LEAVING ON A JET PLANE

Leaving Baton Rouge was fraught with emotions but, by unusual circumstance, was wonderfully easy for us in the physical sense. After hour upon hour spent turning a small, flat, hill of folded brown cartons we bought at the box store into a mass of filled, taped, labeled, carted, stacked, and “climate controlled” stored chattel it seemed as if we would never reach the end of our preparations to leave home and actually get on the road, or, more precisely, into the air. But we eventually did shake the bayou mud off our cuffs and brush the Baton Rouge petro-chemical residue from our hair.

Stuffing our enormous bags into the little rental car (nearly every piece would prove to be overweight) we scooted to Baton Rouge’s signage-lite airport. We didn’t have to pull my “harpoon from my dirty red bandanna,” like Bobby McGee but we did have a hoot joking with the Thai-American check-in guy, talking about how he taught English in Paris for a while before he wound up down in Red Stick. “Just luck!” he guessed.

I know that travelers delight in tales of woe, in much the same way that sailors prefer to discuss bad weather and fisher folk the big’un that got away, but our flights went off pretty much without hitch. Indeed, the connection in Texas debouched, or barfed, I could say more colorfully and graphically, us out almost at the toe of the waiting deck for our next flight.

Interestingly, it cost 20 bucks to have those enormous bags brought from the curb in Baton Rouge to the desk inside the terminal. Once in Tokyo, it was convenient to have the biggest bags sent from the City to the small town in which we reside (a common service provided from the airport). They arrived at our door, delivered next day for $30+-. It was ten dollars more and it did take a day longer, but otherwise I’d say the delivery from Tokyo was a value. After being here for just a few weeks, and still debating the purchase of a vehicle, renting or leasing, or forgoing the honor of pumping up the global fat-cat industrialist economy in that particular way at all, we have found out that a wonderful network of delivery services exist in Japan. You can go into Tokyo to shop, leaving a trail of wine, cheese, and other purchases in your wake, and a day or so later the bags just arrive.

The first delivery service we used (the one from the airport) had a logo which, to me, oddly, seemed to be a cat with two heads. Of course one does not really question a new culture too closely initially and, if a two headed cat signified cartage for the Japanese, who am I to doubt it? I mean, I’ve eaten a Tombstone Pizza for Christ sake—what’s the symbolism there? Then, on the road to a mountain holiday, I caught another gander of the banana yellow logo on a long-haul truck filling its fuel tanks slung under the long chassis: the image is really a mama cat with a kitten in its mouth—not a two-headed beast. For a delivery company, that seems to make more sense!

But back to the flight. Once we made the connection in Dallas, it was about a 13 or so hour flight toward Japan, and I suppose they fly an “arc,” or “rhomb,” line in what must be the straightest way accommodating the prevailing winds and yaddayadda, but in any event in several hours we were, with a low sun and few clouds, over the gypsum whites, vivid roses, and metallic sunny edges of the mountainous Alaskan landscape at 30,000 feet. I’m guessing that this view is often obscured by mist, but for a long time we could see the dramatic, broken fields of mountains, ice, and snow and perhaps, in what looked like sooty valleys, glaciers. I’ll risk a charge of cliché to say the relatively horizontal snow really did bring to mind vast heaps of the whitest sugar, while the sunward sides of the crazily rough places were hosed down with bronze, silver, and canary yellow. The sun-lee-side of the mountain surfaces were pale lead, pewter, lavender—purple, just like the song says—blue, and even black (although art teachers always say shadows are never black). Every now and then a movie comes out about people stranded in that kind of “outback,” and the plot always seems a little tortured. Now, seeing the scale of the landscape roll on and on until, finally, it was covered over by thick layers of mist, has made me more of a believer.

The flawless transit continued into Tokyo, with our paperwork all in place (“tourist visas” are more colloquially called “landing permits” now, it seems) and helpful folks from Tokai University picked us up in the grey, cold, rainy afternoon. Our back-door exit from Tokyo to our town of Hadano was accomplished like a scene from Blade Runner, our eyes glued to a very sophisticated in-dash GPS as we ball-bearinged down twisty, narrow thruways in the gloom. From time to time we would turn into a toll lane, the red and white ringed poles popping open at seemingly the last moment, having scanned a sensor in the car’s bumper.

Hadano is not much like Tokyo, of course not much at all like Old Japan (raked pea gravel around a single well-situated boulder, sliding paper doors into Zen-bare spaces), but if anything is redolent of the architectural glamour of chock-a-block row houses in Baltimore or a bedroom community in New Jersey. It’s just a contemporary town with lots of commuters who train into Tokyo: mostly housing, food markets, convenience stores for the necessities. Things do seem very orderly and there is generally much less litter. Of course the language is thus far absolutely opaque.

Newly arrived, and having read what we could about Japan and talked with folks about their own experiences, we find that we are uncertain exactly which, and how much of, our expectations we want to pan out. Nathanial Hawthorne once advised a young writer ready to travel to note “every peculiarity” no matter how small. We intend to. Sayonara y’all.

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