Shikoku Field Diary: Day 3 (January 26, 2019)

I 💜 Wasting Ink → Diaries → Shikoku Field Diary → Day 3 (January 26, 2019)

♨️ Momijigawa Hot Spring, Tokushima → Kisawa, Tokushima

Map of Tokushima Prefecture with author’s route between Momijigawa Hot Spring and Kisawa highlighted. 🗺 Open map in GaiaGPS →

A muddy motorcycle stands in a field.

A crate of soft drinks with bottle caps rusted through and covered in twigs.

Carved stone warriors covered in lichen.

Looking into a very steep, wooded valley. 📍 Ōkubo, Tokushima

📍 Hōno, Tokushima

We could feel the weather turning with every footstep, with every sip of water, with every glittering snow flurry above the steep valley of the Naka River, and we walked in this dream-world, this vertical, luminous land.

Old, crumbling houses built on the steep bank of a stream. 📍 Hiura, Tokushima

A poster of a smiling woman holding a chainsaw, wearing a red helmet and a pink kimono. 📍 Hiura, Tokushima

It’s a Shikoku thing, you wouldn’t understand.

The silhouette of a man with a walking stick, the author, walking through a tunnel. 📍 Ondani, Tokushima

When Alan Booth walked these roads, in 1983, the demographics of inner Tokushima were already dire, and they haven’t exactly brightened in the decades since. Not that it bothers the distant planners of infrastructure: we walked towards the Dosu Pass across tunnels recently dug, on asphalt perfectly smooth, along concrete supporting walls gleaming grey and new.

A blue lake downstream of a dam in a riverbed.

A man with a white rucksack, the author, walks on a road while it is snowing. 📍 Nagayasuguchi Dam, Tokushima

All day the snow fell and the flurries were drawing nearer. We watched their dance over the valley, white curtains blowing in the wind, then the cloud enveloped us in an instant, and we walked in a waking dream, in a world of whites and greys and greens speckled with orange.

Another man, Gyula Simonyi, walks across a bridge in heavy snowfall, holding his arms above his head.

📍 Nagayasuguchi Dam, Tokushima

Gyula is clearly enjoying this.

Closeup of a citrus fruit on a tree covered in snow. 📍 Nagayasuguchi Dam, Tokushima

This is obviously perfectly normal if you think of “subtropics” as a contraction of “sub-zero” and “tropics”.

A yellow bridge straddles a river in a steep valley where the trees are all covered in fresh snow.

Looking up at the sky, which is partly clear, from the valley of the same river. 📍 Nagayasu, Tokushima

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and I shall now heed his wise words, and shut up, and contemplate the heart-stoppingly rapturous atmospheric phenomenon of snow falling from a blue mountain sky.

A small but very steep, pyramidal mountain rises from a wintry landscape of snow-covered trees and mountains.

📍 Kisawa, Tokushima

“A priest came back from China, and decided to build a temple right on the peak,” Kaz said, and we rounded a bend, and an amphitheater of peaks crowned with the perfect pyramid of Mount Kurotaki revealed itself. We stood at the edge of the drop, in turns giggling and mute with joy, trespassers in a classical painting, and the meager heat of our bodies drained into infinite shades of grey.

Next → Day 4, January 27

Prev. ← Day 2, January 25

Shikoku Field Diary was written on the 500-kilometer walk across Shikoku in January and February 2019 that became the subject of The Wilds of Shikoku, my first book.

Additional photography on this page by Gyula Simonyi.

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