 (black-and-white photo is from this book)