October 8

October 8

Our new standard is now 17 plus miles, so today we walked 19.7 miles, and tomorrow is going to be longer. Can you believe that? It started of so nice but. It was actually foggy. At one point we were cruising down grade with a cool breeze in our face and clouds in the sky, like it was almost fun. Then came the afternoon. The clouds disappeared and the temperature climbed. It was back to watching my feet move one step at a time. The last couple of hours was a living hell. My only hope was that if I kept moving at some point it would be over. It was so pathetic on that horrendous rainy day for I had that sinking feeling after the second hour. Can you believe that too?

The other group of henro besides the young guys are the old guys, like me, but they're tough, unlike me. To show how tough they are, one guy fell early on but he's still moving forward, a slight limp hampering him. This other guy (younger) got blisters, got sick, but is still continuing. The long rainy day made his blisters act up and it's now bleeding and is he stopping like any sane man would. No, he's still going on. And then there's our Dave who's as tough as any of those guys. But even though they pass Emi and I as if we're on a stroll, somehow we keep up with them, barely. We are staying with a fellow henro at our ryokon, and he is one of the faster guys, yet he came in after us and he said that he's tired. I thought those guys were immune to fatigue. I guess they're human after all.

You know, you can talk to fellow henros about a lot of things, but asking why they're doing the walk is not cool. It's like asking, “How are you?” to a patient in a hospital which is a real no no to me. While I was first working in a hospital, I would throw out that question like free lollipops until one day a patient told me how she really felt. “I'm dying,” she blurted out like a cry for help. I can't remember what I said. I think that I held her hand and stayed a while. I never asked that question again. Well henros can have different reasons for walking; for their well being, for someone else's well being, for a pending divorce, for a recent death, etc, etc, etc. The younger guys are questioning the far future. The older guys are concerned about the near future.

A word about the language: I took a number of Japanese language classes, and they did not teach me the real language. The people here don't speak like the text books that I have. For example a lady said to us as we were passing her, “Ame botchi botchi fute ru.” All I ever learned was, “Ame ga furimasu.” It's raining. She's saying rain, off and on, now and then, falling is. Further there are different verb tenses and short cuts, ru instead of iru, and fute instead of furimasu. Further there is a certain politeness that dictates the language. For example, one day Emi and I had just stumbled out of a mountain trail into a auto repair shop next to the road. We must have looked like hell, because a lady driver who was just pulling out stopped to ask if we were daijobu (OK). We said yes and it ended there. It was her way of offering us a ride. We would have had to say something like chotto (a bit) or taihen ( really something), and then she would have offered the ride. These are the thing that you don't learn in a classroom.